Some Tories and their apologists in the media must be feeling relieved at the timing of the demise of former Harrods boss Mohamed Al Fayed and all the column inches and broadcast minutes that will absorb while they’re engulfed in the latest scandal about the faulty Raac concrete in our crumbling schools. The Department for Education issued guidance to 156 schools amid concerns over the use of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) in their buildings, with 104 in need of urgent action including potential closure. The question has been asked repeatedly why the government has waited until now, just a few days before the start of term, to admit the parlous state of much school (and hospital) infrastructure, only to get the non-explanation that further evidence from recent surveys came to light. Seems pretty clear they were hoping to continue as normal when this problem has been known about for at least 6 years.
But a whistleblower (and we need many more) confirms what many will have suspected all along, telling the Observer that ministers and their political advisers were ‘dangerously complacent’ about crumbling school buildings constructed with aerated concrete, and that they were more concerned with saving money than improving safety. Although the government has undertaken to pay for the corrective action and replacement classrooms, etc, we’d better believe this when we see it: the distinction between capital and revenue budgets means there will a push to offload bills onto already stretched schools. On Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg this morning Jeremy Hunt said they will ‘spend what it takes’ to resolve the situation but so often we’ve found this not to be the case, for example with Grenfell. The media need to keep a close eye on this and regularly scrutinize the outcomes.
I thought it was appalling that a list of the affected schools still hasn’t been published, the government giving the excuse that parents needed to hear the decision from head teachers first. Of course this means in some cases beleaguered heads get the flak rather than ministers. Defensive Schools Minister Nick Gibb was seen to struggle badly in media interviews, trying to defend the indefensible, and his boss, Education Minister Gillian Keegan, seems to have eschewed interviews altogether. Her avoidance can’t last long, though: she’s likely to face a grilling when Parliament resumes on Monday. That is, if she doesn’t think up some excuse not to attend, in which case sanctimonious bore Nick Gibb will doubtless be wheeled out yet again.
The whole debacle is a metaphor for crumbling Britain after 13 years of Conservative governments. A tweeter commented on the government’s defence: ‘Nick Gibb also claimed on BBC Breakfast that government is better at identifying RAAC problems than other countries. On a par with Coffey telling us they’re best in world at monitoring sewage discharges ie “We’re the best at sitting watching the country fall apart and doing nothing”’. Meanwhile, Labour has demanded an urgent audit of the government’s handling of longstanding safety fears about aerated concrete found in the roofs, floors and walls of hundreds of schools, hospitals and other public buildings.
Amid all this key news, though, it’s important not to overlook the government’s predictable U-turn on the Letby public inquiry, which will now be a statutory one. What a shame there was time wasted and hot air emitted before Health minister Steve Barclay said they’d ‘listened to families’ (as if…. Like they did with the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice), so they’ve effectively bowed to the inevitable. Statutory public inquiries have a reputation of being slow but surely, given the importance of the issues involved, it could be speeded up. One of the appalling aspects to have received more attention was that NHS public inquiries going back years, including the key Francis Inquiry, recommended that there should be regulation of health service managers and executives, but this has never been implemented. We can only assume that successive Conservative governments have wanted to protect from scrutiny the numerous individuals who have, amongst other things, colluded with their NHS privatization agenda. Quite rightly, it’s been suggested that this Letby inquiry will have as one of its Terms of Reference a review of previous inquiry recommendations and why they were never followed up.
Health service commentator Roy Lilley (and he won’t be the only one) said that the new inquiry report has effectively already been written, because the same issues come up again and again. One reason for the NHS blame culture (but not the only one) is the regulatory regime but I suspect too much court is paid to the Care Quality Commission and its inspections, which have been shown to send trusts into hectic mode and which take a massive amount of resource to prepare for. Lilley has suggested previously that this regime doesn’t actually work, that health and social care organizations don’t improve as a result of a bad CQC. Maybe some do, but we get the point. So much becomes about tick box exercises while the fundamental practice in the inspected areas doesn’t change. The 2010 Robert Francis Inquiry into Mid-Staffordshire trust said: ‘The report recognises that while the overwhelming majority of NHS managers meet high professional standards every day, a very small number sometimes demonstrate performance or conduct that lets down the patients they serve as well as their staff and organisations. The group’s recommendations include replacing the Code of Conduct for NHS managers with a new statement of professional ethics and consultation on a system of professional accreditation for senior NHS managers (my underlining).
Last week another example of the role of NHS executives came to light: Sir David Sloman, then London regional director of NHS England, had offered former Countess of Chester CE Tony Chambers a job at a London trust in January 2020 ‘following a competitive process’, and the story goes that Sloman was unaware of the Chester events at the time. But how and why especially when it was known that Chambers was blocked at the time from similar jobs in the North of England? And how reassuring is this statement in response to the BBC? ‘NHS England has in the last few weeks strengthened the fit and proper person framework by bringing in additional background checks and ensuring that assessments are recorded on the national electronic staff record system so that they are transferable to other NHS organisations as part of their recruitment processes’. Another unhealthy example of revolving doors in NHS management, at the same time illustrating an apparent belief that pompous jargon replaces due process and proper scrutiny. How many knighted bureaucrats are running the NHS and what assurance can this ‘Fit and Proper Person Framework’ really provide?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66651325
What’s also downright alarming is that (not for the first time) figures have emerged as to the numbers dying last year while waiting for NHS treatment, 120,695 people in England. This is a record high of excess deaths, double the 60,000 patients who died in 2017/18. ‘Hospital bosses said the deaths highlighted the dangers of patients having to endure long waits for care and reflected a ‘decade of underinvestment’ that had left the NHS with too few staff and beds. Healthwatch England, a patient advocacy group that scrutinises NHS performance, said the number of people dying while waiting for care was “a national tragedy”.’ We’ve long been aware of the longstanding underinvestment in the NHS by this government but these shocking figures are a stark reminder of the Tories’ non-strategy (like the school buildings debacle) of waiting till the situation is unsustainable before acting. Except in this case they won’t because they’ve long wanted to privatise the entire NHS so it’s in their interest to ‘prove’ its failure.
As we enter the third quarter of the year, there’s been some relief that energy prices are coming down, but this isn’t much of a comfort given energy companies’ blatant profiteering and their notorious standing charges. Ofgem has lowered its price cap by about 7%, from £2,074 to £1,923 for the average household. It should be cause to celebrate, even if the decrease is relatively slim but households will still end up paying large amounts as the government has not offered the financial support it did last winter. Yet again we’re struck by the lack of genuine regulation, whether it’s for water, energy, utilities or organizations like the Information Commissioner’s Office, which are so poorly resourced they can’t perform their roles in a timely and effective manner.
Rishi Sunak’s mini reshuffle in the wake of Ben Wallace’s resignation has also generated much debate, some Tories defending Grant Shapps’s record as a minister and suitability for his Defence Minister promotion, others expressing doubts at his lack of military experience. But hey, we’re told he has a private pilot’s license so that will do the job, won’t it? The Guardian’s Helen Pidd rightly asked if he was the right person for a role involving national security given his use of three false names to front a dodgy business then lying about it for years. He’s also an avid Tik Tok user, which should raise security questions given its Chinese ownership. Sunak’s very obvious choice of loyalists (including the inexperienced Claire Coutinho as new Energy and Net Zero Minister, background prior to politics of private school, Oxford, investment banking, and right wing think tank) indicates the unsafe ground he feels he’s on, with good cause, as apparently some Conservatives are plotting to replace him.
Journalist John Crace sums up how bad things are looking for Rishi: ‘PM’s autumn agenda will be one of desperate hope after months of one bad headline after another’. NHS and rail strikes continue, the ‘small boats’ issue is going from bad to worse (800 arrivals on Saturday), Theresa May has published a ‘deranged’ book in which she claims she aimed for a Brexit which would be acceptable to Remain voters, and possibly the worst thing this government has ever done (now panicking as the election gets closer?) – a relaxation in environmental rules for housebuilding, which prompted very strong reactions including the RSPB’s unexpected tweet starting with ‘LIARS’ x 3. BBC News stated that current Natural England rules mean 62 local authorities cannot allow new developments unless builders can prove their projects are “nutrient neutral” in protected areas, including Somerset, Norfolk, Teesside, Kent, Wiltshire and the Solent. The government announcement about scrapping the rules ‘has provoked a furious backlash from environmental campaigners’.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66666435
This is a view most except house builders and Tory donors (often the same people) would agree with, yet an apology was issued subsequently and later we found out why: a trustee with quite a mixed bag of interests, Ben Caldecott, criticized the tweet because of its ‘political’ nature, but these days it’s difficult, if not impossible, for organizations to avoid politics. Questions have been asked as to how Caldecott was made an RSPB trustee in the first place. So there we have it: increasingly those speaking the truth are silenced if this truth is unpalatable to the government.
https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/person/dr-ben-caldecott
A tweeter commented: ‘Our buildings are collapsing. Our rivers are full of sewage. Our air is polluted. Our NHS is in crisis. Our streets are full of homeless people. Our children go hungry. If you want to see the results of 13 years of Conservative rule. Look around you’. It captures yet again how we cannot feel safe with this government in office. But all was not lost, Rishi may think: at least Nadine Dorries had resigned and the publication of her book delayed due to numerous sources and legal issues which needed verifying – it will now appear a month after the Conservative Party conference she’d planned on coinciding with. Let’s hope the media boycott this deluded work of fiction. And in any case Rishi won’t have to face much of the flak himself this week as he’s flying east to the G20 summit in New Delhi, where he can feel important for a few days. But as Andrew Rawnsley said in the Observer, the Global Britain ‘swaggering braggadocio’ of the previous two PMs has been ‘smashed by contact with geopolitical reality’ and ‘quietly consigned to oblivion by Mr Sunak’.
Further pithy observations about the state of the nation come from Rafael Behr, who describes the state of our governing party as ‘out of ideas and afraid to admit its mistakes finds comfort in pursuit of traitors, scapegoats and in conspiracy theory….Denouncing policy failure from the pulpit of incumbency has become a speciality of the Tory right. Lee Anderson, deputy chair of the party, says immigration is “out of control”. A chorus of backbench MPs laments that high taxes are suffocating economic growth. The Conservative party is appalled by the state of a country it has been governing for the past 13 years’. It’s an extraordinary state of affairs, when a government refusing or pretending not to see its own creation of these problems persists in blaming a ‘malignant blob’, made up of ‘the opposition, lawyers, judges (European and domestic), immigrants, charities, environmental activists, the BBC, the civil service, universities, the Office for Budget Responsibility’ (choose whichever one or few fits the example). This blindness is important because this ‘analysis shapes the thinking of many Tory MPs. It will set the tone for Sunak’s general election campaign because it is the only explanation for underachievement that doesn’t require contrition from the ruling party’….Failure inflates the myth of an all-powerful enemy, which begets bad policy, which fails, confirming the strength of the invisible foe. This is the conveyor from ideology to conspiracy theory’. Behr suggests that Sunak is not riding this conveyor himself but watching it and apparently powerless or unwilling to disrupt it.
Meanwhile, Boris Johnson hasn’t let up in his narcissistic attention-seeking attempts to still play PM, tweeting from foreign climes from where, alongside a local politician he’s meeting, he posts nonsense about their ‘shared vision’ on this or that. His Daily Mail columns seem to be getting worse, this week’s about the late Queen, in which he recalls his meetings with her, his recollections (remember, though, ‘recollections may differ’?) somehow managing to suggest that she was impressed with this chancer: ‘It was because of her humanity and sympathy that you felt, as PM, that you could really open up to her, tell her absolutely everything….’. Err, right: I doubt whether he ever did that. No doubt Mail readers will lap this up, perhaps another reason why the deluded #BringBackBoris was yet again trending on Twitter this morning.
The media have also reported on the humiliating trip to China made by the over-promoted Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, who seems to have got as far as ‘expressing concern’ to the Chinese about this or that, which they steadfastly ignored. He said that anything was on the table as long as it didn’t threaten national security – no worries about the shocking human rights record, then? Journalist Simon Tisdall provided a pithy summary: ‘The foreign minister set off with the aim of both ‘standing up for our values’ and securing profitable trade. He failed at both…The galling bottom line is that the government wants it both ways – to stand up for “British values” while trading profitably – and as a result fails to advance either objective’. But never mind, there’s bound to be somewhere else cropping up soon which ‘needs’ Cleverly to jet off to: this is what he thinks being Foreign Secretary is all about, not having the nous or skill for nuanced diplomacy.
An interim director (Sir Mark Jones – background of Eton, Oxford then curatorial roles) may have been appointed at the British Museum but the reputation busting scandal of the theft of 2000 items and the almost more worrying fact that the Museum as a whole has no documented catalogue of its collection have generated more debate about how the problems need to be resolved. Several commentators have rightly said that this august institution has primarily one job (which it clearly didn’t do) – to document and care for its collection – and anything else is an add on, perhaps almost a gimmick. It’s not only the BM in the frame for poor documentation and ineffective stewardship and management – it could be others, too. Simon Jenkins has suggested deaccessioning, a growing strategy for museums but one which some may regard as heresy for the BM.
This is the kind of plain speaking I like – no doubt some would shudder at his questioning of this sacred cow: ‘Museums are essentially phoney. Few of their objects were made for them but rather to be owned, used, enjoyed and traded….The British Museum is such a beloved institution that no one ever asks what it is about. Little is about Britain – instead it has at least 8m mostly archaeological objects gathered from across the globe, barely 1% of which are on show. The fact that a few hundred of these appear to have vanished is hardly surprising. Nor is it shattering, given that no one seems to have known the objects ever existed’. Some thinking outside the traditional curatorial box is needed. ‘Osborne claims to need £1bn for urgent repairs and to reorder his tired permanent-display rooms. This sum is never going to come from the government’s capital works grant of just £75m a year for all museums. The museum has to find the money itself or it is bust’. It will be interesting to see whether any new direction will be taken with this interim director and perhaps by now a more enlightened George Osborne, or whether they’ll fall back on ‘nothing can change until the new director is in post’.
On Radio 4’s Today programme during August you may have heard the Saturday episodes which featured guest editors with interesting and useful themes. Yesterday’s was the plight of seaside towns and the difficult issues dogging them beyond the sunny beaches. The guest editors were interesting and articulate, focusing on the South Wales resort of Tenby but citing issues which many towns, seaside or not, would also be facing, such as the lack of young people, the number of jobs paying less than the minimum wage, the difficulties of recruiting workers and lack of public transport meaning those workers often had to cut short a shift because of the times of last buses and trains. Perhaps the main issue facing such attractive places is the lack of affordable housing due to the prevalence of second homes and Airbnbs. I know people who use Airbnb frequently but who seem to have zero awareness of the issues accompanying their use.
Almost 20% of Tenby properties are second homes despite the Welsh tax intervention, some at sky high prices eg £1.5m, unaffordable for locals. One angry tweeter protested: ‘Wales is not for English retirees’. I don’t know what the answer is but this is surely what our well paid politicians are for – to devise thought-out solutions and not just allow such an unsatisfactory (very distressing for some) to go on unchecked.
Finally, on a brighter note, also in Wales, it was cheering to hear of an initiative, one of many in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) National Park, featured in the BBC’s Countryfile recently: feeling that ‘our biodiversity is going through the floor’, a number of farmers are working on projects leading to a more sustainable future, one of which involves giving local young people a stake in the place. At present 46% of the area’s food is imported and one of the farmers wants 120 acres to be used for growing fruit and vegetables, thereby leading to less dependence on external sourcing. The idea was to kickstart small scale farming by splitting the purchased land into small plots for locals to cultivate, ‘aiming to restore nature, balance the needs of the people who live, work, and visit the area, whilst ultimately leading Bannau Brycheiniog into a more sustainable future’. Not to mention the mental health benefits such projects bring with them. But at present, no government is doing enough to encourage such enterprise, which should surely take place all over the country. This one farmer was emphatic that the government needs to review the infrastructure for small farmers so young people can be employed locally. Said he:’ In 10 years time people shouldn’t have to ask if food is local – they should expect it!’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001q292/countryfile-bannau-brycheiniog
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 