Sunday 27 October

As the Middle East crisis worsens, the Sudanese civil war continues to be under-reported, as Putin boosts his flagging army with North Korean manpower and the US election is imminent, the world certainly looks a dangerous place. Meanwhile, there’s plenty going on here to occupy us but there’d be much more time and space for international reporting if less resource was allocated to the right wing media’s attempts to undermine this government. From one non-story to another alleging Labour wrongdoing, there was far worse during Tory administrations but somehow this seems to escape the likes of the BBC’s Chris Mason, Sky’s Kay Burley and Beth Rigby and even ITV’s Robert Peston. From the Sue Gray to the Taylor Swift stories and the role of UK politicians in the US election, it’s been non-stop, undermining the government and any pretence to media impartiality. I suspect this campaign is partly due to the media’s irritation that despite their endless speculation and pestering of interviewees, ministers have been discreet about the contents of the forthcoming Budget – a key difference from when the media could rely on Tory leaks.

With the Budget now only days away, more has emerged, and no surprise at the application of VAT to private school fees being misrepresented as a ‘tax on education’ and the rise of employers’ national insurance contributions a ‘tax on jobs’. Needless to say, Conservatives like former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt are doing their best to undermine any policy they hear about but particularly to insist that the ‘black hole’ in the nation’s finances is nothing to do with them. One of the many dangerously misleading aspects of this ‘tax is bad’ narrative is the connection to public services, which we all need and use to a greater or lesser degree. Quite a few have gone on record to say they’d be happy to pay an extra penny or two in income tax in order to raise those crucial revenues. But such decisions are never straightforward, of course: on X Steve pointed out that the media haven’t registered how problematic a rise in employer NI would be for the care industry: ‘…not one of them has picked up that an increase in employers NI contributions will directly hit and hurt anyone having to pay for their own care needs (which ought to be on the NHS). There ought to be tax cuts for people in the care sector’.

Amid the gloom and pre-Budget febrile exchanges, though, lurk a couple of causes for relief, even glee for those on the Left. The Conservatives have shot themselves in the foot by eliminating the centre right Cleverly from their leadership contest, leaving two rabid far right candidates to fight it out and more centrist Tories to become disillusioned. But what’s so noticeable is how seriously the Conservatives still take themselves, aided by media collusion and the constant platforming of resentful has-beens. They still haven’t got over losing the election and won’t be able to progress until they do. As the Guardian’s John Crace put it: ‘…they are locked into their own echo chamber of futility…the Tories have not adjusted well to opposition. Many continue to believe they are the natural party of government and the country has a sacred duty to continue accepting whatever deadbeats it puts in front of voters. They have yet to catch up with reality. They believe that 4 July was a random category error that will in time be righted’.

The most recent example of the media facilitating the rehabilitation of discredited politicians is Michael Gove’s Radio 4 gig, Surviving Politics, in which he purports to engage guests on how they survived their own choppy waters. The first question should be what entitles him to be a judge of these issues? Apart from Margaret Hodge, they mostly didn’t survive: Arlene Foster, Amber Rudd, Humza Yousaf and Peter Mandelson. It’s not the job of the public service broadcaster to platform these efforts to rewrite history, including Gove’s own, but Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has still not addressed the Tory rot at the core of the BBC, which is clearly aiming to bring Labour down. Sky is even worse and a number of channels have been hosting Kwasi Kwarteng recently. Today BBC News tells us that while Kwarteng concedes that the 2022 Budget ‘wasn’t perfect’ (??) – it was disastrous – Labour measures for this one are ‘pure socialism’. (As if that’s a bad thing). Now a journalist has written about what I’ve been saying all week:

‘No worries if you haven’t felt quite up to it: thanks to BBC Sounds, its recent Michael Gove festival, Surviving Politics, should be available for a year, to prove that no political life, however deeply disenchanting it might look, need now end in failure. Not while the BBC, with its extensive experience in rehabilitating widely detested politicians, is still there to pick up the pieces….. In handing him his own series, the corporation is relaunching yet another failed politician’…. this heavily promoted series reinvents Gove as a twinkling fount of political wisdom, a presenter who should now, if you set aside the countless reasons for his unpopularity, be as acceptable to its audience as any other. Be kind: doesn’t the officially “toxic” Gove, the Brexit hysteric, Cummings-patron, proroguing apologist, blob-detectorist, Murdoch protege, elephant-lamp fancier, expert-denigrator and once-prized contact of Michelle Mone – “Judas” to his friends – deserve another chance?….. the premise seems to be that the Spectator editor, with a reputation principally for Brexit and treachery, is a respected guide to dilemmas often faced in politics…..If these politics programmes tell us anything, it’s that if the BBC does not yet treat politics as a game, it’s still captivated by people who do.’

https://tinyurl.com/bdcze8bs

And, following his blatant book promoting media interviews, it appears that Boris Johnson’s much trumpeted Unleashed has badly underperformed, likely to cause a big loss to its publisher HarperCollins who gave him a £2m advance. I was surprised to see that the cover price is £30….. now available in Morrisons for £16.

The NHS is never far from the news but especially now for so many reasons, including the forthcoming Budget, the 10 year plan that’s been announced and the public consultation now underway, the fact that so many being off sick and waiting for NHS treatment is proving a considerable brake on economic growth, the assisted dying debate putting inadequate palliative further under the spotlight, the decision to spend valuable resources on drugs to tackle obesity, and failing mental health services leading finally to scrutiny of lack of regulation of private counselling and psychotherapy. The number of Blairites advising the new government, including former Health Minister Alan Milburn, has rightly raised fears of further NHS privatization, which Keep our NHS Public and other organizations have long been campaigning against. Many patients won’t know that their GP practice has been sold off to a private company, thanks to the decision of local NHS commissioners and KONP has been robustly challenging these contracts. An even bigger threat is the NHS’s determination to boost the dwindling GP workforce (but also in hospitals) with Physician Associates, who only have two years training and who are, in some cases, passing themselves off as doctors. Numerous doctors are up in arms about this, encountering silence and collusion from the General Medical Council, which has been charged with regulating PAs besides doctors.

The core of the 10 year plan (surely we need immediate action, not solely a long consultation) is based on three long term shifts: hospital to community, analogue to digital and sickness to prevention. Very laudable at first sight but the second has been questioned: not everyone has a mobile phone and not everyone has a smartphone or computer to enable the creation of online accounts, etc. Some patients will still prefer to receive appointment letters through the post and there’s still the knotty issue of personal data being made freely available to US tech firms commissioned to produce the NHS record system. Wasn’t that what the Palantir concern was about? Conservatives still plug their mantra that they ‘invested more’ in the NHS but this is untrue and the amount per capita declined significantly on their watch.

But numbers one and three are also problematic, for example shifting from hospital to community would surely involve enabling more patients to self-refer to secondary services and make much more complex the commissioning of primary care services. ‘Sickness to prevention’ is a no brainer but far-reaching changes would have to be made to enable it, including the boosting of local government public health budgets (stupidly removed from the NHS by the Lansley ‘reforms’) or returning that responsibility to the NHS. It also calls for substantial societal changes, such as properly tackling the junk food industry, easier said than done when those lobbies are so powerful and contribute substantial tax revenue. The Change NHS website states: ‘We want to have the biggest ever conversation about the future of the NHS…. If you are a member of the public or someone who works in health and care in England, go to start here, to tell us how the NHS needs to change’. Where to even start? One fundamental thing hardly mentioned is surely tackling the damaging fragmentation of the NHS, catalysed again by those Lansley reforms. The organogram is shocking, to see how the NHS has been split off into so many parts, reducing accountability and encouraging opacity. And why did NHS England, which seems to be a job creation outfit for former NHS trust staff, ever need a banker to head it up?

Meanwhile, many of the ‘economically inactive’, who concern all politicians although not all will use this stigmatizing term, are unable to work because of chronic pain and long NHS waiting lists. One estimate is that those experiencing chronic pain will rise by 1.9m by 2040.

‘The number of people in England aged 20 and over with chronic pain is set to soar from 5.345 million in 2019 to 7.247 million by 2040, according to projections by the Health Foundation think tank. That 1.9m rise means the proportion of the population whose lives are blighted by the condition will increase from one in eight (12.4%) to one in seven (14.4%). That will add to the strain on NHS GP services and hospitals and also increase their spending on pain-relieving drugs’. This problem was found to disproportionately affect poorer communities, women and older people. Yet another example of the interdependency of socioeconomic issues because health directly affects productivity levels and thereby hinders economic growth.

https://tinyurl.com/3mzn2zt4

Of course the state of the NHS is also at the core of the assisted dying debate, because what has led Health Secretary Wes Streeting and others to take an against stance on this legislation is the currently inadequate state of palliative care in this country. One of the leading proponents of this legislation, Dame Esther Rantzen, the Childline founder, who has stage four lung cancer, attracted some flak this week for publicly attacking Streeting when his

decision became known. Some were very annoyed by the well-off Rantzen seeming to think she could determine Streeting’s decision. The Daily Express headline screamed her message to him: ‘Will you force me to fly to Dignitas to die alone?’ Others have defended her on account of the severity of her illness and perception of how much good she’s done in the past.

There’s no doubt the debate is very polarized and whole programmes eg an episode of Any Answers have been devoted to the topic. One doctor said that they could never get involved in the ‘assisted’ bit – they’d ‘have to get technicians to do it’. Some seem to believe (unlike Streeting, obviously) that that the ‘safeguards’ will be sufficient to eliminate potential abuse of the system. It seems to me that although this would not change one’s stance, an important aspect has been overlooked, that of where we locate authority. Many understandably say ‘I should have the right to decide when and how I die’, but for years, due to our traditional location of authority in areas like medicine, the law and the church, those people have effectively decided how things will proceed. It’s only been in the last thirty years or so that these sources of authority have been challenged, effectively shifting the dial towards the individual from the traditional.

 I thought an important development in this area (but not acknowledged) was Martha’s Law – the regulation which is supposed to entitle friends and families of severely ill patients to obtain a second opinion. Merope Mills, the mother of the little girl who died of sepsis due to inadequate hospital care over one weekend, wanted notices to be put up in numerous hospital areas to inform people of this right. I wonder how this is going, because it’s a direct challenge to the ‘doctor is always right’ philosophy. How well it works also depends on the appropriate resources being available and, as we well know, the strained NHS will often fall short of expectations despite the best efforts of the staff.

Another indication of how far and wide the NHS tentacles reach are the calls, finally (as a former therapist I and others have been pressing for this for years) for statutory regulation of private counselling and therapy. Why now, you may ask. In recent years NHS mental health services have been so misdirected in my view (and those of many) towards the shorter term and biomedically oriented Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, when what most people experiencing mental health difficulties want and need is relational work, which gets to the root causes rather than just dealing with symptoms. Add to this workforce shortages and the result over years has been a massive increase in people seeking help privately. It’s a real lottery because anyone, whether trained or not (and some trainings are just not adequate) can call themselves a counsellor or psychotherapist and in my experience people are invariably taken aback to learn this. Numerous trainings also require very little or no personal therapy for the practitioner, the engine of this work: it’s crucial that we understand and have worked through our own issues before we try to help others, so that we can recognize our own projections and introjections and not erroneously attribute them to the client. In my own MSc we were required to be in therapy for the entire three years and many therapists do much more than this. This muddled situation means that people often don’t know where to start seeking help and there have been numerous accounts of serious harm being done by the inadequately trained.

“The public needs more understanding that psychotherapy can do good but it also can do harm, and anything that’s powerful enough to change your life for the better is powerful enough to do some damage if it’s in the wrong hands and done wrongly, or recklessly,” said Glenys Parry, an emeritus professor at the University of Sheffield and an accredited psychotherapist’. Ms Parry also pointed out the under-recognised syndrome of unconscious ignorance and people working beyond their level of competence without referring on. Regulation would help ensure that all therapists have an agreed minimum level of training and experience, and would be expected to keep up with new research and professional updates’. Extraordinarily, it could be argued, when I took this up with my MP during the coalition years, she received a response from the then Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who said that regulation of counselling and psychotherapy was not in the public interest. What ignorance, but then it’s well known that regulation of any kind is contrary to the Conservative mind set.

https://tinyurl.com/3sarjadw

The professional bodies and others will trot out the existing system of ‘accredited registers’, which they pretend is a form of regulation. ‘A robust system of regulating therapists has been in place since 2012. It is the Accredited Registers programme run by the Professional Standards Authority (PSA). Therapy organisations can apply to have their own registers accredited by the PSA, which involves meeting and maintaining rigorous governance standards in which public protection is prioritised. Any therapist on such a register has been properly trained, is subject to professional and ethical codes of practice and a robust complaints procedure is available to their clients. Registrants of a PSA-accredited register will display the PSA logo in their publicity’. I take issue with this: it is not consistently robust, it’s a way of professional bodies maintaining their business model and member income and, primarily, it is not statutory and does not protect titles. It will be interesting to see if anything comes of this important issue coming to the fore. Perhaps it’s now time for more letters to our MPs.

https://tinyurl.com/2dsrj3ep

Finally, I was really struck by the news of the theft of 22 tonnes of premium quality cheddar cheese from the warehouse of the prestigious Neal’s Yard Dairy in London, thought to be worth around £300,000. ‘Fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers received the 950 clothbound cheeses from the Southwark-based company before it was realised they were a fake firm… Neal’s Yard Dairy sells Hafod Welsh for £12.90 for a 300g piece, while Westcombe costs £7.15 for 250g and Pitchfork is priced at £11 for 250g’. It seems this theft is even more upsetting than another would be because ‘the artisan cheese world is a place where trust is deeply embedded in all transactions. It’s a world where one’s word is one’s bond. It might have caused the company a setback, but the degree of trust that exists within our small industry as a whole is due in no small part to the ethos of Neal’s Yard Dairy’s founders’.

I wondered about the logistics: how was it transported, where and how would it be offloaded without detection and where would it be stored in the meantime? It’s a reminder of how food is increasingly expensive now, especially premium brands, giving rise to a substantial black market. Let’s hope the Met Police are better at detecting this crime than they’ve been with so many others. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has described the theft involving more than 950 wheels of cheddar as a ‘brazen heist of shocking proportions’ and urged members of the public to help the police catch the scammers.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cje03dq2pyyo

Sunday 6 October

Amid so much important and disturbing news, including the worsening conflict in the Middle East, it seems to me that partly due to the power of right wing media, there’s been a major and non-stop attack on Keir Starmer and his government. Said one tweeter: ‘The amount of shit being dumped on Starmer at the moment , most of it inconsequential nonsense, makes one think it’s coordinated. But nobody could do that – could they Rupert?’ It seems that Tory politicians, still flailing around in disbelief at their massive loss in July, have been instructed to keep tweeting and stating in interviews that this or that which they’ve never previously been interested in is a terrible mistake and very different from what they would have done. Tobias Elwood, a former MP and defence minister, is a goodexample of this denial and delusion, alluding to the Conservatives’ ‘proud record’ on addressing climate change. An X user responded: ‘Proud record”? Don’t claim Tory achievements on energy & climate change, Tobias Ellwood. Your lot stopped insulation schemes, ended solar funding, sold gas storage facilities, blocked onshore wind, rowed back on net zero targets and even wanted to open a new coal mine’.

But more scrutiny than that usually applied by the media shows just how hypocritical these are, for example on the donations scandal: true that Starmer and his colleagues should not have taken these but those received by many Conservative politicians have amounted to much more and these haven’t stopped. Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick has accepted a massive donation from a company which has no employees and hasn’t made a profit, insisting that this is ‘within the rules’. And quite a few haven’t kept the Register of Interests up to date. Even last week, as she lambasted Labour, Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch was using for her campaign a luxury penthouse flat loaned by a party donor. And the examples go on, perhaps the most egregious (but apparently devoid of self-awareness) being former anti-corruption czar John Penrose popping up to pronounce that something definitely needed doing about corruption in politics: this, when the number of corrupt Tory transactions was so significant and when his own spouse, Dido Harding, was responsible for the notorious wastage of £38bn on the Covid Test and Trace programme.

It’s the sheer amount of misinformation we need to concern ourselves with as well, because many will just believe these social media and newspaper headlines. Tories immediately leapt onto the news about the Chagos Islands deal, on two grounds, saying that it should have come before Parliament and that this move represented a huge threat to UK security etc. A few problems with these simplistic and misleading statements: the Conservatives (as Commons Speaker Hoyle often lamented but did nothing about) frequently announced policy in media briefings, bypassing Parliament altogether, and the security argument (according to some commentators) is specious because we still have the base on Diego Garcia and former Foreign Secretary James Cleverly had initiated the negotiations in the first place. The issues seem complex and there would be reasonable arguments for and against the decision, but the fact that it began under a Conservative government reveals the hypocrisy of outraged former MPs and ministers who have been accused of colonialism.

According to the BBC: ‘One of the largest islands on the tropical atoll, Diego Garcia, will remain a joint US-UK military base and is expected to remain so for 99 years with an option to renew….The International Court of Justice previously ruled the UK’s administration of the island, that some had called its “last colony in Africa”, was “unlawful” and must end….The government of Mauritius has long argued that it was illegally forced to give the Chagos Islands away in return for its own independence from the UK in 1968.Britain later apologised for forcibly removing more than 1,000 islanders from the entire archipelago between 1965 and 1973, and promised to hand the islands to Mauritius when they were no longer needed for strategic purposes’.

A clear source of resentment concerns the handing over of the islands to Mauritius without consultation with the Chagossians. Human Rights Watch said that unless there were proper negotiations with the Chagossians, ‘the UK, US and now Mauritius would be responsible for a still ongoing colonial crime’. It will be interesting to see how the situation progresses, including the potential for parliamentary debate now the party conference ‘season’ has concluded. I admit to not having been that interested when I first heard this news but on further exploration it does throw up key issues around defence policy, the rights of the indigenous population, some of whom would like to return, and sovereignty.

Going back to right wing attempts to destabilise the government, a disturbing example is today’s resignation of Sue Gray from her Chief of Staff role. This follows on from the calculated article on the BBC website by the political editor Chris Mason, whipping up false concern about Gray’s salary when he and many of his colleagues are grossly overpaid. It’s been dismaying to see her capitulate to this politically motivated pressure. Those saying ‘she became a distraction’ etc are being very naive, in my view: this ‘distraction’ was manufactured and fuelled by Mason and others. An X user tweeted: ‘Weirdly a man on almost £100,000 per year more than the subject he is reporting on finds her salary a “news” story and backs it up with tittle tattle. BBC political journalists doing the bidding of Robbie Gibb and his tory friends. Leveson 2 required urgently’.

Mason began: ‘I want to explain how we brought you the story about the salary of the prime minister’s chief of staff, why we did, and why it matters’, prompting at least one commentator to observe that if he felt the need to patronisingly ‘explain’ why he did it, it did not matter. He went on: ‘As journalists, we have to be sceptical about where information is coming from, its accuracy and why we are being told it – and seek to explain to you what we know and do not know, and the motivations of those telling us stuff’. This is manifestly, in so many examples, what the Tory BBC fails to do: besides that bias pervading the entire news and current affairs output, there’s also the issue of news omission, stories which are suppressed or not reported on at all if they don’t suit the required narrative. Just today someone has brought out an important story related to the Middle East conflict, excluded by the BBC and only once appearing in an insignificant place on their website. This is dangerous stuff because so many only get their news from the BBC and other MSM.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czxgdgkew81o

On the party conferences, much amusement was experienced by some journalists covering the Conservatives’ outing – ‘You’ve disappeared through the wormhole into the mephitic swamp where any intelligent life comes to die. Where only the clinically deranged and terminally deluded are to be found. Where the sanest voice is Michael Fabricant’s rug pleading with its owner to be allowed to go home. Welcome to the Tory party conference….Four days when the Tory party has nothing better to do than to turn its gaze in on itself. Four days when you can take centre stage. When your narcissism can go unchecked. You’ve been dreaming about this for weeks. People actually pretending to be interested in what you have to say…. The main event of the afternoon was a session entitled: Dispatches from the election campaign. It was hardly a truth and reconciliation committee. More a coming together of the weak and the fallen, trying to console themselves that the public still loved them really’. This so captures the self-important delusion emanating from so many of them like John Redwood and party members, all taking it terribly seriously as if they’re not a spent force.

https://tinyurl.com/mrjyfarv

But it gets worse, in the form of the absurdly long drawn out party leadership election, which few care about but which the media have discussed endlessly. The candidates’ promotional tweets and videos have been embarrassingly bad, boasting about non-achievements, Cleverly saying he will unite the party (good luck with that) and getting a standing ovation at the end of his speech with ‘Let’s be more like [Ronald] Reagan. Let’s be enthusiastic, relatable, positive, optimistic. Let’s be more normal’. At least this suggests that he gets how cruel and insane some of them have sounded, especially Liz Truss, still jetting around the world making speeches wherever she can find anyone to host her (currently Australia). For his part Tom Tugendhat is fond of constantly reminding us of his military experience, a recent tweet, accompanied by a photo of himself armed, in uniform, declaring ‘I’ve never failed a mission’. He was part of a government which massively failed its mission of running the country, of course.

John Crace again: ‘It is an election that is at best inconsequential and at worst an irrelevance. At a time when the Middle East is about to enter another full-scale war, the Tory party has chosen to take indefinite leave of absence to talk about itself….

Mostly though Cleverly sounded just like David Brent. “There’s no time to lose and I don’t lose,” he announced, clearly thrilled with what he had said. He didn’t mind that it could have been lifted straight from The Office…The Show That Never Ends. At least, that’s the way it feels. Hard to believe, after weeks of nonsense and four days of the Fearless Four saying the same thing minute after minute, that we’ve still got a month of the Tory leadership election to go. I guess we just need to be thankful for small mercies: we may not be at the beginning of the end, but we are at the end of the beginning’.

But surely none of them can be worse than Boris Johnson, whose ‘memoir’ (the absurdly titled Unleashed) the media are constantly alluding to and which has been described in very unflattering terms by reviewers. A sickening video showed him excitedly tearing into a parcel of recently arrived tomes, predicted to be on remainder shelves within weeks. We have to wonder if he deliberately avoided the reviews but he’d ignore them anyway. Nothing, as we’ve been reminded via his appalling tv interviews, can penetrate that entitled thick skin.

‘All the fancy verbiage in the world cannot disguise the emptiness at the heart of this self-serving, solipsistic book. He uses his wit, appearance and persona to deflect from serious matters and to advance his own cause. His language is a form of collusion with his audience to stand apart from the tough business of governing. As Ed Docx observed in 2021 in these pages, Johnson has perfected the role of the clown king, whose speech is “not – in truth – eloquent, but rather the caricature of eloquence”. It is the same with this memoir’.

https://tinyurl.com/bdcswwkw

But worse was to come…. We have to wonder why our media keep platforming this bloated piece of irrelevance but since they are….. It was shameful (confirming what many of us suspected all along) that the BBC had to pull their interview with Johnson because the long discredited Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg, was caught out ‘mistakenly’ forwarding her questions and briefing notes to Johnson himself. Few believe this was a mistake and the BBC made it worse by trivialising a sackable offence into a case of ‘red faces’. Other channel presenters offered to step into the breach, although we later learned that several interviews had been planned, not just the BBC’s.Tom Bradby’s half hour on ITV wasn’t a bad job but he had to resort almost to shouting in order to be heard above Johnson’s ranting and wall of word salad. The famous Johnsonian smirk disappeared as he was repeatedly challenged on core issues, such as did he now accept (confronted with relevant statistics showing the UK’s economic decline since Brexit) that Brexit had been a big mistake? ‘No, not at all’.

The most disgraceful aspects of this interview were his constantly shoving his book into the camera, ‘If you read Unleashed…. In the book…. In Unleashed…’ etc, his denial of Covid mismanagement, his insistence that the ‘outstanding’ vaccine rollout had been enabled by Brexit, his throwing colleagues under the bus eg David Cameron and even Gavin Williamson, his alleging that what resulted was not the Brexit he wanted, his attempt to cancel his Partygate apology (‘Partygate was a lot of overblown nonsense’) and, surely the most egregious given how the country has suffered, giving his Brexit rationale as ‘I wanted to win the argument’. So the country was sacrificed (and this is where the widespread political ignorance in the UK massively enabled him) on the altar of his egocentric Oxford Union debate determination to ‘win’. He also attacked Sue Gray despite having appointed her himself, prompting the following viewer comment: ‘Johnson bleating about Sue Gray is as irrelevant as it is dishonest. He wants us to forget that the separate inquiry by the cross-party Commons Privileges Committee, which had nothing to do with Sue Gray’s inquiry, found that he had deliberately and repeatedly misled Parliament’.

As you might expect, today’s GB News interview was even worse, Johnson talking over the Telegraph hack interviewer at every opportunity, insisting how ‘important’ his point was, desperately trying to convince viewers of his twisted version of reality. I had to switch off after half an hour but even the first bit had him even more aggressively shoving his book into the camera and ranting incoherently. He’s been described as ‘self-mythologising’ and that was very evident here. Not unlike Liz Truss strutting her stuff on the world stage, he’s trying to rewrite his appalling legacy. Let’s hope not many are taken in. You have to despair at some of the GB News comments, though, one saying ‘Boris didn’t mismanage Covid – it was Whitty and Starmer’. Starmer?? Another said ‘I love Boris and can’t wait to read his book’.

The complex issue of assisted dying has been much discussed this week as a result of Kim Leadbeater’s  private member’s bill being put before Parliament this month. MPs last rejected legislation back in 2015 so it could be argued reconsideration is way overdue. It’s also had some high profile supporters, such as Dame Esther Rantzen. Views seem pretty polarized, some desperate for such legislation to be enacted, and others feeling it could be a slippery slope to shuffling off the sick and disabled prematurely and that in the event many who opted for it later change their minds. A key issue is the inconsistent provision of palliative care in the NHS – if this was provided consistently and effectively this would perhaps reduce the support for such a big change. I’m prepared to be corrected if wrong here but an important dimension seems to have gone under the radar: that is the philosophical issue of the extent to which we put ourselves in the hands of experts (doctor/priest/lawyer purveyors of social authority).

Nowadays we are much likely to opt for autonomy, to question traditional sources of authority and this has been evident in views expressed. Yesterday’s Radio 4 Any Answers was entirely devoted to this topic and at least one caller said surely he should have the right to decide when and how he could end his life. Years ago this would have never been an expectation and these longstanding sources of authority don’t always take kindly to this being challenged. (An example of this is the introduction of ‘Martha’s Law’ in the NHS, pioneered by the mother of the little girl who died from sepsis following inadequate hospital care. We’ve often heard the mantra ‘the doctor knows best’ so many patients will simply go along with what they’re told. Having worked in the NHS, I will be interested to see how this initiative pans out). On assisted dying one thing is certain, though, but difficult to guarantee given the run-down state of the NHS: if such legislation reaches the statute book, there would have to be crystal clear safeguards as to how decisions were reached and implemented. It’s clear that some do not have faith in that process. The current situation cannot continue – no one should have to have the threat of legal action hanging over them for 6 months, as one caller did after he accompanied his wife to Dignitas.

Finally, a bit of levity but it won’t be felt in all quarters…. Remember the large lettuce banner with the words ‘I crashed the economy’ which unfurled at an event where Liz Truss was promoting her new book? ‘That’s not funny’, said she, as she walked off that stage. Unfortunately for her, many found it very funny, possibly because such a stunt would pierce that thick skin in the way tweets, for example, would not. Now Tesco in Walthamstow (North London) has unveiled a fake blue plaque to honour the lettuce that outlasted her stint as PM (49 days). The article states that Liz Truss ‘has been approached for comment’. What’s the betting she’ll try to get it taken down?

https://tinyurl.com/32hdvkfz

Saturday 17 August

Considering it’s been the traditional media ‘silly season’, maybe no such thing these days, there’s been no shortage of headline grabbing news and some getting very exercised about it. Within days of taking office the new government started talks with the junior doctors and have now put an offer to the rail unions that looks likely to be accepted. Of course both have precipitated much sniping from the Tory sidelines, using stale old tropes like ‘Labour caving into the unions’, but congratulations are in order for bringing years of extremely damaging strikes to an end and it would be useful to have a figure for how much Tory laissez-faire intransigence cost the economy during that time. The glee with which right wingers have seized on the latest announcement of LNER rail strikes is misplaced because the issues are very different from those which drove the pay disputes. But it does pose another incentive for rail nationalization even if Great British Railways will stop somewhat short of this.

And it’s not only the financial cost of strikes: we have to factor in the psychological strain experienced by travellers and NHS patients awaiting treatment, not knowing how long their journeys would take if possible at all and whether their treatment would be cancelled at the last minute. It’s shocking that this uncertainty and strain have been normalized in recent years. We’ve almost forgotten that things did used to work in this country.

And now, after years of dithering and avoidance by previous administrations, the government has put in place the compensation scheme for victims of the contaminated blood scandal, to begin at the end of the year and amounting to more than £2.5m in some cases.  ‘More than 3,000 people died and many more had their lives ruined because of diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C caused by infusions of contaminated blood given between the 1970s and 1990s. Campaigners spent decades urging successive governments to take responsibility, and compensate victims and their families’. It will be grossly unfair (but wait for it to happen) if the Conservatives start carping about the cost and ‘where’s the money coming from’ (not to mention other compensation schemes waiting for resolution) since the road the cans were kicked down grew longer on their watch.

https://tinyurl.com/mvesc3fw

Day after day we’re reminded of the terrible legacy the Conservatives left the newgovernment: unresolved NHS and transport pay disputes; compensation for victims of scandals kicked into the long grass; contamination of our waterways and profiteering by utility companies; austerity driven public service cuts affecting so many areas including the Met Police, the latest report byHis Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS)showing it to provide ‘an inadequate or failing service in seven of eight key crime-fighting areas, together with ‘serious concerns’ about its management of dangerous offenders; and the latest damning Care Quality Commission report on the multiple failures of the psychiatric services following the murders committed by Valdo Calocane, a severely ill schizophrenia patient. It’s clear the Conservatives thought they could cut funding to the NHS, police, social care and local government, somehow without it being noticed but of course the effects will out. The former policing minister, Chris Philp, is still unbelievably trotting out the nonsense that we have ‘record numbers’ of police officers when this was never the case.

I hadn’t realized that the Met had been in ‘special measures’ for the last two years and contrary to Philp’s lies, the report specifically cites concerns about the Met’s funding, warning of a looming £400m budget shortfall, and failure to recruit more officers, a situation expected to get worse. Where does all this leave the Met’s chief, Sir Mark Rowley, who’s now been in post two years? We surely should be able to expect some progress by now. Apparently Rowley’s position isn’t thought to be in danger because his plans for reform have support, the problems are seen as longstanding and, tellingly, that there’s no other obvious candidate for this Met Commissioner job.

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There’s been a long history of psychiatric patients committing murders and each time a report has been produced, like so many declaring that we must ensure ‘lessons are learned and this never happens again’. But of course it does, because the findings and recommendations of such reports have often not been properly taken on board and action taken to address the core issues. An X user tweeted: ‘Before one more public inquiry is established, may I propose either a joint Commons/Lords select committee or an independent body like the Committee on Standards in Public Life as a public monitor of recommendations made, accepted and delivered?’

A key aspect which needs tackling is the lazy and inadequate system of secondary care services discharging intractable cases back to their GP, meaning they fall between cracks given the problems in primary care, not to mention that most GPs are too busy and insufficiently trained in mental health to cope with complex cases. ‘In Calocane’s case there was no single point of failure but a series of errors, omissions and misjudgements…there are “systemic issues with community mental health care which, without immediate action, will continue to pose an inherent risk to patient and public safety”.

Yet again previous Conservative administrations are in the frame because there was a much needed review in 2018 of the now elderly Mental Health Act but its findings were left dangling and no legislative time was allocated to it. One of the key issues is the disbanding of Assertive Outreach teams, which keep track of and care for hard-to-engage patients, and also what appears to be a prioritization of patient wishes over public safety concerns. It was good news that revised legislation featured in the King’s Speech – another area where the new government has stopped an important issue being kicked further down the road. The CQC’s  report’s recommendations ‘include that NHS England issues new guidance on care for people with complex psychosis and paranoid schizophrenia within 12 months’. There surely needs to be a greater sense of urgency than this.

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What’s necessarily taken centre stage, though, is the shocking disorder which hit the country at the start of August and which might not be over yet. The riots (not ‘protests’) and their aftermath have given rise to many social media posts and commentators’ opinion pieces, varying from suggesting that the far right ‘protesters’ had ‘legitimate concerns’ to acknowledging the deeply embedded problem of longstanding right wing media narratives which blame migrants for all ills. Although this doesn’t excuse the rioters, who were surely taken by surprise by the speed with which the justice system took hold of the situation, a major factor must be the lack of financial and psychological support available to deprived communities where some of the riots at least took place. Fourteen years of Tory misrule from austerity to the blatant neglect of once thriving industrial areas have created a situation where many feel cheated and sidelined, that they have no purpose and that there’s little hope. Some at least will have grown up in dysfunctional settings, then faced with poor employment opportunities, a neglected environment and a lack of support services of all kinds – all factors which lay the ground for resentment and criminality in some cases.

Added to these are the complex and intractable factors which governments will find very difficult to tackle, for instance the insidious effect of right wing media bent on blaming immigration for problems caused by policymakers and surely the toughest: the infectious influence of social media in spreading misinformation, the main culprit being X owner Elon Musk. It was outrageous that he suggested there will be a civil war in the UK but how can he be stopped? There’s been discussion of the Online Safety Bill but no one country’s legislation is capable of tackling a powerful and pan-national medium. What could be tackled is the misinformation spread by the new Reform MPs and others: yet another reason why we need new, robust and enforceable parliamentary rules, one of which should be that MPs should not have their own tv shows. Nigel Farage has not even held a surgery or engaged with voters in his Clacton constituency and the induction training for new MPs was not compulsory to attend. While it’s undeniable that the new government has much work to do, I think rules for conduct at Westminster constitute a top priority which should not disappear under the radar.

Regarding the inaccurate and damaging right wing narrative, one article suggests a way this could change (yes, I know – quite a few would not want it to, the Daily Mail and GB News included).  ‘The government could change the narrative by making the history of empire and migration a statutory party of the curriculum, and by actively countering racism in the press, among opposition parties and within its own ranks. But it could also use this moment to change people’s material circumstances by getting rid of “hostile environment” policies and providing safe routes of travel (one of the only viable solutions to stop people from having to cross the Channel)’.

On the cynical immigrant blame game, a tip of the iceberg example last week was a Channel 4 journalist interviewing a group of women in a knitting circle, one trotting out the cliché about immigrants taking houses and jobs. She was taken aback to be informed that asylum seekers are not eligible for council housing and are not normally allowed to work. ‘Are concerns about immigration “legitimate”? Demonstrably, no. People who arrive in the UK aren’t to blame for an economy designed to benefit the richest while exploiting and abandoning the poorest – immigration is not a significant causal factor of low wages and it’s not why people have insecure jobs. Anti-immigrant feeling isn’t a natural, inevitable reaction to change either’.

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A topic which is occupying too much of the media’s attention is the Conservative Party leadership contest, the result of which won’t be known until 2 November – a process drawn out to absurd lengths. In the meantime we’re seeing sillier and more hypocritical tweets from the hopefuls, especially Tom Tugendhat, who wants you to know about his military experience and who’s been practicing that embarrassing power stance (killed off, we thought, during earlier campaigns), and James Cleverly, who’s seizing every opportunity to criticize Labour when his party for 14 years did nothing about the issue in question. Of course he was going to use the rail unions pay offer for his own ends, seemingly unable to see how his tweets backfire. Yesterday he played the emotive card about families relying on trains ‘to visit loved’ ones now can’t because of the upcoming LNER strikes, when his government effectively kept the strikes going for years. In another tweet he said ‘If you want to know what I’d do as Party Leader… look at what I’ve already done’. Yes, James, that’s just what we are doing – a lamentable performance that included date rape drug blunders, allusions to shithole constituencies, describing the government’s flagship Rwanda policy as batshit crazy and boasting about your Foreign Secretary gig when you were replaced Lord Dave before you could get much worse. There’s much more important stuff the media could be reporting on rather than this ridiculous pantomime of has-beens.

As for the Tories who lost their seats, I’ve suggested the media do a feature on how these Westminster rejects are getting on, especially as they were able to benefit from taxpayer funded specialist career coaching. We did hear about the hapless Therese Coffey, who, with an extraordinary over-estimation of her abilities, had applied for and was rejected from a senior job with the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. She’d said ‘I thought I would apply…. I’ve dealt with these sorts of banks before’, yet she’s been useless in every ministerial post she held and her constituents gave her a clear message in July. She always came across as lazy and disengaged – not qualities any employer would relish, surely.

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Meanwhile, though surely they don’t need yet more money given their lucrative sidelines, we heard that Nadhim Zahawi and Boris Johnson were stitching together a bid for the Torygraph. It seems numerous people, especially Tory MPs, have become very exercised about where the ownership of the Telegraph and Spectator should lie, so determined are they that this Conservative Party mouthpiece keeps its show on the road, but some bidders have already decided that the process is just too complicated. ‘A number of interested parties have already walked away, including Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail, who pulled out of the auction owing to fears that his newspaper group would be drawn into a long and complex battle to allow any takeover to overcome competition and political hurdles’. This future ownership issue has been unresolved for so long, but possibly now, with a different Culture Secretary (and hopefully some action to beef up Ofcom) a decision will be reached in the not too distant future.

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In the wider world, the scandal of executive pay continues. Along with others, I don’t buy the frequently wheeled out line that you have to pay colossal amounts in order to get the ‘talent’ the organization needs. It’s nonsense. The gap between executive and employee pay has never been larger and there never used to be this sense of entitlement amongst the CEO candidate brigade. I suspect two factors contributing to this are Mrs Thatcher’s massive privatization of public resources programme, encouraging expectant (greedy, even?) investors and shareholders and the subsequent creep of these values into the public sector. An article reports data analysis from the High Pay Centre showing that ‘the bosses of Britain’s blue-chip companies are raking it in, having seen their pay rise to the highest level on record last year…The data shows that median pay for a FTSE 100 chief executive increased from £4.1m in 2022 to £4.19m in 2023’.

This is absolutely astonishing and in itself inflationary, although the right wing narrative is that it’s public sector pay deals which cause inflation. These are the highest and I’m glad it’s described as ‘received’ rather than earned – two different things: ‘AstraZeneca’s Pascal Soriot, consistently the best-paid chief executive among FTSE 100 bosses, received a £16.85m package last year, while Emma Walmsley, head of the rival drugmaker GSK, got £12.72m. Others on the top earners’ table include Rolls-Royce’s Tufan Erginbilgiç, who was awarded £13.61m, and HSBC’s outgoing boss Noel Quinn, who received £10.64m’. The High Pay Centre’s rationale is partly the same as mine as to how we got here: ‘…a number of factors, including the decline of trade union membership, low levels of worker participation in business decision-making and a business culture that puts the interests of investors before workers, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders’. Another factor is that such salaries are even higher in the US so it’s felt that companies must stop high fliers defecting to the States.

My hackles go up when I hear this use of ‘package’ to describe pay: in over 30 years of public sector roles I and many like me just got our salary, not a ‘package’, which can include all sorts of perks including chauffeur, health insurance and shares. Unions say these salaries distort the market and the TUC general secretary, Paul Nowak, has rightly called on the government to ‘redesign pay setting structures to reflect the contribution that all staff make to company success’. The article asks if anything can be done to rein in this unhealthy trend, and, not surprisingly, it’s largely up to shareholders, who have yet to be convinced that high pay is detrimental. However, there have been some high profile cases of shareholders voting against some packages and companies can claw back pay and benefits from executives who have been ousted or resign following some kind of misdemeanour. It will be interesting to see if the TUC gets anywhere on this but we can bet change won’t happen any time soon.

https://tinyurl.com/4fn3r5yj

Warm weather and summer holidays have increased the media focus on over-tourism and the environmental damage associated with foreign travel, the former contributing to serious housing shortages both in the UK and abroad. Some cities have banned cruise ships, others are whacking up their tourist tax, Barcelona is getting rid of Airbnbs and, interestingly, Copenhagen is trying a cooperative and incentivizing approach by giving tourists something in return for adopting for environmentally aware behaviours. An excellent article in the Guardian uses St Ives as an example ‘a rich man’s playground’ of how places can be ruined by tourism but the author gives a much wider perspective than this one town. ‘In winter, St Ives is empty and in summer, overwhelmed: a town that has lost its balance. Holiday cottages and Airbnbs fill the town with carnival, or absence, depending on the season, and locals are priced out. This dynamic plays out nationally – in Wales, Kent, Norfolk – but it has a brittle poignancy here’.

https://tinyurl.com/2jrme5w4

Radio 4’s Moral Maze focused on tourism last week, prompted in part by Peter DeBrine, Unesco’s senior project officer for sustainable tourism, saying  “What we’re seeing is that we’re breaching a threshold of tolerance in these destinations…It’s really trying to rebalance the situation. It’s totally out of balance now’. As the programme title implies, the morality or otherwise of mass tourism was discussed, and, interestingly, whether some kinds of tourism are better than others, because some definitely believe this. For example, is one a ‘better’ tourist for booking a holiday which promises (a bit of a faux promise in some cases) visits and activities which put you in touch with the ‘real’ Timbuktu or wherever, rather than an all inclusive package where folk mostly stay close to a hotel pool and drink cocktails all day?

This next article focuses partly on the protests taking place in Spain: in one place tourists were sprayed with water as they dined out, which must have been quite disconcerting and could have felt downright dangerous. One factor informing the protests is the behaviour of some tourists: ‘Destinations across Spain have long sought to push back against what local people describe as antisocial behaviour: introducing dress codes, cracking down on alcohol sales and – as happened recently in one resort town – moving to ban inflatable penis costumes and sex dolls’.

https://tinyurl.com/5crxp5ez

Still on this subject the cruise industry has come in for some flak, especially aimed at the vast ships known as ‘cruisezillas’, some as high as 20 decks: tourists disgorged from them tend to walk around a place but not spend much or any money because everything they need is supplied on board. So they’re not seen as benefiting the local economy. ‘If the industry’s growth does not slow, the biggest ships in 2050 will be eight times larger, in terms of tonnage, than the Titanic – the largest ship on the seas before it sank a century ago, according to the campaign group Transport & Environment (T&E). The group also found that the number of cruise ships has risen 20-fold since 1970. Industry projections suggest about 35 million passengers will travel the seas on cruise ships this year – a 6% increase from pre-pandemic levels which analysts attribute to rising wealth. Research published by JP Morgan in June found that demand for cruises “remains robust” and noted that the cruise industry had moved beyond its core market of baby boomers to increasingly attract millennials’.

It’s a tricky one because the economies of many places depend heavily on tourism but there seems no doubt that it’s gone too far in its current range of formats. It will be difficult to reach a consensus when the industry is so large, its products are in such demand and solutions will need to be cross-border ones. One factor which never seems to be identified is the dubious role of travel writers – every day in the media we see articles and programmes urging us to get to this or that exotic destination before the hordes descend. These writers often (always?) get free trips but are not acting responsibly if the effect is to cause such distress to locals pushed out by inflated tourist numbers.

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Finally, Radio 4’s Today programme this morning had a feature about the worrying growth of tourism in the Brecon Beacons, an area of Wales known for the beauty of its scenery and its Dark Skies status. One factor cited (which of course happens everywhere) is the determination of instagrammers to snap selfies in these special destinations and in some places what’s effectively a queue develops. But we must no longer call it Brecon Beacons, because its official name is now the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park. Having discussed the financial aspects of managing such places, the presenter raised the issue of an entrance fee, suggesting, tongue in cheek, that only those able to pronounce this name should be allowed in. That would be one way of managing the hordes!

Sunday 28 July

Three weeks into the new government and as perhaps we should have expected, the media are still expecting Labour to have already cleared up the shocking mess left behind by the Conservatives. And asking how this or that would be paid for – something the media rarely did with the Tories. What’s emerging very strongly is how chronic these messes are, in nearly every area of responsibility, and in my view it’s outrageous that the Tory BBC has platformed the previous incumbents so they can defend their record (defending the indefensible). Last Sunday Laura Kuenssberg interviewed former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt specifically for this purpose. He had the temerity to suggest that things were really not so bad as the government was portraying them, wheeling out his usual cherry picking fibs, such as the one that the UK is ‘the fastest growing economy in the G7’. Everyone can see all around them the evidence of a stagnant economy and broken public services. Indeed, the Tory was challenged on BBC’s Any Questions when they trotted out this ‘things aren’t so bad’ line: the rejoinder was ‘you just don’t get it, other Conservatives, too – how bad things are’. A £20m black hole in public finances will be bad enough for most.

From Ofgem to Ofwat and Ofcom, it will be clear that the Conservatives presided over an ideologically laissez faire avoidance of regulation – none of these regulators have done their job yet their CEOs and senior staff are disproportionately remunerated. What a marvellous job – a regulator who doesn’t actually regulate. A good but shocking example, given the importance of health and social care, is the scandalous state of the Care Quality Commission, recently uncovered by an investigation and interim report requested by Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Systemic failures have been identified and it’s not credible that the previous administration was unaware of them. ‘Wes Streeting said the Care Quality Commission was in such deep crisis it was not able to do its basic job reliably. His warning came after an interim report by the public care doctor Penny Dash found the CQC was plagued by low levels of physical inspections, a lack of consistency in assessments and problems with a faltering IT system’.

One in five health and care providers has not received a rating and others haven’t been inspected for years, leading to big question marks hanging over ratings that have been allocated.  Mine was an area inspected some years back in a large mental health trust, but I found that they only did half of the job. Worrying. As Streeting recognises, the public must have confidence in this system and not be left wondering if, for example, they’ve made the best choice for their relative in the case of care homes. Streeting again: “When I joined the department, it was already clear that the NHS was broken and the social care system in crisis. But I have been stunned by the extent of the failings of the institution that is supposed to identify and act on failings. It’s clear to me the CQC is not fit for purpose’. What a damning judgement and what does it tell us that the CEO resigned during the time changes were being implemented. This surely is a key problem with many of these quangos (applying much more widely than ‘only’ regulators’): CEOs and senior management not up to the job and whose inadequacy pervades the culture of the organisation. Who recruits them and on what grounds? The old boy network will be one factor.

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And what planet is the former CEO, Ian Trenholm, on? An article in a June issue of Civil Service World has him speaking about his imminent departure ‘after having delivered on the organisation’s “complex” transformation ambitions. ‘During my six years leading CQC, we have made important changes to the way we work in order to help improve care and keep people safe. We are now in the final stages of delivering an ambitious transformation programme – this month saw the delivery of the last big milestone in a complex and challenging programme of work’. What a way to dress up failure: the chair even said Trenholm had led the organisation towards its ambition of being a ‘smarter and better regulator’. Such eulogies are completely at odds with the findings of the investigation report.

https://tinyurl.com/4wtykske

Another quango seriously found at fault is the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which failed the wrongly convicted Andrew Malkinson so badly and failed to apologise for this even when he walked free from the Court of Appeal. ‘The Criminal Cases Review Commission twice prevented Malkinson’s case being considered again by the court, even though it knew from 2009 that DNA implicated another then unknown man. It also declined to do further forensic testing and never once looked at the original police file. These facts were known to its chair, Helen Pitcher, when Malkinson was exonerated last summer, but it took her another nine months before an apology came. Conceding that the Commission had “failed” him, Pitcher said she had not been able to say sorry before seeing the findings of an independent review of its handling of his case’. What kind of pathetic excuse is this from yet another clearly over-promoted quango head?

An independent report into the CCRC’s handling of the case detailed the many mistakes made during the course of Malkinson’s three applications. The new government is not,  unlike preceding administrations, prepared to sit back and let this kind of incompetence continue: Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has said Pitcher is unable to fulfil her duties as chair. But it’s also emerged (so much for focus on the job) that Pitcher has been holding eight other jobs besides chairing the CCRC. One of these is chairing the Judicial Appointments Commission, seen by some as a clear conflict of interest. Two others are directing a property business and being a non-executive director at United Biscuits. She (and the no doubt many others in this position) must get up in the morning having to seriously think which role they’re occupying that day.

Inflated salaries are another issue amongst this group of often revolving doors, mutual backscratching brigade of chairs and CEOs. On discussing a new position, a Radio 4 Today programme presenter was heard trotting that old cliché that you have to offer a high (aka grossly inflated) salary to ‘get the talent, the right person’ etc. What rubbish: if ‘talent’ had not been so highly rewarded in the first place we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now, whereby the chief/worker pay ratio is so pronounced. Numerous media chiefs and presenters are definitely in the frame here when they’re not seen as doing a good job. It will take a while but we need to engender a culture where people are paid adequately for what they do but not excessively. And what about the multiple jobs syndrome, as in the CCRC case discussed above? The high profile scandal of thefts at the British Museum lifted the lid on this tendency, chair George Osborne having several jobs, meaning that they can’t apply the necessary attention and oversight to each one. How many examples are waiting to be uncovered?

All these issues have come into play during speculation about who should replace Simon Case, the compromised Cabinet Secretary who took sick leave during the stage of the Covid Inquiry when he should have appeared. He will apparently ‘step down’ in January: in my view he should have been removed on discovery of his various manifestations of wrong doing and this should not be his choice to make. But you could not make it up: one of the individuals thought to be in the running for this position is none other than Melanie Dawes, the woman who had been so feeble for so long at Ofcom. ‘She gave an interview to Civil Service World last year which touched on the difficulties of juggling parenthood with a big job, and how Grenfell had helped give her a “very deep belief in the importance of good, effective, proportionate regulation”. Again, like Trenholm discussed above, another having a strangely inflated view of their abilities and achievements – she has not regulated.

https://tinyurl.com/d23a233e

Going back to the NHS, two pieces of news have been obvious to some of us for some time, but not, it seems, to some cynical policy makers. One is the dangers associated with online medical consultations. We could have told them this and did, but they pressed ahead, resulting in many conditions being missed or misdiagnosed. ‘Patients have died after describing their symptoms to a GP in an online form rather than at a face-to-face consultation, the NHS’s safety investigations body has revealed. Online consultations with GP surgeries involve risks to patients’ safety and have led to sometimes serious harm and even death, an investigation by the Health Services Safety Investigations Branch (HSSIB) found’.

When this first started a few years ago, quite a few GPs wrote to newspapers about their concerns, stressing that with in person consultations they could see so much more, for example the gait and demeanour of the patient in front of them. NHS England saying ‘every GP practice must also offer face-to-face appointments where patients want or need them…Keeping patients safe is a priority for the NHS’ is yet another indication of how out of touch some of these quangos are: it’s often not about what the patient ‘wants or needs’, it’s about what that GP practice offers. It can still be very difficult to get a face to face appointment. I’m old enough to remember when GPs made home visits: back then we’d never have anticipated that getting a face to face appointment at the surgery would be an achievement!

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The second bit of NHS news is the glaringly obvious issue that ongoing health problems are a drag on the economy. ‘With extended life expectancy Britain has wound up an increasingly sick nation – and experts say that this is as bad for GDP as it is for our health. Experts say that the UK must move towards disease prevention to save the economy and the NHS’. Never – who would have guessed this? Of course it’s been damned obvious for a long time but during the last 14 years the Tories have chosen instead to demonise through the benefits system those unable to work because of health issues which have not been addressed.

These are shocking findings for a so-called developed economy: ‘Long-term sickness is the main reason why economic inactivity in the UK rose to a record 9.4 million – or 22.2% of adults aged 16 to 64 years – in February 2024, costing the economy £43bn a year. And at least 80% of the health inequality outcomes in the UK are driven by chronic yet potentially modifiable diseases. Only 9% of men and 16% of women born today can expect to reach pension age in good health’. This is a great idea, a ‘pre-NHS’ – truly devoted to prevention. It would take a lot of organising and funding but it would be worth it.

‘Prof John Deanfield, who was asked by the government last year to set up a taskforce to identify radical new approaches to prevent cardiovascular disease and reduce pressure on the NHS, has had enough of tinkering with the current health system. Instead, he has recommended the creation of not a parallel NHS, but a pre-NHS. He envisages a system of one-stop health clinics in offices, football grounds, leisure facilities and supermarkets where people can have their health assessed, treatments prescribed, their progress monitored and motivation coached – all without having to go into the traditional medical system and, ideally, keeping them so healthy they don’t need to’.

https://tinyurl.com/3a9ntk6h

We’ve had a few weeks off but now it’s time (should you choose) to focus on the next round of Tory infighting – yes, their ill-fated leadership campaign, illustrating just how deeply the barrel has been scraped to produce the candidates. They didn’t actually take much ‘producing’ as most have tried for the leadership before and failed. Parliamentary sketch writer John Crace observes: ‘The good news, though, is that the Conservative fun factory is back up and running. As in fully dysfunctional. The even better news is that this time the fun comes with no personal jeopardy to the country. Because whatever the outcome, none of it really matters. The Tories are no longer – for the next few years at least – a danger to anyone. Except themselves. They are an irrelevance. They now exist purely as entertainment for entertainment’s sake. An amusing diversion for lovers of political theatre’.

James Cleverly, a prime contender, gave his usual car crash interview last week on the Today programme, refusing to answer questions about one of his fellow competitors declaring support for Trump. Challenged about the timing of the leadership contest coinciding with the US election, Cleverly, clearly puzzled and irritated, kept saying he/we did not have a vote in the US election and that they could not let this election have any effect on what the Conservative Party needs to do. I did have limited sympathy for this viewpoint, since the BBC and Radio 4 in particular seem obsessed with the US election. Cleverly also posted a tweet with a photo showing himself wearing braces (is this supposed to convey authority?), his hand hovering over a pile of papers and a lackey looking on. Anyone impressed by this kind of thing surely needs to give their heads a wobble.  

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Meanwhile, numerous deluded Tories continue to believe that their party can still be a force to be reckoned with. Last week Tobias Elwood actually alluded to ‘our great party’ and how it can be rejuvenated. ‘But our great party must want to be led, and, more fundamentally, agree what it now stands for and where it sits in the political spectrum – so that our next leader can build on solid foundations, allowing the party to advance and rebuild trust with the nation. Edmund Burke, the philosophical founder of conservatism, stressed the importance of reform and renewal to “conserve” our shared values. After years of political turmoil, we must reaffirm what those values are. Our strength has consistently been our broad appeal to the nation, with tolerance and respect within our ranks – united around the fundamental belief in opportunity, enterprise and responsibility…’

You’d have thought he would have realised that the election result illustrated that there was manifestly not a ‘broad appeal to the nation’. Describing a meeting at the Carlton Club organised by Rishi Sunak for those who lost their seats, Elwood describes the atmosphere as ‘Far from being a wake, there was a clear sense of resolve that many of us were not done. Bruised, yes – but energised to fight another day. Churchill would have approved – given that he lost his seat on more than one occasion’. Seems more of an indication of denial and delusion. Isn’t it likely that the British public have decided for good and all that they don’t want to be governed by such a lot of self-interested and fundamentally dishonest charlatans?

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Now we’re well and truly into the holiday season, the topics of mass tourism and the role of AirBnb in the worsening housing shortage have moved centre stage. Several times a week we hear news of protests taking place – not here (yet) but in Ibiza and Majorca, for example, and now Barcelona is enacting a total ban on Airbnbs and short term rentals in response to the accommodation shortage for local people. It’s shocking that the boom in short term rentals has caused rents to rise by 68% in the past ten years, while house prices have risen by 38%. It’s also staggering to learn that the city has 10, 101 apartments for short term rental, licences which will not be renewed. But there will probably be some backlash and illegal activity. Feelings are running high: locals in Barcelona have taken to spraying diners with water from water guns to protest against the deluge of tourists, 12m last year and one anti-tourism demo attracted a crowd of 3,000. It will be interesting to see how this situation develops as people will take holidays, local economies do depend on the income, yet the socioeconomic problems continue.

Finally, I was ‘tickled pink’, as they used to say, by hearing on Radio4’s The World Tonight an interview with Sarah from Talking Pictures Tv, which apparently specialises in legacy tv shows. She said she ‘couldn’t get enough of Dixon on Dock Green’, the 1960s police series starring Jack Warner. What nostalgia – Jack Warner standing under a street lamp at the start of each episode is etched on the memory: (tipping his helmet): ‘Evenin’ all….. ya know, it’s a funny old world.’ Perhaps I should tune in some time!

Sunday 14 July

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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’.

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Sunday 23 June

As general election fever rages on, especially following the dramatic entry into the fray of Nigel Farage and the publication of the party manifestos, the Conservative party’s campaigning shows ever increasing desperation in the form of repeating proven lies (like the £2000 additional tax under Labour one), introducing one policy gimmick after another and extreme scaremongering about ‘putting Keir Starmer in number 10’. Not to mention the spiteful tweets eg Rishi Sunak: ‘If Labour get in, they will change the rules so it’s much harder to ever get them out… they will change every rule to make sure they keep power’. Yet another stupid tactic but one which has gained traction in the collusive media is this harping on ‘dangers’ of a Labour ‘supermajority’: there’s no such thing as a ‘supermajority’ but this hasn’t stopped it being trotted out at regular intervals.

But despite these relentless efforts the polls have barely shifted, with Labour still 20 points ahead. With press headlines alluding to ‘Tory wipeout’, it’s been predicted that even a number of Cabinet ministers will lose their seats – Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt, Grant Shapps, Johnny Mercer and even Sunak himself. An unprecedented situation: even more if an off piste candidate like Count Binface gains traction. Many are so disillusioned with politics and politicians that we can’t rule it out. Social media wags have taken to asking who we’d most like to see lose their seats – name the top 5. Mine would have to include the absurd and empathy free Rees-Mogg and the complacent and nasty targetter of the vulnerable Work and Pensions Minister Mel Stride. On the topic of polls, questions have been posed as to whether they are now too powerful. Some countries apparently disallow them, because they’re thought to artificially influence voters too much, but surely it’s better to have polls in order to prevent too much political party propaganda from gaining traction.

But I’ve been mystified why, especially as a new constituency here, we’ve had no advance information about its name or anything else and we shouldn’t have to dig this out of websites. We’ve now received polling cards and postal votes but only leaflets from Labour and Reform when at least eight candidates are standing. I contacted the Lib Dems about this as it seems presumptuous and disrespectful of voters to totally ignore them and the response I got was ‘sorry but we have to target our resources on seats we can win’! I don’t think that’s an acceptable attitude and despite the sudden nature of the election announcement all parties have now had a chance to get their acts together.

The frequent election debates are certainly adding to the febrile atmosphere and besides all the repetition we’re hearing, it seems our PM is getting tetchier and tetchier in response to the awkward questions thrown at him. Thursday’s 2 hour Question Time was a good example, during which the audience openly groaned and laughed at some of his statements, for example trying to explain away the dreadful state of the NHS and public services and threatening sanctions to young people not volunteering for national service, like restrictions on finance and driving licences. There were also shouts of ‘shame’ when Sunak refused to commit the UK to remaining in the European Convention on Human Rights. Sunak’s deep-seated sense of entitlement leads him to think no one really has the right to challenge him.

‘This wasn’t just Tetchy Rish!, it was Angry Rish!. He had no time for the little people bothering him with their stupid questions. Why couldn’t they accept he was Mr Integrity, Accountability and Professionalism? Hell, no one ran a better gambling ring inside No 10 than him. The Avatar was now completely out of control. Furious that the only applause was for the audience questions. Furious that there was not more gratitude for him. Furious that no matter how patronising and condescending he became, no one warmed to him or believed a word he said. At one point he was even laughed at. The billionaire Avatar was now just a standing joke. Stop the Boats. Stop the Bets’. Heaven knows how much angrier he will be when 4th July arrives.

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We might wonder how many times before July 4th we will see Sunak in a hard hat, trying belatedly to indicate some commitment to one industry or another. Besides a succession of tone deaf own goals, he faces an increasing number of challenges to his authority and credibility. It’s clear that the ever widening betting scandal, which has dominated the news during recent days, is not going away, many asking why it’s taking Sunak so long to deal with the situation instead falling back on the non-authority of the Gambling Commission. It’s also noticeable that the police officer under investigation was suspended immediately whereas the two Conservative candidates accused – Craig Williams and Laura Saunders (married to the Tory campaign director, Tony Lee, who has since taken leave of absence) – are carrying on regardless. (An interesting facet of the police officer case is that it’s the first time I’ve seen the crime of Misconduct in Public Office cited although it could well apply to some politicians. Because it’s apparently a criminal offence contrary to common law rather than statute it’s not clear cut and the misdemeanour needs to have been ‘wilful, done on purpose, and to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder’. You can just hear the excuses which could be proffered: ‘I didn’t intend to cheat the system, I didn’t intend to put £100 down, it just happened, I’ve not done anything wrong so can we now just move on?’)

Some suspect that the reason Sunak hasn’t acted (although he’s long shown weakness with others like Truss, Johnson and Braverman and their off piste policy making) is that many more are suspected of gambling on the election date and he doesn’t want this to emerge. An X user tweeted: ‘It’s because there’s more than the 2-3 already implicated. There are rumours of a cabinet minister also involved. So he’s just waiting a couple of weeks until they are all out of jobs and it doesn’t matter any more. After all he prides himself on spreadsheet-like efficiency’. There are now reports that Sunak knew about this betting scandal two weeks ago and could have stopped the candidates standing but chose not to, hoping it wouldn’t come to light. And now more alleged gamblers have been thrust into the limelight. What does this confected anger of his remind you of? Yes – Boris Johnson initially pretending to be ‘very angry’ on ‘discovering’ there had been government parties during lockdown when a totally different story emerged later.

And now yet another nightmare for Sunak and the Tories – a recording of James Cleverly aide James Sunderland declaring the Rwanda Plan to be ‘crap’.

Another noticeable phenomenon is the Tory habit of underplaying serious issues and events – it’s a kind of reality denial. Williams alluded to having had ‘a flutter’ and the Tories’ terrible poll ratings are merely ‘disappointing’ or ‘regrettable’. But whereas the usual stance is to wring an apology from the miscreant and say ‘he/she has apologised, we need to move on’ (and note the constant allusion to ‘this election is about the future’, denying accountability for the last 14 years), this scandal is sticking in the public’s minds as it reinforces Tory behavioural stereotypes. A recent twist on this is Saunders having the nerve to threaten the BBC and other media with legal action for reporting on her. No wonder hashtags like Tory Criminals Unfit to Govern have been trending on Twitter.

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But besides the long record of Tory criminality, it doesn’t end with the betting scandal: Elizabeth Philp, wife of policing minister Chris Philp, has been reported to the Crown Prosecution Service by a former employer and is being sued in the high court for alleged corporate espionage. She’s accused of data handling offences and illegally using confidential data from this former employer to set up her own business. A key irony, which we’re now so used to seeing in today’s politics, is that Chris Philp has called for ‘zero tolerance’ of all crime, by which we must assume he includes ‘white collar’ crime.

Another blow for the Conservatives is the Supreme Court landmark decision dictating that Surrey County Council must have considered the full climate impact of burning oil from new wells (under the usual planning law it was assumed that only the impacts of creating the oil wells was counted, not the much wider area of the use of the products of such wells). This is a stunning win for climate campaigners and also leads to the possibility of other oil and gas project costs being differently assessed. Needless to say, this precipitated a slew of Conservatives in media interviews repeating the lie that the new licences helped safeguard our ‘energy security’ etc when this is untrue as the products are sold on an international market, not domestic. It’s flabbergasting how often politicians like departing Scottish Conservative Party leader Douglas Ross and renewable minister Andrew Bowie aren’t challenged on this more often.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cxwwzmn12g9o

As if all this wasn’t enough, former Tory minister Chris Skidmore has publicly condemned the PM’s policy on climate change, saying that he will vote Labour. Writing in the Guardian, Skidmore said: ‘His decision to renege on net zero means the UK has scaled back on measures that would have saved households £8bn a year in lower energy costs. Worse still has been an extremist rhetoric that frames net zero policies as an imposition. This false narrative is the product of both ignorance and deliberate misinformation. Nobody has ever been told that they must remove their boilers or replace their petrol cars. The energy transition is a transition – an act of shifting from the past towards the future. Sunak’s decision instead to side with climate deniers and to deliberately politicise the energy transition is perhaps the greatest tragedy of his premiership. It has cost us not just environmentally but also economically. For the first time, I cannot vote for a party that has boasted of new oil and gas licences in its manifesto or that now argues that net zero is a burden and not a benefit’. Oof.

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And Nigel Farage continues to snap at the Conservatives’ heels, his latest controversial statement (and, of course, it’s his clear intention to disrupt proceedings and gain media attention) during his Panorama interview with Nick Robinson being that EU expansion effectively caused Putin to invade Ukraine.

Of course the NHS continues to be one of the election’s focal points and the latest news about GP shortages is something the Conservatives will find very hard to wriggle out of. On top of what’s already wrong with the NHS, (perhaps, in a nutshell, inadequate funding per capita,  inefficient organisational fragmentation and severe workforce shortages) this is the absurd situation where people struggle to get a GP appointment, often waiting weeks, at the same time as locums can’t find work and are considering leaving the NHS. ‘A survey of 1,852 locums, conducted by the British Medical Association found that 84% cannot find work despite patients across the country waiting weeks for GP appointments. Just under a third (31%) of respondents said that the lack of suitable shifts was leading them to leave the NHS entirely, while 71% said the government funding model was to blame for the levels of unemployment’.

An earlier BMA survey had shown that over half had had problems with cash flow, meaning locum cover became unaffordable, a result of the current funding model. Dr Katie Bramall-Stainer, BMA England’s GPs committee chair, called the model ‘ridiculous’: ‘We have made it clear to the government that this needs to change so we can have more GPs working in local practices…We’re hearing lots of pre-election promises about increasing GP numbers, but the first challenge for the next government will be to find a way to keep the GPs we already have in the NHS. To run a bath, you first must put in the plug…’ Clearly, this government doesn’t recognise what a ‘plug’ constitutes and their overall ‘long term’ NHS workforce plan is just that – ‘long term’ so they think they don’t actually have to deliver much right now. Meanwhile, the government boasts about its equally absurd Pharmacy First scheme, which isn’t even working, which pharmacists are unhappy about, and patients want to see doctors, not a cheaper alternative including physician associates who only have two years training, if that. But it’s long been recognised that what the Conservatives want to do is run down the NHS to such a degree that it finally breaks, leading to the long term goal of privatisation and normalisation of health insurance schemes – great for the American health conglomerates which started making inroads here years ago.

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There’s been much discussion recently of our broken justice system, ministers still blaming the pandemic for the backlogs in court cases but just in time for the election comes news that prisons in England aren’t just full – they won’t be able to accept more inmates after 4th July. ‘The heads of jails in England and Wales were informed by HM Prison and Probation Service officials earlier this month that data pointed to an ‘operational capacity breaking point’ only days after the 4 July general election. The development signals a significant logistical headache for an incoming justice secretary. It is expected to trigger Operation Early Dawn, a crisis measure that allows offenders to be housed in police cells when jails are full, while other measures can prompt magistrates courts to delay cases’.

Since many of us won’t have detailed knowledge of the prison system, this problem has been allowed to grow under the radar, and I’ve been struck by the ongoing absence of key ministers in such scenarios eg Justice Minister Alex Chalk and also Environment Minister Steve Barclay. At least Labour are onto it – ‘Shabana Mahmood, Labour’s shadow justice secretary, said: “This is just the latest example of the chaos the Conservatives have created in our criminal justice system. Not only are they releasing prisoners in secret, now they are deliberately delaying the delivery of justice. For months, the Conservatives have been operating under a cloak of darkness. They must now come clean about the true scale of the crisis on their watch’. But to ‘come clean’ will take persistent questioning from the media and this can be very selective, as we know.

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It also hasn’t played well for the Conservatives that progress on Levelling Up, which many never believed in in the first place, has been ‘glacial’. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, a reputable organisation which the government can’t just dismiss, said that, on many measures, regional inequality had widened and the UK had gone into reverse. ‘In 2022, the government set out a white paper containing 12 goals aimed at ‘levelling up’ the UK… but ‘in key areas such as employment, primary school attainment and self-reported life satisfaction, the country’s overall performance has got worse even as gaps between areas have widened’. An additional survey by the Guardian showed that rather than improving, key areas including health, housing and pride in place had ‘gone backwards’. Interestingly, the article doesn’t state how the government has responded to this – were they even asked for comment? But we pretty much know what such a response would be: disagreeing that things had gone backwards, progress was being made but it would take time because of, yes, you guessed it, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

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With all this bad news showing the Conservatives in such a poor light, it was lucky that last week came news that UK inflation had fallen to 2% in May, reaching this official target for the first time in almost three years. But, try as they may, the Tories can’t claim credit for it as it was nothing to do with their mythical ‘plan’ no one has actually seen and it’s important to remember it still means that prices are continuing to rise.

It’s not been plain sailing for Labour, though: there’s been criticism of Keir Starmer for timidity in the party manifesto, for unclear positions on a number of issues, for sidelining and cancelling left wing candidates, and planning for further privatisation in the NHS, even if it is to help clear the backlog. Overall, though, he comes across well in interviews, in my opinion, and has a quality of gravitas none of the recent PMs have had which is essential for our (now much reduced) standing on the world stage.

There must be some good news out there, you might think. At least last week, despite the much reduced credibility of the honours system, the King’s Birthday Honours saw the unassailable Alan Bates get a knighthood, for his admirable campaigning for justice for the victims of the Post Office scandal. Having previously refused this honour, ‘the former post office operator and founder of the Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance said he was accepting the honour “on behalf of the group” of branch operators and the “horrendous things that had happened to them.” And, of course, the official Inquiry won’t be completed for some time yet, revelations of skulduggery emerging all the time.

I admit to detesting the Americanism ‘side hustle’ but it was interesting to hear that, according to a poll conducted by Sage, the software company, 47% of adults have more than one source of income and a further 10% are looking for one. On average ‘hustlers’ are pulling in an extra £546 a month. This made me wonder whether they’re declaring this to the Inland Revenue. Besides the cost of living crisis being a major factor, it’s also likely that people gain a sense of satisfaction from their business ventures which their ‘day job’ does not provide.

Finally, on the topic of bringing in the money, it’s flabbergasting to learn that Transport for London, which must lose quite a bit of revenue via fare dodging, is also owed huge amounts because of embassies not paying their congestion charges. First up is the US, owing £14.6m, second is Japan, owing £10m, third is India, owing £8.5m, with Nigeria, China and Russia not far behind. I’ve long wondered whether ‘diplomacy’ isn’t a bit of a racket and this would appear to confirm it!

Saturday 8 June

As general election campaigning accelerates by the day, we see an increasing number of faux pas (or missteps, as some journalists like to call them) and dirty tricks on the part of the key political parties. The facts haven’t emerged yet but we have to wonder if the hoax video call from ‘the previous Ukrainian president’ which Foreign Secretary David Cameron was inveigled into was one such, revealing the Tories as the fools they are. Having long maintained he wouldn’t stand, Nigel Farage threw the Tories into a tailspin last week by changing his mind and being all over the airwaves ever since, then Rishi Sunak precipitated a storm by fibbing during the leaders’ debate that Labour would raise our taxes by £2k. Rather than climbing down and apologising when the claim that the figures were signed off by Treasury civil servants was revealed as a lie, he continued to double down on this and so have his politically suicidal colleagues. Widely circulated in the media was the letter from James Bowler, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, to Darren Jones, Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, which made crystal clear that the £38bn figure and others quoted in the Conservatives’ Labour’s Tax Rises were not the work or civil servants and should not be presented as such. Oof. How long before he gets the sack, like his predecessor who displeased Liz Truss?

Presumably Sunak didn’t expect the Permanent Secretary to out this political con but even now the government is sticking to the story that most of the figures they’d used were produced by civil servants so it was ok to misuse Treasury authority to underpin the entire document. Yet again we have to wonder who’s advising them, as this strategy is such an own goal. There are now two investigations being conducted by the UK Statistics Authority (statistics watchdog), about both the tax misrepresentation and Sunak’s use of the term ‘going gangbusters’ for the economy. The PM has also been outed for basing his over-optimistic state of the economy pronouncements on the performance of just one quarter, which is simply misleading. Some sources also mention an investigation by theOffice for Statistics Regulation and yet again it made me think why do we need yet another organisation? One statistics watchdog should suffice. On Wednesday Energy Security and Net Zero minister Claire Coutinho admitted that the £2k figure was spread over four years, yet analysis by commentators and others showed that the offending figures comprising the overall package were based on so many Conservative Party assumptions that any attempt to convey accuracy through them could not be taken seriously.

An X user tweeted: ‘The blatant reliance on Special Advisors for costings simply and patently cannot be trusted as independent or unbiased no matter how many times Rishi Sunak, Jeremy Hunt, Claire Coutinho or any one of the garbage goblins pretending to be politicians tell us they are. These advisors are 100% politically motivated and solely serve the interests of their party, not the public’. Another said: ‘The real tax issue isn’t the fictional £2k rise under Labour made up by the Tories, or even the forecast £3k rise under the Tories calculated by the Spectator using the same methodology, it’s Tory cronies encouraging certain types to avoid their fair share’.

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Labour have also had their difficulties, including the debacle over Diane Abbott. the deselection of Faiza Shaheen and the suggestion that (not totally unlike the Tories) they’re parachuting centrist candidates into seats to silence left wingers. So much for parties describing themselves as ‘a broad church’.

The leadership debate was frustrating to watch as format is faulty for this kind of discussion, Sunak came across as aggressive and the presenter struggled to keep control. There was also no correction to the untruth Sunak keeps quoting to keep his right wingers on side, ie that the ECHR is ‘a foreign court’. And Sunak is increasingly being laughed at during such events, increasingly getting his deserved reputation of (as someone put it) ‘pound shop Boris Johnson’. ‘We raced through questions on the NHS, education, tax, defence and climate change. Keir got far more of the applause while Rishi died a death as the audience groaned and openly laughed at him. First on health, then on national service. His only tactic was to keep saying that he was the one with the ideas. Even if they were all completely rubbish’. But this hasn’t stopped the government throwing out what BBC News calls ‘eye catching policies’ (aka ill thought out gimmicks) on a daily basis, for example today we hear about the plan to abolish stamp duty for first time buyers on homes up to £425,000. Good luck with that in places like London but no matter as it will never come to pass anyway.

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It comes to something when the Prime Minister being outed for an outright lie pales into insignificance compared with other massive mistakes but this has been the case to some extent following the disgraceful episode of Sunak exiting the Normandy events early.  Leaving Foreign Secretary Lord Dave to hold the fort, Sunak missed the key event with other world leaders in order to return to the UK for a tv interview (in which he would again try to defend his Labour tax lie). He later apologised, constantly cited by his extremely embarrassed colleagues, but the idea that a faux apology for a massive error makes everything ok hit the buffers long ago.

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Sunak’s statement: ‘The 80th anniversary of D-Day has been a profound moment to honour the brave men and women who put their lives on the line to protect our values, our freedom and our democracy. This anniversary should be about those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. The last thing I want is for the commemorations to be overshadowed by politics. I care deeply about veterans and have been honoured to represent the UK at a number of events in Portsmouth and France over the past two days and to meet those who fought so bravely. After the conclusion of the British event in Normandy, I returned back to the UK. On reflection, it was a mistake not to stay in France longer – and I apologise’.

This precipitated a flurry of tweets and media comments, eg ‘If you could work out today that it was a mistake to leave D-Day commemorations early, why couldn’t you work it out yesterday?’ ‘A crawling apology and a double down on lies. Just another day for Sunak’. ‘This indicates such a lack of self-awareness. He’s on a self destruct path’.’What does it say about Rishi Sunak’s judgement as Prime Minister if he left an event of profound national and international significance so that he could do a campaign interview with ITV?’ But in my view an important issue has been missed in all these displays of support and gratitude for those brave servicemen involved in the Normandy landings: that despite the virtue signalling and ‘patriotism’ displayed by so many politicians many of those leaving the armed forces have experienced severe mental health and housing problems which haven’t been addressed in any consistent way. Minister of State for Veterans’ Affairs Johnny Mercer then made the situation even worse by commenting on voters’ ‘faux outrage’ about Sunak missing the key event. It would have been vulnerable before but now some reckon this arrogant comment will lose Mercer his seat: ‘As PM you receive a lot of advice, obviously it’s disappointing, but I do find the faux outrage pretty nauseating’.

Jonathan Freedland dissects Sunak’s actions, taking a historical perspective: ‘it’s clear the prime minister does not grasp the hallowed place 6 June 1944 occupies in the island story of this nation’ but points out the lack of urgency and honesty in how he presented his actions: ‘It turns out that Sunak returned home to do an interview with ITV – which will not be broadcast until next Wednesday. So the opposite of urgent. What’s more, Downing Street volunteered that time slot to ITV. Sunak was not compelled to desert his post in Normandy: he chose to do it. No wonder even his fellow Conservatives are accusing him of political malpractice. They’re right, but it’s more than that. It’s an offence against history.’ It’s not only historical ignorance the PM stands accused of, it’s political illiteracy: ‘For this was not just any memorial event. The D-day anniversary is the big one, summoning the Allies to stand together once more. King Charles knew that…What’s more, everyone knows this was almost certainly the last time the D-day veterans could be honoured in person. Yesterday was to be the final act of thanks to the generation that saved Europe, a last farewell. It was beyond obvious that a British prime minister had to be there.

But forget the duty. Think of the politics. Sunak faces a challenge from Reform UK and its freshly installed leader, Nigel Farage, especially among older voters and those swayed by appeals to patriotism. Why hand him such a free hit?’ No wonder Sunak’s colleagues are furious with him because he’s deeply embarrassed them and made their electoral chances even slighter. Perhaps they will even come to regret behaving like such sheep, for so long obediently trotting out his lies and misrepresentations.

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Another point about these celebrations is the surely questionable tradition of royals like Charles and William sporting a chest full of medals they’ve done nothing whatsoever to earn. It’s yet another aspect of monarchy which needs challenging. But gird your loins as it’s not long before the Trooping of the Colour ceremony, which will have royal valets working around the clock to ensure that all the right medals, buckles and braids are ready in time.

There’s been much comment about Friday night’s 7 way BBC debate presented by the often (but not this time, I thought) excellent Mishal Husain, who said that BBC fact checkers were present but we never heard what their findings were. Angela Rayner and an aggressive pointy fingered Penny Mordaunt repeatedly clashed on taxes, the NHS and defence, Mordaunt throwing statistics around like nobody’s business but there was no verification on air of these numbers. ‘Debate moderator Mishal Husain interrupted Ms Mordaunt to remind her that the (tax) figure had been questioned and Green Party leader Carla Denyer sarcastically described her opponents as “terribly dignified”. Leading political figures also clashed on the issue of migration as Nigel Farage – who is well known for his views on the subject – accused both Conservative and Labour governments of not controlling migration as he pledged to stop migrants from bringing their family members to the UK’. The smaller parties like the Greens and Lib Dems are making a good case so far, I think, and there have been complaints about BBC programmes like Question Time constantly platforming people like Tice and Farage to the exclusion of others more deserving of a place on the panels.

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With increasing anger from his own side over his constant faux pas, Sunak allies like the hopeless Conservative Party chair Ric Holden being parachuted into safe seats (this must really upset the local activists who actually do the work) and unease over acceptance of the additional Frank Hester donation (£5bn accepted in January but not publicised), the PM looks extremely vulnerable. Further racist comments by Hester had come to light but as his total £15bn donation amounts to more than 40% of the total national spending limit for each party for a general election, we’re not likely to see the money returned any time soon.

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Meanwhile, damning but not surprising news about the extent of financial realities to be faced by the next government means that it will be some time before any improvement is felt. ‘Political parties must be honest with Britain about the immediate crisis of collapsing public services facing the next government, according to a hard-hitting report that lays bare the crisis affecting the NHS, criminal justice system, prisons and local government. In a direct challenge to Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer to come clean with voters, the Institute for Government think tank said most state services are performing worse than at the time of the 2019 general election, and “substantially worse” than when the Conservatives first took office in 2010.The IfG said it was not plausible for the victorious party on 4 July to stick to current spending plans at a time when the performance of hospitals was arguably the worst in the history of the NHS, prisons were at crisis point, and councils were shutting libraries and cutting back on waste collection and social care’. There should be some sanction for those leaving the country in this shocking state – it amounts to severe malpractice in public office.

Don’t hold your breath but this dire situation is exactly what media presenters should be challenging their guests on. It was never credible for the Tories to claim that the economy was ‘turning a corner’, that they’d invested XYZ in the NHS etc, but now it’s even less so. ‘Friday’s report from the IfG, titled The Precarious State of the State, said the reality was that growth had stagnated in recent years, living standards had fallen over the course of the 2019-24 parliament, tax and spending levels were already at a historically high level and plans for post-election public spending were implausible.’ Trevor Phillips, Laura Kuenssberg, Robert Peston, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Beth Rigby and co – we’re on your case!

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Now that Nigel Farage is even higher profile than he was previously, various commentators have been warning against his kind of insidious populism. He’s a skilled orator and political operator but analysts have shown how his frequent sound bite statements don’t stand up to scrutiny, like the one on Radio 4’s Today programme about streets in Oldham where ‘no one speaks English’.

Journalist Adittya Chakrabortty describes him as ‘a virus infecting UK politics’ and there’s been much general criticism of the media for platforming him when he doesn’t even have a seat at the same time as downplaying smaller parties which don’t get enough air time. Yet even as they splash the man across every front page, they trivialise his importance. To read the broadsheets this week, they are lavishing so much attention on an inveterate attention-seeker because he spells certain defeat for Rishi Sunak, who in any case is a total loser. Got it? Except that’s not the way Britain works. Over the course of his career, Farage has shown time and again that you need not win Westminster elections to change Westminster politics. As a politician, Farage is no Boris Johnson; yet, as a mode of politics, the power of Faragism is vast’. This is exemplified by politicians reacting so quickly to Farage baits eg ‘this will be an immigration election’ then the very next day the Tories announce a cap on immigration policy.

‘He has not reached that position by democratic means, if by democracy we mean open and rigorous testing of ideas and arguments. Instead, he has relied upon sugar-daddy businessmen such as Arron Banks, who funded Leave.EU. He also depends upon the chuckling indulgence of the media, from the BBC comedy shows and panel discussions (no fewer than 36 appearances on Question Time, analysts calculate) to the Torygraph and all its various franchises’. The media and politicians are seen as being asleep at the wheel as the insidious influence spreads. ‘At its root, Faragism is a project to take this country further and further to the right. And from Brexit through to Suella Braverman, it has worked. Its most devoted support in this project has been the media, which sees leaving the EU or denying care system migrant workers as essential and easy tasks, while taxing the rich or investing in public services are swivel-eyed Marxism. Such an argument cannot be appeased or compromised with. It needs to be countered, disproved with facts and its progenitors shown as the cosseted chancers they are. Yet it is a feature of Westminster politics that there is no institution willing or able to make that case’. Possibly this won’t happen if Farage loses the Clacton seat but we have been warned…

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Although, despite Tory claims to the contrary, numbers crossing the channel are higher than ever (316 on Friday, the most for June so far), voters are much more concerned about the cost of living and the state of the NHS, with 8m on waiting lists. The unpleasant irony is that many of those ‘economically inactive’ people they’ve been trying to bully back into the workplace are too unwell to be thus dragooned because they’re part of this massive queue. It’s no use the Conservatives saying they’ve invested XYZ amount, which they imply is a lot, when this figure also cynically includes things that have no honest place in the figure, as they did during the pandemic when they included the useless crony contracted PPE. The figure is also not per capita so spending on each patient has gone way down. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the figure also includes the high cost of agency workers to replace strikers and vacancies due to Tory failure to invest in the workforce over years. No wonder their workforce plan is ‘long term’ – besides being seriously faulty in itself it means ministers don’t yet have to show that they’re achieving anything.

Of course it doesn’t help that another doctors strike is underway at present. Last weekend Laura Kuenssberg interviewed the hapless Health Secretary, Victoria Atkins, who came out with all kind of spin about the Tories’ record on the NHS, and who later boasted that she’d been ‘in the room with doctors’, as if this was some kind of achievement without disclosing what the upshot of that interaction was. The ongoing strikes have unfortunately been useful to the government, for allowing them to blame medics for the waiting list growing and to convey to their right wingers that they’re bravely standing up to the unions. They will struggle to get the better of the BMA, though.

Not everyone realises that there’s no such thing as ‘the NHS’ as such because, following the disastrous Andrew Lansley (yes, of course, he’s in the Lords now) 2013 ‘reforms’, the NHS was split into a myriad of bodies and an organogram is quite shocking, revealing the sheer extent of the fragmentation. This is one of the reasons malpractice can occur because of the sheer difficulty of achieving accountability in such a sprawling, arms length from government organisation. But what I’d like to know is what the various political parties will do about the neglected issue of Long Covid. It affects thousands, only some of whom can access NHS treatment (still effectively in its infancy) and who in many cases feel their lives have been wrecked by this condition. There’s a heartbreaking example in this article. ‘Long Covid has taken a huge toll on your mental health. You feel resentful, angry, lost, unseen and unheard, left behind and forgotten about. Your confidence is shot to pieces. You are existing, not living; you want to live again. You are in mourning, grieving for the person you used to be’. So many are just assuming Covid is behind us but it’s not and in any case experts predicted that contrary to what the Tories assumed was a ‘once in a century’ phenomenon, another pandemic of some kind will hit us as some point.

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Despite all the ‘Sturm und Drang’ going on in the outside world, you can take comfort from knowing that home fashion experts have your interests at heart when it comes to choosing sheets and quilt covers. ‘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’. The key thing, you understand, is for your ‘bed dressing’ to be Instagram feed-friendly. Meanwhile, back in the real world, now that Wilko has mostly disappeared from high streets, we will just make do with B&M or John Lewis if we’re lucky.

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Finally, I don’t know whether barbers and hairdressers think they’re doing us a favour with their chat, asking about our holidays, etc, but a Finnish hairdresser has apparently started an innovatory ‘silent service’ for those who don’t want to participate. The owner, a self-declared introvert, said: ‘I understand how uncomfortable it can be for a client to have to make small talk’. Communication is kept to the minimum required to get the hair attended to and it seems demand for the service has been brisk! Perhaps it could catch on here…

Sunday 2 June

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?

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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?’

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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.

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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.

https://tinyurl.com/pjj7mskr

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…

Sunday 19 May

Following the local elections the pace of the political rollercoaster has hugely and predictably accelerated, the last fortnight seeing the dramatic defection of Conservative MP Natalie Elphicke to Labour and the government doubling down on their lies, misrepresentations, delusion and denial. If the local election results fallout constituted the ‘soft’ launch of the general election campaign, the substantial ones firing the starting gun were Rishi Sunak’s scaremongering presentation to the right wing think tank Policy Exchange and Starmer’s pledges speech.

There’s been much debate about the Elphicke move, which, like the Dan Poulter one, blindsided the Conservatives, some seeing it as a massive coup for Labour but others as a potentially dangerous Trojan horse. On the left of the party there’s been considerable disquiet about an MP with Elphicke’s track record being welcomed in, seen as unprincipled and strange as she’s not even standing at the election. But wouldn’t you just know that once the Tories got over the initial shock, they let it be known that Elphicke had unethically tried to lobby the Secretary of State of Justice, Robert Buckland, on behalf of her former husband, Charlie Elphicke. Additional criticisms of her conduct also emerged and of course, the obvious question then was why did the government only come clean about this improper behaviour following what some termed her ‘act of disloyalty’. It’s clear that after four years of silence, nothing except recent events would have changed this.

Rishi Sunak keeps shooting himself in the foot with absurd presentations and out of touch videos and last week’s must be one of the worst: during his scaremongering and gaslighting response to Labour’s success in the elections, he worked hard to convince us that the UK was approaching its worst ever dangerous era, that the UK wouldn’t be safe under Labour and that only the Conservatives could keep the country safe. The irony of this could only be missed by the dimmest and most right wing: it’s Conservative administrations which have significantly reduced police numbers, exposed us to huge security risks (like money laundering and the close connections to Russian oligarchs) and which have wrecked the prison and justice systems so they’ve now decided to release dangerous prisoners early in order to free up prisonplaces.

An X user tweeted: ‘Sunak will say he has “bold ideas” that can “create a more secure future” for Britons and restore their “confidence and pride in our country”. Right, so the best person to restore ‘confidence and pride’ is one of the main architects of their removal?

Sunak’s presentation tellingly was quite controlled in terms of who could ask questions, the journalists being pre-listed. Not for the first time, the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason came in for some flak for so nakedly displaying his Tory bias by feeding the PM the Labour and danger question. Commentator Simon Jenkins didn’t hold back in his own analysis of Sunak’s performance, calling it ‘floundering’ and suggesting that ‘beleaguered British leaders have always resorted to shielding their belligerence behind a wall of ‘values’. That’s what today’s speech was about’. As so often with politicians, Sunak insults our intelligence by assuming that we can’t see through this. Even Daily Mail readers must be questioning his performance by now, making, as he does, absurd claims for the economy, education and the NHS when all around us we see the destructive effects of 14 years of Tory government.

Jenkins observes: ‘A post-imperial rhetoric has allowed every global conflict to be somehow Britain’s concern… Sunak now declares that the UK must face up “to an axis of authoritarian states” – China, Russia, North Korea and Iran – if it is to “succeed in the years to come”. He demands that these countries not be allowed “to undermine our shared values and identities”. But they are not seeking to do that. He does not have the power to stop them, nor are they anything to do with Britain’s defence. In reality, Sunak’s intention has been simply to taunt Labour for not promising at once to raise defence spending to an arbitrary 2.5% of national income – which he too has failed to do…No credible European leader would seek to scare their people by threatening them that the next few years will be “the most dangerous yet”. They would not call on them to pay higher taxes and sacrifice public services to impose their values on the rest of the world. They would see their job as to uphold those values at home, period. So should Britain’. Oof!

https://tinyurl.com/av47p5bf

In the Observer Andrew Rawnsley also deconstructs the speech in a nutshell, stressing that the longstanding Conservative fear tactics are just not working:  ‘He’s previously tried marketing himself as Mr Stability, Mr Delivery and Mr Change. None of these iterations has put a dent in Labour’s headline poll ratings. They insistently place Sir Keir Starmer’s party about 20 points ahead of the Tories. In his most recent attempt at a relaunch, an exercise he performs almost as often as he changes his undies, the Tory leader tried another costume. This time he cloaked himself in the garb of Mr Security. In what Downing Street puffed as a big speech, the prime minister tried to chill the country’s bones with the warning that Britain is entering a very dangerous period. His ostensible subject was the threat from “an axis of authoritarian states”. His electoral purpose was to try to build an argument that voters will be safer sticking with him than taking a punt on Labour’.

Rawnsley then suggests three key reasons why the fearmongering isn’t working, such as this a strategy needing a powerful leader, which floundering Sunak manifestly is not. We have to wonder how long it will take the government to realise that this isn’t working when they’ve been attached to it for years.

https://tinyurl.com/mr2kc24r

Of course much attention has been directed to Starmer’s speech outlining his pledges and again Chris Mason’s ‘analysis’ came in for flak. An X user tweeted: ‘That Chris Mason ‘analysis’ of the Starmer pledges was predictably biased and patronising, alluding to ‘whizzy presentation’ and ‘theatre’. This kind of thing from the public broadcaster serves listeners very badly and undermines democracy’. What some of the critics don’t seem to get is that (yes, there will be some holes in Labour’s plan) the party has learned the danger of stating policies explicitly because they could well be nicked by the Conservatives, as happened with the non-dom issue. There are quite a few topics not listed in the pledges but which are planned for the manifesto but the Tories can’t bear not knowing. It’s clearly irritating them in the extreme. It shouldn’t be surprising that Labour alludes only to first steps because they will have a hell of a lot of work to do repairing the damage inflicted on the country by the Conservatives.

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So how are the Conservatives reacting to Labour’s election success and the pledges? Fairly predictably, in several ways and it’s clear just how rattled they are. First we have more tweeted photos of Tory MPs on the campaign trail, looking and sounding unjustifiably bullish. Some, like Liz Truss, make you wonder how they dare to show their faces in public after the damage they’ve inflicted. Then we’ve been bombarded by ‘articles’ in Tory papers like the Telegraph, in which the authors try to rescue their reputation and paint Labour in a bad light. Arrogant Jeremy Hunt claims to have ‘set out’ what a labour government will result in (massive ‘black hole in the economy’ when it’s his government which has wrecked it) and what his government has allegedly achieved. An excellent analysis of his spiel clarified the extent to which he’d cherry picked sources to make his case. He’s a great one for making spurious G7 comparisons but on closer scrutiny it’s found that he’s only quoting one quarter – misleading techniques like that. The broadcast media mainly do us a disservice in not bringing these to public attention. Hunt even tried to claim that the UK economy was doing better than that of other countries and that the Conservatives had put the economy ‘back on its feet’ following the pandemic, Ukraine war and energy shocks etc (carefully omitting Brexit and the Liz Truss disaster).

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But Hunt didn’t leave it there: he partnered up with Work and Pensions Minister Mel Stride for an article in The Times reacting to news that unemployment had gone up again, doubling down on their anti-welfare rhetoric. ‘It came a day after data from the Office for National Statistics showed unemployment increased by 166,000 between the final three months of 2023 and the first three months of 2024, pushing up the jobless rate from 3.8% to 4.3%’. Of course these ministers don’t want to take responsibility for the conditions preventing many from working (NHS waiting lists, for example, or needing to provide care as there’s so little social care available), instead just trying bullying tactics and cosmetic tinkering to get people back to work. The dynamic duo even had the nerve to say ‘The road to recovery is never entirely smooth – there are bumps, twists and turns. But by standing up to the issues of our day, we will grow the economy and raise living standards for hard-working Britons’ and that ‘the economic outlook was ‘better than many would have you believe’. Of course what we’ve experienced is far worse than ‘bumps, twists and turns’.

https://tinyurl.com/mw9yx6sz

The third Government strategy in reaction to Labour’s advance is the creation of further culture wars to appeal to their right wingers, three notable recent examples being the sex education guidelines (the subject of car crash Gillian Keegan media interviews last week), Common Sense minister Esther McVey’s condemnation of certain lanyard designs and the ‘proposals’ of Lord Walney (former Labour MP John Woodcock) to proscribe organizations like Just Stop Oil ‘that have a policy of using criminal offences or causing serious disruption to influence government or public debate. If a group’s actions were persistent, and used to promote a political or ideological cause, that would count against them, according to the recommendation’. Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to the Home Office that such protests are about the only option some of these groups have left because other approaches to legitimate protest have been legally suppressed. Yet another attack on democracy posed by this government.  

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2qv7425gvwo

Meanwhile, the bad news keeps coming: despite Sunak insisting that child poverty has declined, Gordon Brown’s longstanding work proving that it’s worse than ever, a quarter of Britain’s children living below the poverty line; the appalling state of our water supply, rivers and coasts due to water company pollution; pharmacies reporting that supplies of some medications are critically short, which could be life threatening for patients needing them; and the disgusting decision to ‘recover’ (albeit ‘with compassion’, as recommended by Oliver Dowden!) overpayments made to unpaid carers when these people are giving essential social care, get little support or respite and most likely have had zero time for admin.

One of the worst aspects of this is the discovery that only pressure from campaigners and some MPs forced the publication last week of a report (one of several suppressed by the then DWP minister Coffey in 2021) which flagged up a problem in the payments system that was never rectified despite its massive financial and emotional impact. Even worse, it’s likely to be the products of decisions like this (to continue with the overpayment ‘recovery’, £250m) which are being used to replenish government coffers emptied by their own wastage.

Meanwhile, Welsh Secretary David Davies is lucky that his breach of the ministerial code has gone under the radar, at least for a while, it seems. Labour is demanding an investigationafter Davies used his government office in Whitehall to film an anti-Labour video that he then posted on social media. The Code states that ‘Ministers are provided with facilities at government expense to enable them to carry out their official duties. These facilities should not generally be used for party or constituency activities’. But ‘in the video Davies said the Welsh Labour government had to decide whether it wanted to spend £120m of taxpayers’ money on more Senedd members or increase the number of nurses, doctors, dentists and teachers, as the Conservatives would do’. He then said that he knew what he would do. This episode clearly illustrates that either Davies didn’t know that this constituted a breach (unlikely) or he just didn’t care, assuming there would be no comeback because recent years have proved that there often isn’t. It’s the ‘rules are for little people’ mentality on display again. So much for the ‘integrity, professionalism and accountability’ Sunak promised when he was parachuted into his role. We’ve seen the opposite when we thought it couldn’t get worse after Johnson.

https://tinyurl.com/mrxe2xzf

So just how long can Rishi Sunak cling on? Following their terrible election results and people waking up to their mismanagement of pretty well everything, he’s clearly at the endgame. But he ploughs on, digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole while desperately hoping the economy will ‘turn a corner’ and ‘prove’ that his non-existent ‘plan’ is working. It’s interesting timing, then, that the government is having another go at trying to resolve the junior doctors’ strike, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins spinning that this is ‘a peace process away from the glare of the media… the talks need time and space’, as if this, rather than government intransigence, was responsible for the failure of previous attempts. In fact the BMA agreed to fresh talks because a so far unnamed independent mediator will be involved and it’s most likely this is the crucial factor, not being away from ‘media glare’. It’s taken the government a while to come to this view, given that the last talks broke down in December.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-69022696

One of the gratifying things this week was the sight of Suella Braverman, accompanied by GB News presenter Patrick Christys, trying to taunt Palestinian supporting Cambridge University students at their encampment into what she called ‘engaging andlistening’ (aka picking a fight in order to maintain a presence in the public eye)about the Gaza issues. They totally blanked her, treating her as the irrelevance she is, leaving them both standing around looking and sounding very foolish. That’s rather a good tactic which no doubt other protesters will be trying.

Much of the news has long been terrible for our mental health and it’s no coincidence that during Mental Health Awareness Week last week, George Monbiot penned a powerful article which attributed our worsening mental wellbeing to our society ‘spiralling backwards’ and to the longstanding policy of neoliberalism. ‘The latest map of mental wellbeing published by the Global Mind Project reveals that, out of the 71 countries it assessed, the United Kingdom, alongside South Africa, has the highest proportion of people in mental distress – and the second worst overall measure of mental health (we beat only Uzbekistan)’.This is damning: ‘What it calls “the market” will, if left to its own devices, determine who deserves to succeed and who does not. Everything that impedes the creation of this “natural order” of winners and losers – tax and the redistribution of wealth, welfare and public housing, publicly run and funded services, regulation, trade unions, protest, the power of politics itself – should, albeit often subtly and gradually, be shoved aside. It has dominated life in this country, to a degree unparalleled in similar nations, for 45 years’.

For years politicians have successfully conned us into believing that if we tighten our belts today there will be jam tomorrow, but as we’ve seen, this never comes. Added to which we’ve seen politicians’ naked self-interest and pocket-lining on an industrial scale in recent years. ‘So they keep us hanging on. And the endless promises and the endless breaking of those promises grind us down. It would perhaps be more surprising if we found ourselves anywhere else on the mental health rankings’. This is a ‘world-beating’ ranking you won’t see Sunak and Hunt bragging about.

https://tinyurl.com/ysuxehaf

Some good news to end on, that an intended 76 mile walking and cycling path in Somerset, the Strawberry Line, one which connects villages and communities, has had a significant boost from campaigners using a different approach to gaining the permissions needed to progress the route. ‘….in 2022, they began experimenting with using “permitted development rights” – the separate process that a farmer uses when building a new track through a field’. Although there’s still much work involved, it’s streamlined compared with traditional routes, which have often seen councils turn down proposals. The project has involved a great deal of volunteer effort yet this in itself is good for community development and people can see how it benefits them all. It sounds a great initiative which perhaps could be replicated elsewhere in the country.

https://tinyurl.com/v9y2p77x

Sunday 5 May

Although what we really is a general election, the local elections have proved somewhat cathartic and predictably the Conservatives did very badly, losing the Blackpool South by-election with a swing of 26% to Labour, over half the council seats they contested (could be as many as 500) and losing ten entire councils including Redditch, Rushmore and Nuneaton and Bedworth to Labour, the others where there had been no overall control. The mayoral win for Ben Houchen in Teesside isn’t enough to compensate for these significant losses but this didn’t stop Rishi Sunak speechifying after the count declaration with ‘a message for Labour’. Just laughable. He said twice that Labour needed to win Teesside to win a general election, a statement totally untrue, as commentators have remarked. No doubt he’s now digesting the Saturday afternoon news that Andy Burnham won the Greater Manchester mayoralty and Sadiq Khan the London one. So much for biased reporters like Laura Kuenssberg briefing that the latter was very close. And eventually, after a recount, the shock for Sunak that Labour won West Midlands, which will shiver Sunak’s timbers to the core.

It was noticed that the BBC reported the Houchen victory at length without mentioning the ongoing corruption allegations against him and another thing I don’t understand is how he can be a mayor and a peer. Just one of these positions should fully occupy the incumbent. Polling expert Sir John Curtice says the resultsare ‘not far short of catastrophic for the Tories…one of the worst if not the worst Conservative performances in local elections for 40 years’. The PM seems determined to cling on until polling day. Could this be another Liz Truss moment, though? After days of clinging on she was finally compelled to resign.

Needless to say, the Tory script writers have been busy developing a new spiel and set of sound bites for media appearances and this exercise has resulted in some absurd excuses and examples of twisted logic. First up on the early programmes was party chairman Ric Holden, who delivered what must be the worst car crash interview on the Today programme, even claiming something you’d think they’d never be daft enough to say, ie ‘the performance is typical for governments midterm’! Err, we’re way beyond mid-term. Another later said ‘We’ve got a fantastic Prime Minister….’ – NO, we haven’t. Get real. These people really aren’t helping themselves with their delusion and denial. Then later we heard a very clipped and tetchy Andrew Griffith, Minister of State for Science, Research and Innovation, alluding to the government ‘continuing to deliver’ and expecting to be taken seriously. He actually claimed that because two thirds of the electorate didn’t vote the government must be popular because all those people were happy to stay at home.

Next up was pompous bore Andrew Mitchell saying that the Conservatives have still got ‘a considerable number of cards to play’. They expired years ago but even this expression is telling, isn’t it, government conceptualised as about ‘playing cards’. Then we were fortunate to get another dose of defensive Andrew Griffith on Saturday’s Today programme. Mishal Husain: Are you going to change the plan? Andrew Griffith: No, we’re going to keep delivering the plan. Mishal Husain: The reason I ask, because it’s a plan that’s just lost you 448 councillors’.

Part of the Tory script is that this is a straight contest between Conservative and Labour: it’s not and this is disrespectful to smaller parties which have quietly made significant gains. And at key moments in political history the major parties have depended on smaller ones to present a majority to form government. ‘But in a warning sign for the main parties, there was also a strong showing for the Green party, which won more than 150 seats and narrowly missed out on overall control in Bristol, and independent party candidates, who won 260 seats amid disillusionment with Westminster politics and Labour’s stance on Gaza’.

https://tinyurl.com/4xnycu7d

Voters also elected 10 metro mayors: Conservatives had to swallow the bitter pill not only of Ben Bradley losing to Labour in the East Midlands but also Susan Hall in London and, unexpectedly, Andy Street in the West Midlands. Much media attention had focused on Street, who Sunak has talked up as an example of Conservative success, but Street distanced himself from the party, not mentioning it in any of his campaign literature. The Conservatives’ loss of the West Midlands will give Sunak serious food for thought – hopefully that his game is up.

The persistent rustling noise you’re increasingly hearing is that of the Tories like Andrea Leadsom clutching at straws as they try to cope with what BBC News called their ‘bruising defeats’. And clutch they may well, as (not before time, no place for complacency in politics, and there’s been a lot of it) a former Tory minister told a journalist ‘There’s no such thing as a safe Conservative seat any more’. Also (especially given the plotting against him in some quarters) that Sunak needed to ‘hold his nerve’ until the general election. This is surely a ridiculous phrase well past its sell by date: it’s predicated on the conviction that the government actually does have ‘a plan’, it’s working, and they just have to hang on in there. And increasingly voters can see the Emperor’s lack of clothes.

Once again the vox pops the media are so keen on broadcasting reveal the shocking level of political ignorance in this country, although we have to bear in mind that if media channels choose to interview folk in places like Wetherspoons they’re already guaranteeing the likelihood of certain views. In my view politics and political awareness should be taught in schools (yes, there could be bias but it would be a big improvement on what we have now). Many young people interviewed shockingly say they get their news from the likes of Instagram and Tik Tok. But an overlooked factor in the undermining of the democratic process is the fate of so many local newspapers going to the wall, only some of which have gone online. The Week did a substantial piece on this recently and it coincided (just one example) with a community newspaper around here ceasing to publish its printed version. Between 2009 and 2019, 320 local newspapers closed down and some of surviving ones were rolled into conglomerates, thereby losing the valuable connection to local communities.

Lord Hague, in the Times, stressed how important local journalism is to democracy in terms of promoting and supporting debate and accountability: if communities then don’t have the wherewithal to hold power to account, the chances are (and we’ve surely seen this) this goes by the board, leading to a severe imbalance and abuses of power. Of course these significant changes are attributed to the internet – people getting their news there and advertisers moving online from print – but people also now have a far greater choice of things to do so newspaper reading as a whole has sadly declined. It was interesting to learn that local news publishers have long complained about the BBC regional news websites poaching their readers and distorting competition, some even saying the Beeb had ‘suffocated’ their businesses. Despite the very difficult market conditions, it’s to be hoped that the remaining papers survive and perhaps newcomers will innovate, because, apart from supporting political and social awareness, these resources help keep communities connected.

One of the rather satisfying episodes of recent days was Boris Johnson being turned away from his local polling station because he’d turned up without photo ID. ‘The misstep was embarrassing for Johnson because the requirement to bring photo ID is a stipulation of the Elections Act he introduced in 2022 while in Downing Street’. Marvellous – hoist by his own privileged voter suppression petard. You can almost imagine how the exchange went: BJ loudly on being told he couldn’t initially vote: ‘Do you know who I am???’ Polling station official: Yes, only too well…. you’re the narcissistic charlatan who wrecked the country and still believes he’s PM’. Ipswich Tory MP Tom Hunt also rolled up without the required ID, blaming hisdyspraxia for losing his documents: entitled attitude in a nutshell since the ordinary voter wouldn’t expect to get away with that kind of excuse. 

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As if the elections humiliation wasn’t enough, the Conservatives were confronted with another today, which they immediately tried to misrepresent as being about factors other than the content. ‘The UK government’s climate action plan is unlawful, the high court has ruled, as there is not enough evidence that there are sufficient policies in place to reduce greenhouse gas emissions’. How typical that the Tories try to deny by splitting linguistic hairs that the court found this unlawful. Delusion and denial form the Tories’ modus operandi. Now energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, will have to produce a revised plan within 12 months. This must ensure that the UK achieves its legally binding carbon budgets and its pledge to cut emissions by more than two-thirds by 2030, both of which the government is off track to meet. Don’t hold your breath…

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The election flurry has caused another humiliation to go under the radar and typically, Jeremy Hunt, who regularly makes false comparisons between UK and other G7 country performances, is nowhere to be seen. ‘The UK will be the worst-performing economy in the G7 next year, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, as high interest rates and the lingering effects of last year’s surge in inflation drag on growth. In a downbeat assessment, the Paris-based think tank also downgraded its forecast for UK growth this year to 0.4% from a November forecast of 0.7%.The UK will fall to the bottom of the G7 growth league in 2025’. What’s the betting (he has form on this) that if Hunt is called upon to defend this, he will come up with ‘findings’ from another organisation which appear to contradict those of the OECD?

https://tinyurl.com/y4j5f2ub

Yet another blow for Sunak will be the news that pharmacists are complaining that GPs are not referring patients to them for ‘minor conditions’ as per the plan he imagined was clever, to cope with pressure on GPs. Yet another piece of Tory cosmetic tinkering that doesn’t solve the massive issue of GP shortages and NHS pressures across the board. An X user said: ‘I think many patients will refuse to be fobbed off onto pharmacists and will already have gone for minor issues if they feel the need to. And besides not settling the junior doctors’ strikes it’s yet another way (besides the cynical use of Physician Associates) the government is disrespecting the medical profession by trying to bypass GPs in this way’. The BMA said ‘Community pharmacists and GPs want to work together to ensure patients receive safe and effective care. Rather than a reluctance to engage with Pharmacy First, we are aware of GPs raising concerns that this scheme is being rolled out too quickly, and is relying on inadequate IT infrastructure which is ultimately increasing the burden on our profession. This is putting further pressure on a system already close to breaking point’. Another piece of Tory tinkering grounded before it has a chance to take off?

https://tinyurl.com/2uhpmx8f

Last week the witty parliamentary sketch writer John Crace coined a good phrase for the government’s very transparent pre-election stunts: electile dysfunction. This has consisted of two far reaching performative cruelty measures designed to appeal to right wingers – the earlier than planned (there’s the pre-election clue) rounding up of asylum seekers and the disability benefits ‘reforms’. ‘There’s a hint of desperation in everything the government is doing. The absurd publicity stunt of a volunteer offering to have himself returned to Rwanda in exchange for £3k in cash and five years’ paid accommodation. Just to be able to say the flights have begun when they obviously haven’t. To boast “THE PLAN IS WORKING” when it isn’t. It’s hardly a deterrent if people are queueing up to take advantage. Up the cash a bit and I’m sure you could attract a fair number of benefits claimants, too’. The rounding up isn’t even working because of at least two (so far) powerful protests, which succeeded in seeing off the enforcement vans minus those destined to be taken. Wouldn’t you just know that the only way people like James Cleverly can cope with such a humiliation was to condemn the protesters on the front page of the obliging Daily Mail and stress that ‘they will not deter us from doing what is right (!) for the British public”.

It’s not surprising that Dimly overlooks the fact that the protesters ARE ‘the public’ and ‘the public’ never voted for the Rwanda Scheme. It’s yet another humiliation for the government that the Home Office quietly slipped out that ‘Rwanda had agreed in principle to take 5,700 people, of whom 2,143 “continue to report … and can be located for detention’. The Home Office came out with various ‘reasons’ why at least half were not reporting but it’s highly likely that some have absconded, especially when they got to hear about the rounding up and it didn’t strike the spokesman that they can ‘report’ via email but still have vanished.

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But as if he needed yet another problem, Sunak’s policies have led to a diplomatic stand off with Ireland over asylum seekers entering Ireland via the Northern Ireland border. Meetings earlier this week sought to reach a decision, but Sunak has stuck to his guns, refusing to take these people back. ‘We’re not. I’m not interested in that. We’re not going to accept returns from the EU via Ireland when the EU doesn’t accept returns back to France where illegal migrants are coming from. Of course we’re not gonna do that. I’m determined to get our Rwanda scheme up and running because I want a deterrent’.

The second stunt was the disgraceful attempt to demonise those unable or struggling to work because of often chronic mental health conditions by making it much harder (and it’s already very hard) to claim the PIP benefit on which so many have to depend. Being concerned about the expense of the benefits bill is justifiable but it’s clear that neither Sunak nor Mel Stride, who is spearheading this policy, have any real understanding of mental health. And a major factor is that the Conservatives have brought about the very decimation of MH services which could have helped numerous claimants instead of parking them on a long waiting list. Psychologist Jay Watts wrote a good article about this, which well and truly skewered the cruel and nasty thinking underpinning the policy. ‘I speak from experience when I say that politicians propagating these obscenely simplistic and false narratives have the potential to drive vulnerable patients to self-harm and increased suicidal tendencies. They can also trigger acute episodes…those diagnoses are the speakable ways of labelling the very real impact on body and psyche resulting from hardship, a pandemic and a lack of opportunity. It is then made all the worse by the Tories’ demolition of the mental health infrastructure that is needed to recover’.

She calls out the dishonesty of Stride implying that people just visit their GP, speak about their symptoms, get a diagnosis, on the basis of which are then awarded thousands of pounds a month. Of course designed to get the right winger ‘benefits scroungers’ brigade going. The process is very different, and even clearly disabled people have a hard time getting their PIP. Does Stride even know that a condition in itself won’t guarantee PIP? Applicants have to detail what their condition renders them unable to do. Also, PIP is not worth ‘thousands of pounds’:  the highest rate of Pip is £798 a month but most claimants get much less. A friend who worked for the Citizens Advice Bureau for over ten years cited a 32 page form and said much of their work was preparing appeals for highly stressed individuals who had initially been turned down. Many succeeded on appeal but it’s doubtful whether this would have happened without the expert help and many won’t be able to access this.

And this is the key point: ‘This government’s “moral mission” to reform welfare is an attempt to blame on individuals a problem that can only be explained systemically. The rising disability bill is not down to duplicitous claimants, but widespread and disastrous cuts that have left our mental health services emaciated and failing. Rather than an honest assessment of their own failures, all the Tories can do is blame sufferers. It is a grotesque distortion that callously sacrifices vulnerable people for political gain’. Of course it’s convenient and cheaper for the Conservatives to blame the individual rather than systemic factors and it fits with their laissez faire survival-of-the-fittest ideology. The ironic aspect of   Sunak’s attack on ‘sick note culture’ didn’t pass people by, Cabinet Secretary Simon Case having very publicly gone on sick leave  for weeks on end when he was due to appear at the Covid Inquiry. ‘Look closer to home, Rishi’, said one X user.

https://tinyurl.com/5tt6n7wv

On the same subject Frances Ryan focuses on the political thinking behind it, including the extension of demonizing to issuing vouchers, implying that without this claimants would just irresponsibly blow their money on non-essentials. ‘There is a desire to “move away from a fixed cash benefit system”. Reports suggest this could mean disabled people having to provide receipts for the extra costs associated with their disability in order to claim back money from the state, or being awarded vouchers instead of cash. This is social policy if it was run by Groupon: use code TORYWIPEOUT24 for 25% off an oxygen cylinder. She also points out that besides being ‘unethical and demeaning’, the ideas are unworkable. ‘Forcing even a small fraction of the up to three million disabled people who receive Pip to send in their receipts for “approval” each time they need to buy specialist food or pay for a taxi would leave civil servants wading through tens of millions of invoices a month’. And this is the party claiming to tackle ‘bureaucracy’. The scheme would create far more.

https://tinyurl.com/mum8ure7

The point above about the tendency to blame the individual rather than acknowledging systemic causes of societal problems has also been identified in the recent example of knife crime. The Hainault attack, where the perpetrator killed a teenager and wounded others with a sword, could be the latest victim of systemic mental health service failings. Of course this does not exonerate him, but it’s a key factor to consider which this government doesn’t. ‘If the police hunches are correct, the tragedy may turn out to be the latest in a series of high-profile killings that have focused public attention on the adequacy of mental health treatment …An internet search of similar incidents in the UK throws up many other recent cases: reports of attacks and arrests, court hearings and inquest findings. Julian Hendy, of the charity Hundred Families, says these are all examples of problems with psychiatric care provision not being taken seriously enough – until it is too late.

Hendy said: ‘The offenders are often people who are dangerous when they are unwell, who can be unwilling or unable to access care. They aren’t getting the right treatment. And it’s often only after the event [the attack or killing] that they get the treatment they need’. He argues that services need to be more assertive and proactive in their approach but even the Care Quality Commission, the health and social care regulator, notes that there’s been a notable decline in the quality of specialist mental health services provided. The government and NHS really need to join the dots and stop pretending that these tragic incidents are isolated and irreparable.

https://tinyurl.com/ymuuh6jw

This week, as the media were supposed to steer clear of politics in the run up to the local elections, they made even more than usual of the King’s ‘return to work’. What work, many have asked. The cynical aspect of this is the government’s recruitment of King Charles into their ‘economically inactive’ strategy, the message being: if the King can get back to work despite his cancer diagnosis, you can too, oblivious of the difference in the nature of that work and of accessibility of treatment for those on waiting lists. Ironically the King’s first engagement was at a cancer centre in central London – he received treatment immediately but for the almost 8m on the waiting list it’s a different story. The King regularly stresses the importance of early diagnosis in cancer cases – of course he’s right but many patients won’t be able to benefit from this. A report from the Nuffield Trust and Health Foundation notes that in poorer areas there’s far less early diagnosis than in affluent areas and that younger people across the board need 3 to 5 or more GP visits to obtain a referral than older people. This markedly reduces the chances of early diagnosis. What’s the betting Charles wasn’t briefed on this and maybe his minders don’t even know?

Finally, as someone whose teeth are set on edge when they hear the letter h mispronounced as ‘haitch’, surprisingly common, it was very good news to hear that viewers of University Challenge had complained in droves about presenter Amol Rajan’s haitches. He has now undertaken to change his ways, saying ‘this matters to a lot of people’. No doubt regular viewers will be keen to see that this undertaking is fulfilled, but what about the other programmes he presents, like the Today programme?! Some of us will be ‘all ears’.