Phew – the first week of the Trump second term many of us have been dreading, with good reason. The 47th president declared: ‘Starting tomorrow, I will act with historic speed of strength and fix every single crisis facing our country’. The sycophantic media excelled themselves with their obsessive and excessive coverage of the inauguration itself (yes, it’s important, but not to the exclusion of other news), followed by endless discussion and speculation about his immediate executive orders – a bit more useful. Regarding the ceremony itself, if you could put up with Trump’s cringingly bad and hyperbolic speech, it was interesting to see who was there and what they wore. One wag dubbed Melania Scary Poppins, with her severely tailored outfit more suited to a funeral and massive wide brimmed hat seemingly intended to deflect the President’s celebratory kiss. But also very noticeable was the amount of ‘work’ the Trump women had had done. There was much speculation as to who Trump had actually invited and who had just turned up and obtained a public seat in order to be close the centre of power, as they see it. Boris Johnson did apparently get a well positioned seat, no surprise there – not so Farage and Truss. Elon Musk’s fascist salute, alarming stuff, caused more to finally leave X in disgust, although it didn’t prevent various efforts to pretend that it was something else instead.
‘As executive orders rolled in on Monday, the accelerated pace amounted to a shock-and-awe campaign. Trump promised in his inaugural speech that these orders would amount to a “complete restoration of America” ‘. As could be expected, though, many of these are big talk which doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. His undertaking to take Greenland is unhinged and he has not ended the Ukraine War ‘on Day 1’, instead posting on his Truth Social platform an amateurish and inflammatory message to Putin about ‘ending this ridiculous war’ which will have the opposite effect. Everyone knows Putin doesn’t respond well to threats. Trump is sending his country backwards with the reversal of diversity, inclusion and equality initiatives and giving the green light to reclassifying multiple federal hirings, making them easier to fire. The president sees this as part of his campaign to tackle the so-called ‘administrative’ or ‘deep state’ – smacks of conspiracy theory.
Several major executive orders, including the one to end birthright citizenship (automatic citizenship for US-born children of immigrants) and the pro-fossil fuels measures (‘drill, baby, drill’ etc) are already attracting legal challenges. ‘Birthright citizenship, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born on US soil, is protected by the 14th amendment and any attempt to revoke it will likely bring immediate legal challenges’. However, if the orders are overturned by state courts, Trump can be fairly sure of getting them through the Supreme Court as he packed it with Republicans during his first term. Trump’s latest attack on standards and due process comes in the form of firing with immediate effect 17 independent watchdogs at multiple US government agencies, said to violate federal law, which requires the president to give both houses of Congress reasons for the dismissals 30 days in advance. Democratic US senator Chuck Schumer reportedly called the firings ‘a chilling purge’: absolutely – there seems to be zero accountability here and who could stop him?
Regarding the performative vow to rename the Gulf of Mexico – apparently there’s no international maritime authority which dictates nomenclature so Trump can order ‘Gulf of America’ to be used by US authorities but that doesn’t have to make an ounce of difference to the practice of other jurisdictions. Some orders seem unworkable and self-sabotaging, for example the deportation of undocumented migrants. Apparently in some areas they’re already being rounded up, no doubt leading to a climate of fear and despondency, but (not that they should be thus restricted) who do Trump voters think will do the jobs they won’t to do themselves? On Farming Today Radio 4 interviewed an agricultural union representative who made clear how dependent the US is on undocumented farm workers and who wants a route for their citizenship to be developed.
As for the motley crew he’s appointed to major posts (the latest being Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, with very murky credentials) and the massive number of pardons for those convicted of 6 January offences, it’s almost as if Trump has thought out what’s the most he can possibly do to undermine the international order and stick two fingers up to law, justice, decency and equality. Common sense, too, when it comes to taking the US out of the World Health Organisation and the Paris climate change agreement.
Commentator George Monbiot observed: ‘Musk, with a fortune of more than $400bn (£330bn), has warned: “We have to reduce spending to live within our means.” But he doesn’t mean “we”, he means you. Trump and Musk want to cut the federal budget so they can slash taxes for the ultra-rich. This benighted class needs all the help it can get. Since 2020, the wealth of the 12 richest men in the US has risen by a mere 193%. Collectively, the poor dears now own only $2tn. We can endlessly debate whether or not Trump and his acolytes are fascists, as if that somehow solves the problem. It is more useful to recognise them as representatives of a much longer tradition, of which fascism was just one iteration. The emperors are back.But the billionaire class will move swiftly to consolidate the oligarchy, and will meet almost no resistance. US institutions, the established media and foreign governments are completely unprepared. Despite copious warnings over many years, they know only how to appease oligarchic power, not how to resist it’. (My italics).
Of several pieces of important UK news, there was no shortage of coverage of the Southport murders perpetrator sentence (not surprisingly a multi agency failure to address what were clearly early indications of disturbance with Axel Rudakubana, Tory cuts to youth and mental health services being firmly in the frame). In my view this is a crucial point: ‘We live in a world where human beings can do unspeakable things; where society’s job is to find and fix the cracks through which such horror slips’. What’s crystal clear is that ‘society’ didn’t do its job, conditioned as it was by a Conservative administration prioritising bigotry over effective strategy. ‘…the then Home Secretary Suella Braverman seemed mainly preoccupied with whether too many far-right suspects and not enough Islamists were being investigated, attacking “cultural timidity”’.
In contrast, another major news item became yet another example of news omission by the BBC: on some bulletins there was zero coverage or only very late mention of PrinceHarry’s striking victory over the Murdoch press. It’s nothing short of disgraceful that it took this amount of money and legal action to get a verdict on phone hacking offences going back to the 1990s. Some are now calling for criminal proceedings as it has become clear that some of the accused during previous legal action must have perjured themselves.
Contrary to her intentions, the efforts of Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch to rewrite history and portray herself as a powerful leader fell rather flat. Her performances on two sessions of Prime Minister’s Questions and her party political broadcast (carefully timed, I suspected, to coincide with Rachel Reeves’s presence at the World Economic Forum in Davos) have been described as ‘woeful’, yet she always seems very pleased with herself. I hadn’t been expecting this many but parliamentary sketch writer John Crace devoted three witty articles to eviscerating her and she has yet another problem which seems out of control – what to do about Liz Truss, who will not shut up and who brings the party into even more disrepute as she strives to rehabilitate herself.
‘Call it a combination of arrogance, laziness and delusion, but KemiKaze’s usual approach to prime minister’s questions is to burble on about the latest conspiracy theory. One of her many failings is that she believes whatever she reads on X… It seems the more you see of Kemi, the less there is of her to like…. She longs to distance herself from Boris, Liz and Rishi – but it’s as if she has given up already.’There’s a lot that needs fixing,” she continued… No shit. “The economy. The NHS. Immigration.” And who broke it? Kemi didn’t care to join the dots. That it was the Tories who had been in power for much of the last 14 years’. For me her worst faults are her incessant lying and misrepresentations, the unjustifiably haughty air and that pretentious delivery. It’s been predicted she won’t last as leader till the next election.
Several ostensibly separate strands of business news seem to be coinciding, starting with a report in The Economist about how there are fewer jobs in the US these days for MBAs, the ‘traditional destinations such as consulting, finance and tech all hiring fewer of them’. In the UK the Chancellor’s tax raising budget is thought responsible for fewer hires, top white collar recruiter Page Group for one example having experienced a drop in share price after a profit warning, but AI must also be in frame for obviating the need for more junior roles. In the Guardian Gaby Hinsliff warns against the ‘fury of frustrated graduates’ as vacancies and graduate salaries have fallen markedly in recent years, some salaries barely above what a minimum wage shelf stacker could earn.
One problem is surely the over-production of MBAs and other graduates and another is the higher than realistic expectations of those graduates, few of whom seem to know much about the Labour market, not helped by the higher education institutions which compete for bums on seats. Hinsliff points up a dangerous dimension of this situation: ‘an economy in which there are more educated, ambitious young people than there are jobs to meet these ambitions is a breeding ground for social unrest’. The frustrated could move even further away from mainstream parties towards far right organisations making unrealistic promises while having no policies to fulfil them. ‘The revolt of the frustrated elites is only getting started’. ‘In his 2023 book End Times, the US academic Peter Turchin identifies “elite overproduction” – essentially an economy creating far more educated, ambitious potential elite members than it has prestigious jobs to offer them – as a key trigger for revolutions and civil wars, especially when combined with deep economic inequality and high public debt…Though the two lines are still a long way from crossing over, for gen Z and millennials in particular the boundaries between white-collar and blue-collar worlds are getting blurrier’.
With other job losses announced recently (eg Sainsbury’s letting 3,000 staff go despite bumper profits over the festive season), maybe that ‘leisure society’ forecast some years ago is gradually coming to pass, but not in agood way for many young people. It would meanneeding to look again at the Universal Basic Income ideas which were occupying policymakers a while back.
Meanwhile, it seems businesses have had it their own way for too long under the laissez faire Tories and, not unlike the farmers, start squawking when measures to correct an imbalance or loophole kick in. The forthcoming Employment Rights bill has 28 measures including ending exploitative zero hours contracts, banning hire and rehire tactics and dating rights and protections from the start of a job rather than after the existing one year period. Added to all this the rise in employer National Insurance and the minimum wage, we can understand how bosses are concerned but they need to get real rather than play the victim card.
Polly Toynbee observed that ‘Business leaders may thunder about job cuts, but their threats could backfire: union membership is only growing’. She cites a large food distribution business which has derecognised the Unite and GMB unions, a move which members hadn’t seen coming but which they take to indicate the company’s plan to stick to fire and rehire tactics. When Polly spoke to the company they pointed her to their statement, which sounds avoidant and disingenuous to me, to the effect that they want ‘to work with our teams directly through our employee engagement forums, which we believe represent a wider range of our employees’ views’ and that “a number of employees” are “voicing concerns and frustrations over long delays in resolving issues” via the unions’.
‘The radicalism of this bill is its intent to tilt power back from capital towards labour. Often overlooked is the bill’s obligation on employers to allow unions in to address their workforce, hoping to recruit from the most vulnerable workforces in social care, fast food outlets, warehouses and deliveries’. Predictably, bodies like the CBI and British Chambers of Commerce warn of ‘dire consequences’, plummeting business confidence in the government, etc, but the government has reiterated its intention to stick to its guns. ‘Make work pay” is Labour’s rubric for this act: growth depends on better pay, it says. Polls show overwhelming support for these working rights. People see the need for stronger protection of a workforce that has become more insecure and vulnerable’.
Very relevant to this debate is an interesting episode of Radio 4’s The Bottom Line, presented by economist Evan Davis, about ‘unbossing’ – the phenomenon of organisations getting rid of layers of management. It’s an idea Amazon, Meta and Citigroup are exploring. But generally, even in the private sector, let alone the public, this tackling of the very notion of hierarchy to bring in flatter organisations would be seen as revolutionary, at the very least an upheaval. Where would all the offloaded managers go? The programme opens with an interviewee reporting revealing reactions to his questions at a business conference, the first being how many here are managers (many hands shot up) and the second being how many here feel the need to be managed (very few hands shot up). The mismatch is glaring. Of course it could be that some are rather deluded in believing they don’t need to be managed, but perhaps many more could benefit from increased autonomy and escape from micro-management, making them happier and more productive in the workplace. It then goes on to hear the views of those for whom ‘unbossing’ has worked and those for whom it hasn’t. Interesting stuff.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00274y3
It could be argued that yet another thing that needs fixing in the workplace is the inequality driver of unpaid internships – effectively beyond the reach of young working class people. ‘Research by the Sutton Trust found that middle-class graduates made more use of internships as stepping stones into sectors such as finance or IT, even in cases where the internships paid nothing or below the minimum wage as required by legislation. Nick Harrison, the chief executive of the Sutton Trust, said: “Internships are an increasingly critical route into the best jobs, and it’s shocking that in this day and age, many employers still pay interns below the minimum wage, or worse, nothing at all. They should be ashamed’. I was right in thinking that unpaid internships had been banned in 2018 but they persisted – no surprise there given years of Tory laissez faire and that their own contacts would be the ones benefiting from these legs up enablers. ‘Only 40% of those who went to state schools had done an internship, while 71% of those who attended private schools did so’. Let’s hope that this government shows more resolve than previous ones.
Finally, on a positive note, it’s good news to see in The Week that over 300 acres of low lying farmland on the Severn estuary are to be turned back into saltmarsh – these coastal areas which are regularly flooded by incoming tides. The restoration on the Awre peninsula will be carried out by Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, to include creating habitats such as creeks and ponds to encourage wildlife. Good to know that farmers have generally been supportive of this endeavour, which also aims to reduce flooding and capture carbon. Good luck to all involved!
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 