Well! Although he kept us hanging on for some weeks for a general election announcement and kept saying it would be in the autumn, it was really only a matter of time following those dreadful local election results. But what an own goal calling it so soon (some suggest to avoid the planned vote of no confidence). At one fell swoop he alienated many in his party by not giving them insufficient time to prepare, precipitating another tranche of Tory MPs stepping down, and completely reneged on his ‘flagship’ Rwanda plan and tobacco policy intended as his legacy but which maybe he could finally see were unworkable. Government ‘insiders’ hinted at other key reasons, like wanting to limit the time Reform has to prepare and the IMF warning that the UK faces a £30bn black hole in its public finances.
And what a rollercoaster – we’ve seen all the party leaders dashing about the country trying to make an impact on the voters some of them have ignored for years and what a disastrous start Sunak had. Once again you have to wonder who’s advising him, with these dreadful Alan Partridge videos and PR disasters like being photographed with two exit signs and with the Titanic building in the background, not to mention his wooden and cliché ridden delivery. And the desperation of the Tory campaign is palpable, announcing one unworkable gimmick after another, cooked up when closeted with ‘advisers’ on his one day off the campaign trail.
Within days we were bombarded with back-of-an-envelope national service plans, Triple Lock Plus, jazzed up apprenticeship schemes, 30 towns getting £20m for regeneration, tackling longstanding NHS issues and lower interest rates (when this isn’t even within his remit to decide) but, not surprisingly, neither these nor the Sunak campaigning has made a dent in the ‘headline’ polls. And yet again his inability to relate to ordinary people was apparent when he was ambushed by a student asking why he hated young people so much. Before scuttling off Sunak’s response to the young man saying he’d volunteered all his life was ‘you’ll love it, then…there’s a choice’. And there’s been another defection to Labour – Mark Logan (Bolton North East) – who said Labour could ‘bring back optimism into British life’. And hell, don’t we need it.
Predictably there’s no shortage of people talking up the hapless Prime Minister, including the Daily Telegraph suggesting he’s about to make an astonishing comeback and this extraordinary tweet from failed London mayoral candidate Susan Hall: ‘IfRishi Sunak was able to speak to every voter he’d win. His energy is infectious, his work ethic second to none. Unlike the others flip flopping on every decision or playing the fool in water parks Rishi means business. The economy is recovering-please give him the mandate’. Besides the government’s failure to train anywhere near enough doctors and nurses, those now qualifying can’t find posts, the NHS waiting list gets worse and thousands are seeking private midwives because of the widespread problems with maternity services. Yet gaslighting Health Minister Victoria Atkins tweeted: ‘Nursing vacancies are at their lowest level in SEVEN years. And our Long Term Workforce Plan will increase domestic nursing training places by 92% by 2031. It is Conservatives who have the clear plan to modernise our NHS so it is always there for you’. Yes, the workforce plan is so ‘long term ’they think they can get away with nothing concrete for some time.
Despite their bullish talk and constant fibs about ‘turning the economy around’ the Conservative party strategy seems mainly about damage limitation. ‘Lee Cain, the founding partner of the public affairs and communications consultancy Charlesbye Strategy and a former Boris Johnson communications chief, said: “This is about firming up the base, beating back Reform and ensuring that defeat isn’t as bad as it could be.”Another former Downing Street adviser said: “The first play on national service was about shoring up the Tory vote and shooting the Reform fox. It wasn’t about Labour and framing it as a two-horse race. There isn’t an overarching message and narrative yet.”…One thing the prime minister has been preparing for is the live televised debate against the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, which will be held on Tuesday night. Conservative advisers believe the format will suit Sunak, who has an excellent grasp of detail and is often at his best taking quick-fire questions on a range of topics’. I can’t wait. Just how many PM ‘resets’ are we going to see over the next few weeks?
Meanwhile, we’re confronted by evidence of Tory failure on a daily basis, for example the scandal of the overpayments to carers still rumbling on, with absurd amounts being demanded of carers by the DWP which should have fixed this system problem back in 2019. And despite their accusations of Labour, the Conservatives can’t give a credible account of how some of their gimmicks would be paid for. Media interviews with the constantly lying and gaslighting Jeremy Hunt saw him claiming that a 2% increase in ‘productivity’ would do it, when the very notion of ‘productivity’ in the public sector like the NHS is questionable. Hunt and colleagues are fond of citing technology as a productivity enabler but everyone knows that although this can help, the real solution lies in sufficient staffing, funding and organisational re-engineering. Since 2010 the Conservatives have deliberately fragmented the NHS in order to enable privatisation and reduce accountability: it’s quite shocking to see an organogram of the entire NHS.
But Hunt doesn’t stop at fibbing and gaslighting: he and others do quite a bit of scaremongering, making stuff up about alleged Labour policy. He even had the nerve to tweet about ‘Labour’s £30bn black hole’ when this has been solely of the government’s making. Reminds us of the absurd claims some months back that Labour would slap a tax on meat, and the like. They think they’re being clever when it just looks silly. But we surely reach another level of desperation with the attempt of a Conservative MP to misrepresent himself as Labour, thereby confusing voters: Robert Largan, Tory MP for High Peak, has issued red campaign literature branded Labour for Largan and tweets: ‘So many local Labour voters have told me they’re going to vote for me, because they want to keep me as their local MP. There have been so many that I’m launching a new Labour for Largan club. You can join other traditional Labour voters backing me at…’. He’s been reported and let’s hope the Electoral Commission get onto this ASAP.
Another blow for the Conservatives is the row which blew up yesterday when the PM was accused of using levelling up funds to gain votes – last week’s gimmick to give 30 towns £20m each for regeneration turns out to have focused heavily on Tory constituencies. What a surprise. ‘Just eight awards were made to towns in Labour seats, although many of the party’s strongholds tend to be in more deprived areas in need of levelling up money. The funding pledge led to accusations from Sunak’s opponents of “pork barrel” politics, while those involved in regeneration of the north said the announcement was more about winning votes than levelling up….. Justin Madders, who retained the seat of Ellesmere Port and Neston in the north-west of England for Labour in 2019, said “given their monumental failure to deliver on levelling up over the last four years, why would anyone believe this is going to make a difference now?’
The latest vacuous promise is ‘a £1bn plan to bring more NHS care services into the community, meaning fewer people will have to see a GP. As well as modernising 250 GP surgeries, the party pledged to build 50 new community diagnostic centres on top of the 160 built in this parliament’. Will these meet the same fate as the 40 new hospitals, we have to wonder. At least they seem to have finally realised that most voters care much more about the economy and the NHS than immigration. And nothing compensates for the failure to act on the 2019 manifesto commitment to reform social care.
Health Secretary Victoria Atkins was on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg earlier making all sorts of misleading statements about the NHS and the Conservatives’ intentions for it – there didn’t seem to be a fact checker around to challenge the claim to there being x more Gp appointments, x more GPs working etc etc but the claims made for the much trumpeted Pharmacy First are so disingenuous given the pressure pharmacies are under and how many of them are closing, leaving vulnerable patients with difficult journeys to make. One of the problems is rising debt for these businesses and the fact that they’re significantly underpaid by the NHS for the medications they obtain. Yet again, this scheme was yet another fig leaf to deflect attention from the government’s failure to train sufficient doctors.
But despite the positive polls, Labour aren’t at all out of the woods of course, with the left/right party split having come to a head in the Diane Abbott issue and uncertainty over economic policy.
With so much designed to grab our attention, there’s a risk that other important issues get overlooked and one that simply can’t be is the ongoing Post Office Inquiry. Many were disgusted by the long awaited Paula Vennells’s performance, her weeping and apologising when her wiles, cover ups and avoidance tactics over years as Post Office CEO were uncovered by the excellently relentless subpostmasters’ barristers. They really had her on the ropes despite her haughty manner. Much of the questioning naturally focused on when she knew what, as there had been so much denial – ‘I wasn’t aware’, ‘I can’t recall’, etc. ‘The former Post Office boss Paula Vennells killed a review that would have exposed the Horizon IT scandal more than 10 years ago after being told it would make “front-page news” but insisted she was not part of a cover-up. During a second day of giving evidence at the public inquiry into the scandal, Vennells, who led the Post Office for nine years, said a different decision could have avoided a “lost decade” for persecuted branch operators…. The Post Office did not stop fighting attempts to appeal against the convictions until 2019’.
The PO’s then director of communications, Mark Davies, seems to have been very much in the frame, although it doesn’t excuse Vennells. He warned her about the ‘front page news’ likelihood and that the Horizon revelations would become ‘mainstream, very high profile’ and even then she didn’t take responsibility, responding ‘You are right to call this out. And I will take your steer, no issue…the most urgent objective was to “manage the media”. You might recall her tearful statement ‘I loved the Post Office’: this and these key revelations about how long she was in touch with Davies and advised by him epitomise a key issue, in my view, that to people like this, the corporate entity of the Post Office, its brand and reputation, were of supreme importance, not the staff who actually comprised the PO and did the work. A typical avoidant exchange between Vennells and Jason Beer (KC) focused on her continuing to take Davies’s advice, even in 2020 getting him to ‘advise’ her how to deal with the media.
‘Did you exchange messages with Mr Davies about media statements you might make and the media lines you might take in the announcement of this inquiry?” Beer asked.
“I believe that the inquiry has texts that showed that,” she responded.
“He [Davies] was still advising you in 2020 about the lines to take in your media statement?” asked Beer.
“I had kept in touch with Mr Davies for reasons which were very personal to him,” Vennells replied. “I think he offered advice at one point in time.”
See the way her pompous and self-righteous responses are designed to retain the dignity her conduct doesn’t merit? ‘I think he offered advice….’ – so she doesn’t admit asking for this, as if it comes floating in from somewhere not at her behest – nothing to do with me etc. Despite what they’ve suffered over the years, it must have been cathartic for the PO victims present that their barristers called her out on this. ‘Vennells broke down under the questioning of barristers for the victims who accused her of hiding a deceptive nature by using “cloying managerial speak” and of living under a “cloud of denial” and providing “craven self-serving” evidence’.
Another misdemeanour surely bordering on criminal activity was to exclude the by then well founded doubts about the integrity of the Horizon system from the 2013 Royal Mail flotation prospectus and boasting about it. One of the most galling aspects of the sense of entitlement in such individuals is the assumption that they will never be found out. At least now some culprits have discovered that they’re not untouchable. And just to think that at one time the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was seriously considering Vennells for the post of Bishop of London, the third highest position in the Church of England.
The UK has been shamed in recent years with the number of inquiries (Grenfell, Windrush, contaminated blood, Covid and the Post Office) which have several major factors in common – the toxic rot at the heart of much public life, the mass cover ups of wrongdoing and punishment of hapless victims, all aimed at protecting organisational reputations at any cost and those of senior executives. It exemplifies a key principle of capitalist thinking, doesn’t it? The people working in an organisation aren’t there to be cared about in any way – they’re simply units of work who can be ruthlessly sacrificed for what’s perceived as the corporate good.
But I’d say a central and overlooked factor is this: whether public or private sector, many of us have encountered this kind of perpetrator in the workplace – ruthless sociopaths determined to climb the corporate ladder regardless of the amount of lying and bullying they have to do to get there. The fault also lies with inadequate selection procedures which enable these wordsmithing opportunists to be recruited in the first place. An overarching question applying to all the inquiries is how we deal with malpractice in the future. It should never have to get to public inquiry level.
On a related issue, significant concerns have been expressed about the potential sale of Royal Mail to Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky. It seems absurd that such a longstanding British enterprise could fall to foreign ownership but I don’t claim to understand how his has already happened to so many others. It seems that the Royal Mail chair, Keith Williams and his board have been seduced by the generous £3.5bn bid and the government has been typically laissez faire about it. Kretinsky has been described as ‘a shadowy figure’ and one commentator at least has said that Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch should invoke the National Security and Investment Act without delay. ‘Have we learnt nothing from our disastrous record of selling public utilities to foreign and private ownership? There are complex issues to navigate, for example the Royal Mail’s ‘universal service obligation’, the fact that the business is currently propped up an external parcel business, and that letter volumes have declined so markedly since RM floated in 2013. Perhaps such major decisions are put on hold during this pre-election period as a Labour Business Secretary might take a very different stance on this conundrum.
God help us on the actual day because the sycophantic media have already been talking about the Trooping of the Colour ceremony on 15 June to celebrate the official birthday of King Charles. Even more is being made of this as it’s the second one the king has presided over since his Coronation and the timing is soon after his return to official duties following his cancer diagnosis. Not only does all this pomp and flummery act as a cynical deflection from the broken state of this country, it also reinforces a monarchist narrative which acts a kind of anaesthetic, and such exercises are extremely costly when there’s so much else the UK should be spending its money on. Officials must be putting additional precautions in place to ensure that this time horses won’t bolt and cause mayhem.
Finally, it’s interesting to read about the experience of one organisation regarding their privacy policy – in my view one of the most tedious things about so many websites besides the cookies notice. The Week tells us that Dan Neidle of the think tank Tax Policy Associates suspected that these aren’t commonly read and thought he would test this. He inserted into one of his websites clauses: ‘We will send a bottle of good wine to the first person to read this’. You might have guessed: it took three months for the bottle to be claimed. This makes me feel not so bad at not engaging with this stuff – heaven knows what I could be signing up to! I’d also be interested to know what the ‘good bottle’ actually was…
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 