As Trump’s capitulatory and short-termist non solutions to Gaza and Ukraine struggle to take hold, not surprisingly, and Budget speculation gets worse, not better, there are three interesting sources of silence. One is that the BBC, having lost another Board member this week, has still not received the threatened law suit from Trump (is he just biding his time or has he been advised he doesn’t have a leg to stand on?) and it’s bad news for them to be losing so much licence fee revenue. Increasing dissatisfaction with the BBC and the compulsory nature of the fee has led numerous consumers to stop paying, some under the false impression that they don’t need a licence, but there seems to be very little checking. To get the content while evading payment I saw a recommendation to get a VPN and tick the box which asks if you have a licence. ‘The BBC is now losing more than £1bn a year from households either evading the licence fee or deciding they do not need one, according to a cross-party group of MPs who warned the corporation is under “severe pressure’. Attempts to enforce payment of the licence fee are also stalling. The number of visits to unlicensed homes increased by 50% last year, but it did not translate into either higher sales or successful prosecutions’. As the BBC charter renewal date is not that far off (2027) it will be interesting to see what they come up with as potential funding solutions. The Corporation seems to have learned nothing following the recent Panorama/Trump debacle, at least regarding its news and current affairs output – as right wing biased as before, if not more. It was appalling having ‘Lord’ Gove on the Today programme on Friday actually defending Boris Johnson given the findings of the Covid Inquiry, especially when Gove has been seriously implicated in the corrupt PPE VIP lane.
The second more predictable source of silence is Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. The former Prince had been given till Thursday to respond to the US Congress’s request to give evidence regarding what he knew about Epstein but no surprise, again, that this arrogant royal is treating the request with the contempt he’s used to doling out. King Charles’s hope that he has now, given recent the defenestration, put the Andrew scandal ‘behind him’ will likely prove in vain as the US is not letting this story die and the British public is increasingly losing interest in and commitment to the monarchy. Pressure is coming from various quarters including Keir Starmer, who said that ‘in principle anyone with knowledge of child sexual offence cases should disclose what they know’, clearly alluding to Andrew.
Following the agreement to release the Epstein files, we can expect further revelations concerning this disgraced character, who continues to live in luxury despite the spin of exile. And amongst ‘conditions’ that he’s laid down for leaving Royal Lodge, he’s refused to be ‘confined’ in his future home at Sandringham, despite royal family disapproval that he was seen riding his horse around the Windsor estate last week.
Meanwhile, royalist propaganda and bots continue to swamp the media, especially social media, with posts of various royals’ activities misrepresented as ‘work’, especially those of William and Catherine. Last week she gave an embarrassing opening address at the first Future Workforce Summit, a word salad clearly written by someone else and which she struggled to deliver, constantly looking at the notes and manifestly without the ‘passion’ she purports to feel. While, of course, the business leaders listened politely, the reaction of others was damning, along the lines of this privileged woman, living in luxury, has the temerity to address senior workforce and early years experts about the importance of ‘love’. It certainly is extremely important but, contrary to what the royal industry and her ethereal videos want you to believe, she did not develop this thinking herself – the crucial importance of early childhood was the work of 20th century psychoanalysts like D Winnicott. As one X user tweeted: ‘This is such an embarrassment, no job Kate lecturing businessmen on ‘love’. As if businesses were run on Kate’s puerile feelings or as if the princess has a clue of how employment or profit work in the real world’. Another said: ‘Got diverse family with independent business people, teachers & highly qualified people who’ve decades of experience in Social Care, Nursery Care, Early Years Teaching & SEN & Kate should go find another bloody hobby. Everyone I know has absolutely nothing to learn from her’.
But what’s been noticeable since the early days of the marriage and is undeniable now is that the Princess has an eating disorder which the royal industry gushing about her has turned a blind eye to. Her obvious weight loss and gaunt appearance have been prompting more and more comments and speculation as to what could be behind this. Of course this has echoes of Princess Diana and her own mental health struggles. Despite their luxurious lifestyle it can’t be easy living in this bubble, forever under a microscope and hedged in by the expectations of others.
The third silence relates to former head of Welsh Reform, Nathan Gill, who has now been found guilty of accepting Russian bribes (and other allegations of Russian involvement have long dogged Reform) and sentenced to a ten and a half year prison sentence. The media have been supportive of Reform UK for some time (the BBC openly admitted this) so didn’t cover this subject and, extraordinarily, top dogs Farage and Tice denied even having met Gill despite footage of them together. But Reform’s Zia Yusuf has now broken this silence, describing Gill as ‘treasonous, horrific, awful’ in an interview with Sir Trevor Phillips on his Sunday morning political show on Sky News. ‘Sir’ Trevor suggested to Yusuf that these events would affect people’s ability to trust anything Reform said about Russia. Gill had been well embedded in Reform, but Yusuf responded ‘I think it is unreasonable to besmirch everyone else at Reform and the millions of people around the country who support Nigel and support our party’.
There’s been another silence that, now it’s been broken in part, is breathtaking in its dishonesty and disrespect. I’m talking about Boris Johnson’s initial silence, with no formal response, following Baroness Hallett’s second report on the Covid Inquiry (set up by Boris Johnson himself) which rightly condemned his chaotic management of the pandemic and the toxic culture which was allowed to take hold in Downing Street, leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths. One X user cited 44 serious mistakes, including failure to attend key COBRA meetings, allowing sporting events like Cheltenham to go ahead, facilitating the discharge of Covid positive patients into care homes, Eat Out to Help Out, lack of testing at airports and many more which all indicate a criminally slack approach to this life-threatening situation.
But it gets worse: Johnson has been found to have lied under oath, surely leading to criminal prosecution. Regarding his activities between 14th and 24th February 2020, he told the Inquiry in December 2023 that ‘There wasn’t a long holiday that I took. I was working throughout the period and the tempo did increase’. But official activity logs have revealed this to be untrue, that that he took time off at a crucial time, walking his dog, taking motorcycle rides and hosting lunches and overnight stays for family at friends at Chevening. And what has brought all this to light, you might ask. We have to be grateful to the individual (s) who leaked this information and a transparency outfit I’d never previously heard of called Distributed Denial of Secrets. They describe themselves as ‘a non-profit that specializes in publishing, archiving and analyzing leaked and hacked datasets, while protecting sources. It is the world’s largest public library of previously secret information’. How the presumptuous charlatan must have been infuriated by the revelation of his lies.
Lady Hallett’s report described February 2020 as ‘a lost month’, citing the fact that there were no Cabinet meetings between 14 and 25 February. Johnson was not briefed ‘to any significant extent’ on the virus during this period and received no daily updates. Such a contemptuously casual approach clearly indicates an individual not suited to public life, let alone this role.
No wonder the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice have started a petition with the aim of bringing about legal action – public inquiries have to be about accountability besides ‘learning lessons’. It’s absurd that the main perpetrators in this tragic situation (Johnson, Cummings, Hancock, Sunak and Gove) have so far escaped any consequences for their grossly cynical and incompetent mismanagement. They should be prosecuted for misconduct in public office, but somehow such privileged people manage to remain above the fray. Even more astonishing, then, was Radio 4 Today’s choice of ‘Lord’ Gove to reflect on the report’s findings and its clear blame of the former PM. While Johnson himself remained silent yesterday, he was defended by Gove and also ‘Sir’ Mark Spencer, (unsurprisingly) Nadine Dorries, Tory MP Joe Robertson on Question Time and Rachel Johnson on LBC. An X user observed: ‘Conservative MP Joe Robertson’s dismissal of COVID negligence criticism reveals a chilling truth: the party’s moral compass remains broken. This isn’t just political defense, it’s institutionalized contempt for accountability’.
But now Johnson has attracted the ire of many by using his Mail on Sunday column to blast the Inquiry and Lady Hallett, a classic case of shooting the messenger. It’s a longstanding and cowardly defence to attack the means of seeking truth and justice and the individual in charge rather than considering one’s own role in a bad situation – I bet the mendacious clown learned this technique at Eton alongside their ethos of ‘cultivating effortless superiority’. He (of ‘let the bodies pile high’ notoriety) wrote: ‘Have these people lost their minds? More than three years after the end of the pandemic, they are still wrangling about what went wrong…Some judge has just spent the thick end of £200 million on an inquiry, and what is the upshot? She seems, if anything, to want more lockdowns. She seems to have laid into the previous Tory government for not locking down hard enough or fast enough – just when the rest of the world has been thinking that lockdowns were probably wildly overdone… I think it’s pretty obvious. Lady Hallett has been unable or unwilling to address the really important questions’. The irony which seems to have conveniently bypassed ‘Boris’ is that the two questions he reckons are key (Where did the virus come from and were the lockdowns worth the terrible price we paid?) were not in the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference which he himself approved.
He then has the nerve to describe Lady Hallett as ‘hopelessly incoherent’ and even purports to empathise with the victims and their families who, it’s been clear all along, he’s held in contempt, especially given what we later learned about Partygate.’ ‘So, faced with the agony of the Covid victims and their families – and their entirely understandable desire for catharsis of some kind – she has decided that the neatest thing is to administer a judicious kicking to the Tory administration, who no one much has an interest in defending except me, and to move on’. The families are clear: ‘He has no place in public life and we are calling again for Boris Johnson to lose all of his ex-PM privileges following the inquiry report’. Having penned his column, Johnson is now tweeting parts of it, to which the response has been forceful – the anger is palpable. One of the more polite ones reads: ‘Oh dear, what an inept response to the very clear findings that you and your shambolic government made a complete mess of the situation, resulting in thousands of premature deaths and costing the UK £billions. You and many of your colleagues should be on trial’. It will be interesting to see who else steps forward to defend this man. Also now attracting ire is a huge long ranting defence from Dominic Cummings accusing the report of being ‘damned lies’ and the result of ‘stupidity and incompetence’.
There have been other surprising events this week, some of which seem to have gone under the radar. One is the surely astonishing offer from Labour’s Clive Lewis during BBC’s Politics Live to give up his seat for Andy Burnham, amid continuing speculation regarding Keir Starmer’s leadership. He later said this had been a ‘hypothetical question’ put to him and he did not intend to stand down, but perhaps it’s an indication that such a move could be considered at some point.
Another surprise has been the Daily Mail group’s offer to purchase the Telegraph for £500m after the previous deal fell through. I thought it further proof of the lack of proper regulation in this country that the bidders have anticipated no strong pushback from the government but they might be well aware of the weakness of Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy. One right wing rag buying another? The business model sounds most unhealthy: ‘The Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) said it had entered a period of discussion with RedBird IMI, which is a joint venture between the United Arab Emirates and the US private equity firm RedBird Capital Partners. RedBird Capital’s own bid for control of the Telegraph collapsed last week’. A Liberal Democrat peer, Chris Fox, has expressed the doubts many will have: ‘…we are sceptical about concentrating so much agenda-setting power in the hands of so few…’ and, urging the competition regulator to ‘rigorously examine’ the terms of the agreement, he spoke of the need to ‘ensure we don’t get an even more unbalanced media market for consumers and competitors’. This is a crucial point because most of our media, print and broadcast, are in right wing hands. If this bid succeeds it will be interesting to see how the BBC responds, as they nearly always cite the Telegraph and the Mail first in newspaper reviews.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2eg1w0n81o
It’s frustrating that government and officialdom are always late catching up with damaging trends and a key example must be the insidious inroads into the UK made by Chinese online retailers who escape import tax, prime culprits being fast fashion purveyors Temu and Shein. The BBC obtained data showing that the value of small parcels shipped from China to the UK under an import tax exemption more than doubled last year to £3bn.The government is reviewing the rules which lead to imports of small packages worth £135 or less currently avoiding customs duties. UK business owners and industry groups rightly want action to protect bricks and mortar retailers from being undercut and to protect consumers from potentially faulty goods. We Brits have been far too supine about this, less so in France. In Paris other organisations have been pulling out of a luxury department store, BHV, because Shein has set up there and there have been significant public protests. It’s the first time Shein has ventured a bricks and mortar presence and it’s not being taken casually. The Week quotes The Spectator: ‘Don’t look on this as just another retail opening- it’s cultural surrender’, because for ‘more than a century, BHV has ‘embodied a certain Parisian ideal of accessible luxury, craftsmanship and good taste’. It seems that Shein is regarded as the direct opposite. Some Parisian commentators have called it ‘the Walmartification of French fashion’ and ‘Paris renting out its soul to Chinese algorithms’.
But we, as well as the Parisians, have a big responsibility here. Too many have been seduced by the desire for cheap stuff at the expense of quality and environmental principles. Shein has been associated with ‘well documented vile labour and commercial practices’ but not unlike Primark and others here in the UK, what do the purchasers care when they can get some cheap stuff with zero hassle? It seems short termism rules supreme despite the concern in some quarters about these ‘regulation skirting companies’ effectively closing down domestic companies. I never thought I’d approve of anything Trump did but here’s something: he’s imposed a 100% tax on parcels from Shein and similar and shipments to the US have dropped 40%. That is some result. The EU and the UK need to do something similar but individual consumers need to understand what their desire for cheap fashion is doing to domestic industry and the environment.
Besides the Budget another over-hyped event coming up is Black Friday, trailed for weeks on end but which might prove useful if we’re clobbered by Rachel Reeves’s measures. This coming week the BBC is focusing on scams. ‘Scam Safe week brings together content from across the BBC including TV, radio, iPlayer, Sounds and online – to help the public stay informed in the fight against scams’. Consumers have been warned about Black Friday scams and also adverts which may not be scams as such but which are misleading, such as promoting a product at a higher price for a while then reducing it just before next Friday, to make it look more of a bargain. I’d be interested to know just how much people do benefit from this heavily hyped event.
Finally, on a lighter note, we often hear about library amnesties and books being returned after years but now The Week cites a plate stolen from a Cambridge College over 100 years ago being returned. It was swiped from Gonville and Caius College by a Gordon Stewart Wimbush in 1908 and on his death his widow passed it to a close family friend, then in her 20s. I wonder why this lady, now 85, waited all this time to return it to ‘its proper home’ and also if the college is still using the same china! The response of the college is not recorded.
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 