What an extraordinary week it’s been. Many have been very newsworthy, as we’ve seen for years now, but there’s been nothing like this last week. First, we had the unprecedented (and so shameful that it was necessary) Commons debate and vote on the Privileges Committee’s report on whether Boris Johnson did mislead Parliament, the increasing inflation and mortgage crises, then the tragic deaths of those on Titanic sub trip, culminating in the dramatic events in Russia. Despite the inevitability of some of these developments, this degree of upheaval is destabilizing and not helpful for our mental wellbeing. Many are already very stressed by the cost of living crisis and the strain this can place on health and relationships but it’s difficult to get respite when the disturbance is both inside and outside, both interacting with each other.
There was widespread disbelief on Monday evening at Rishi Sunak’s cowardly avoidance of the Commons debate and his refusal to even admit to an opinion. Despite what we now know some Tories, notably veteran Bill Cash, spoke at length in Johnson’s defence, in this case via a hair splitting legalistic argument which must have sent some attendees to sleep. It was striking that despite so many bullishly declaring in advance that they would vote against the report, a good number didn’t even attend, some being seen arriving at the Conservative Home summer party. It’s worth watching the debate, if only to see the pompous, finger wagging Jacob Rees-Mogg very politely demolished by Committee Chair Harriet Harman, not to mention the tour de force from Labour’s Jess Phillips and Hilary Benn. It was a resounding result, with 354 MPs voting to approve, while just seven voted against. It will also be interesting to see the imminent additional report of the Committee’s investigation into the contempt of Parliament demonstrated by a number of MPs including Rees-Mogg.
I wonder what the actual process will be of removing Johnson’s parliamentary pass from him. With predictable arrogance, the former PM, on that Monday evening, was giving a speech to the International Democratic Union during which a source said he called the Privileges Committee ‘biased and wilfully ignorant’ and that there was ‘always another innings’. Let’s hope not.
The inflation problem has been getting worse and now the Bank of England’s decision to put interest rates up to 5% has thrown the worlds of many borrowers into turmoil, some saying they feel ‘terrified’. Although there are already some measures to help some borrowers, many do not fall into those categories and face going into further debt and even repossessions. Needless to say, this ideologically intransigent government just continues to spout how important it is to get inflation down, we must ‘hold our nerve’, things will be better in the longer term while not providing any immediate help for the desperate. We are supposed to feel grateful that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt had a meeting with the banks on Friday, during which he ‘asked’ them (the laissez-faire Tories won’t compel them to act) to see what could be done to help borrowers. Homeowners will be able to switch to an interest-only deal, extend their repayment term temporarily and be assured that speaking to their lenders won’t affect their credit score. (I wonder about that).
But these wealthy politicians are so out of touch that they just blithely repeat their script during media interviews or make a mickle out of a muckle: Hunt was clearly pleased with himself for saying people can now ‘reach out’/’pick up the phone’ to their lender to discuss their situation with them. Good luck with that as I can well imagine, like with so many services, they will have to wait a long time then work their way through a series of bots first. Meanwhile, Bank of England boss Andrew Bailey, extremely well remunerated himself, is the latest to try reinforcing the myth that wage raises amongst the lowest and middle earners are inflationary. Of course he doesn’t apply that principle to his own. He and others will have to pipe down because recent Office for National Statistics figures have shown that it’s pay increases ‘for the top 10% of UK earners, including City bosses, have clearly outstripped those for the rest of the workforce and been prime drivers of recent inflation and soaring interest rates’.
Union leaders are up in arms at being blamed for inflation. ‘On Saturday, as anger over pay unfairness and the rising cost of living grew, union leaders rounded on ministers over suggestions they were now ready to overrule the official pay review bodies (PRBs) if they recommended “unsustainable” increases, after the Bank governor’s comments’. They’ve called out the government trying to have it both ways: they habitually hide behind the ‘independent’ pay review bodies but when they don’t like something recommended they threaten to overrule them. ‘Rishi Sunak has staked his credibility on halving inflation by the end of this year, a promise that most economists now believe he may struggle to keep’. Not half, along with his other ‘priorities’, most likely. Meanwhile, as government intransigence hardens, further strikes have been announced by the rail, junior doctors’ and other unions.
Although the official inflation rate of 9.4% is bad enough, this obscures the much higher inflation rates applying to particular foodstuffs, and last week a useful chart appeared from the ONS with sugar at the top (47.4) but also applying markedly to other, healthier items, eg 46.4% olive oil, 37% eggs and 36.6% cheese. Shocking.
There’s been widespread criticism of Rishi Sunak for his robotic delivery and cowardly avoidance of challenging issues. Parliamentary sketch writer John Crace quotes his frequent flyer – ‘I am delivering on the things that the people want delivering on’, pointing out ‘…except he isn’t. Things are going from bad to worse. Inflation is stubbornly high, mortgages are becoming unaffordable, people are broke, and we’re still waiting on the promise of a government of honesty, integrity and accountability’. An example of his embarrassingly bad communication style was during his visit to an Ikea warehouse, addressing his audience: ‘Hi guys, you might have one or two concerns about inflation. But don’t be because I’m 100% on it. We’re going to get through this’. (Crace: ‘No shit. Most people’s mortgages had just gone up substantially…You and your many millions and the rest of us with bills we can’t all pay’.
Rather than the image of ‘the Goldman Sachs tech bro who is effortlessly competent…. the safest of safe pairs of hands…Almost as if Rish! is on a mission to stop us thinking for ourselves. Because the longer it goes on, the clearer it becomes he is trying to gaslight us. There’s only so much cognitive dissonance anyone can take. Trying to persuade yourself that someone who is demonstrably a bit hopeless is some kind of new-age statesman eventually becomes an impossibility. You have to accept the evidence of your own eyes’.
Perhaps the most damning criticism came from comedian Ben Elton during today’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, invited along with other panel members to comment on Laura’s interview with Rishi in the no 10 garden. Describing it as ‘an extraordinary, Orwellian, meaningless, evasive word salad’ and noting ‘vanity …. dripping vanity.Everyone wanted to believe, and I sort of believed, maybe he’s kind of a bit more decent. And it turns out, he’s as much of a mendacious, narcissistic sociopath as his previous boss’. It makes a refreshing change to hear from someone prepared to say it how it is rather than the usual wheeling out of platitudes during such programmes.
Rishi also seems unable to announce anything without absurd hyperbole. It’s shameful enough that the NHS Workforce Plan has been delayed so long, apparently to emerge this coming week, but now the PM has to describe it as the ‘biggest workforce expansion plan in the history of the NHS. It will be interesting to see its contents after all this time – it takes seven years to train a doctor so those shortages and plans to ameliorate them can’t just be glossed over. Needless to say, though, when it’s convenient the PM distances himself from whatever appears not to be going well, insisting in his Laura K interview ‘it’s not MY workforce plan, it’s the NHS’s’. Except we can be sure it will suddenly become his if anything is found praiseworthy in there.
Another thing the Prime Minister has been criticized for is allowing the resignation honours of Boris Johnson and quite possibly Liz Truss as well. The House of Lords is already absurdly packed and although there are some very good people there unfortunately there are plenty who are totally unsuited to this or any other honour. We seem to hear of yet another example of Tory corruption on an almost weekly basis and now it’s emerged that Ben Elliot, recently knighted by Johnson, is the subject of allegations of conflict of interest. He’s previously been accused of blurring his business and political activities and it’s now emerged that he helped arrange a Tory fundraiser at the V&A while he was both a trustee of the museum and the party’s chair. We assume such intelligent people know that this is improper conduct so they must contemptuously believe they can get away with it, perhaps not surprisingly given the degree to which Boris Johnson has catalyzed a decline in moral standards. Although Elliot has been accused of tarnishing the reputation of the V&A, their defensive statement makes us wonder how much they have been implicated in this.
Following massive media coverage we finally heard the tragic news this week that the Titanic sub mission rescue had failed and those on board were pronounced dead. It seems that Titanic enthusiasts will happily pay 250k dollars to ride in OceanGate’s specially-designed submersible vehicle, equipped with 4K video cameras, to visit the remains of the luxury liner 13,000 feet beneath the North Atlantic. Although we offer condolences to those who have lost loved ones, we must surely condemn the blatant disregard for health and safety exhibited by entrepreneur owner Stockton Rush, who apparently is on record as saying ‘At some point, safety just is pure waste. If you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed.’ Although it’s crucial for our development to take risks in life, there are risks and risks and I struggle to have sympathy with those who purposely embark on extreme sports and events, then expect to be rescued at huge public cost, usually.
What’s been pointed out (including by former US President Barack Obama) is the obscenity of the huge media coverage of this event compared with the relatively scant attention paid to the huge loss of life from the Greek migrant ship. ‘Anees Majeed, who lost five relatives in the boat that sank off Greece on 14 June, watched in disbelief and growing anger as a frantic, multimillion-dollar rescue effort played out for five other men lost at sea last week….. There is little hope Majeed’s cousins will ever be found or brought home. The family are tormented by rising evidence that European authorities knew the boat was in trouble but did not intervene’. This article cuts to the two key issues – the contrast between these events couldn’t be starker. The OceanGate rescue target was five men ‘on a trip they had chosen as an adventure, not one they were driven to make out of desperation’ (the migrant ship involved at least 300 deaths) and the victims were mostly at the opposite ends of the social scale. Some media outlets reacted to criticism of their coverage but I thought that of Radio 4’s Today programme added insult to injury, the complacent presenter just introducing a very short interview with one of the Pakistani relatives. During a media interview Obama made the bigger picture point about the harm caused by huge inequality: ‘It’s very difficult to sustain democracy when you have such massive concentrations of wealth’.
It felt extremely tasteless that Boris used this subject for his second Daily Mail column, taking the insultingly simplistic heroic explorers line eg ‘Harding and his friends died in a cause — pushing out the frontiers of human knowledge and experience — that is typically British, and that fills me with pride’. Social media users were quick to object, one reading: No, Boris Johnson. They weren’t even explorers. They were tourists conned into a deadly descent by a careless man who believed his own hype. And thousands of corpses rot at the bottom of the Mediterranean. That’s real tragedy’.
Many would have been stunned yesterday by the drama unfolding in Russia and what started looking like a coup by Wagner Group head Prigozhin, who was said to have taken over several cities and to be marching on Moscow. By the evening this had evolved to some kind of agreement between Prigozhin and Putin, with the former exiled to Belarus. But it won’t end there, will it? It opens huge questions about Putin’s leadership, Prigozhin’s future and what this means for Ukraine. I’ve not heard the Trojan Horse label attached to the Wagner supremo, but surely that’s what it is. Without this mercenary force would Putin have been able to prosecute this war for so long? But a force which contained a massive sting in its tail, not surprising given what we’ve heard about Prigozhin’s character. The Observer offers a thumbnail sketch: ‘The man who raised a force against Moscow is a former convict and hotdog seller, notorious for his ruthlessness, violence and cruelty. Born in St Petersburg in 1961, he went to a sporting academy but fell in with petty criminals. Convicted of several violent robberies in 1980, he spent most of his 20s in jail’.
The media mostly seem to believe this represents a humiliation for Putin. The Washington Post cast the past 24 hours as the gravest threat to Putin’s presidency ‘that till now has thrived on Putin’s ability to divide and rule by pitting rival groups against each other and serving as the ultimate arbiter among feuding elites…After more than two decades of autocratic rule, Putin’s hubris has repeatedly clouded his judgment — both in invading Ukraine and in misjudging whether Prigozhin could pose a threat’. The BBC’s Security Correspondent Frank Gardner observed: ‘Have to say, if I were Prigozhin, the mutinous Wagner boss now exiled to Belarus, I’d be staying well clear of upper floor windows or generous cups of tea. Deal or no deal, Putin is not going to forgive him for his ‘treachery and betrayal’. Despite initial hopes, it’s thought to be too early to see whether or not these events will benefit Ukraine.
Because of such a powerful news agenda this last week, several issues could have slipped under the radar, one being the 7th anniversary of the Brexit referendum. It was chilling to learn that the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, was prevented from flying the EU flag from City Hall because of new planning regulations which would require permission from the local authority. ‘Until 2021 the EU flag had also been among those that did not require permission but the law applying to England was changed as a response to the UK’s departure from the bloc on 31 January 2020. Encouragement was instead issued by ministers at the time to fly the union flag of the UK throughout the year on national government and local authority building. Khan will instead use lights to display the EU flag’s blue and yellow colours on the building to mark the anniversary of the Brexit vote’. How petty any objection sounds but I wonder how hard Khan tried – Newham Council is Labour and it seems unlikely they would have withheld this ‘advertising consent’.
It’s also been the 75th anniversary of Windrush this weekend, marked by joyful celebrations in some areas, not to mention exhibitions in museums and galleries continuing for some time. There were several events in this area of North London and I absolutely loved the one featuring steel bands – a great atmosphere prevailed, performances clearly enjoyed by participants and spectators alike. Needless to say, the royal PR machine also went to work via the Palace’s commissioning of ten Windrush passenger portraits. King Charles has spoken warmly about his project, framing this programme and exhibition as feelgood fare that will ‘recognise and celebrate the immeasurable difference that they, their children and their grandchildren made to this country’. But one commentator said ‘there’s a jarring disconnect between his positive messaging, delivered while sitting on a golden throne, and the harrowing tales of systemic racism’.
On a lighter note, those who’ve patiently waited for the National Portrait Gallery in London to reopen (it was closed for three years for the second refurb since 2000, something I was surprised was considered necessary) can now step across its threshold. The work cost £41m, key features, we’re told, including ‘slashed stone, daylight galore and doors by Tracey Emin’. The architect describes it as ‘the greatest building Londoners never knew they had. Our job was to open it up, tie its different eras together, and give it a new public face’. It sounds as if they’ve really made the best use of space and existing features using creative remodeling. ‘Inside, a sense of light, space and legibility has been flushed throughout the building, as if it’s undergone a supercharged spring clean, banishing much of the former gloom’. One thing the critics don’t ever seem to talk about though, and one on which I’ve unsuccessfully tried to engage with arts organization, is the cafes and restaurants. It used to be (and maybe still is) that grant funds are issued on the basis of audience development, but audiences are still mostly middle class in these places. Quite apart from entrance fees, the cafes are always so expensive that there’s no way, say, a family of very modest means could afford a drink and biscuit there, let alone a meal. Perhaps one day we’ll see theinnovatory step of a gallery or museum with the usual offering but also with a much humbler café tacked on!
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 