As 2025 gets underway, it feels as the last couple of weeks have been accompanied by a strong whiff of suspended animation, with endless media speculation about the responses of the combatants in the Gaza ceasefire deal and about what Trump will do when he takes up the presidential cudgels again. Agonizes one newspaper: ‘Faced with Trump’s threats, US allies are torn between outrage and fear of antagonising the incoming president and his tech backers’. How this unpredictable egoist must be enjoying all this. Following the outrageous interference of Elon Musk in UK (and German) politics, though, some will be looking forward to the surely inevitable falling out between Musk and Trump – a titanic clash of egos could be on the cards. Trump has certainly selected such a motley crew to take up key posts in his administration that no doubt the media will have plenty more to talk about.
While the media sound so excited about the ceasefire deal, we have to wonder whether phases 2 and 3 will simply be kicked into the long grass and whether the ceasefire will hold at all. Israel has continued to bomb Gaza, a strident member of Israel’s Religious Party said during an interview that ‘there will be no Palestinian state – we’re done with that’ and two extreme right wingers in the Cabinet based their reluctant acceptance of the deal on the ‘war’ being recommenced after their hostages had been handed back. Surely one of the worst things Netanyahu has said is that he ‘reserves the right to continue the war (sic), with American backing’. And thereby lies the huge problem, of course. Skulduggery on both sides can’t be ruled out – after the initial delay let’s hope that today’s exchange of hostages and prisoners will now proceed as smoothly as it can.
Ahead of Trump’s inauguration (predictably to be covered by the BBC’s US obsessed Justin Webb despite having plenty of reporters already there) we hear that it will be moved inside due to the extremely cold weather. Some commentators have suggested that it had been colder when previous presidents were inaugurated and this was more a reflection of Trump’s doubts about the size of the crowd. Those doubts might be well founded: although many will be attending, it sounds like quite a few Washingtonians are planning on avoiding it like the plague. Alluding to Trump’s re-election one said: ‘It represents the ugly side of America that people don’t want to acknowledge. I guess I maybe mistakenly had a lot of faith that people saw what happened during the first administration and I figured we as a country wouldn’t regress’. Another said: ‘I have a fundamental set of beliefs and values that differ greatly from the supporters of the president-elect, so it is best that I just remove myself. It says to me that we’d rather have a criminal leading our country than a person of colour, or a criminal rather than a woman’.
Perhaps not surprisingly, anything to get one over the government, they imagine, the Shadow Foreign Secretary (yes, ministerial code breaking Priti Patel) took to X to announce her planned trip to Washington ‘to represent the Conservative Party’. I wouldn’t have thought Trump would care two hoots if the Tories were represented or not, being such an obviously irrelevant spent force.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the relentless right wing attacks on the government continue and some perpetrators are cock-a-hoop, claiming credit for what they see as a volte face, that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced an additional raft of investigations around the grooming gangs scandal. In their protests vociferous right wingers shamelessly expressed anger and indignation that Cooper didn’t initially announce a statutory public inquiry, when a) they’d never spoken about the issue in Parliament when it was all happening and b) totally ignored the fact that Professor Alexis Jay’s 2022 public inquiry had come up with multiple recommendations which have never been implemented. Some have also demonstrated a worrying preoccupation with ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’, sidestepping the fact that grooming and abuse have and do take place across all ethnic groups and all social classes.
Conservative and Reform politicians are constantly snapping the government’s heels, often aided and abetted by the media, when their points are often based on misinformation, the grooming gangs issue being a prime example. Conservatives still seem not to get that they’re out of office, ‘calling’ for or demanding this or that intervention. And hypocrisy is off the Richter scale, for example the bitter jibes about the Chancellor’s China trip when Rishi Sunak spent a great deal of time and money jetting around the world, often to avoid confrontations like Prime Minister’s Questions. They’re busy whipping up alarm about the ‘dire’ state of the economy when authoritative sources have challenged this ridiculous hyperbole, although it’s clear to all that the government does need to act decisively. For once it’s worth tuning into the latest Today programme podcast, which focuses on the economy and during which the presenters speak to some good interviewees. It’s also worth listening to the new series opener of Radio 4’s Political Thinking, for Nick Robinson’s ‘conversation’ (as the trailers stress, not an interrogation though it kind of is) with Rachel Reeves. This presenter’s agenda is very clear but the Chancellor manages to keep her end up very well, in my view.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00274r2
Unfortunately one of the worst at misrepresentation and downright lies is new Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, who gave ‘an important speech’ at the Institute of Directors last week. Despite Tories pretending that she’s a great leader doing a great job, the evidence to the contrary is only too clear. The way she presented herself and Conservative resolve, you’d never know that she was a member of the administration which presided over 14 years of misrule. There’s a splendid evisceration in the Guardian. ‘No one does pointlessness quite like KemiKaze. She is the queen of futility. If it was a relaunch, things got quite meta on Thursday afternoon – the question became “What was she relaunching as?” At a wild guess, a standup comedian. Because the speech was one sick joke. Then there was the nonsense about doing things differently. New broom, new team. Except the new team looks suspiciously like the old team. The same men and women who screwed up the country filling the same shadow cabinet jobs. No hope. No insight. No apology. A speech that was best described as an absence…. Hopeless at Prime Minister’s Questions and seemingly already out of ideas, many in the party are already looking around for possible successors. Even Robert Jenrick. Things really are that desperate’.
But it could be argued that even Kemi comes across quite well compared with Liz Truss, who seems determined to wreck her reputation even further through ever more absurd attempts to rehabilitate herself and rewrite history. The latest was a ‘cease and desist’ letter she had lawyers send to Keir Starmer, who’d repeated in the Commons the truism that she ‘crashed the economy’. You have to wonder what kind of lawyers she recruited because a lawyer’s blog pointed out how legally weak this 5 page letter was. Its main argument seemed to be that she hadn’t ‘crashed the economy’ because (dancing on the head of a pin) the definition of crashing would mean a fall in GDP or rise in unemployment, neither of which had happened, and that any fault lay with the Bank of England. Tell that to the millions subjected to much higher mortgage costs as a result of her reckless actions, not to mention those affected by the bond markets and pension funds having been thrown into turmoil.
‘When the value of government bonds dropped dramatically after the disastrous mini-budget, pension trustees were forced to sell their holdings at speed to raise cash, which further drove down the value of bonds, creating a ‘doom loop’. We could wonder whether this latest attempt to rewrite history resulted from an emboldened Truss successfully getting erstwhile Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, to delete a reference to ‘the disastrous Liz Truss mini-budget’ from official Cabinet Office briefing document in July after she wrote to him to complain. Needless to say, the PM has taken no notice. One commentator suggested that this was ‘arguably Truss’s most unhinged intervention yet’; another said it was ‘hardly a move befitting a free speech advocate’. As Sean O’Grady said in the Independent: ‘Her mistake was to actually believe in the economic fantasy she peddled to the grassroots, the one where tax cuts always pay for themselves and where it is definitionally impossible for a Conservative prime minister to crash the economy. It was Truss herself who tanked her reputation, and the position is irrecoverable. She may as well sue the lettuce’. This writer also wonders if Truss is familiar with the Streisand Effect. ‘In case it had passed you by, the term refers to how a public figure attempts to protect their reputation from some slight, but where the attempt to do so actually makes matters worse by drawing even more public attention to them and the cause of their embarrassment’. Great stuff – sounds snappier than shooting oneself in the foot.
Many have been understandably disappointed (putting it mildly) that the government has opted for yet another massive review of social care, which won’t result in final recommendations until 2028. Talk about kicking a longstanding problematic can down the road again when the need is so acute. The doyenne of inquiries and reviews, Baroness Louise Casey, will chair an independent commission on building a National Care Service. Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting explained: ‘The commission will publish its interim report next year and conclude towards the end of the parliament. Previous reviews on different aspects of social care, including Andrew Dilnot’s work on care costs, will be fed into the commission. It’s fair to say that it won’t be starting from scratch’.
His article gives useful background to the entire issue, starting with the birth of the NHS and emphasising one of the key problems today: over 12,000 hospital patients a day in November, for example, were ready to leave but couldn’t be discharged because of lack of social care provision in the community. That’s a massive number. It’s now clear to pretty well everyone (or should be) that problems within the NHS can’t be addressed without resolving the massive conundrum of social care. ‘By 2050, there will be 4 million more people aged 65+ in England than today. If we do nothing, real social care costs are expected to nearly double by 2038, compared with 2018 numbers. Many more people will be left without the care they need, the burdens will fall on the health service and our NHS will be overwhelmed. We can’t keep paying a heavier and heavier price for failure. Our NHS can’t afford to keep bearing a heavier burden. We can’t afford not to act’.
In political terms the delay is understandable, it could be argued: the government has said how important it is to build cross party consensus around this key issue against the backdrop of over 25 years of various proposals (including the Sutherland Commission, the Dilnot Commission, Labour’s Andy Burnham’s in 2010, Theresa May’s in 2017). Shamefully, these proved unpopular and those politicians lost the elections. (No doubt the losses weren’t solely due to these proposals but they could well have been a major factor). And we know what happened in 2019, don’t we? Boris Johnson made a dramatic announcement of a plan ‘from the steps of Downing Street’, which got nowhere. Although Covid would have been in the frame here, we’ve seen that Boris Johnson had form regarding his ‘oven ready’ deals which actually never existed. A very useful briefing in The Week (Can the social care system be fixed?) quotes George Osborne as saying ‘working out who pays for social care is incredibly unpopular. It’s much more straightforward politically to keep kicking the can down the road’. The Week observes: ‘He should know: as Chancellor he delayed what is widely seen as the most promising attempt at reform’. So here we have it: the social care so many desperately need is routinely sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. But we, the electorate, also need to take a realistic and more mature stance: whatever is finally decided is bound to cost us.
Staying on related territory here’s an ongoing NHS issue which I’ve long thought needed investigating. Complaints and attempts at rules have been made about ‘revolving doors’ within government and business, whereby, for example, a senior HMRC staffer could switch to the private sector, taking with them knowledge of tax dodges useful to future clients. The anti-regulation Tories effectively disabled regulators and disregarded rules so there’s probably quite a bit of this syndrome going on. But it’s also happening in the health sector, an example being ‘Sir’ Julian Hartley. Formerly CEO of the Leeds Teaching Hospitals under investigation for up to 56 potentially preventable infant deaths, he then headed up NHS Providers for a short time (one of three NHS organisations including NHS Confederation and NHS Employers why three?) and now heads up the Care Quality Commission. Parents of the deceased infants have argued that this current role at the health regulator constitutes a conflict of interest given his former role at Leeds.
At NHS Providers, he was regularly interviewed by the BBC about the state of the NHS, services under pressure, etc, but it always sounded (like the other usual suspect invitees) like wordsmithing and stating the b obvious. We have to wonder how this individual has been able to so easily and quickly move up the NHS hierarchy. ‘Bereaved parents say they are concerned that the trust’s chief executive during the period most of the deaths occurred is now leading the regulator, saying this could affect its independence in investigating LTH Trust’. Two parents said they ‘don’t think any future CQC investigation into Leeds could be independent with the trust’s former chief executive in charge of the regulator’. The BBC ‘approached the CQC and Sir Julian for comment and the regulator replied on behalf of both saying it was independent, with ‘robust policies in place to manage any conflict of interest’. This kind of denial just allows injustice to prevail. Where is the accountability?
Besides new and enforceable parliamentary rules this is another area the government needs to take in hand.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5gd48v10jo
It was interesting to learn this week about Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s ’new ‘soft power council’ (which sounds as if its objectives can’t be measurable), intended to bring together ‘experts from across culture, sport, the creative industries and geopolitics’ to promote Britain globally and provide a boost to the UK economy… It is understood the council will seek to work alongside institutions including the royal family, which counts the US president-elect, Donald Trump, among its admirers’. Perhaps now the royals will have some real work to do, including supping with the ‘devil’ Trump with a long spoon. Remember the body language of Princess Anne when Trump first came to meet them? As for the council’s objectives, they sound reasonable enough but it’s hard to see how any particular results could be attributed to it. ‘We are determined to strengthen our soft power abroad, and in turn deliver a major boost to our economy, as we focus on our missions to create jobs and spread opportunity across the UK’.
Finally, there’s optimism for Bradford as the new City of Culture. Said one commentator: ‘We don’t have the swagger of Manchester or the sheen of Leeds, but Bradford has a radical culture all its own… The city of culture celebrations will show the truth breadth of our community, from the Brontës to the working-class plays of Andrea Dunbar’. I won’t be the only one to find such places more interesting and attractive than the most obvious ones. The city has certainly had its problems, from neglect and decay to racial conflict, but seems to have a huge amount going for it now. ‘If you grew up in the city, Bradford’s cultural history was drilled into you from an early age. The names Forster, Priestley and Brontë were inescapable, as was the annual school trip to the Industrial Museum to relive life as it was when Bradford was a booming textile centre. But Bradford has also always been radical. It was the place where the Independent Labour party was founded (a mural still adorns the outer wall of the Bradford Playhouse), while in the 1970s the Asian Youth Movement and Bradford Black Collective confronted the far right. The city’s cultural institutions came to embody that radicalism: the Peace Museum grew out of the peace studies department at Bradford University. Cartwright Hall, which sits at the centre of Lister Park, is home to one of the biggest collections of Black and Asian art in the country, compiled at a time when – unlike today – many institutions were completely dismissive of Black British artists’.
Although Bradford will receive £15m from the government, producing an estimated £140m boost to the local economy, it’s visible improvements that excite some locals, such as public toilets at the Bronte parsonage, and, as Andy Burnham alluded to regarding Liverpool’s win back in 2009, the renewed sense of pride and confidence in the city can be a lasting legacy. A good place for UK tourism, then, and good luck to Bradfordians if that’s the right nomenclature!
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 