Just over a week since Labour’s election success and five things have been very noticeable: how many are saying they feel relieved and hopeful for the first time in years (a vitally needed mental wellbeing boost); the speed with which Starmer got his programme up and running, with a Cabinet meeting the following day, talks with junior doctors opened and steps to resolve the shocking criminal justice system crisis; how many programme areas show the extent of Tory failure over 14 years; the ongoing attempts of the media to delegitimize the election result and the fact that so many Tories seem to be genuinely puzzled at why they lost. The only Conservative I’ve heard being realistic about the massive wipeout was one Daphne Bagshawe, chair of Sussex Weald Conservative Association, who was clear on the World Tonight last week, citingPartygate and the rest: ‘it’s our fault’. By contrast so many others seem totally mystified, quite a few still maintaining that they’re proud of their record. This degree of delusion or defensive lying is nothing short of alarming.
Yes, we can understand how the election shed much more light on the weaknesses of the FPTP electoral system, but the success didn’t just happen overnight. Labour have been working towards this for years, evidenced by the speed with which they’ve got onto deep-seated problems. But the success isn’t just Labour’s, of course: it’s healthy that we now have more LibDems, Greens and independents in the House.( As well as the 335 new MPs, a further 15 people are returning to parliament after a period of absence, bringing the total number of those newly elected to 350. There are 412 Labour MPs altogether). Parliamentary sketch writer John Crace summed up the very grudging and unfair stance adopted by some parts of the media in the wake of the election, for example in last Sunday’s news programmes, during which Labour’s very mandate was questioned. ‘How could Labour say it had a mandate when it had only won about 35% of the vote? Both Phillips and Kuenssberg said this as if it was somehow Labour’s fault rather than a consequence of the first-past-the-post system. As if Starmer was personally at fault for having adopted a strategy of trying to win as many seats as possible’.
But despite the sniping of Conservatives and the media, no one can deny the huge boost to the public mood afforded by this result. One tweeter summed up the feeling that’s manifestly widespread: ‘We now have competent adults leading the country. A week after the election, we have a fully formed and installed Government and our Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is operating on the world stage. God it feels good. Who else thinks this?’ And even for those not interested in sport, England qualifying for the Euros final has got to be a massive boost as well. Although England lost, it was still an achievement to get that far.
Last week I attended a book launch talk by veteran journalist and political commentator Will Hutton (his book is This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain) and during the Q&A he was asked for his three top priorities. He thought about this for a minute or two because his book has many more, sorted into categories, but he decided on housing, the NHS and probity in public office. He was keen to get back to the ‘we’ in politics, a marriage of socialism and progressive liberalism, rather than the neoliberal individualism we’ve been saddled with under the Tories, which has gone under the radar and been normalised so not everyone is aware of this damaging narrative. This is one reason why life is so challenging for carers and those with mental health difficulties, because rather than seeing these roles and issues as systemic, a collective need whereby the whole of society is responsible for supporting them, they’re located in the individual in a stigmatising and ruthless way. It’s the ‘survival of the fittest’ philosophy – you’re on your own. How many of us know people who’ve suffered from this mindset and left without any safety net?
Talking of recipes for remaking Britain, an interesting article focuses not on the views of the political establishment, for a change, but those of five key workers. A head teacher for 19 years says his job is harder than it’s ever been, with 4m children having been pushed into poverty, problems with Ofsted and the faulty curriculum and the growing numbers of young carers who get no government support. An A&E nurse says politicians have no idea what’s going on in our hospitals: ‘they get a sanitised view, they see fully staffed shifts, plenty of ward managers, matrons, when in fact things are breaking down. There’s a lack of dignity of care, massive burnout and poor retention rates. Staff breaking down into tears during shifts because they can’t provide the care they want… I’ve had mental health patients waiting in our department more than four days for a bed. Recently, we had 28 patients waiting in our corridor and one of the paramedics came in and told me they had 21 ambulances queued up outside’. He went on to talk about the problems with social care and staff retention. ‘So I want the government to grasp the scale of the problem and deal with it’.
A police sergeant describes a litany of problems, from insufficient officers to deal with calls, the amount of paperwork, new recruits resigning and the growing amount of time taken up by medical and mental health problems. There’s a feeling they can’t be proactive in preventing and dealing with crime because of the endless fire fighting involved in coping with rising demand. A prison officer struggles with understaffing, leading to prisoners locked in their cells for far too long, citing the need for better recruitment systems and dealing with corrupt officers and more investment in the service as a whole. A learning disabilities support worker talks about their appalling pay and being given huge amount of responsibility for tasks they’re not trained or prepared for, and the same thing I’ve been on about for some time, a national care service, not one taken over by private equity. ‘My top asks would be a national care service. We need to get a fair pay agreement, so let’s start the ball rolling on that. Let’s make this career – and I do call it a career – appealing to the younger generation. Mentally and physically, it’s a hard job to do’. She wants young people to think there’s no need to go to university because they can make a really good career from their support role. Quite right too, as for too long the vacuous jobs in society have been absurdly highly paid and the important roles thankless and underpaid.
It’s also noticeable how many, especially Tories in no position to pontificate to their successors, want to step forward with ‘advice’ for Labour (partly incited by the media), much of which, like ‘get to know your civil servants’, is blinking obvious and things Starmer would have prepared for months ago. As ever keen to maintain his profile, former PM Tony Blair timed his Tony Blair Institute’s Future of Britain Conference to coincide with the Labour victory, the sessions having a particular focus on AI. Like him or loathe him, there’s no doubt Blair still carries a lot of weight in politics and it’s striking how many key political and media figures have chaired sessions or spoken at this conference.
It remains to be seen whether Speaker Hoyle will invite the independents and those representing smaller parties to contribute and how often. I was disappointed to see him re-elected: in my view he’s been hopeless and Tory biased, not holding Tory MPs to account and allowing blatant lying. But we’re stuck with him now. One of my longstanding preoccupations has been the urgent need for a new (written) Constitution and new and enforceable rules for parliamentary conduct so I hope this new Ethics Commission does the business. Apparently probity was covered in the induction programme for new MPs but that probably would have been fairly cursory. With such a huge influx of new blood in Westminster this is an opportunity to re-implant the Nolan Principles across the entire parliamentary estate.
Nearly every area of news this last week has involved Tory failure, some on a massive scale. Thanks to the greed of water companies and uselessness of our regulators amid poor service, sewage dumping and leaks, we are now told to expect unsustainable hikes in our water bills, up to 44% by 2029/30. Many will simply be unable to afford this. These plans ‘raised concerns that consumers were paying the price for previous underinvestment by water companies, which have paid out £78bn in dividends since 1989, and accumulated £60bn in debt’. As campaigner Feargal Sharkey has said, we consumers are being expected to pay twice, now for the infrastructure improvements which we’ve already paid for and which was the rationale for the disastrous decision to private water in the first place.
Ofwat has finally put Thames Water into ‘special measures’ (aka slapped wrists?) but possibly one glimmer of hope: ‘water company executives signed up to a set of reforms after meeting Reed (Steve Reed, new Environment Minister) on Thursday. The new measures ensure funding for vital infrastructure is ringfenced for upgrades that benefit consumers and the environment, and is refunded if it is not spent’. Of all the feet this new government has to hold to the fire, these water company ‘feet’ must be some of the most slippery and intractable.
What’s competed with water for airtime and column inches is the prisons crisis, a symptom, of course, of systemic justice system failures over 14 years. No one seems to be remarking on this but I think it’s very striking (and unacceptable) that, like Steve Barclay former Environment Minister, the former Justice Secretary, Alex Chalk, was AWOL for months before the election. We never heard from them on the airwaves. It was almost as they were being protected from scrutiny and the public’s opprobrium. Prisons are now so full that drastic measures are needed immediately, such as releasing some prisoners before their sentences have been completed. The Independent observed:’There will be an outcry, calls for a public inquiry, questions in parliament. Labour will no doubt be labelled “soft on crime” by Conservatives who actually created the problem, and who refused to face up to the tough choices required to ameliorate it’. And only now Alex Chalk (though it was only on the Today programme podcast, not live on a news programme) chooses to pontificate about what Labour needs to do about this crisis which grew massively on his watch. The new Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said Sunak and his former ministers are ‘the guilty men who should be held responsible for the most disgraceful dereliction of duty by failing to address the prisons crisis.
Just in case you missed it, on Saturday night Radio 4’s Profile (a very useful series) featured Ms Mahmood and a very impressive individual she sounds.
A related failure, which has only come to light because of the recent horrific murder of three women by someone using a crossbow, is the one regarding the law on crossbows. The World Tonight interviewed a tragic victim of a 2018 attack, which killed the woman’s husband and severely injured her when she was several months pregnant. Now a single parent, this woman has pursued this case and reckons crossbows are actually more dangerous than other weapons but only last year did the Home Office decide to ask for evidence as part of a legislation review. Yet again Tories asleep at the wheel.
Besides growing the economy, of course, the other issue which has been top of the agenda is the NHS and it was impressive that on day one Health Minister Wes Streeting opened talks with the junior doctors. Ending this longstanding campaign of strikes has got to be one of the key planks in reducing NHS waiting lists and reviewing how the entire system works (or doesn’t). Doctors’ representatives have said they’re confident that further strikes can be avoided – of course they’ll realise that this is their best chance and it will be a very different kind of negotiation than with the ideologically intransigent Tories. The co-chair of the BMA junior doctors committee said: ‘It was a positive meeting, we were pleased to be able to meet the Secretary of State and his team so quickly after the general election – it signifies the urgency that they’re placing on resolving this dispute, which has already lasted 20 months’.
A few essential statistics convey why settling the strikes is so urgent: ‘Strikes across the NHS since December 2022 by doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, paramedics and other staff have led to nearly 1.5m appointments, procedures and operations postponed, at an estimated cost to the NHS of more than £3bn’. Many of us know someone whose appointment has been cancelled or is very slow coming through, with implications for patients’ quality of life, ability to work and mental health. But plenty have real doubts about Labour’s NHS plans, especially the use of the private sector and bringing back Blair health guru Lord Darzi. Many don’t recognise the extent to which privatisation has made inroads into the NHS and the extent of accountability denying fragmentation which occurred as a result of the 2012 Lansley ‘reforms’, We also hear much about prevention: critically important but have politicians and the media forgotten that one of the damaging Lansley interventions was to hand public health to local authorities, which weren’t well off back then but which are sorely cash-strapped now?
Disgracefully, poor loser Conservatives and the media keep asking Starmer and ministers when/how will they do this or that, as if they and not the Tories have been in charge for the last 14 years. Quite a few X users have said similar to this tweeter: ‘Incredible to have absolutely trashed the place for the last 14 years then, within days of being resoundingly trounced, to be standing on the sidelines tutting about how the new govt is starting to clean up after you. As usual, the lack of humility and shame is off the scale’. Showing commendable restraint, Starmer said at his closing press conference after the NATO summit that he hoped people would be patient. ‘We can get started, roll up our sleeves and hit the ground running…But real long-term fixes will take time’.
And when it comes to the right wing media, one of the first things Starmer needs to do (otherwise the damaging narrative will even further embed itself) is get rid of the Tory rot at the core of the BBC. As is commonly known, the main figures leading the organisation are Conservatives and stick to that narrative, not to mention ‘presenters’ like the much-criticised Laura Kuenssberg, who has lost over 700,000 viewers from her Sunday morning show on account of her blatant bias. Observed one of the many X users on the subject: ‘Can the BBC recover its once-precious reputation for quality and balance while the Conservatives’ highly political appointees remain on the board?’
An additional source of relief could be felt by cultural institutions since the election, as Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy made clear that ‘the era of culture wars is over’. As well as bigoted and dangerous, it was just downright silly the way the last government inveighed against ‘wokery’ and made arts funding effectively dependent on removing what others might call enlightened policy (eg making explicit evidence of racism, sexism and classism in exhibitions and collections) from their strategies. At least the National Trust, being a charity not in receipt of government funds, ‘only’ has the bigoted and determined Restore Trust to contend with rather than the government as well. Announcing her intention to reverse this negative strategy, Nandy told DCMS staff: ‘For too long, for too many people, the story we tell ourselves, about ourselves as a nation, has not reflected them, their communities or their lives. This is how polarisation, division and isolation thrives. In recent years we’ve found multiple ways to divide ourselves from one another. And lost that sense of a self-confident, outward-looking country which values its own people in every part of the UK’. There’s a good chance Nandy will be in this for the long haul, in sharp contrast to the Conservative administrations which saw 12 culture secretaries over their 14 years, conveying a clear lack of commitment to this important area.
On the topic of culture, while it was good news that the Young V&A has won the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year award, I always think in these situations that the less well known and lesser resourced institutions should be the ones awarded.
On a more controversial issue, it will be widely welcomed in some quarters that the Science Museum has now had to drop its oil and gas conglomerate sponsorship after a concerted campaign by climate protestors. Campaigners welcomed the ‘seismic shift’ and urged museum bosses to review links with other fossil fuel sponsors. Equinor, the Norwegian state owned energy giant, has been cut off by the Museum for its failure to lower carbon emissions sufficiently to align with the Paris Climate Agreement undertaking of limiting global warming to 1.5C. This result has taken quite some time to achieve because Equinor has sponsored the interactive WonderLab since 2016: now attention will surely turn to other cultural institutions sponsored by fossil fuel companies and Big Pharma. This issue is yet another for Lisa Nandy’s in-tray because no government here could afford to wholly fund these institutions, but it’s successive cuts which drive them into the arms of sponsors.
I suspect a good number of us would be happy not to hear about the Conservatives for some time but the media are regularly reporting on their leadership election and their shadow cabinet: you can almost hear the barrel being scraped for viable candidates. It was despicable that Lord Dave resigned after the election but clung onto his peerage, with the excuse that he couldn’t hold the Foreign Secretary to account from the Lords. It didn’t worry him previously that his not being in the Commons made him unaccountable. It’s thought that likely leadership contenders include Badenoch, Tugendhat, Patel, Cleverly, Atkins, Braverman and Jenrick. Gawd help us as no doubt we’ll be subjected to endless words of wisdom from the successful candidate.
https://tinyurl.com/yckmsmc6 Finally, with so much going on in the world it can be a shock to find what some put their energy info, in this case bed linen. I always thought a sheet was just a sheet, notwithstanding the obvious differences between cotton, polyester, nylon and flannelette (remember these?). But no – it’s a complex matter, one feature of which is the ‘thread count’ and another (naturally) is how Instagrammable the items are. Who’d have thought we should be considering how we ‘dress’ our beds as much as we do ourselves? ‘From soft brushed cotton to aspirationally rough linen; ticking stripes to bold, Instagram feed-friendly colours; scalloped-edges to the renaissance of the dust-collecting valance, beds are big business beyond the foundational mattress and frame. The domestic equivalent of picking what to wear, what you dress your bed in would ideally suit a mood, a season; it is an important part of the domestic jigsaw just as much – if not, arguably, more – than your sofa, kitchen tiles or rugs’.
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 