Following the local elections the pace of the political rollercoaster has hugely and predictably accelerated, the last fortnight seeing the dramatic defection of Conservative MP Natalie Elphicke to Labour and the government doubling down on their lies, misrepresentations, delusion and denial. If the local election results fallout constituted the ‘soft’ launch of the general election campaign, the substantial ones firing the starting gun were Rishi Sunak’s scaremongering presentation to the right wing think tank Policy Exchange and Starmer’s pledges speech.
There’s been much debate about the Elphicke move, which, like the Dan Poulter one, blindsided the Conservatives, some seeing it as a massive coup for Labour but others as a potentially dangerous Trojan horse. On the left of the party there’s been considerable disquiet about an MP with Elphicke’s track record being welcomed in, seen as unprincipled and strange as she’s not even standing at the election. But wouldn’t you just know that once the Tories got over the initial shock, they let it be known that Elphicke had unethically tried to lobby the Secretary of State of Justice, Robert Buckland, on behalf of her former husband, Charlie Elphicke. Additional criticisms of her conduct also emerged and of course, the obvious question then was why did the government only come clean about this improper behaviour following what some termed her ‘act of disloyalty’. It’s clear that after four years of silence, nothing except recent events would have changed this.
Rishi Sunak keeps shooting himself in the foot with absurd presentations and out of touch videos and last week’s must be one of the worst: during his scaremongering and gaslighting response to Labour’s success in the elections, he worked hard to convince us that the UK was approaching its worst ever dangerous era, that the UK wouldn’t be safe under Labour and that only the Conservatives could keep the country safe. The irony of this could only be missed by the dimmest and most right wing: it’s Conservative administrations which have significantly reduced police numbers, exposed us to huge security risks (like money laundering and the close connections to Russian oligarchs) and which have wrecked the prison and justice systems so they’ve now decided to release dangerous prisoners early in order to free up prisonplaces.
An X user tweeted: ‘Sunak will say he has “bold ideas” that can “create a more secure future” for Britons and restore their “confidence and pride in our country”. Right, so the best person to restore ‘confidence and pride’ is one of the main architects of their removal?
Sunak’s presentation tellingly was quite controlled in terms of who could ask questions, the journalists being pre-listed. Not for the first time, the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason came in for some flak for so nakedly displaying his Tory bias by feeding the PM the Labour and danger question. Commentator Simon Jenkins didn’t hold back in his own analysis of Sunak’s performance, calling it ‘floundering’ and suggesting that ‘beleaguered British leaders have always resorted to shielding their belligerence behind a wall of ‘values’. That’s what today’s speech was about’. As so often with politicians, Sunak insults our intelligence by assuming that we can’t see through this. Even Daily Mail readers must be questioning his performance by now, making, as he does, absurd claims for the economy, education and the NHS when all around us we see the destructive effects of 14 years of Tory government.
Jenkins observes: ‘A post-imperial rhetoric has allowed every global conflict to be somehow Britain’s concern… Sunak now declares that the UK must face up “to an axis of authoritarian states” – China, Russia, North Korea and Iran – if it is to “succeed in the years to come”. He demands that these countries not be allowed “to undermine our shared values and identities”. But they are not seeking to do that. He does not have the power to stop them, nor are they anything to do with Britain’s defence. In reality, Sunak’s intention has been simply to taunt Labour for not promising at once to raise defence spending to an arbitrary 2.5% of national income – which he too has failed to do…No credible European leader would seek to scare their people by threatening them that the next few years will be “the most dangerous yet”. They would not call on them to pay higher taxes and sacrifice public services to impose their values on the rest of the world. They would see their job as to uphold those values at home, period. So should Britain’. Oof!
In the Observer Andrew Rawnsley also deconstructs the speech in a nutshell, stressing that the longstanding Conservative fear tactics are just not working: ‘He’s previously tried marketing himself as Mr Stability, Mr Delivery and Mr Change. None of these iterations has put a dent in Labour’s headline poll ratings. They insistently place Sir Keir Starmer’s party about 20 points ahead of the Tories. In his most recent attempt at a relaunch, an exercise he performs almost as often as he changes his undies, the Tory leader tried another costume. This time he cloaked himself in the garb of Mr Security. In what Downing Street puffed as a big speech, the prime minister tried to chill the country’s bones with the warning that Britain is entering a very dangerous period. His ostensible subject was the threat from “an axis of authoritarian states”. His electoral purpose was to try to build an argument that voters will be safer sticking with him than taking a punt on Labour’.
Rawnsley then suggests three key reasons why the fearmongering isn’t working, such as this a strategy needing a powerful leader, which floundering Sunak manifestly is not. We have to wonder how long it will take the government to realise that this isn’t working when they’ve been attached to it for years.
Of course much attention has been directed to Starmer’s speech outlining his pledges and again Chris Mason’s ‘analysis’ came in for flak. An X user tweeted: ‘That Chris Mason ‘analysis’ of the Starmer pledges was predictably biased and patronising, alluding to ‘whizzy presentation’ and ‘theatre’. This kind of thing from the public broadcaster serves listeners very badly and undermines democracy’. What some of the critics don’t seem to get is that (yes, there will be some holes in Labour’s plan) the party has learned the danger of stating policies explicitly because they could well be nicked by the Conservatives, as happened with the non-dom issue. There are quite a few topics not listed in the pledges but which are planned for the manifesto but the Tories can’t bear not knowing. It’s clearly irritating them in the extreme. It shouldn’t be surprising that Labour alludes only to first steps because they will have a hell of a lot of work to do repairing the damage inflicted on the country by the Conservatives.
So how are the Conservatives reacting to Labour’s election success and the pledges? Fairly predictably, in several ways and it’s clear just how rattled they are. First we have more tweeted photos of Tory MPs on the campaign trail, looking and sounding unjustifiably bullish. Some, like Liz Truss, make you wonder how they dare to show their faces in public after the damage they’ve inflicted. Then we’ve been bombarded by ‘articles’ in Tory papers like the Telegraph, in which the authors try to rescue their reputation and paint Labour in a bad light. Arrogant Jeremy Hunt claims to have ‘set out’ what a labour government will result in (massive ‘black hole in the economy’ when it’s his government which has wrecked it) and what his government has allegedly achieved. An excellent analysis of his spiel clarified the extent to which he’d cherry picked sources to make his case. He’s a great one for making spurious G7 comparisons but on closer scrutiny it’s found that he’s only quoting one quarter – misleading techniques like that. The broadcast media mainly do us a disservice in not bringing these to public attention. Hunt even tried to claim that the UK economy was doing better than that of other countries and that the Conservatives had put the economy ‘back on its feet’ following the pandemic, Ukraine war and energy shocks etc (carefully omitting Brexit and the Liz Truss disaster).
But Hunt didn’t leave it there: he partnered up with Work and Pensions Minister Mel Stride for an article in The Times reacting to news that unemployment had gone up again, doubling down on their anti-welfare rhetoric. ‘It came a day after data from the Office for National Statistics showed unemployment increased by 166,000 between the final three months of 2023 and the first three months of 2024, pushing up the jobless rate from 3.8% to 4.3%’. Of course these ministers don’t want to take responsibility for the conditions preventing many from working (NHS waiting lists, for example, or needing to provide care as there’s so little social care available), instead just trying bullying tactics and cosmetic tinkering to get people back to work. The dynamic duo even had the nerve to say ‘The road to recovery is never entirely smooth – there are bumps, twists and turns. But by standing up to the issues of our day, we will grow the economy and raise living standards for hard-working Britons’ and that ‘the economic outlook was ‘better than many would have you believe’. Of course what we’ve experienced is far worse than ‘bumps, twists and turns’.
The third Government strategy in reaction to Labour’s advance is the creation of further culture wars to appeal to their right wingers, three notable recent examples being the sex education guidelines (the subject of car crash Gillian Keegan media interviews last week), Common Sense minister Esther McVey’s condemnation of certain lanyard designs and the ‘proposals’ of Lord Walney (former Labour MP John Woodcock) to proscribe organizations like Just Stop Oil ‘that have a policy of using criminal offences or causing serious disruption to influence government or public debate. If a group’s actions were persistent, and used to promote a political or ideological cause, that would count against them, according to the recommendation’. Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to the Home Office that such protests are about the only option some of these groups have left because other approaches to legitimate protest have been legally suppressed. Yet another attack on democracy posed by this government.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2qv7425gvwo
Meanwhile, the bad news keeps coming: despite Sunak insisting that child poverty has declined, Gordon Brown’s longstanding work proving that it’s worse than ever, a quarter of Britain’s children living below the poverty line; the appalling state of our water supply, rivers and coasts due to water company pollution; pharmacies reporting that supplies of some medications are critically short, which could be life threatening for patients needing them; and the disgusting decision to ‘recover’ (albeit ‘with compassion’, as recommended by Oliver Dowden!) overpayments made to unpaid carers when these people are giving essential social care, get little support or respite and most likely have had zero time for admin.
One of the worst aspects of this is the discovery that only pressure from campaigners and some MPs forced the publication last week of a report (one of several suppressed by the then DWP minister Coffey in 2021) which flagged up a problem in the payments system that was never rectified despite its massive financial and emotional impact. Even worse, it’s likely to be the products of decisions like this (to continue with the overpayment ‘recovery’, £250m) which are being used to replenish government coffers emptied by their own wastage.
Meanwhile, Welsh Secretary David Davies is lucky that his breach of the ministerial code has gone under the radar, at least for a while, it seems. Labour is demanding an investigationafter Davies used his government office in Whitehall to film an anti-Labour video that he then posted on social media. The Code states that ‘Ministers are provided with facilities at government expense to enable them to carry out their official duties. These facilities should not generally be used for party or constituency activities’. But ‘in the video Davies said the Welsh Labour government had to decide whether it wanted to spend £120m of taxpayers’ money on more Senedd members or increase the number of nurses, doctors, dentists and teachers, as the Conservatives would do’. He then said that he knew what he would do. This episode clearly illustrates that either Davies didn’t know that this constituted a breach (unlikely) or he just didn’t care, assuming there would be no comeback because recent years have proved that there often isn’t. It’s the ‘rules are for little people’ mentality on display again. So much for the ‘integrity, professionalism and accountability’ Sunak promised when he was parachuted into his role. We’ve seen the opposite when we thought it couldn’t get worse after Johnson.
So just how long can Rishi Sunak cling on? Following their terrible election results and people waking up to their mismanagement of pretty well everything, he’s clearly at the endgame. But he ploughs on, digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole while desperately hoping the economy will ‘turn a corner’ and ‘prove’ that his non-existent ‘plan’ is working. It’s interesting timing, then, that the government is having another go at trying to resolve the junior doctors’ strike, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins spinning that this is ‘a peace process away from the glare of the media… the talks need time and space’, as if this, rather than government intransigence, was responsible for the failure of previous attempts. In fact the BMA agreed to fresh talks because a so far unnamed independent mediator will be involved and it’s most likely this is the crucial factor, not being away from ‘media glare’. It’s taken the government a while to come to this view, given that the last talks broke down in December.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-69022696
One of the gratifying things this week was the sight of Suella Braverman, accompanied by GB News presenter Patrick Christys, trying to taunt Palestinian supporting Cambridge University students at their encampment into what she called ‘engaging andlistening’ (aka picking a fight in order to maintain a presence in the public eye)about the Gaza issues. They totally blanked her, treating her as the irrelevance she is, leaving them both standing around looking and sounding very foolish. That’s rather a good tactic which no doubt other protesters will be trying.
Much of the news has long been terrible for our mental health and it’s no coincidence that during Mental Health Awareness Week last week, George Monbiot penned a powerful article which attributed our worsening mental wellbeing to our society ‘spiralling backwards’ and to the longstanding policy of neoliberalism. ‘The latest map of mental wellbeing published by the Global Mind Project reveals that, out of the 71 countries it assessed, the United Kingdom, alongside South Africa, has the highest proportion of people in mental distress – and the second worst overall measure of mental health (we beat only Uzbekistan)’.This is damning: ‘What it calls “the market” will, if left to its own devices, determine who deserves to succeed and who does not. Everything that impedes the creation of this “natural order” of winners and losers – tax and the redistribution of wealth, welfare and public housing, publicly run and funded services, regulation, trade unions, protest, the power of politics itself – should, albeit often subtly and gradually, be shoved aside. It has dominated life in this country, to a degree unparalleled in similar nations, for 45 years’.
For years politicians have successfully conned us into believing that if we tighten our belts today there will be jam tomorrow, but as we’ve seen, this never comes. Added to which we’ve seen politicians’ naked self-interest and pocket-lining on an industrial scale in recent years. ‘So they keep us hanging on. And the endless promises and the endless breaking of those promises grind us down. It would perhaps be more surprising if we found ourselves anywhere else on the mental health rankings’. This is a ‘world-beating’ ranking you won’t see Sunak and Hunt bragging about.
Some good news to end on, that an intended 76 mile walking and cycling path in Somerset, the Strawberry Line, one which connects villages and communities, has had a significant boost from campaigners using a different approach to gaining the permissions needed to progress the route. ‘….in 2022, they began experimenting with using “permitted development rights” – the separate process that a farmer uses when building a new track through a field’. Although there’s still much work involved, it’s streamlined compared with traditional routes, which have often seen councils turn down proposals. The project has involved a great deal of volunteer effort yet this in itself is good for community development and people can see how it benefits them all. It sounds a great initiative which perhaps could be replicated elsewhere in the country.
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 