New Year greetings to all!
As we enter 2024, there’s no doubt that the starting gun has been fired on the general election, Rishi Sunak predictably trying to distract from Starmer’s key speech with the declaration that his ‘working assumption’ (odd choice of words when the timing is solely his decision) that it will be in the autumn. Part of Sunak’s distraction strategy on Thursday was to visit a youth centre in Nottinghamshire, notably without media in tow, but judging by the expressions of those captured on camera Sunak’s bullish talk about 2024 didn’t cut much ice. It’s starting to look like pleading.
So Tories have doubled down on trying to rejuvenate their policies and to present faulty decisions like tax cuts as a good thing. The tone deaf tweets and videos continue, for example the one about overseas students not being able to bring their families, accompanied by the bullish mantra ‘we’re delivering for the British people’. Actually it’s an own goal. But Sunak has his work cut out because despite their attempts to suggest the opposite, none of the PM’s pledges have shown an improvement and some are much worse. He also has several byelections to prepare for, the latest (due to Chris Skidmore’s resignation on Friday) being Kingswood, the most far-reaching junior doctors’ strike so far to contend with and the James Cleverly scandal is not going away. On Friday he was booed and heckled en route to an event in Stockport and now yet another challenge: the BBC has seen papers dating from the PM’s reign as Chancellor to suggest that he had significant doubts about the Rwanda plan, was reluctant to fund reception centres for migrants and thought the ‘deterrent’ wouldn’t work. Needless to say, ‘a source’ close to the PM said ‘The prime minister was always fully behind the principle of the scheme as a deterrent’. How, then, would the source and others explain this evidence to the contrary? It spells more trouble for the PM from his party’s right wing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67897560
What’s been one bright spot during the last week is that the only regulator which actually seems to regulate – the Office for Statistics Regulation – has started challenging the PM on his misrepresentations in two key areas (asylum case numbers and cancer checks). The media are also challenging ministers more on these lies and obfuscations and on Radio 4’s PM programme statistician David Spiegelhalter reminded Evan Davis of this duty. John Crace captures the new post truth environment personified by Sunak, Cleverly and the others. ‘For there is only one true reality. And that is whatever the government wants it to be. Rishi Sunak is the sole arbiter of the truth. He alone is blessed with the knowledge of the divine. Received wisdoms of time and space have been dissolved. Sidelined into an alternate reality. All that is real is what Rish! says is real. Black can be white, up can be down. Depending on the prime minister’s mood. The one change required of all of us is to be open to this new state of consciousness.It was like this: the prime minister had said he had cleared the backlog. And if he said he had done something then he must have done it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have said it. Get it? Dimly smirked at his own faultless logic. This was going really well. People would talk about his time at the Home Office for decades to come. Yes, but not in a good way’.
Those only getting their news from the BBC or right wing press could believe the ‘official’ NHS figures showing that ‘almost 3 million people in England were tested for cancer in 2022, a 133% increase in the decade since 2013….and that October 2023 was the highest month on record for cancer checks, with 269,492 urgent referrals’. But these figures were dismissed as ‘misleading’ and ‘smoke and mirrors’ by cancer experts, ‘ noting that the NHS was failing to meet every cancer target by significant margins and that the UK has one of the worse cancer survival rates in the western world’. Needless to say, health minister Andrew Stephenson (never heard of him due to the government’s never ending musical chairs with ministerial posts) claimed that they’re ‘improving cancer survival rates across almost all types of cancer’, citing their plan to grow the cancer workforce. How, when the NHS Workforce Plan has been shown to be pretty threadbare and there’s not even the will to fix the junior doctors’ strike?
We’ve regularly seen how keen Pinocchio Hunt misleadingly compares the UK’s economic performance favourably with that of other G7 countries, usually unchallenged by the media. How will he dress up the finding that we’re now in the 17th consecutive month of contraction? Rishi Sunak regularly reinforces the myth that ‘you can trust the Conservatives with the economy’ by using this cynical Tory ‘continuing’ narrative (as in ‘we’re going to continue growing the economy’ when they’ve done no such thing in the first place). But a survey of around 650 manufacturers by S&P Global and the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply shows that factory output fell more than expected in December, attributed to poor weather conditions, clients delaying orders but also ‘a worsening economic backdrop’. Interestingly, business confidence in the finance sector was reported as higher than that in the manufacturing sector – A KPMG senior executive said: ‘It’s great to see financial services leaders go into the new year feeling confident despite ongoing economic turbulence, which is set to continue to challenge the sector in the first quarter’.
Still more on lies and misrepresentations, not content with their car crash tv interview, Doug Barrowman last week issued a letter purporting (the nerve of it) to tell the British public ‘the facts’ about the PPE Medpro scandal. There’s a lot of whataboutery in it, citing other companies which ‘benefited’ in the same way his did and says he and his wife, Michelle Mone, have been hung out to dry by ministers. ‘Michelle and I are being hung out to dry to distract attention from government incompetence in how it handled PPE procurement at [a] time of national emergency.” Predictably, a DHSC spokesperson said ‘We do not comment on ongoing legal cases’. So what happens now? We have to wonder how the National Crime Agency investigation is coming along.
The current junior doctors’ strike is naturally causing much anxiety – during one strike I heard some say they weren’t intending to leave the house for fear of having an accident then having to wait hours on end for an ambulance and possibly a hospital bed as well.
As we know (eg above) the government has been accused of ‘smoke and mirrors’ regarding its cynical manipulation of cancer check figures, but the strikes are aggravating the situation by delaying further the treatments required, especially for the particularly aggressive types of this condition. Experts said: ‘Patients diagnosed with typically less survivable cancers such as lung, liver, brain, oesophageal, pancreatic and stomach, were particularly at risk from the disruption caused by the strikes. Any delay to treatments in these cases could severely limit their options and mean even worse survival prospects’. At least these experts are urging ministers and the doctors to get round a table ASAP rather than just blaming the doctors.
But there’s another cause for anxiety which I suspect has gone under the radar: the increasing use in the NHS, especially in primary care, of so-called ‘physician associates’, who have some medical training but who are not qualified and experienced doctors. Keep our NHS Public and other bodies are concerned that patients aren’t told and even if they are they won’t know the difference, especially since the term ‘physician’ is not one in common use here. A survey found that 57% of those questioned had never heard the term. We need much more transparency in the NHS. ‘Around 4,000 physician associates work in the NHS in England. Ministers and health chiefs plan to increase the figure to 10,000 to help plug widespread gaps in the NHS workforce…However, there is widespread confusion among the public about their role and relationship with fully trained medics’.
In one shocking case last year, a 30 year old woman died when misdiagnosed by a PA at her local GP practice and the coroner said she probably would have survived if she had been sent to A&E. Leading diabetes specialist Professor Partha Kar opined that the rollout of physician associates had been ‘an unqualified mess’ and that their ‘vague’ remit meant their use by hospitals and GP practices was questionable at best and dangerous at worst’. It gives the old exhortation ‘the doctor will see you now’ a whole new meaning: will we now have to start applying caveat emptor when visiting the GP?
This last week many of us have been glued to the excellent ITV dramatization of the Post Office Horizon scandal, starring the marvellous Toby Jones. There’s also a documentary accompanying the series. Thought to be the widest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, during which hundreds of subpostmasters and subpostmistresses were wrongly prosecuted and convicted of alleged fraud when all along it was the faulty Fujitsu Horizon computer system being deliberately manipulated and covered up, the series revealed a massive catalogue of errors and dishonesty on the part of Post Office executives, especially on the part of its then CEO, Paula Vennells. To date none of these people have been made accountable but perhaps that will change now. There’s a petition to remove Vennells’s CBE,
the series has prompted yet more Post Office staff to come forward and it’s just emerged that the chair of Fujitsu, which has won further government contracts recently, is a Tory donor. What a surprise.
I nearly fell off my seat to learn that for 300 years the PO has been able to carry out its own prosecutions so no police investigations took place. What an invitation to corruption this is. Executives used the vile tactic of telling victims they were the only ones having these issues and one of the worst aspects: the money victims were forced to ‘pay back’, bankrupting them and causing them to lose their homes, was just rolled into Post Office profits. But the damage done to those involved and their families seems incalculable: some took their own lives, some didn’t live to see their convictions quashed and others suffered considerable mental distress, some experiencing relationship breakdown.
This ghastly saga is a bit like an onion, with reprehensible layer beneath reprehensible layer revealing further pieces of the jigsaw that kept the whole thing hushed up for years. That is, out of the public eye. Whereas Private Eye and Computer Weekly reported on it years ago and there was a very well-regarded BBC podcast later, the mainstream media have not properly touched it until recently. I thought the first sentence of this review absolutely nailed it: This is a David v Goliath story, but the Goliath is a multiheaded beast, emerging from a tangle of old institutional power and modern corporate practices’. This scandal has shown what a lethal combination these are. Let’s hope the ongoing public inquiry proves a catalyst in bringing those responsible to account.
Following Radio 4’s Today programme’s belated attention to this on Saturday, an X user rightly said: ‘A couple of people in the BBC have been looking at the Post Office Horizon scandal almost as long as Private Eye has, and – to the BBC’s credit – they weren’t told to stop. But to the BBC’s shame, the story has hardly been mentioned over the years until recently’. Another said: ‘I will do what the BBC failed to in this piece, and mention Paula Vennells, the CEO who knew what was happening, lied to parliament and got a CBE for it. SHE needs to be held to account NOW, otherwise closure will never happen’. Another: ‘If only Today used Private Eye and Byline Times to set its editorial agenda instead of Daily Mail, Sun, Telegraph, Express, it might focus on something important instead of Megan & ‘Stop the Boats’. But the mainstream media haven’t been guilty of keeping this scandal out of the public eye, they’re not even reporting on the current Post Office public inquiry.
The Met were already investigating two former Fujitsu staffers for perjury and perverting the course of justice: now they’re investigating the Post Office for potential fraud. The police have been asleep at the wheel for so long – they must wake up for this.
‘AbolishTheMonarchy’ has often trended on Twitter and last week was no exception, the surprise abdication of Queen Margarethe of Denmark prompting further speculation about King Charles. Journalist and commentator Simon Jenkins opined that the King should follow Denmark’s example: ‘Queen Margrethe is the latest European monarch to make way for new blood. It puts our archaic system to shame’. Express.co.uk asked its readers ‘whether the King should abdicate and let Prince William take the throne, and the results were torn. In total 5,609 people voted in the poll, with 47 percent voting yes and 51 percent voting no. The remaining two percent opted for ‘Don’t know’. Former Labour MP Stephen Pound didn’t see it this way but clearly sees that there’s a need for something to change: “Let’s give the monarchy an injection for the future. Let’s give them a restart. Let’s kick-start the monarchy. I don’t think we should elect the king and queen on popularity polls.”
But there’s no basis for ‘kickstarting’ this feudal and expensive institution and pressure is also mounting from another source – the release of the Epstein client list, which names Prince Andrew multiple times. Many have been unhappy at the royals’ attempts to rehabilitate Andrew by publicly including him in events such as the Christmas Day Sandringham walkabout. He also still retains the titles the Earl of Inverness and the Duke of York. Having waited so long to become King, though, I can’t see Charles deciding to depart any time soon. While the Palace has tried the specious argument of not commenting on Prince Andrew ‘because he’s not a working royal’, the head of Republic, Graham Smith, has reported Andrew to the police, demanding that the investigation be re-opened. ‘I am calling on the Met police to reopen this case, I am calling on MPs to debate this affair in parliament, and I am calling on Charles to make a public statement – in front of the press and taking questions – to respond to these allegations and what they say about the monarchy. How can we not expect a response from the government and head of state? At the time of the alleged offences Andrew was a government trade ambassador and an active member of the royal family. They fudged and obfuscated for 11 years before taking any definitive action’.
But we pretty quickly heard that the Met Police will not be investigating the Prince, using another specious argument that there was no ‘new and relevant information’. As one of the many tweets said:’ ‘Proof that the establishment can do what it likes to whoever it likes whenever it likes, without consequences’. That’s as may be, but this is not going away any time soon.
Finally, today (6th) is the day (12th night) when Christmas decorations are supposed to come down but it seems that at least some are departing from this time honoured practice. The Independent tells us that this tradition took hold because ‘In ancient times, people believed that tree spirits lived in the decorations people used to bedeck their homes, such as holly and ivy. Failing to ‘release’ the spirits before Christmas ended was believed to result in crop failures and food problems’. (Nowadays ‘crop failures and food problems’ are more likely to result from climate change rather than offending ‘tree spirits’!) One respondent didn’t put any up because they were so distressed by the Gaza situation, one stuck to tradition and another said if people felt stale with them lingering on to just try putting them up later, eg in December, not in November as some do. I admit to only half of mine going up in the first place and the whole lot is now en route to the loft!
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 