Most of us must be hoping now that we don’t soon have a full scale Middle East war brewing up. Here, in the UK…..
What an absolute rollercoaster British politics has been during recent weeks, much of it intensely unsavoury and depressing, including the latest Tory (donor ‘Lord’ Bamford) being the subject of a three year HMRC investigation, a 26% rise in people asking for (sadly lacking) mental health support between 2018-22, the shameless antics of Liz Truss still trying to repair her damaging legacy, Sunak’s alleged loss of his WhatsApp messages as the Covid Inquiry recommences, the continuing housing and cost of living crises, lack of confidence in the UK economy (despite Jeremy Hunt’s bullish fibs business investment is said to be lower in the UK than any other country in the G7), the GB News debate indicating once again the weakness of our regulatory infrastructure, Suella Braverman’s incendiary ‘invasion’ speech and efforts in the US to undermine support for ECHR and the massive one shrouded for some time in opacity – the cancellation of HS2.
We learned that the PM and his government had to scrabble around overnight to string together what they thought was a convincing narrative about this (‘the facts have changed’!) as the announcement was planned for November, not mid conference, but a leak put paid to that. You can understand but not excuse why Sunak did his best to avoid making this announcement in the very city no longer to be served by the longstanding flagship infrastructure project, aka hugely expensive and damaging debacle. Politicians and commentators seem to be split on their views as to whether or not HS2 should have been continued, but I think their apparent promise that the money will be reallocated to other transport project (‘every single penny’) needs intense ongoing scrutiny.
It’s been suggested (and many will agree) that with his transparently skin-saving retreat from Net Zero, Rishi Sunak entered a sinister new downward phase, further confirmed the embarrassingly bad performances at the Tory Party Conference. One worried X user tweeted: ‘Nightmare stuff from #RishiSunak, from the delusion (‘in my first year I brought stability to government’ etc) to ‘I want a better future for our children’. Only the children of the wealthy. Far more sinister than the bumbling Johnson. We need to be very afraid’. Apart from Sunak’s desperate bid for voter appeal by claiming to ‘scrap’ measures like a tax on meat and compulsory car sharing which were never policies in the first place, it’s clear his net zero retreat is an own goal as developers are not happy with it and nor are environmental campaigners about that or the plan to restrict the installation of solar panels on farmland. Clearly, he wasn’t expecting this blowback.
‘This is the latest weakening of green policies ahead of the general election, which started when the Conservatives won the Uxbridge byelection, a result widely attributed to anger around Labour mayor Sadiq Khan’s ultra low emissions zone. Sunak recently announced that the 2030 phase-out of new petrol and diesel cars will be pushed back to 2035, as well as weakening the 2035 gas boiler phase-out, confirming it will apply to far fewer homes. The government also plans to scrap pollution rules for housebuilders in sensitive areas, where they are currently not able to add to sewage pollution without paying to improve nearby wetlands’.
Polly Toynbee summed up the essence of Sunak’s own goal. ‘Restoring some semblance of solidity was his calling card, but he has just trashed his unique selling point. The man who set out to restore the tattered fragments of his party’s reputation for responsibility – wrecked by his two predecessors – has added himself to this list of the most dishonourable, self-interested prime ministers in living memory. Here’s the irony: in breaking with Boris Johnson’s green policies, he most resembles him as callow and opportunistic, willing to say and do whatever pleases in the moment. And another one: it takes quite something to make Johnson seem the more statesmanlike, allowing him to tell Sunak not to “falter” now’.
The conference itself was surely like no other before, unprecedented for one deluded, gaslighting and misleading or downright lying speech after another, Sunak’s coming out top, of course. Not to mention the spectacle of Nigel Farage dancing with Priti Patel, something she seemed keen to disavow when asked about it the next day. It seems that the Conservatives want to lay claim to ‘a brighter future’ beckoning, when they have, increasingly transparently, plundered the Treasury, ensured the flow of funds and projects to their families (especially the Murthys) and friends and trashed the country. The plan seems to be to leave Labour with a huge debt, sewage damaged rivers and coastlines, a continuing housing and economic crisis and wrecked public services. Sunak does indeed want to change politics and ‘take the country in a new direction’ but in a profoundly destructive way, not the way we are supposed to read into such a positive sounding descriptor. As for ‘long term decisions’ – yet another piece of gaslighting as everything this government does is short-term, aimed at boosting their flagging electoral chances.
Possibly the worst and most sickening tactic he used (after which any political wife could surely be fair game for media scrutiny) was getting his non-dom wife, Akshata Murthy, to introduce his conference speech. It was telling that this tweet, based on a Guardian article by Zoe Williams, was liked and reposted hundreds of times, proving that many here are sick to death of this unelected tech bro robot, so totally divorced from the realities faced by so many: ‘…my best friend, your prime minister”? Lady, this rhetorical symmetry is way off. You chose him, we didn’t. None of us, not even the people in the hall’. Get real, Akshata Murty. You may have chosen Rishi, but none of us did’. It’s hard to know which was worse: the absolute rubbish spouted from the conference platforms all week or the cheers and clapping from the gullible Tory faithful.
How disappointing for the Tories, then, that polls have shown all these efforts were for nought as their ratings are still very much down. ‘Rishi Sunak’s has achieved no positive conference bounce after trying to relaunch the Tories as the party of “change” at their annual gathering in Manchester last week. Instead Labour, ahead of their gathering in Liverpool which starts this weekend, is up three points since last weekend and now stands on 42%, stretching its lead to 13 points. Despite all the coverage of Sunak and the Tories, the latest Opinium poll for the Observer shows the Conservatives unchanged on 29%’. If it wasn’t so serious what’s been almost amusing to see this last week is Tory-colluding BBC presenters getting very frustrated when interviewing these politicians, especially the tetchy, slippery Sunak, when their normal tactic is to defend the indefensible and read out government press releases. One of the main challenges they had to put to them was effectively the absurdity of lamenting some problem or other when they’ve been in government for 13 years. ‘Many Tory MPs conceded at their conference that Sunak’s approach of casting himself as a leader representing change would be a hard sell after 13 years of Conservative government’. Not half.
But one presenter who stands head and shoulders above the rest is Victoria Derbyshire, standing in for Laura Kuenssberg on her Sunday morning BBC show and pretty well demolishing in a very reasoned way not only Transport Minister Mark Harper but also Keir Starmer, some viewers felt. And this is the depressing thing: we can’t have as much faith in Labour as they would like because their policies often don’t stand up to scrutiny and there’s too much evidence of Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting being hand in glove with American health service providers he intends to do NHS deals with. If Labour is not prepared to stand against NHS privatization (and it’s already gone too far down that slippery slope) there’s not much chance of preserving it.
One of the most galling things Sunak came out with must be: ‘There is the undeniable sense that politics just doesn’t work the way it should … a feeling that Westminster is a broken system … It isn’t anger, it is an exhaustion with politics. In particular, politicians saying things, and then nothing ever changing’. Galling because the Conservatives have been in office for so long and had every opportunity to change things and ignorant because people aren’t just ‘exhausted’, they are indeed damned angry. The Guardian’s John Crace (who, alarmingly, was denied entry to the proceedings at one point) got the measure of this conference: ‘There are only a brave few – we unhappy few – who have made it to Manchester for the Tory conference. Dead-eyed delegates anxious to be sucked into a collective delusion. If only for a few hours. Anything to shake off the reality. Interviews aren’t Sunak’s strong point. Or rather his less weak weak point. The Inaction Man jibe has really got to him. It’s broken through his narcissistic defences and we are getting to see the real Rish!. Entitled, tetchy, out of touch. Pretty much exactly as the wordcloud Kuenssberg confronted him with observed. The public have got Sunak’s measure’.
An interesting article by Phillip Inman (Sunak’s spreadsheet solutions for Britain are a product of his ego) suggests that the PM fundamentally misunderstands what is needed for public sector reform (it’s not all about numbers) and that his distaste and refusal of consensus building is mistaken. ‘He suggested his dictatorial drive and superior knowledge about how to transform the education system, the health system and the way we commission transport projects would be the only antidote to those misguided consensus-builders when the next election arrives…. Sunak has fallen into the trap of believing that numbers win the argument – a view which pervades the top of the financial services industry and seems to have infected the prime minister from his time in the City’. Naturally for Sunak, and unhealthily, his mechanistic approach involves no consultation with workers or experts: ‘the move ranks as another top-down declaration of intent’… Like Boris Johnson and Liz Truss before him, Sunak is signed up to the idea of “magic bullet” reform that ignores sensible analysis in the belief that public services can be transformed quickly and painlessly’.The arrogance of such an approach is breathtaking indeed, even for this deluded individual.
Meanwhile, Sunak tweeted his intentions bullishly throughout the week, the one possibly attracting the most flak being his stylishly posed version from (yet again) the private jet: ‘This week I took long-term decisions to build a brighter future and change our country – transforming our towns, boosting our transport, improving our education and reducing cancer deaths’. Who is taken in by this when the reverse is the case? A wag tweeted: ‘This week I took short-term decisions to scrap a brighter future and block our country’s progress. This change will: keep towns disconnected and under-resourced, overload our already failing transport, do nothing for education. Aren’t I great? Here’s me in my private jet, suckers.’ Oof.
There was also the little matter of the first in a series of byelections: on Thursday Labour won the Rutherglen and West Hamilton with a big victory over the SNP. On Any Questions the Tory, Chris Heaton-Harris, while graciously acknowledging the result, said that we shouldn’t read too much into by-election results. Funny, though, that they’re quite prepared to read a lot into it if they win, as happened with the recent bigging up in Uxbridge. The Conservatives would also not have been pleased that Channel 4 chose to broadcast its predictably horrifying Partygate dramatization during the conference. The amount of traffic at the Twitter hashtag continues to demonstrate the degree of loathing for these people who partied while the rest of us were largely cut off from social contact and so many lost loved ones and couldn’t publicly mark their passing because of travel, mixing and funeral restrictions. Another tweet reposted hundreds of times last week was this: ‘Matt Fowler, co-founder of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, said: “If Johnson and Sunak don’t provide the inquiry with the messages it has asked for, they need to face the full force of the law’.
Some Tories were up in arms recently at Sue Gray’s appointment as Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff: they could also be perturbed by his latest coup, now we hear Boris Johnson’s ex-wife and leading barrister Marina Wheeler is set to be appointed Labour’s new “whistleblowing tsar” for women. Great stuff. Ministers should also feel alarmed at the announcement Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves will make this week, that Labour would create a Covid corruption commissioner role to help recoup billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money lost to waste, fraud and flawed contracting during the pandemic. Let’s hope they don’t double down on burying or losing the evidence as we’ve seen they have form on this.
With this country plummeting to heaven knows where under this self-serving government I often wonder what the international media makes of us, apart from a laughing stock, that is. Yes, Jonathan Powell was Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff for many years but his comments in the New Statesman deserve to be taken seriously. Concerned about how a Starmer government can begin to repair the damage caused by the last 13 years, he said:
‘The damage done to Britain’s standing in the world in the past six years is far worse than the legacy we inherited from Thatcher and Major. It will not be sufficient for Labour to not be the Tories. The three main pillars of our foreign policy – the US’s strongest ally, a leader in Europe and the soft power of development – have been systematically dismantled. To rebuild effectively, a new government will need a clear strategy in place to re-engage, and a plan to restructure the security and foreign policy machinery of government to deliver that strategy. Then world leaders will truly be able to say: “Britain is back.”
The National Trust’s AGM is approaching and members will have seen that yet again (apparently this is the role of their Nominations Committee) that not only do they recommend resolutions members are invited to support (or not) but also candidates. Five individuals are recommended for the five vacancies for the governing Council yet many more are standing for election, most of them having excellent-sounding professional backgrounds, skills and commitment to the Trust and its aims. It was noticeable that some of those not ‘recommended’ were those sounding prepared to speak up and not just be a compliant presence on this governance forum. The Trust maintains that the selected five meet criteria for the skills, knowledge and experience it needs, etc, but I doubt whether they are any more impressive than the other candidates.
One proposed resolution is to get rid of the Quick Vote option, which just enables members to tick a box for these recommended candidates. Quite right those proposers, as this automatically, and with no effort on the part of the member, enables many more votes for the Trust’s chosen candidates. We can understand that some Trust machinations are needed because for a while there have been elements trying to prevent the organization reflecting its 21st century status in terms of political awareness, describing some initiatives as ‘wokery’. But this need not be a reason, as the AGM system has long been the same, to patronize members and perpetuate unfairness by disadvantaging the non-recommended candidates. Let’s hope members have the awareness and guts to understand what’s underway here and to counteract it by voting for those they feel will make the most positive difference, not just the Trust recommends. In the longer term it would be best to get rid of this patronizing, manipulative, opaque and unjustifiable practice.
Finally, on a brighter note, we hear that a 19th century icehouse on the quay at Great Yarmouth, used when the town’s fishing industry was thriving, is to be restored with the help of a £2m National Lottery grant. The intention is to make into a training centre for circus arts, as part of a wider transformation project to reinvent the town as a capital of circus and street arts. This is so important as many seaside towns in the UK have been allowed to decline over the years, because of the loss of local industries and tourism, leading to more neglect and poor social conditions for the local community. Let’s hope other neglected seaside towns will follow suit!
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 