As we gradually emerge from the high winds and deluges of yet another storm, there’s sadly no sign of emergence from the Israel/Hamas conflict, the appalling Covid Inquiry revelations, further examples of Tory corruption and debates about AI and the much trumpeted AI Safety Conference. The police and politicians seem to be taken aback by the strength of feeling and number of pro-Palestinian marches, officers being pressed to make more arrests under the Public Order acts and a current debate is around marches scheduled to take place not on Remembrance Day but the day before. Whatever our view of the conflict, Foreign Affairs Select Committee chair Alicia Kearns has a point when she opines that this government has failed to be a critical friend and had taken its eye off the ball by failing to appoint a minister for the Middle East.
‘Critics argue that the UK government, along with others, missed the danger signals and invested in an unconditional and one-sided relationship with Israel that did not acknowledge how different the government elected in November was to its predecessors.
Concerns that the UK Foreign Office has neglected the Israel-Palestine conflict in its tilt to the Indo-Pacific and the pursuit of trade deals across the Middle East is to be investigated by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee’. Kearns said: “I stress that this low-commitment ask would allow us to live up to our responsibilities and demonstrate meaningful resolve. Our voice is unique and will be heard, and we have a role to play in the peace process’. In my view she hits the nail on the head regarding the real reason for the government’s lack of focus because they routinely take the easy way out and direct their efforts to self-aggrandizing interventions: ‘If I am honest, it feels increasingly to me that the reason we are silent around the Middle East is because there is no Instagram diplomacy to be won. There are no easy wins’.
Speaking of self-aggrandizement, this is exactly what this latest AI conference has been about (besides deflecting from Tory chaos, of course) despite script-churning clones like Science Minister Michelle Donelan bigging up this summit (the phrase ‘across the globe’ was doing a lot of heavy lifting) and saying they’d scheduled numbers two and three already. Sunak’s interview of Elon Musk plumbed new depths of embarrassment and sycophancy and plenty have suggested that this is yet another route Sunak is using to grab more opportunities for his father-in-law’s Infosys tech giant. A key aspect not given much air time is that although journalists were allowed to attend, no questions could be asked: if this doesn’t suggest these people being on shaky ground I don’t know what does. Channel 4 News’s Cathy Newman conducted a bullish interview of Donelan outside the Bletchley Park venue, raising the key issue of lack of coverage of regulation, to which Donelan responded that discussing regulation was not within the summit’s remit. You couldn’t make it up, except we know how antithetical regulatory frameworks are to ideological Tories.
Concerns have been growing around this government moving more and more to the right, the latest measures seen as entering dictatorship territory. Besides wanting the inappropriately labelled ‘hate marches’ more rigorously policed, Suella Braverman has now embarrassed herself further by demonizing rough sleepers and undertaking to get tents removed, arguing that their use by the homeless (nothing to do with Tory housing policy, of course) is ‘a lifestyle choice’. We now hear of Michael Gove’s plans for broadening the definition of ‘extremism’, which would severely curtail free speech and criminalise legitimate dissent. No doubt Braverman would have liked something like this to be in place for the State Opening of Parliament and King’s Speech on Tuesday, during which there will be Not My King protests.
Although the media have been criticized for paying the Covid Inquiry scant attention up till now, it was undeniably a major news item last week, a situation set to continue as yet more damning evidence emerges of government dishonesty and incompetence. Yet again, as he’s been implicated in so many irregular government dealings, Cabinet Secretary Simon Case comes across as a Houdini-like figure, going on sick leave just before he was scheduled to give evidence. It’s clear this intervention has been diplomatic, or at least partly diplomatic, and the question must be will this let him off the hook altogether or will another way be found to extract crucial evidence from him? The fact is that, like many others around at the time, he went along with criminally negligent inattention to facts and detail, misrepresentation of ‘the science’ and the staggering incompetence of Boris Johnson.
If it wasn’t so serious it would be comical to hear former director of Communications Lee Cain say that Covid was the “wrong crisis for this prime minister’s skill set” and that they were exhausted by the PM’s dallying and changing his mind on a daily basis. ‘Anyone that’s worked with the prime minister for a period of time will become exhausted with him…Sometimes he quite challenging character to work with, just because he will oscillate, he will take a decision from the last person in the room’. The Trolley nickname seems very apt. Johnson said he wouldn’t comment on the Inquiry prior to giving evidence himself but we can imagine he’d be spitting with fury at what these witnesses were saying about him. Some of these people claim to have ‘lost’ their vital WhatsApp messages but there’s no denying the evidence of Sir Patrick Vallance’s diary. Many of us will recall the obvious discomfort emanating from Vallance and Chris Whitty as they shared the daily press conference platform with Johnson – but they chose not to speak up about their doubts and the extent they had to cover for him. It seems they waited till their knighthoods were in the bag before doing so.
Although most of us won’t be surprised, given what we already knew, amongst the worst revelations must surely be Dominic Cummings’s dismissal of most of his former colleagues, using appalling language; the evidence of former top civil servant Helen MacNamara that Johnson’s no 10 was ‘sexist’, ‘toxic’ and ‘awful’ in a way she had never experienced in government before, that there was no plan for the crisis, the sizeable number of issues the government hadn’t considered, and that she could barely think of a time when nationally imposed restrictions had been observed in Downing Street; Vallance’s diary notes of Johnson saying the virus was ‘nature’s way of dealing with old people’ as an argument against locking down and his obsession with ‘older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life and [keeping] the economy going’; and former NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens reporting Matt Hancock’s conviction that he, rather than medics, should determine who lived or died if hospitals became overwhelmed.
Needless to say, commentators didn’t hold back. John Crace said: ‘At a time when thousands were dying alone in hospitals and care homes, the government had lost its humanity. Unable to treat its own citizens with dignity and respect. Unaware of its obligations to the country. Or even to its own employees. Just posturing and ad-libbing its way through with macho abandon…Journeymen and women more interested in fighting their own macho turf wars. All seemingly not that bothered their decisions were costing lives…Here’s a thought. Almost any of us could have done a better job than those who were meant to be running the country’.
As if any were needed, all this is surely further proof that we largely have the wrong people going into politics. A young caller, Patrick, was on Radio 4’s Any Questions, asking why he should now trust any politicians. Absurdly but predictably, the Tory (Treasury Minister Gareth Davies) said yes, we can trust politicians! A listener tweeted: ‘MacNamara’s testimony reveals the danger of having too many over-entitled, arrogant old Etonians in government who think they have special abilities’. A Byline Times (a non mainstream news source now available in newsagents) article was headlined: ‘Boris Johnson’s Covid Catastrophe Has Exposed the Tragic Deference and Negligence of British Politics – Damning evidence from the Covid Inquiry reveals how the former PM was enabled by a system determined to look the other way’.
Polly Toynbee wrote: ‘From pensions to health to social care, this government has done precious little to prepare for an ageing population’. Detailing the rising costs of servicing the ageing population, she points out the irony of many older people being Tory voters, the government then complaining about them and demonstrating such inhumane readiness to offload them. ‘I doubt many older Tory voters will forget the terminal plans being hatched for them inside No 10, not just by Johnson but also by all those around him, who discussed them willingly’.
In the Observer Andrew Rawnsley goes further: ‘The Covid inquiry testimony is an eviscerating indictment of Boris Johnson and a stain on the reputation of his enablers’.
‘If a government looks bad from the outside, it will be twice as rotten on the inside. I’ve found this a reliable rule of thumb over the years, but it underestimated the breathtaking depths of the dreadfulness of the reign of Boris Johnson. That looked ghastly from the outside, but was many times more grotesque on the inside’. Not half: and it’s notable that Sunak, Rees-Mogg and many others, who maintain such insouciance, are markedly implicated in all this themselves. ‘It was already established that he was a wholly unsuitable character to be leading the country through the gravest peacetime emergency in more than a century. We knew he was too selfish, too weak, too amoral, too capricious, too negligent and too frivolous. What the inquiry is adding to the familiar portrait of Mr Johnson is detailed and compelling testimony from people who were in the room about how utterly unfit – ethically, intellectually, temperamentally and in any other way you might mention – he was to be prime minister’.
So much for Covid being the ‘wrong’ crisis for Johnson’s ‘skills set’. We can’t imagine his ‘skills set’ being any use in any crisis. ‘When the country most needed a decent, diligent and decisive prime minister, we had a derelict at the helm. The UK was unprepared to handle a rogue pathogen or a rogue leader and had the huge misfortune to be afflicted with both at the same time’. In my view what’s so incisive about this article is that it doesn’t just focus on Johnson’s failings: it incorporates those of his colleagues, Tory party members, the media and others who enabled him, besides the supporting structures (eg Civil Service) any PM has to rely heavily upon. ‘The cabinet were elected ministers of the crown. Yet the “morons” even humiliated themselves by obeying orders to defend Cummings’s “eye-test” excursion to Barnard Castle. Were they spineless, clueless or simply useless? Whichever, they failed to perform their constitutional function’.
As for the Civil Service, ‘speaking truth to power has traditionally been part of the remit and the voice needed to be especially insistent when the power was being wielded so atrociously. This didn’t happen and it is not the only dismal failure by the senior echelons of the mandarinate’. Singled out for particular criticism, on the grounds that that they’re the most important officials for the PM, are the Principal Private Secretary (Martin Reynolds) and the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, the first not only failing to stop Partygate but who actually sent invites to one party, and the second abjectly unable or unwilling to perform the role of ‘the wise man of government, with sufficient gravitas to cajole a bad PM to correct his ways’. It sounds like the cowardly Case just opted out, on one occasion even ‘bleating ‘Am not sure I can cope with today. Might just go home.”
The fact that Johnson was ejected in July 2022 has been given as proof by some that the ‘system’ still works but, as Rawnsley points out, that’s not the case, not least because such people can do huge damage beforehand. I’ve long harped on about the need for a new (and written Constitution) and new parliamentary rules – as we’ve seen time and time again during this administration, they’re not fit for purpose. We must devise rules which are enforceable and not dependent on individuals ‘doing the right thing’. Also, voters should be able to recall MPs much more easily (numerous constituents have not been represented for considerable periods of time because their MP, under investigation or having thrown their toys out of the pram, is absent or had the whip removed) and the electorate should be empowered to demand an election in extremis, and we’ve long had extremis.
It’s noticeable that despite what we know ie about Johnson’s delay to this Inquiry, the Tory script is to claim credit for setting it up. Deputy PM Oliver Dowden was on Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday this morning giving his usual car crash interview and was the latest to spout this version of events. A tweeter observed: ‘Dowden says it’s right to have an inquiry… Yes, but was it right for Johnson to delay the start so long that by the time the report comes out all those seen to be culpable will have long departed the political scene?’.
Meanwhile, despite his ongoing disgrace, Boris Johnson continues to take himself seriously and remains determined to make his irrelevant presence felt: not only is he getting his own show on GB News (surely the home of clapped out Tories) but we hear he’s now in Israel ‘to show support’. To keep himself centre stage, more like – who’s paying and is he now bored with Ukraine?
During Storm Babet, which killed 7 and flooded 1,250 homes, Environment Minister Therese Coffey had already made an absolute fool of herself again, offering the excuse about inadequate forecasting that it was harder to predict because the rain was coming from the east, not the west. This deservedly resulted in derision from Lib Dems and others, who urged her to ‘get a grip’ and ‘stop blaming everyone else for her failings’. A wag tweeted: ‘Hello BBC weather, I can confirm the rain is coming from the East, got my compass out. Am wearing rain coat on right side only. Please tell Coffey I have it under control’. One of the laziest and most disengaged ministers of recent times, Coffey is once more in the frame, for Environment Agency failings. Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrats’ environment spokesperson, said: “This is a new low for an environment secretary that cannot help but say or do the wrong thing’.
Last week it emerged that the Environment Agency had almost halved water use inspections over the last five years and has even introduced desk-based inspections, which an insider said were meaningless. It sounds like the worst time for this to be happening. ‘Environment Agency (EA) officers visited people and businesses with licences to abstract, or take, water from rivers and aquifers 4,539 times in 2018-19, but this dropped to 2,303 inspections in 2022-23, according to data obtained by the Guardian and Watershed Investigations. The fall in inspections comes despite England facing a possible water deficit of 4bn litres a day by 2050 unless action is taken, and predictions that the summer flows of some rivers could dwindle by 80% in that time’.
Not surprisingly, an insider told the investigators that these measures benefited agriculture and the water companies but were ‘incredibly detrimental’ to water resources and the environment. Even more worrying is the lack of transparency around these changes: the insider said ‘these methods (including desk inspections) provide a smokescreen of numbers that suggest correct regulation is being carried out should anyone try to audit it, when in reality the regulation is meaningless’. Let’s hope that the minister is quizzed about this in the Commons as she’s the kind who regularly presents one intervention or another as being useful and constructive when it’s anything but.
Richard Benwell, the CEO of Wildlife and Countryside Link, is quoted: ‘A long-term funding drought for the Environment Agency has left it under-resourced for the water challenges ahead. Recent funding rises don’t offset the years of underinvestment in the agency.This drop-off in post-Covid inspections is highly worrying and runs the risk of failures going under the radar. Desk-based and industry self-assessments simply aren’t up to the task, as we’ve seen with the sewage pollution crisis’.
Astonishingly, in this morass of gloom, there was some excellent news this week despite its delivery incorporating a sting in the tail. The consultation regarding the closure of railway station ticket offices netted more than 750,000 responses, which made clear how difficult being without these important resources would be for many, especially those with disabilities. The government has U-turned but this was disingenuously presented by Transport Minister Mark Harper as the government instructing the rail companies to withdraw these proposals, when they were driven by the government in the first place. The rail companies were understandably livid about this misrepresentation. It’s marvelous news for passengers and for staff who would have lost their jobs. So it was worth signing those petitions and attending those demos!
The Independent reported on the latest findings on the crumbling state of public services in Britain, ‘in a state of perpetual crisis’. Many of us have long been bogged down by nothing working and the difficulty of getting anything done, even getting a GP appointment feeling like wading through mud. ‘The Institute for Government (IfG) said the UK’s “dire” public services were performing worse than they did before Covid – and much worse than when the Conservatives came to power in 2010. In a bleak assessment, the respected think tank pointed to funding cuts during austerity and the disruption caused by recent strikes as being behind the worsening state of the NHS, schools, courts and prisons’. The report said Rishi Sunak’s refusal to negotiate over public sector pay had worsened the situation, and alarmingly but predictably, this state of affairs would leave a big mess for the next government: ‘Escaping this will not be easy and whoever forms the next government will be hindered by the short-sighted decisions of its predecessors’.
An interesting analysis of the ‘wellness’ industry effectively shows how this has benefited from these public service deficits and austerity. The article portrays how the self-care business model cynically exploits perceptions that something is missing in our lives, making the goal unattainable to encourage customers to keep on buying in the hope of eventual transformation. One of the mechanisms hooking people in is the offer of false certainty, eg ‘I can definitely help you. This supplement is definitely going to cure your symptoms. You should try this diet. It’ll get rid of all your pain.’
In case anyone wonders why this is important the article cites authoritative sources which indicate the size of the industry and it wouldn’t have become so without the failure or unavailability of conventional medicine: ‘According to a 2019 report by the Global Wellness Institute, a non-profit advocacy organization, the industry represents a $4.4tn market. A 2021 NielsenIQ report declared health and wellness “THE single most powerful consumer force”. It’s also seen as offering the ‘illusion of control and empowerment’. It conveys a powerful and seductive message: “If you work hard enough and you buy the right things, you’ll be saved from disease and ageing and anything bad happening to you’ but what’s really needed is far harder: ‘Perhaps it is far healthier to agitate against the circumstances making us sick and miserable than it is to latch our hopes to another glossy promise’.
Finally, it’s good news for environmentally aware coffee consumers that Marks and Spencer has become the first major high street retailer to launch a plastic-free, fully recyclable takeaway coffee cup. Made of paper fibre, it’s already available at 20 sites and the plan is to extend this to every M&S café over the next few months. It will be interesting to see if this encourages more sales at these cafes in preference to other coffee purveyors!
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 