Sunday 23 February

‘There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen’ (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin) – a timely quote from the BBC yesterday considering we’re now at one of those historical junctures. Many were plunged into despond at the election of Donald Trump in November and, following a brief respite for the Christmas and New Year, even more when Trump took office and immediately issued a slew of far-reaching executive orders. But politicians, media and the public were blindsided by his almost casual overturning of the international world order, becoming progressively more alarming over the last fortnight. What’s crystal clear is that the US is no longer an ally and the myth of the ‘special relationship’ needs firmly putting to bed.

At every stage Trump has increasingly demonstrated zero understanding of the process of government, which for him is a matter of doing ‘deals’: there’s no nuanced and intelligent consideration of ‘grey areas’, everything is just black and white, ‘shooting from the hip’ and directed to stoking his ego and benefiting his business interests. First, we had his lawless proposals for Gaza, suggesting that it would become a kind of Riviera of the Middle East, this Gaza a Lago necessitating total displacement of the Palestinians. Trump opined that the ‘only reason’ they don’t want to leave is that ‘they have nowhere else to go’, but of course his ideas as where they should be exiled takes no account of homeland or statehood. All is transactional.

Second, we had Vice President J D Vance last weekend at the Munich Security Conference astonishing attendees by attacking European defence spending and insisting that the biggest threat to Europe was coming from within, the threat to democracy allegedly emanating from limitations on ‘free speech’ (aka hate speech). Vance’s attack was designed to suggest that European democracies may not be worth defending because of this alleged inner threat, Le Monde calling this tactic ‘a declaration of ‘ideological war on Europe’.

Third, several commentators having observed that contrary to Trump’s inflated view of his deal making skills, they’re actually pretty poor, eg Afghanistan, he did a terrifyingly similar thing with Putin, effectively capitulating on Ukraine and throwing Zelensky, who hitherto had relied heavily on American support, under the bus and excluding both him and European leaders from negotiations.Historian Timothy Garton Ash compared such a ‘senseless capitulation’ to the appeasement of Hitler in 1938 after the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Then we had Trump’s astonishing projections and lies about Ukraine, suggesting that they had started the ‘war’, calling Zelensky a dictator, criticising him for not holding elections and saying he only had a 4% approval rating when it’s actually 57%. Trump also suggested that the US had given Ukraine far more aid than Europe had: not so. Together Europe has given Ukraine £132bn since the start of the war. America has given £114bn.While so many politicians have remained silent during these onslaughts or danced on the head of a pin to distance themselves from Trump’s statements without criticising him directly, Zelensky tackled him head on, only to be ‘advised’ by Trump henchmen to ‘tone it down’ when he rightly diagnosed that Trump occupied a ‘disinformation bubble’. But lo, we now hear that Trump later admitted that Russia invaded Ukraine, begging the question of how many more absurd statements he might feel compelled to withdraw.

It was surely very telling, too, that following the meeting between Zelensky and US special envoy Keith Kellogg, the press conference was cancelled – by the US. One commentator suggested that Kellogg felt ‘sidelined’ by Trump and this view has been supported by others eg a comment on the BBC website: ‘The well meaning old man Kellogg is being used by Trump as cover for his pact with Putin’. Indeed, a split with Trump appeared stark as Kellogg called Zelensky ‘the embattled and courageous leader of a nation at war’. It’s breathtakingly imperious for Trump to so casually decide that Zelensky isn’t necessary for negotiating the end of the conflict. ‘I don’t think he’s very important to be at meetings, to be honest with you’. How ironic is that – ‘to be honest with you’, being just the opposite, of course, but pretending to honour journalists with his innermost wisdom. It’s good that unlike the charlatan Boris Johnson, who’s still sitting on the fence, Keir Starmer publicly came out in support of Zelensky and Ukraine.

The media haven’t held back with their (justified, for once) dramatic headlines and article titles eg ‘The awful price of Trump’s ‘peace’ plan for Ukraine becomes clear as Washington upends the transatlantic alliance and embarks on a historic realignment’; ‘the doctrine of ‘America First’ seems to imply the demise of the liberal international order’; as Trump empowers Russia and the Far Right he is laying the foundations for undermining democracies around the world;’ The new world order is exactly what it looks like – are we too frozen with fear to name it?’. Nor, of course, have social media users: one X user tweeting: ‘This is such an important moment for the world, seeing how much Trump is a Russian asset and what European countries do about it. The US is surrendering its global position for ever, becoming a rogue far right state’. Another said: ‘Pretty disturbed by some of the framing being widely used on the Trump talks. It’s as if the genesis of the war is entirely forgotten. This isn’t a conflict which needs mediation. It was an illegal unprovoked act of aggression. It could end tomorrow if Putin just withdrew.’

Regarding the asset observation and Trump being owned by Putin, this has been attributed to Trump allegedly having been recruited by the KGB back in 1987 and has been blackmailed ever since. Said an X user: ‘No one should be shocked by Trump’s betrayal of our allies. Trump is a Russian asset. The Biden DOJ was foolish for not investigating Trump’s Russian ties and the election hack’. Even more alarmingly, a commentator said ‘French media outlet Le Point is reporting Trump will join Putin in Moscow for Russia’s May 9th Victory Day celebrations. America’s humiliation is now complete’. This sounds quite genuine and not a conspiracy theory – time will tell. No wonder Trump Unfit For Office has been trending on X.

Meanwhile, besides wanting to claim credit for ending the war, the key reason emerged for Trump’s relentless involvement – access to valuable mineral resources located in Ukraine. No surprise there – same reason for his acquisitive strategy on Canada and Greenland. An initial US proposal apparently asked for (demanded?) a 50% stake in Ukraine’s natural resources, including critical minerals, oil, and gas, as well as stakes in ports and other key infrastructure through a joint investment fund. Disgracefully, the demand was framed in terms of needing to repay the US for wartime support. A source also told media that Ukraine was threatened with the loss of Starlink if it didn’t reach a deal, Starlink providing crucial internet access to Ukraine and its military. This audacious request was rejected by Zelensky for lacking ‘concrete security guarantees’, yet we have arrogant Trump henchmen insisting that Zelensky ‘will’ sign an agreement within days. Again, time will tell.

Needless to say, numerous politicians, historians and journalists have opined on these events and shifting of political tectonic plates, including Sir John Major last weekend on the BBC. Journalist Robert Reich reminds us that post-war liberal democracies stuck together, on the opposite being autocracies Russia and China. The relatively rapid recent change has been the US effectively joining those two in the rich oligarchy stakes ‘at lightning speed under Donald Trump and Elon Musk’. Until recently it would have been unimaginable to hear an American Secretary of State state their intention to ‘explore the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians’, both geopolitically and economically. As we’ve seen, these Americans are, probably unwittingly, using the psychological mechanism of projection to justify this volte face. Last weekend VP J D Vance,  ‘the man who refuses to say that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election – accused Europe of abandoning the values of democracy by excluding the far right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) from government…. There should be no doubt about what is happening. The Trump-Vance-Musk regime wants to empower the nationalist far-right in Europe in order to divide European democracies and weaken the western alliance. This potentially emboldens further Russian military incursions like the 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine’.

https://tinyurl.com/37hcu2n9

George Monbiot reflects on the possibility of systemic collapse in the US (and of course, such an event could trigger a global political and economic meltdown. ‘… we cannot now rule it out: the possibility of systemic collapse in the United States. The degradation of federal government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk could trigger a series of converging and compounding crises, leading to social, financial and industrial failure…But the hazards extend much further. Musk, calling for a “wholesale removal of regulations”, sends his child soldiers to attack government departments stabilising the entire US system. Regulations, though endlessly maligned by corporate and oligarchic propaganda, are all that protect us from multiple disasters’. He goes on to point out that already fragile systems are far less resilient to sudden shocks and within such a situation, the far right and the wealthy benefit from chaos and everyone else is left to sink or swim. ‘A consistent feature of globalised capitalism is an unintentional assault on systemic resilience…Trump presents himself as the hero who will save the nation from the ruptures he has caused, while deflecting the blame on to scapegoats’. (The cynical manipulation bit MAGA cultists still don’t get).

https://tinyurl.com/2hk4cjyh

A different view is taken by commentator Simon Jenkins, to the effect that we have to accept the reality of what we’re seeing. Jenkins: ‘The US has chosen the worst possible moment and the worst possible way to say it, but it is right to call for a realignment….We must try to understand the case they are making, whether we agree with it or not. Yes, these men are mendacious and hypocritical… (but)Trump/Vance have cut through half a century of consensual waffle about the US’s God-given destiny to lead the world to goodness and freedom. Whether the issue is peace and war, immigration or tariffs, they claim to seek the US’s self-interest and nothing else. Why should Americans fork out billions each year to defend a Europe that fails to defend itself? Why should they arm distant nations to fight their neighbours, or tip staggering amounts of aid into Africa’s basket cases?… In reality, these talking points are not new, though they have not previously been expressed so brutally by an administration’. You can say that again. Naked realpolitik.

https://tinyurl.com/ph9v85

Possibly the worst version of Trump we’ve seen so far (he sounded demented in clips played by media last night) is his performance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland (at which Liz Truss has made another treacherous and deluded appearance). ‘Drunk on power, Donald Trump spent Saturday afternoon before adoring fans, boasting of his victories, taunting his enemies and casting himself as America’s absolute monarch, supreme leader and divine emperor rolled into one….a man who has never felt so sure of himself, so contemptuous of his foes and so convinced of his righteous mission to make America great again, even if it means breaking china, cracking skulls and leaving global destruction in his wake…this was a man who has never felt so sure of himself, so contemptuous of his foes and so convinced of his righteous mission to make America great again, even if it means breaking china, cracking skulls and leaving global destruction in his wake’.

This writer describes how the conference illustrates the inverted reality world Trump inhabits, bragging that ‘we stood up to all the corrupt forces that were destroying America. We took away their power. We took away their confidence … and we took back our country.” ‘When someone wakes up knowing that, when their self-aggrandisement is so monumental, they are like a golfer who believes they will never miss. But as Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine put it, Trump is living inside a disinformation bubble. The iron law of politics is that all bubbles burst’. The question must be will it burst before Trump has caused irreparable damage across the entire globe?

https://tinyurl.com/hes29shy

Trump’s antics at this conference must be in the minds of those focused on this week’s visits to the White House by Macron and Starmer. Key questions on political programmes have been around how should Starmer approach the meeting – usually expressed in an unhelpfully polarized way eg should he flatter Trump or tell the truth? Of course it’s neither – it’s a question of navigating a careful path between frankness and diplomacy and staying on that tightrope. From what Trump has said so far about Europe and its politicians one can’t help feeling that he considers the French and British leaders as mere buzzing bluebottles to be squatted away. We will see, but in the meantime, it seems terrible that so much time and energy in numerous quarters have to taken up handwringing and speculating as to what the Orange One thinks and ‘means’. Indeed, charlatan Boris Johnson has devoted his weekly Daily Mail column to just this subject, posing as ‘interpreter’. Besides raising fear and alarm, another side effect of this intense focus on Trumpery is the danger of other important news going unreported. There’s certainly an intense focus on the German election but this very much relates to the Trump focus because of the rise of far right AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland).

In usual timely fashion, this week’s Radio 4 Profile features NATO chief Mark Rutte, described by one observer as a ‘Trump whisperer’ and by many others as ‘able to talk to anyone’. Having this former businessman, politician and PM as NATO top man could prove vital to preventing Trump-catalyzed anarchy. ‘During his tenure, he steered the Netherlands through times of significant national and global upheaval. From economic crisis, to the coronavirus pandemic. And now, as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 14th Secretary General, he faces his next challenge – leading Europe’s response to recent Russia-US talks over Ukraine’. Well worth a listen.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028995

It should go without saying that this dramatic political realignment and autocratic rejection of democratic and diplomatic norms is seriously damaging for our mental wellbeing. But going under the radar of media coverage doesn’t make it less important. As George Monbiot’s article made clear, the effects of systemic collapse leads to ‘an assault on everyone’s wellbeing’. Every government should hope for the best and prepare for the worst. But, as they do with climate and ecological breakdown, freshwater depletion, the possibility of food system collapse, antibiotic resistance and nuclear proliferation, most governments, including the UK’s, now seem to hope for the best and leave it there. So, though there is no substitute for effective government, we must seek to create our own backup systems’. He goes on to describe how we could do this, eg via neighbourhood support networks and activism. ‘We also – and urgently – need national and global action, brokered by governments. But it’s beginning to look as if no one has our backs (my italics). Prepare for the worst’.

This gets to the heart of the mental wellbeing conundrum because (in psychoanalytic theory) we unconsciously transfer the authority originally vested as infants in our parents/caregivers, whose role it is to look after us and do the psychological ‘holding’ (known as containment, protecting us from anxiety) to authorities in later life such as employers and governments. We elect the latter to look after the country and thereby look after our interests. During the pandemic we saw good and bad examples of this – a good example being Angela Merkel, who effectively created a partnership between the German government, scientists and citizens and a bad example being the corrupt and incompetent government of Boris Johnson, which lurched from crisis to crisis while managing to line its pockets from crony contracting. Such an approach can make us feel very alone, unsupported and justifiably frightened.

Politicians agonise about the size of the benefits bill but a high proportion of it, especially with young people, is due to mental ill health. This should not be surprising given the world we’re living in and the seeming inability of these politicians and policy makers to effectively address it. This would be, for example by properly funding psychological treatments that genuinely help instead of (since the mass move to CBT after 2006, Tony Blair having been seduced by the neoliberal agenda) over reliance on medication, short term cognitive treatments (which in many cases are false economies in the long run) and cosmetic tinkering. I guess we have to live in hope…

Finally, on a positive note, as the winter approaches its end (we hope) it has been very uplifting to see swathes of snowdrops, crocuses, hellebores in bloom, with daffodils well on the way. Despite the threat posed by climate change, it’s comforting to see these beautiful displays, a reminder of the persistence of the seasons regardless of whatever else is going on in the world…

Sunday 26 January

Phew – the first week of the Trump second term many of us have been dreading, with good reason. The 47th president declared: ‘Starting tomorrow, I will act with historic speed of strength and fix every single crisis facing our country’. The sycophantic media excelled themselves with their obsessive and excessive coverage of the inauguration itself (yes, it’s important, but not to the exclusion of other news), followed by endless discussion and speculation about his immediate executive orders – a bit more useful. Regarding the ceremony itself, if you could put up with Trump’s cringingly bad and hyperbolic speech, it was interesting to see who was there and what they wore. One wag dubbed Melania Scary Poppins, with her severely tailored outfit more suited to a funeral and massive wide brimmed hat seemingly intended to deflect the President’s celebratory kiss. But also very noticeable was the amount of ‘work’ the Trump women had had done. There was much speculation as to who Trump had actually invited and who had just turned up and obtained a public seat in order to be close the centre of power, as they see it. Boris Johnson did apparently get a well positioned seat, no surprise there – not so Farage and Truss. Elon Musk’s fascist salute, alarming stuff, caused more to finally leave X in disgust, although it didn’t prevent various efforts to pretend that it was something else instead.

‘As executive orders rolled in on Monday, the accelerated pace amounted to a shock-and-awe campaign. Trump promised in his inaugural speech that these orders would amount to a “complete restoration of America” ‘. As could be expected, though, many of these are big talk which doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. His undertaking to take Greenland is unhinged and he has not ended the Ukraine War ‘on Day 1’, instead posting on his Truth Social platform an amateurish and inflammatory message to Putin about ‘ending this ridiculous war’ which will have the opposite effect. Everyone knows Putin doesn’t respond well to threats. Trump is sending his country backwards with the reversal of diversity, inclusion and equality initiatives and giving the green light to reclassifying multiple federal hirings, making them easier to fire. The president sees this as part of his campaign to tackle the so-called ‘administrative’ or ‘deep state’ – smacks of conspiracy theory.

Several major executive orders, including the one to end birthright citizenship (automatic citizenship for US-born children of immigrants) and the pro-fossil fuels measures (‘drill, baby, drill’ etc) are already attracting legal challenges. ‘Birthright citizenship, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born on US soil, is protected by the 14th amendment and any attempt to revoke it will likely bring immediate legal challenges’. However, if the orders are overturned by state courts, Trump can be fairly sure of getting them through the Supreme Court as he packed it with Republicans during his first term. Trump’s latest attack on standards and due process comes in the form of firing with immediate effect 17 independent watchdogs at multiple US government agencies, said to violate federal law, which requires the president to give both houses of Congress reasons for the dismissals 30 days in advance. Democratic US senator Chuck Schumer reportedly called the firings ‘a chilling purge’: absolutely – there seems to be zero accountability here and who could stop him?

https://tinyurl.com/ypr9ra8x

Regarding the performative vow to  rename the Gulf of Mexico – apparently there’s no international maritime authority which dictates nomenclature so Trump can order ‘Gulf of America’ to be used by US authorities but that doesn’t have to make an ounce of difference to the practice of other jurisdictions. Some orders seem unworkable and self-sabotaging, for example the deportation of undocumented migrants. Apparently in some areas they’re already being rounded up, no doubt leading to a climate of fear and despondency, but (not that they should be thus restricted) who do Trump voters think will do the jobs they won’t to do themselves? On Farming Today Radio 4 interviewed an agricultural union representative who made clear how dependent the US is on undocumented farm workers and who wants a route for their citizenship to be developed.

https://tinyurl.com/5cyyu7se

As for the motley crew he’s appointed to major posts (the latest being Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, with very murky credentials) and the massive number of pardons for those convicted of 6 January offences, it’s almost as if Trump has thought out what’s the most he can possibly do to undermine the international order and stick two fingers up to law, justice, decency and equality. Common sense, too, when it comes to taking the US out of the World Health Organisation and the Paris climate change agreement.

https://tinyurl.com/4rkwtb7n

Commentator George Monbiot observed: ‘Musk, with a fortune of more than $400bn (£330bn), has warned: “We have to reduce spending to live within our means.” But he doesn’t mean “we”, he means you. Trump and Musk want to cut the federal budget so they can slash taxes for the ultra-rich. This benighted class needs all the help it can get. Since 2020, the wealth of the 12 richest men in the US has risen by a mere 193%. Collectively, the poor dears now own only $2tn. We can endlessly debate whether or not Trump and his acolytes are fascists, as if that somehow solves the problem. It is more useful to recognise them as representatives of a much longer tradition, of which fascism was just one iteration. The emperors are back.But the billionaire class will move swiftly to consolidate the oligarchy, and will meet almost no resistance. US institutions, the established media and foreign governments are completely unprepared. Despite copious warnings over many years, they know only how to appease oligarchic power, not how to resist it’. (My italics).

https://tinyurl.com/bdh4ms8c

Of several pieces of important UK news, there was no shortage of coverage of the Southport murders perpetrator sentence (not surprisingly a multi agency failure to address what were clearly early indications of disturbance with Axel Rudakubana, Tory cuts to youth and mental health services being firmly in the frame). In my view this is a crucial point:  ‘We live in a world where human beings can do unspeakable things; where society’s job is to find and fix the cracks through which such horror slips’. What’s crystal clear is that ‘society’ didn’t do its job, conditioned as it was by a Conservative administration prioritising bigotry over effective strategy. ‘…the then Home Secretary Suella Braverman seemed mainly preoccupied with whether too many far-right suspects and not enough Islamists were being investigated, attacking “cultural timidity”’.

https://tinyurl.com/yh6m32ub

In contrast, another major news item became yet another example of news omission by the BBC: on some bulletins there was zero coverage or only very late mention of PrinceHarry’s striking victory over the Murdoch press. It’s nothing short of disgraceful that it took this amount of money and legal action to get a verdict on phone hacking offences going back to the 1990s. Some are now calling for criminal proceedings as it has become clear that some of the accused during previous legal action must have perjured themselves.

https://tinyurl.com/4e9a3nea

Contrary to her intentions, the efforts of Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch to rewrite history and portray herself as a powerful leader fell rather flat. Her performances on two sessions of Prime Minister’s Questions and her party political broadcast (carefully timed, I suspected, to coincide with Rachel Reeves’s presence at the World Economic Forum in Davos) have been described as ‘woeful’, yet she always seems very pleased with herself. I hadn’t been expecting this many but parliamentary sketch writer John Crace devoted three witty articles to eviscerating her and she has yet another problem which seems out of control – what to do about Liz Truss, who will not shut up and who brings the party into even more disrepute as she strives to rehabilitate herself.

‘Call it a combination of arrogance, laziness and delusion, but KemiKaze’s usual approach to prime minister’s questions is to burble on about the latest conspiracy theory. One of her many failings is that she believes whatever she reads on X… It seems the more you see of Kemi, the less there is of her to like…. She longs to distance herself from Boris, Liz and Rishi – but it’s as if she has given up already.’There’s a lot that needs fixing,” she continued… No shit. “The economy. The NHS. Immigration.” And who broke it? Kemi didn’t care to join the dots. That it was the Tories who had been in power for much of the last 14 years’. For me her worst faults are her incessant lying and misrepresentations, the unjustifiably haughty air and that pretentious delivery. It’s been predicted she won’t last as leader till the next election.

https://tinyurl.com/yc55nt2p

Several ostensibly separate strands of business news seem to be coinciding, starting with a report in The Economist about how there are fewer jobs in the US these days for MBAs, the ‘traditional destinations such as consulting, finance and tech all hiring fewer of them’. In the UK the Chancellor’s tax raising budget is thought responsible for fewer hires, top white collar recruiter Page Group for one example having experienced a drop in share price after a profit warning, but AI must also be in frame for obviating the need for more junior roles. In the Guardian Gaby Hinsliff warns against the ‘fury of frustrated graduates’ as vacancies and graduate salaries have fallen markedly in recent years, some salaries barely above what a minimum wage shelf stacker could earn.

One problem is surely the over-production of MBAs and other graduates and another is the higher than realistic expectations of those graduates, few of whom seem to know much about the Labour market, not helped by the higher education institutions which compete for bums on seats. Hinsliff points up a dangerous dimension of this situation: ‘an economy  in which there are more educated, ambitious young people than there are jobs to meet these ambitions is a breeding ground for social unrest’. The frustrated could move even further away from mainstream parties towards far right organisations making unrealistic promises while having no policies to fulfil them. ‘The revolt of the frustrated elites is only getting started’. ‘In his 2023 book End Times, the US academic Peter Turchin identifies “elite overproduction” – essentially an economy creating far more educated, ambitious potential elite members than it has prestigious jobs to offer them – as a key trigger for revolutions and civil wars, especially when combined with deep economic inequality and high public debt…Though the two lines are still a long way from crossing over, for gen Z and millennials in particular the boundaries between white-collar and blue-collar worlds are getting blurrier’.

https://tinyurl.com/yzay694k

With other job losses announced recently (eg Sainsbury’s letting 3,000 staff go despite bumper profits over the festive season), maybe that ‘leisure society’ forecast some years ago is gradually coming to pass, but not in agood way for many young people. It would meanneeding to look again at the Universal Basic Income ideas which were occupying policymakers a while back.

Meanwhile, it seems businesses have had it their own way for too long under the laissez faire Tories and, not unlike the farmers, start squawking when measures to correct an imbalance or loophole kick in. The forthcoming Employment Rights bill has 28 measures including ending exploitative zero hours contracts, banning hire and rehire tactics and dating rights and protections from the start of a job rather than after the existing one year period. Added to all this the rise in employer National Insurance and the minimum wage, we can understand how bosses are concerned but they need to get real rather than play the victim card.

Polly Toynbee observed that ‘Business leaders may thunder about job cuts, but their threats could backfire: union membership is only growing’. She cites a large food distribution business which has derecognised the Unite and GMB unions, a move which members hadn’t seen coming but which they take to indicate the company’s plan to stick to fire and rehire tactics. When Polly spoke to the company they pointed her to their statement, which sounds avoidant and disingenuous to me, to the effect that they want ‘to work with our teams directly through our employee engagement forums, which we believe represent a wider range of our employees’ views’ and that “a number of employees” are “voicing concerns and frustrations over long delays in resolving issues” via the unions’.

‘The radicalism of this bill is its intent to tilt power back from capital towards labour. Often overlooked is the bill’s obligation on employers to allow unions in to address their workforce, hoping to recruit from the most vulnerable workforces in social care, fast food outlets, warehouses and deliveries’. Predictably, bodies like the CBI and British Chambers of Commerce warn of ‘dire consequences’, plummeting business confidence in the government, etc, but the government has reiterated its intention to stick to its guns. ‘Make work pay” is Labour’s rubric for this act: growth depends on better pay, it says. Polls show overwhelming support for these working rights. People see the need for stronger protection of a workforce that has become more insecure and vulnerable’.

https://tinyurl.com/t3bhwxns

Very relevant to this debate is an interesting episode of Radio 4’s The Bottom Line, presented by economist Evan Davis, about ‘unbossing’ – the phenomenon of organisations getting rid of layers of management. It’s an idea Amazon, Meta and Citigroup are exploring. But generally, even in the private sector, let alone the public, this tackling of the very notion of hierarchy to bring in flatter organisations would be seen as revolutionary, at the very least an upheaval. Where would all the offloaded managers go? The programme opens with an interviewee reporting revealing reactions to his questions at a business conference, the first being how many here are managers (many hands shot up) and the second being how many here feel the need to be managed (very few hands shot up). The mismatch is glaring. Of course it could be that some are rather deluded in believing they don’t need to be managed, but perhaps many more could benefit from increased autonomy and escape from micro-management, making them happier and more productive in the workplace. It then goes on to hear the views of those for whom ‘unbossing’ has worked and those for whom it hasn’t. Interesting stuff.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00274y3

It could be argued that yet another thing that needs fixing in the workplace is the inequality driver of unpaid internships – effectively beyond the reach of young working class people. ‘Research by the Sutton Trust found that middle-class graduates made more use of internships as stepping stones into sectors such as finance or IT, even in cases where the internships paid nothing or below the minimum wage as required by legislation. Nick Harrison, the chief executive of the Sutton Trust, said: “Internships are an increasingly critical route into the best jobs, and it’s shocking that in this day and age, many employers still pay interns below the minimum wage, or worse, nothing at all. They should be ashamed’. I was right in thinking that unpaid internships had been banned in 2018 but they persisted – no surprise there given years of Tory laissez faire and that their own contacts would be the ones benefiting from these legs up enablers. ‘Only 40% of those who went to state schools had done an internship, while 71% of those who attended private schools did so’. Let’s hope that this government shows more resolve than previous ones.

https://tinyurl.com/k3tz8vty

Finally, on a positive note, it’s good news to see in The Week that over 300 acres of low lying farmland on the Severn estuary are to be turned back into saltmarsh – these coastal areas which are regularly flooded by incoming tides. The restoration on the Awre peninsula will be carried out by Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, to include creating habitats such as creeks and ponds to encourage wildlife. Good to know that farmers have generally been supportive of this endeavour, which also aims to reduce flooding and capture carbon. Good luck to all involved!

Sunday 19 January 2025

As 2025 gets underway, it feels as the last couple of weeks have been accompanied by a strong whiff of suspended animation, with endless media speculation about the responses of the combatants in the Gaza ceasefire deal and about what Trump will do when he takes up the presidential cudgels again. Agonizes one newspaper: ‘Faced with Trump’s threats, US allies are torn between outrage and fear of antagonising the incoming president and his tech backers’. How this unpredictable egoist must be enjoying all this. Following the outrageous interference of Elon Musk in UK (and German) politics, though, some will be looking forward to the surely inevitable falling out between Musk and Trump – a titanic clash of egos could be on the cards. Trump has certainly selected such a motley crew to take up key posts in his administration that no doubt the media will have plenty more to talk about.

While the media sound so excited about the ceasefire deal, we have to wonder whether phases 2 and 3 will simply be kicked into the long grass and whether the ceasefire will hold at all. Israel has continued to bomb Gaza, a strident member of Israel’s Religious Party said during an interview that ‘there will be no Palestinian state – we’re done with that’ and two extreme right wingers in the Cabinet based their reluctant acceptance of the deal on the ‘war’ being recommenced after their hostages had been handed back. Surely one of the worst things Netanyahu has said is that he ‘reserves the right to continue the war (sic), with American backing’. And thereby lies the huge problem, of course. Skulduggery on both sides can’t be ruled out – after the initial delay let’s hope that today’s exchange of hostages and prisoners will now proceed as smoothly as it can.

Ahead of Trump’s inauguration (predictably to be covered by the BBC’s US obsessed Justin Webb despite having plenty of reporters already there) we hear that it will be moved inside due to the extremely cold weather. Some commentators have suggested that it had been colder when previous presidents were inaugurated and this was more a reflection of Trump’s doubts about the size of the crowd. Those doubts might be well founded: although many will be attending, it sounds like quite a few Washingtonians are planning on avoiding it like the plague. Alluding to Trump’s re-election one said: ‘It represents the ugly side of America that people don’t want to acknowledge. I guess I maybe mistakenly had a lot of faith that people saw what happened during the first administration and I figured we as a country wouldn’t regress’. Another said: ‘I have a fundamental set of beliefs and values that differ greatly from the supporters of the president-elect, so it is best that I just remove myself. It says to me that we’d rather have a criminal leading our country than a person of colour, or a criminal rather than a woman’.

Perhaps not surprisingly, anything to get one over the government, they imagine, the Shadow Foreign Secretary (yes, ministerial code breaking Priti Patel) took to X to announce her planned trip to Washington ‘to represent the Conservative Party’. I wouldn’t have thought Trump would care two hoots if the Tories were represented or not, being such an obviously irrelevant spent force.

https://tinyurl.com/3xrak7nd

Meanwhile, in the UK, the relentless right wing attacks on the government continue and some perpetrators are cock-a-hoop, claiming credit for what they see as a volte face, that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced an additional raft of investigations around the grooming gangs scandal. In their protests vociferous right wingers shamelessly expressed anger and indignation that Cooper didn’t initially announce a statutory public inquiry, when a) they’d never spoken about the issue in Parliament when it was all happening and b) totally ignored the fact that Professor Alexis Jay’s 2022 public inquiry had come up with multiple recommendations which have never been implemented. Some have also demonstrated a worrying preoccupation with ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’, sidestepping the fact that grooming and abuse have and do take place across all ethnic groups and all social classes. 

https://tinyurl.com/2bfdwt9y

Conservative and Reform politicians are constantly snapping the government’s heels, often aided and abetted by the media, when their points are often based on misinformation, the grooming gangs issue being a prime example. Conservatives still seem not to get that they’re out of office, ‘calling’ for or demanding this or that intervention. And hypocrisy is off the Richter scale, for example the bitter jibes about the Chancellor’s China trip when Rishi Sunak spent a great deal of time and money jetting around the world, often to avoid confrontations like Prime Minister’s Questions. They’re busy whipping up alarm about the ‘dire’ state of the economy when authoritative sources have challenged this ridiculous hyperbole, although it’s clear to all that the government does need to act decisively. For once it’s worth tuning into the latest Today programme podcast, which focuses on the economy and during which the presenters speak to some good interviewees. It’s also worth listening to the new series opener of Radio 4’s Political Thinking, for Nick Robinson’s ‘conversation’ (as the trailers stress, not an interrogation though it kind of is) with Rachel Reeves. This presenter’s agenda is very clear but the Chancellor manages to keep her end up very well, in my view.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00274r2

Unfortunately one of the worst at misrepresentation and downright lies is new Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, who gave ‘an important speech’ at the Institute of Directors last week. Despite Tories pretending that she’s a great leader doing a great job, the evidence to the contrary is only too clear. The way she presented herself and Conservative resolve, you’d never know that she was a member of the administration which presided over 14 years of misrule. There’s a splendid evisceration in the Guardian. ‘No one does pointlessness quite like KemiKaze. She is the queen of futility. If it was a relaunch, things got quite meta on Thursday afternoon – the question became “What was she relaunching as?” At a wild guess, a standup comedian. Because the speech was one sick joke. Then there was the nonsense about doing things differently. New broom, new team. Except the new team looks suspiciously like the old team. The same men and women who screwed up the country filling the same shadow cabinet jobs. No hope. No insight. No apology. A speech that was best described as an absence…. Hopeless at Prime Minister’s Questions and seemingly already out of ideas, many in the party are already looking around for possible successors. Even Robert Jenrick. Things really are that desperate’.

https://tinyurl.com/82knne4f

But it could be argued that even Kemi comes across quite well compared with Liz Truss, who seems determined to wreck her reputation even further through ever more absurd attempts to rehabilitate herself and rewrite history. The latest was a ‘cease and desist’ letter she had lawyers send to Keir Starmer, who’d repeated in the Commons the truism that she ‘crashed the economy’. You have to wonder what kind of lawyers she recruited because a lawyer’s blog pointed out how legally weak this 5 page letter was. Its main argument seemed to be that she hadn’t ‘crashed the economy’ because (dancing on the head of a pin) the definition of crashing would mean a fall in GDP or rise in unemployment, neither of which had happened, and that any fault lay with the Bank of England. Tell that to the millions subjected to much higher mortgage costs as a result of her reckless actions, not to mention those affected by the bond markets and pension funds having been thrown into turmoil.

‘When the value of government bonds dropped dramatically after the disastrous mini-budget, pension trustees were forced to sell their holdings at speed to raise cash, which further drove down the value of bonds, creating a ‘doom loop’. We could wonder whether this latest attempt to rewrite history resulted from an emboldened Truss successfully getting erstwhile Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, to delete a reference to ‘the disastrous Liz Truss mini-budget’ from official Cabinet Office briefing document in July after she wrote to him to complain. Needless to say, the PM has taken no notice. One commentator suggested that this was ‘arguably Truss’s most unhinged intervention yet’; another said it was ‘hardly a move befitting a free speech advocate’. As Sean O’Grady said in the Independent: ‘Her mistake was to actually believe in the economic fantasy she peddled to the grassroots, the one where tax cuts always pay for themselves and where it is definitionally impossible for a Conservative prime minister to crash the economy. It was Truss herself who tanked her reputation, and the position is irrecoverable. She may as well sue the lettuce’. This writer also wonders if Truss is familiar with the Streisand Effect. ‘In case it had passed you by, the term refers to how a public figure attempts to protect their reputation from some slight, but where the attempt to do so actually makes matters worse by drawing even more public attention to them and the cause of their embarrassment’. Great stuff – sounds snappier than shooting oneself in the foot.

https://tinyurl.com/yvpc7muu

Many have been understandably disappointed (putting it mildly) that the government has opted for yet another massive review of social care, which won’t result in final recommendations until 2028. Talk about kicking a longstanding problematic can down the road again when the need is so acute. The doyenne of inquiries and reviews, Baroness Louise Casey, will chair an independent commission on building a National Care Service. Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting explained: ‘The commission will publish its interim report next year and conclude towards the end of the parliament. Previous reviews on different aspects of social care, including Andrew Dilnot’s work on care costs, will be fed into the commission. It’s fair to say that it won’t be starting from scratch’.

His article gives useful background to the entire issue, starting with the birth of the NHS and emphasising one of the key problems today: over 12,000 hospital patients a day in November, for example, were ready to leave but couldn’t be discharged because of lack of social care provision in the community. That’s a massive number. It’s now clear to pretty well everyone (or should be) that problems within the NHS can’t be addressed without resolving the massive conundrum of social care. ‘By 2050, there will be 4 million more people aged 65+ in England than today. If we do nothing, real social care costs are expected to nearly double by 2038, compared with 2018 numbers. Many more people will be left without the care they need, the burdens will fall on the health service and our NHS will be overwhelmed. We can’t keep paying a heavier and heavier price for failure. Our NHS can’t afford to keep bearing a heavier burden. We can’t afford not to act’.

https://tinyurl.com/39tzpbnd

In political terms the delay is understandable, it could be argued: the government has said how important it is to build cross party consensus around this key issue against the backdrop of over 25 years of various proposals (including the Sutherland Commission, the Dilnot Commission, Labour’s Andy Burnham’s in 2010, Theresa May’s in 2017). Shamefully, these proved unpopular and those politicians lost the elections. (No doubt the losses weren’t solely due to these proposals but they could well have been a major factor). And we know what happened in 2019, don’t we? Boris Johnson made a dramatic announcement of a plan ‘from the steps of Downing Street’, which got nowhere. Although Covid would have been in the frame here, we’ve seen that Boris Johnson had form regarding his ‘oven ready’ deals which actually never existed. A very useful briefing in The Week (Can the social care system be fixed?) quotes George Osborne as saying ‘working out who pays for social care is incredibly unpopular. It’s much more straightforward politically to keep kicking the can down the road’. The Week observes: ‘He should know: as Chancellor he delayed what is widely seen as the most promising attempt at reform’. So here we have it: the social care so many desperately need is routinely sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. But we, the electorate, also need to take a realistic and more mature stance: whatever is finally decided is bound to cost us.

Staying on related territory here’s an ongoing NHS issue which I’ve long thought needed investigating. Complaints and attempts at rules have been made about ‘revolving doors’ within government and business, whereby, for example, a senior HMRC staffer could switch to the private sector, taking with them knowledge of tax dodges useful to future clients. The anti-regulation Tories effectively disabled regulators and disregarded rules so there’s probably quite a bit of this syndrome going on. But it’s also happening in the health sector, an example being ‘Sir’ Julian Hartley. Formerly CEO of the Leeds Teaching Hospitals under investigation for up to 56 potentially preventable infant deaths, he then headed up NHS Providers for a short time  (one of three NHS organisations including NHS Confederation and NHS Employers why three?) and now heads up the Care Quality Commission. Parents of the deceased infants have argued that this current role at the health regulator constitutes a conflict of interest given his former role at Leeds.

At NHS Providers, he was regularly interviewed by the BBC about the state of the NHS, services under pressure, etc, but it always sounded (like the other usual suspect invitees) like wordsmithing and stating the b obvious. We have to wonder how this individual has been able to so easily and quickly move up the NHS hierarchy. ‘Bereaved parents say they are concerned that the trust’s chief executive during the period most of the deaths occurred is now leading the regulator, saying this could affect its independence in investigating LTH Trust’. Two parents said they ‘don’t think any future CQC investigation into Leeds could be independent with the trust’s former chief executive in charge of the regulator’.  The BBC ‘approached the CQC and Sir Julian for comment and the regulator replied on behalf of both saying it was independent, with ‘robust policies in place to manage any conflict of interest’. This kind of denial just allows injustice to prevail. Where is the accountability?

Besides new and enforceable parliamentary rules this is another area the government needs to take in hand.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5gd48v10jo

It was interesting to learn this week about Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s ’new ‘soft power council’ (which sounds as if its objectives can’t be measurable), intended to bring together ‘experts from across culture, sport, the creative industries and geopolitics’ to promote Britain globally and provide a boost to the UK economy… It is understood the council will seek to work alongside institutions including the royal family, which counts the US president-elect, Donald Trump, among its admirers’. Perhaps now the royals will have some real work to do, including supping with the ‘devil’ Trump with a long spoon.  Remember the body language of Princess Anne when Trump first came to meet them? As for the council’s objectives, they sound reasonable enough but it’s hard to see how any particular results could be attributed to it. ‘We are determined to strengthen our soft power abroad, and in turn deliver a major boost to our economy, as we focus on our missions to create jobs and spread opportunity across the UK’.

Finally, there’s optimism for Bradford as the new City of Culture. Said one commentator: ‘We don’t have the swagger of Manchester or the sheen of Leeds, but Bradford has a radical culture all its own… The city of culture celebrations will show the truth breadth of our community, from the Brontës to the working-class plays of Andrea Dunbar’. I won’t be the only one to find such places more interesting and attractive than the most obvious ones. The city has certainly had its problems, from neglect and decay to racial conflict, but seems to have a huge amount going for it now. ‘If you grew up in the city, Bradford’s cultural history was drilled into you from an early age. The names Forster, Priestley and Brontë were inescapable, as was the annual school trip to the Industrial Museum to relive life as it was when Bradford was a booming textile centre. But Bradford has also always been radical. It was the place where the Independent Labour party was founded (a mural still adorns the outer wall of the Bradford Playhouse), while in the 1970s the Asian Youth Movement and Bradford Black Collective confronted the far right. The city’s cultural institutions came to embody that radicalism: the Peace Museum grew out of the peace studies department at Bradford University. Cartwright Hall, which sits at the centre of Lister Park, is home to one of the biggest collections of Black and Asian art in the country, compiled at a time when – unlike today – many institutions were completely dismissive of Black British artists’.

Although Bradford will receive £15m from the government, producing an estimated £140m boost to the local economy, it’s visible improvements that excite some locals, such as public toilets at the Bronte parsonage, and, as Andy Burnham alluded to regarding Liverpool’s win back in 2009, the renewed sense of pride and confidence in the city can be a lasting legacy. A good place for UK tourism, then, and good luck to Bradfordians if that’s the right nomenclature!  

https://tinyurl.com/mv9yz5er

Sunday 29 December

So Christmas is over for another year and we’re now amid Twixmas, the travel industry invented name for that no man’s land between Christmas and New Year (therapeutic for some, possibly many) when it’s tricky to know what places and services are open and when. This lack of consistency can make it hard to plan but at the same time it’s good to escape our normal routines for a while, allowing more time for reflection, perhaps. Of course neither Christmas nor Twixmas have seen the news agenda diminishing- indeed, it seems to have accelerated, not least the relentless efforts of right wing politicians and media aiming to undermine the government. Even on the day that Keir Starmer lost his younger brother, some unpleasant characters continued to attack him on social media, one criticising his allegedly luxurious time at Chequers. Never mind the facts, that it’s been the Christmas recess, this Buckinghamshire country retreat was always intended for the PM and his family to have some relaxation away from the public eye and Starmer has made little use of it compared with predecessors like the charlatan Johnson.

Despite the best efforts of the monarchist media and their hangers on, a noticeable aspect of this Christmas was far less interest in the activities of the royals, including King Charles’s Christmas Day address (television viewing ratings way down compared with previous years) and their walk to the Christmas Day church service at Sandringham. No doubt the revelations this year about the exploitation and profiteering from the Duchy of Lancaster and Duchy of Cornwall played a major part in raising awareness of the true nature of this arcane and secretive institution, besides lack of transparency around the illnesses of the King and Princess of Wales, the continuing disgrace of Prince Andrew and the machinations of the Palace PR machine such as the out of touch, privileged and tone deaf videos. Quite a few, too, have commented on the appalling serf mentality of those who did turn up to observe the walk to church and how the royals’ acceptance of gifts was in direct contradiction of the message of Christmas. And the worst media brainwashed thing is that the serfs feel so proud of themselves.

The maelstrom in Syria continues and we have to hope that the attack on security personnel by forces loyal to Assad (14 fatalities) is not a harbinger of inter-factional fighting, since Syria’s de facto leader Ahmad al-Sharaa had been keen to convey the message of acting to the protect the rights of  people of all backgrounds. In the meantime mass graves were discovered outside Damascus and I’m still wondering what will happen to the illegal but highly lucrative drug trade (Captagon) which fuelled Assad’s regime. Although HTS has vowed to cease its production, possibly not all of its apparatus will have been destroyed and the new regime could be tempted to keep it going in order to provide much needed income. Not surprisingly, other countries are jockeying for influence there, if not guilty of outright interference, such as Israel’s land grabs and bombing raids, Turkish proxies attacking US-backed Kurdish forces in the north and the US attacking ISIS targets in the east of the country. They should back off and let the Syrians determine their own future but as The Week credits the New Yorker for pointing out, ‘Syria’s geography means it will always be of interest to foreign powers, ‘a hub for migration, terrorism and drug trafficking’ and where ‘Turkish–Arab and Iranian-Arab competition play out’.

There’s some hope that a huge archive of 1.3 million documents smuggled out of Syria some years ago could provide the evidence to bring Assad and colleagues to justice. Experts reckon that such a war crimes trial would be ‘bigger than Nuremberg’. The latest Radio 4 Today podcast discussed Syria and presenter Amol Rajan rightly said how complex the country is, with different factions and ‘tribal loyalties’ etc. But given the decline in journalistic standards over recent years we have to wonder whether our media are sufficiently skilled to properly analyse the situation in order to inform us.

Back in the UK, the extent of Reform UK self-aggrandizement and indignant attacks on Labour and the Tories based on misinformation beggars belief (Anderson, Lowe and Tice in particular sounding increasingly unhinged in their rants) and what’s been called ‘the war of words’ between Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage broke out over his claims of hugely increased Reform numbers now in excess of Conservative Party numbers. Accused by Badenoch of falsifying these figures, Farage threw down the gauntlet of verification via an independent source and has demanded an apology from her. Good luck with that. Although many see the rarely visiting Clacton MP as a destructive influence in British politics, it is quite amusing to see this undignified spat conducted so publicly, once again demonstrating Badenoch’s weird and hopeless performance as Opposition leader when she has such a high opinion of herself.

What’s more dangerous is Reform leaders’ lack of transparency over the nature of their organisation and the failure of the media to carry out their educational role: These supporters allude to ‘members’ when it’s not actually a party to be ‘joined’ but a limited company so people’s donations are going to the directors rather than a party whose policies and modus operandi they can influence. But it’s not only the royals who need to rethink their PR strategy: while presenting himself as a ‘man of the people’ the ‘fagash fuhrer’ (as one X user called him) arranged to have himself filmed with a Boxing Day hunt meet, seemingly unaware of the disconnect.

https://tinyurl.com/4naw6tue

Even more dangerous is Farage’s determination to inveigle his way into positions of influence, for example with Trump and Musk and his latest audacious offer to help incoming US Ambassador Mandelson to cut a US trade deal. Mandelson could be damned if he does or doesn’t take up the ‘offer’ (Farage had the nerve to say he was a ‘fool’ if he doesn’t), potentially accused of letting Farage get a foot in the door and supping with the devil or looking a gift horse in the mouth when Trump is such a tricky individual to do business with. Yet another danger is Musk’s rumoured very large donation to Reform – amounts over £500 must come from UK sources but it could be even more insidious than a straight donation.  It’s thought that especially since they now have the wealthy property developer, Nick Candy, as treasurer, donations could be channelled through organisations under less scrutiny, for example the Restore Trust, which campaigns to prevent organisations like the National Trust explaining to visitors the historic context of their stately properties (slavery and colonialism), attacking what it sees as a ‘woke’ agenda.

It’s essential that the authorities (but so many  like the Electoral Commission have zero clout) and political parties take this threat seriously because we shouldn’t sleep walk our way into allowing malign actors outside the UK to determine election results. A few years ago you’d never have imagined it possible that directors of a limited company purporting to be a UK political party would have an audience in the President Elect’s home with someone like Musk. The statement they issued sounds unhinged: ‘We learned a great deal about the Trump ground game and will have ongoing discussions on other areas. We only have one more chance left to save the west and we can do great things together. Our thanks also to President Trump for allowing us to use Mar-a-Lago for this historic meeting. The special relationship is alive and well’. Everything about it is worrying and misleading – ‘ground game’ (so that’s what it is!); ‘one more chance to save the West’ (melodramatic take on Liz Truss’s book title and unbridled capitalism won’t ‘save the West’); ‘historic’ it might have been but not in a benevolent sense; and ‘special relationship’? That’s a concept mainly located in some Brits’ minds. It’s nothing short of alarming that Nick Candy said Reform (enriched by large donations which apparently could soon include Tory donors switching) would bring about ‘political disruption like we have never seen before’. But while the Electoral Commission has called for the rules to be strengthened, the government has said there are ‘no immediate plans’ to change them.

https://tinyurl.com/53x5k2cd

Reform UK is certainly keeping its finger on the pulse for opportunities to get one over Labour and the Conservatives, now courting voters in Runcorn and Helsby in case the court case involving the incumbent, Mike Amesbury, results in his recall. Said their insider: ‘We are first out of the blocks on this one. The Labour majority is massive, but when you look at the demographics in all areas, it is everything you would want for a Reform seat. If you wanted to win somewhere with such a large majority, you’d probably need an unpopular government, a bad economy and a scandal. Obviously, you’ve got all three. People think their public services are getting worse, and we think we have a story to tell on that. It’s also about community and promoting the family. People forget that we are opposing the two-child benefit cap. We think we can be the party that lets people show their anger at the Labour government’. Meanwhile, Reform is planning to make a big impact at May’s council elections – who knows, they might actually develop some policies before then. They need more than far right rhetoric.

https://tinyurl.com/mr2yx5bh

There’s been much talk about the government’s housing plans, included in a new National Planning Policy Framework and intending 1.5 million new homes to be built in England by 2029. This is a much ambitious target than ever before, pushing the current planning system hard, and a number of councils have said there’s no way they can deliver the numbers demanded. That can’t be the case around here as a huge number of blocks have been erected in recent years, with quite a few still under construction but with no additional infrastructure. We have to hope that green belt land isn’t overly compromised but we’ve long needed a proper focus on brownfield and ‘grey belt’ sites. I’ve long thought the same as a Telegraph correspondent, who made the case for the thousands of unused and empty properties to be brought back into use.

In October 2023 the Office for National Statistics reported 1.5m empty homes in the UK, of which 90% were reckoned to be genuinely empty or abandoned. It would be much cheaper and more efficient overall (despite the work needed by councils to identify and assess them) to regenerate these, which already exist and are connected to services. No doubt developers would be less but this is surely a minor concern. Needless to say, the kneejerk Conservatives found plenty to criticise, as ever an attempt distract us from their own failure in another key policy area. There are indeed genuine problems, of course, like nimbyism, the market dominance of the big housebuilders and the lack of skilled workers to actually build these homes, but governments must tackle these rather than use them (as the Tories did) as an excuse to do nothing.

This weekend we’ve heard about Keir Starmer’s strategy to ask regulators for ideas on how to boost economic growth –  somewhat ironic as these toothless bodies have proved very good at ensuring their own ‘growth’ and disproportionate salaries. Their proposals are due by mid-January. ‘Signed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds, it said ministers believed collaboration to be essential to ensure the regulatory environment became ‘more pro-growth and pro-investment’ while respecting the independence of regulators’. Interestingly, Starmer’s letter was sent to Sky News – interesting it wasn’t also the BBC and other media. It sounded initially like inviting the fox into the henhouse but defenders say this is exactly the kind of exercise regulators should be involved in. At least it should ensure they actually do some work. These organisations rightly have a poor reputation with the public – mostly staffed by former water company employees, Ofwat, for one, seems to be working much more for the companies than consumers.

A letter to the Independent pointed out how out of touch their claim to transparency is – ‘Since when have private companies disclosed anything that may damage their bottom line unless forced to do so by legislation? The roughly £10bn spent annually by Ofwat is literally money down the drain..the government needs to show some resolve by ensuring that water companies cease their unfettered discharge of raw sewage and pollution into English waterways. It’s time for meaningful action’.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy0n14ywzqpo

At this time of year there’s the predictable media coverage of New Year’s resolutions, although it’s now well known that the top three (or maybe now smoking has been shoved down the list) ie losing weight, getting fit and giving up smoking have often run into the buffers by Mid-January. I believe that any time is the right time to make a ‘resolution’, not just 31st December, although for many this timing could prove a useful catalyst. And of course they don’t have to be something tangible or measurable – it could be, for example, changing a behaviour, attitude or expectation. My heart often sinks when I read ‘psychologists say’ but this article had some useful content in it eg ‘the best changes are personal, start small and tackle expectations – our own, and those we might have internalized’; ‘make sure you’re starting with what feels easiest… you want to feel that sense of achievement, of success – because that’s going to keep you motivated to do the harder things down the road; in all cases, the goal of setting the goal should be to get in touch with yourself, your values and your own needs today’,

https://tinyurl.com/3esu2kaw

While we all have our pet hates within corporate jargon (two of mine are ‘going forward’ and ‘direction  of travel’ – over-used by politicians and often signifying the speaker to be a time wasting wordsmith), James Marriott in The Times comes up with some awful ones we may be unfamiliar with if not working in a particular field. He tells us that ‘business is a world of ‘key deliverables’, ‘actionable items’ (what about  items deemed inactionable?) and ‘cross-sllo leadership’…. it is always the most pointless spheres of human activity that are the most prolific sources of jargon’. As someone (and I suspect there are many) who never had a good experience of HR people, this struck a chord: ‘The notoriously bloated human resources industry has developed virtually its own branch of the English language: ‘onboarding’, ‘rightsizing’, employee lifecycle’, ‘performance calibration’. At least with the corporate ones you generally know what they mean – less so with these HR ones. Jargon is used, consciously or unconsciously, to keep others out and make users feel important. It’s a moot point as to when necessary technical terminology which developed in a specific field becomes exclusionary jargon but it seems to me that the media fail by not challenging interviewees over their excessive use of it.  

Finally, some but not all will have been pleased by the news that Christmas dinners would be graced by the presence of larger than usual sprouts. Farmers predicted that this year’s would be ‘whoppers’ because growing conditions have been good, and Tesco said that this year theirs had an average diameter of 30mm, up from 24mm last year. Let’s hear it for the humble sprout!

And best wishes for 2025!

Sunday 15 December

Syria – what a dramatic turn of events which no one saw coming. Just a month ago, a Western diplomat was apparently arguing that sanctions should be lifted from Assad because clearly he had won the war and now we needed to ‘move on’. Although such a rebel operation (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS) must have been planned for some time eyes have been off that ball because of the Gaza/Lebanon situation. It seemed that no sooner than they’d taken Aleppo, HTS had taken Hama and Homs and made inroads into more and more territory and suddenly it was all over for Assad after 50 years of his family’s tyrannical reign over this strategically important country. Let’s hope that the very understandable jubilation of Syrians, especially at the liberation of thousands of prisoners, isn’t followed by a descent into civil war because of different rebel groups wanting a piece of the action. It will be interesting to see what Saturday’s diplomats’ meeting in Jordan comes up with, especially as some countries are already active there, for example bombing stocks of allegedly chemical weapons to stop them falling into the ‘wrong hands’. Journalists will be relieved that, unlike Gaza, they can actually get into Syria to report from there. The BBC’s Lyse Doucet, for one, does not feel optimistic that other powers will put Syrian interests above their own. Syria must not become another Libya or Iraq.

It’s interesting to learn now about the different factions which came together to achieve this result, especially Operations Room to Liberate Damascus, which ‘gathered the leaders of 25 opposition factions across three southern provinces. It was formed a year ago with the assistance of HTS, and provided a sense of order to the disparate factions in south Syria. The faction leaders would communicate with one another in a WhatsApp group, then pass on instructions to their respective rank-and-file on a need-to-know basis’. It was clear the government was taken by surprise, first reacting with silence to these advances, then alluding to a ‘tactical retreat’ to protect civilian lives at the same time as essentially accusing the advances as fake news.

But what accelerated the taking of Damascus was HTS urging soldiers to lay down their arms and defect, giving them a phone number to call, which received thousands:  ‘soon, the fighters were marching towards Damascus. No statement came from Assad, and though state media insisted he was working diligently in his office, he had not been seen in days. Soldiers were left leaderless’. It was left to a passer by to tell one general that Assad had fled’ No surprise that Assad just abandoned his army but now we know more about his very limited new life in Moscow it doesn’t sound great for him, perhaps not even safe given the Russian’s propensity to take people out when they become a problem. At only 54, relatively young for a politician, the chances are he will feel increasingly isolated, impotent and irrelevant. How the mighty have fallen.

‘People began to rejoice in their ability to speak freely. Furious debates over the country’s future ensued. In cafes, over cups of coffee and cigarettes, furious arguments were taking place about the direction the rebel-led government would take, voices raised as people tested the new limits of their freedoms’. At least the new regime has announced the formation of a civilian, transitional government – nothing about elections yet but there’s still time for that.

https://tinyurl.com/28yhs7v4

I thought an intriguing discovery was that of the widespread manufacture and distribution of the illegal amphetamine Captagon, the profits of which kept Assad in power for so long. ITV News tells us ‘that it is cheap to make and vast quantities can be produced in a relatively short period of time. It acts a bit like a stimulant, making the messages between your body and your brain move faster’. This made it good during warfare because (perhaps like giving the men a shot of rum before they went over the top during World War One) it blurred the line between courage and recklessness. Popular in the Middle East, it has apparently been shipped all over the world. A win win all round for the Assad regime, then. ‘Some experts, including those at the Observatory of Political and Economic Networks, suggest almost £10 billion year was generated for Syria through its sale. Two billion is thought to have gone directly to Assad and his family’. Although stashes of Catagon have been found and destroyed by HTS, we have to wonder whether they could change course on this because of the vital revenue it produces. At least one commentator has called Assad’s Syria a ‘narco state’ – HTS might have a difficult choice to make between the right moral choice and tempting profits.

https://tinyurl.com/2hxzpfzw

It’s interesting that so far there’s been no mainstream media reporting on yesterday’s high level meeting of diplomats in Jordan on the future of Syria. Notably, no Syrian representatives were present. Reuters tells us that (no surprise) powers are jostling for influence there, with some going straight to direct action. An X user observed: ‘Appalling that Israel has made 400 air strikes on Syria since the fall of Assad. With Western collusion, of course, this goes way beyond caution that weapons stocks don’t fall into the wrong hands. Nothing short of mission creep’. There’s also concern about the preparedness of Turkey to sign up to a peaceful and inclusive transition as Turkey and the US, both NATO members, have conflicting interests regarding the other groups of rebels operating in Syria. A major aim is to avoid a partition of the country.

Reuters gave the main points as the US making contact with HTS and the US, EU and regional powers jointly calling for an inclusive political process, leading to a joint statement which emphasised ‘full support for Syria’s unity, territorial integrity and sovereignty’. This was thought to be a message to Israel but, as we’ve seen at length regarding Gaza, the chances of any notice being taken are low.

https://tinyurl.com/bdcys7hv

Back in the UK, the relentless right wing politician and media attacks on the government continue: the timing and contents of the Budget and the spending review may not have been perfect but policy areas which the Conservatives sidestepped for years like house building, prison places and the wider justice system are unfairly coming in for flak. Most if not all government policies have had to be put in place due to 14 years of Tory neglect and we surely need an end to the demonisation of tax. The country needs taxation in order to fund the services we all depend upon, but this simple fact seems to escape so many. The Conservatives have predictably leapt upon the latest disappointing GDP figures, but must recognise that it takes time to turn an economy around, not just a few months. And it’s not just about policy – a whole raft of infrastructural issues come into play, as we’ve seen regarding successive campaigns to increase productivity by getting the ‘economically inactive’ back to work.

But the government did miss a trick by failing to introduce a proper wealth tax for all that unearned income which has long fostered social inequality: their timidity over this isn’t helpful. There’s a useful explainer about the Spending Review here, a key question being how much can genuinely be saved via ‘efficiencies’. ‘The sheer number of governments that have leaned into efficiency savings as a way to fund public services or tax cuts does rather suggest that it is a convenient political line more than a serious pursuit.’ The article argues that crucial to the government’s success will be whether the PM and Chancellor can break the longstanding pattern of governments’ ‘efficiency’ tactics actually leading to higher expenditure.

https://tinyurl.com/4uj8cums

A preoccupation both main parties share at present is what appears to be the steady rise of Reform UK, which despite only having 5 MPs still won more votes at the election than the Lib Dems. Party leader Farage is never off our screens and the media have been accused of talking up his chances by constantly platforming him, besides constantly maintaining a right wing narrative, of course. It seems that never a week passes without Reform broadcasting a council by-election win and they’re already planning a major campaign for the 2026 Welsh Senedd elections. But a key criticism levelled at Reform is their habit of lambasting Labour and the Conservatives, for example on the ‘small boats crisis’, while having no clear policies themselves to tackle that problem. It was interesting (if hard work because of the amount of annoying self-congratulatory chortling the presenters engage in) that the latest Radio 4 Today podcast (Nigel Farage, Reform and the future of British politics) discussed the possibility of Reform winning the next general election and Farage becoming PM. Together with guest Tim Montgomerie (longstanding Conservative and recent defector to Reform) they insisted that Reform and Farage must be taken seriously, which I think quite a few would struggle with. Despite his politics I found Montie (as he’s known) quite engaging and interesting to listen to. I wonder whether his defection will last.

https://tinyurl.com/y8bvs42k

Against this political and economic backdrop many have faced a distinctly unfestive advent due to damage inflicted by storms Bert and Darragh – it can feel bad enough in cities battling against high winds and torrential rain but it’s nothing compared with what some areas, particularly Wales, have had to put up with. Some would have hardly recovered from Bert before being clobbered by Darragh and the rise in household insurance premiums affect all of us across the board. I wonder whether some parts of the country struggle to get insured at all because of the likelihood of further flood damage.

On the subject of Christmas many of us will have been inundated by charitable appeals and an article featured in The Week via The Times (Losing our faith and hope in charity) has Libby Purves suggesting that we Brits are falling out of the habit of giving. Ten years ago we were apparently the 6th most generous country in the world for charity donations and we’re now down to 22nd. Of course this is partly due to the cost of living crisis and people wanting to avoid the incessant requests, ‘but a key factor is surely people’s diminished respect for charities’. The professionalization of this sector has led to private sector type remuneration packages for CEOs (eg up to £175,000) and there’s also the revolving doors syndrome, individuals moving from one charity to another. ‘What was born in selfless passion can mutate into comfy careerism…the more people come to regard charities as just another corporate business the less inclined to donate’.

Recently there’s been no shortage of news about the Royal Family, including the Channel 4 documentary Dispatches focusing on the exploitation and profiteering practiced by the Duchys of Cornwall and Lancaster, presided over by Prince William and King Charles, the real cost of the Coronation and the expectation that the £45m Queen Elizabeth statue would be paid for by taxpayers. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Prince Andrew has once more caused damage to his family and this country by exposing us to a security risk via his connection to an alleged Chinese spy. Not yet named (although former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith has said he will raise an urgent question in the Commons tomorrow, raising the possibility he could be named under parliamentary privilege) the individual known as H6, taking advantage of Andrew’s desperate financial straits, managed to inveigle his way into the Prince’s circle.

Having been banned from the UK, after a judgement by the UK’s semi-secret national security court, H6 appealed against the ban in March 2023 but the court upheld the original judgement – ‘Judges were told the businessman was attempting to leverage Prince Andrew’s influence’…The court was told that H6 was invited to Prince Andrew’s birthday party in 2020 and was told he could act on his behalf when dealing with potential investors in China. It’s not clear how H6 became close to the Prince, but in November 2021 police officers stopped and questioned him at the UK border under powers to investigate suspicions of ‘hostile activity’ by a foreign state.  Security chiefs feared Beijing was attempting to run an “elite capture” operation to influence the Duke of York because of the pressure he was under, a tactic which aims to appoint high profile individuals to Chinese businesses, think tanks or universities’. I wonder how many will believe the Duke’s assertion that he had ceased all contact with H6 when concerns were first raised. His ‘office’ said he had met the individual through ‘official channels’, with ‘nothing of a sensitive nature ever discussed’. Hmmm.

A key question must be why are we only just learning about this now? Just because the court ruling has been published? Another is whether the Prince is really so arrogant and entitled that his need for finance and for recognition following his forced withdrawal from royal duties were clearly prioritised over the nation’s security. Yet another was how royal ‘advisers’ are selected since one of Andrew’s, a Dominic Hampshire, is on record as telling H6 ‘Outside of [the prince’s] closest internal confidants, you sit at the very top of a tree that many, many people would like to be on..Under your guidance, we found a way to get the relevant people unnoticed in and out of the house in Windsor’. Besides this conduct approaching treason, it hints at a strategy enabling Andrew to flex his depleted royal muscles under the radar, for example the ‘getting relevant people unnoticed in and out’ perhaps being when his family were otherwise occupied. A wider question, which the media don’t seem to have touched on yet, is why there’s never been any proper investigation or bringing to account of Russian infiltration, for example Boris Johnson’s notorious mingling with oligarchs and Russian donation to MPs.

Besides the obvious security issues, this news shines a light on the longstanding opacity surrounding royal finances, which is surely no longer being acceptable if it ever was. ‘His finances have recently come under scrutiny. King Charles is no longer funding him, and there has been speculation about the running costs of Royal Lodge – the security bill alone is believed to be several million pounds per year. The big picture of Prince Andrew’s finances is full of unknowns, such as how much he might have inherited from his mother or how much private money he might have accumulated in his envoy days’. It looks like this story isn’t going away any time soon, several Sunday papers leading on how H6 was photographed with two former PMs, May and Cameron, neither of whom recalled him. It could be argued that this just demonstrates the level of infiltration H6 achieved. The story resulted in two pretty outrageous cop outs: one from the Palace saying they do not act for the prince, who is not a working royal and the other from Beijing, saying China supports ‘normal people-to-people and cultural exchanges with other countries’ and that the UK should stop creating trouble.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd75vwdg3yvo

There have been some bright spots amid the often gloomy and/or disturbing news (not good for our mental wellbeing), including the re-opening of the iconic Notre Dame in Paris, news that contaminated blood scandal victims were finally receiving their compensation and that Spellow library in Liverpool, torched by rioters last summer, reopened following a campaign raised £250k to rectify the damage. It’s yet another reminder that often overlooked by politicians and the media, libraries are important local hubs, enabling community engagement besides their core function of providing books, information and computer access.  

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crk0nk4z25zo

Best festive wishes to all and thanks for reading!

Sunday 1 December

 ‘This is a historic day’, the John Cleese character in the film Clockwise repeatedly intoned to himself as he rehearsed his speech while driving to a conference – a scene which has always stuck in my mind. Whether or not we approve of the Assisted Dying Bill passing its first reading (330 to 275 votes), no can deny that it was indeed a historic day on Friday. If its passage through Parliament succeeds it will irrevocably change society, not least because those with terminal diagnoses can openly access and exercise their own authority regarding end of life rather than be at the sole mercy of medical authority. Although the GMC and BMA have changed their stance on the issue, this bill could be seen by some medics as a blow to their longstanding traditional authority. Opponents of the bill said it would fundamentally change the relationship between the state and its citizens, and between doctors and patients. They argued the bill had been rushed and the safeguards for vulnerable people were insufficient. Yes and maybe it’s high time that this relationship changes and as for judges and doctors not being trained in coercive behaviour, that can easily be rectified prior to enactment of legislation. The bill is about enabling autonomy and dignity.

Political sketch writer John Crace remarked on it being ‘a rare Commons sight: intelligent debate’, although we know that at least 100 MPs who wished to speak got no opportunity to do so. MPs were visibly moved as they heard one heart rending account after another of loved ones’ ends – though at least one X user suggested that these accounts should not determine the decision. But our views on this subject are bound to be at least partially determined by our own experiences.

‘Here the chamber was packed throughout the five-hour debate. Then a vote in which parliamentarians were free to go with their conscience. Governments don’t allow this sort of thing too often. We might end up with far better laws. Heaven forbid. The bill passed its second reading quite easily. Not nearly as close as some had predicted’. It’s noticeable that some opponents unwittingly or deliberately misrepresented the strict conditions the law would involve, for example calling it ‘killing’ and suggesting difficulties for doctors administering the means of ending life when the Bill clearly specifies that the patient must do it themselves. ‘Leadbeater talked through the mechanics. This wasn’t a matter of life or death. It was one of death or death. Only adults who have been given less than six months to live qualify and even then two medical practitioners and a judge had to give the go ahead. Various opponents intervened to raise the issue of coercion. Not so much from families pressurising sick relatives to kill themselves, but terminally ill people believing they had a societal obligation to die sooner.

There were no easy answers to this. We were trading in imperfections. There were no certainties in life. But it was far better to have a situation where these conversations were out in the open. Where doctors were on the lookout for signs of coercion. Because whether terminally ill people were allowed assisted dying or not, they would still be having the same feelings’.

https://tinyurl.com/32zpx4cz

Exactly, but there have been understandable questions about the process, which have to be worked through at Committee stage, not at this point. These include doubts about availability of judges given the appalling state of the justice system bequeathed by the Conservatives, whether said judges would just accept the views of doctors and how the two doctors would be selected. Powerful opposition has come from the palliative care area, demanding that due to insufficient resources its current state isn’t fit for purpose and this should be fixed before any change in the law is entertained. There’s an argument that if palliative care was consistently available and of a high standard there would be no need for such a bill. But one MP (also a doctor) speaking in Friday’s debate was clear that there are some situations beyond the reach of palliative treatment. This issue has put hospices under the spotlight and it’s truly appalling that only 18% of their funding comes from the NHS, the rest left to charitable donations. If hospices didn’t exist these patients would be in hospitals, resulting in even higher bed occupation and strain on the NHS. There’s also the significant ‘slippery slope’ argument, which opponents fear could induce disabled people to conclude their lives were a burden which they should release themselves and others from. I think there could be some useful lessons to learn from Canada’s experience on this.

A leader in the palliative care field, Dr Rachel Clarke, maintains that ‘Making dying easier is not the solution when NHS, social and palliative care are simply not there for patients’. She rightly points out the disconnect and hypocrisy of former prime ministers asserting their compassion for the dying when their administrations did nothing to properly fund the palliative care patients need and deserve. ‘So it’s over to you, Streeting and Keir Starmer. What will you do now about those anguished, frail, pain-racked patients who sit and quake in death’s proximity as they are failed by the NHS, social care and society at large? Surely you are not going to permit MPs to usher in a law that makes dying easier while failing to address the underfunding that forces people with terminal illnesses to conclude that death is their only option?’

https://tinyurl.com/bdt7yp4n

 ‘At present, 600 terminally ill people kill themselves each year. Those that can afford it go to Dignitas. Often alone and sooner than they might ideally like in order not to incriminate loved ones. How is that more humane than a medically sanctioned death at home? Some terminally ill people are going to want to kill themselves regardless. This bill was for them, said Leadbeater’. I was surprised the number is so high. Even more reason to continue debating this issue but as it represents such a massive social change I think it should be decided by all of us via referendum, not just Parliament.

Polly Toynbee is amongst commentators very pleased with this result: ‘Here it is at last, a landmark that will be an enduring symbol and the humane legacy of this Labour government. Parliament has finally caught up with the public, who have long been firmly and unwaveringly in support of assisted dying since the first polls on the issue more than 40 years ago. What took MPs so long?’ Religion, for one thing, but Polly thought this hadn’t been mentioned much in the debate because it doesn’t cut much ice with voters these days and there’s going to be a lot less value attached to suffering: ‘Christianity – with the cross as its emblem – has a peculiar relationship with suffering as a value in itself’. The dogmatic caller on Radio 4 Any Answers yesterday wouldn’t be alone in trotting out ‘human life has always been regarded as sacred’ but these days there’s far from a consensus on this.

Besides deliberate misrepresentation of what the Bill would actually involve, what’s been striking and worrying is the amount of muddled thinking, for example those believing that a religion-informed view is the correct one; one vox pops interviewee saying if the Bill passed ‘we’d no longer be a Christian country’ (that’s surely been the case for a long time); another cliché ‘every life is worth living’ when that should be solely the decision of the individual living that life; and those complaining that there was no right of appeal for relatives. Surely that’s one of the points: it should be the patient’s decision, not determined by the views and agendas of relatives. It’s important to point out that this wouldn’t become law for another three years because of all the stages it must go through and also that best practice from the ten or so countries and around 8 US states already having adopted such legislation need to inform UK policy.

It’s well known that Kim Leadbeater is the sister of murdered MP Jo Cox but it was moving to hear much more about her background and just what challenges she had overcome to take her seat and get as far as she has (Radio 4 Profile, Saturday 30 November). At the very least this debate has shined a light on how little as a society we talk about death, a point reiterated by Dame Joan Bakewell, whose radio series We Need To Talk about Death, very usefully still on BBC Sounds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09kgksn

The relentless attacks on the government by Tory politicians and right wing media haven’t let up and now, following Sue Gray some weeks back, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh has been brought down for an offence which these days would not be subject to criminal prosecution. It would not be so bad if the media hadn’t long sidestepped the much worse offences committed by Conservative administrations, one irony being the subject of mobile phones and the number of high flying Tories during Covid Inquiry appearances having ‘lost’ their phones containing incriminating messages about crony contracting and worse. Another irony is that a leading opponent of the Assisted Dying Bill, Conservative Danny Kruger, is himself under investigation by the parliamentary standards watchdog for alleged failure to declare donations from far right Christian organisations to the dying well all party parliamentary group. Kruger has repeatedly been platformed during the Assisted Dying media coverage but while Louise Haigh has been lambasted there was no mention of the Kruger investigation. ‘Observer analysis of financial disclosures raises questions about an apparent failure to promptly register several donations from pressure groups. Records indicate that in 2022, the dying well APPG received £37,500 in donations from three anti-assisted-dying campaign groups with strong links to the evangelical Christian right’. Of course what this also shows is the insidious power of lobby groups and political donations the public are largely unaware of but which can markedly influence policy.

https://tinyurl.com/yen7pst9

As the questions regarding Mohammed Al-Fayed’s alleged abuse of female staff  intensify, with now over 110 women coming forward with their accounts, it’s been suggested that this number of victims over four decades would make him one of the country’s most notorious sex offenders. The Harrods staff and Metropolitan police who enabled him are very much under the spotlight, yet another example of how the powerful are allowed to get away with serious crimes via the collusion of authorities. ‘A huge review is also being undertaken into whether opportunities were missed in past police investigations and whether there are grounds to pursue past or current officers over historical corruption claims’. Interesting that it takes a ‘huge review’ to determine something so obvious. We’re also told that besides an independent review, the Independent Office for Police Conduct may carry out its own.

Said a senior Specialist Crime Command staffer: ‘We are aware that past events may have impacted the public’s trust and confidence in our approach, and we are determined to rebuild that trust by addressing these allegations with integrity and thoroughness’. You could well imagine sceptical reactions to such a statement given the Met Police’s failures over a number of years now. What’s the betting that these reviews will enable the can to be kicked down the road, resulting in a few dust gathering reports and victims feeling no better? There’s an excellent French crime drama on BBC4 based on a real life serial rapist case (Sambre), which illustrates the extent of police corruption, collusion and inefficiency spanning more than 40 years and also how traumatised most of the victims still were despite the passage of time. Jo Maugham, who heads up the Good Law Project, observed: ‘Both our lawmakers and our police need to take a good hard look at themselves and ask, why does this stuff tend only to come out when the abuser is dead? The answers will include: our defamation law, which is often the friend of sex offenders; the police, who are under-resourced and often too ready to disbelieve women; and an institutional deference to power’.

https://tinyurl.com/4nyd9epk

Again and again, it seems, we hear of public figures getting into trouble via allegations of sexual impropriety or inappropriate behaviour, and they have been enabled in this by organisations employing and protecting them. The latest is BBC Masterchef presenter Gregg Wallace, who has had to ‘step aside’ while the allegations are investigated. We can wonder who’s advising him because instead of seriously addressing the complaints, he’s foolishly doubled down and dismissed them, because they were made by ‘middle class women of a certain age’. What an own goal. Said one tweeter: ‘Middle class women of a certain age”… a sentence to end any TV career immediately’. Another said ‘As with Prince Andrew he’s not bright enough to see what he’s doing’. BBC News (Wallace refused an interview with them) tells us: ‘Wallace’s lawyers say it is entirely false that he engages in behaviour of a sexually harassing nature. Masterchef’s production company Banijay UK has launched an investigation and said Wallace is co-operating’.    

Since Kemi Badenoch became leader of the Conservative Party, the sixth in eight years, she’s not surprisingly proved herself a poor performer in the Commons, especially during Prime Minister’s Questions – no match for Starmer, who several times now has had to point out that what she’s attacked him for was actually a Conservative policy. The culture warrior’s agenda sounds horrifying and hubristic. ‘She aims, she said, at nothing less than “a comprehensive plan to reprogram the British state. To reboot the British economy … A plan that considers every aspect of what the state does … A plan that looks at our international agreements. At the Human Rights Act. The Equality Act. At judicial review and judicial activism, at the Treasury and the Bank of England. At devolution and quangos. At the civil service and the health service’. Tories accuse Labour of going towards a police state but Badenoch’s approach sounds much more like it to me.

But journalist John Harries raises a key question. ‘Not unlike the US Democrats, Keir Starmer and his colleagues are betting everything on the idea that theirs is by far the bigger political planet, and ordinary meat-and-potatoes politics will prevail. But the nervousness sparked by projections of the budget’s consequences surely highlights the risks of that gamble failing. What if modest Labourism can do nothing about stagnating wages and a flatlining economy? Will such outcomes not show millions of voters that our existing model of power and politics is simply bust, and Badenoch’s claim that Starmer’s government is just “doubling down on this broken system” is true?’

https://tinyurl.com/5dxwnrsk

Following on from its brave edition of Dispatches, which exposed the exploitation and profiteering of members of the Royal Family from the two ‘private estate’ duchys, Lancaster and Cornwall, Channel 4 recently screened a documentary about ‘Queen’ Camilla, the contents of which won’t be a surprise to everyone. ‘Queen Camilla – the wicked stepmother’ shows how, following Diana’s death, we were manipulated by PR into accepting her as the partner of the then future King, the PR having worked successfully first on the late Queen. Prince Harry was quoted throughout, taking a very different view and confirming her as indeed ‘the wicked stepmother’ who had briefed against himself and his wife. It does indeed seem shocking that Charles has effectively sacrificed the relationship with his younger son in order to enable the arrangements with Camilla. What also strengthened anti-monarchist feeling was the revelation of the Coronation, which we did not need to have, costing the nation at least £72m, when we have thousands having to use food banks and unable to afford heating, etc.

Republic, which campaigns to replace the monarchy with an elected head of state and more democratic political system, described the coronation as an “obscene” waste of taxpayers’ money. Its head, Graham Smith, reckons the figure is much higher because of the additional costs incurred by the MoD, Transport for London, fire brigades and local councils – other estimates have suggested between £100m and £250m. ‘It was a parade that Charles insisted on at huge expense to the taxpayer, and this is on top of the huge inheritance tax bill he didn’t [have to] pay, on top of the £500m-a-year cost of the monarchy’. It definitely sounds as if there needs to be much closer scrutiny of expenditure on this arcane institution of monarchy.

https://tinyurl.com/2kyp46m7

Finally, The Week reports on some depressing findings by academics relating to a decline in reading, especially the capacity and appetite for classics. They say students read far less than they used to, taking 3 weeks to ‘plough through one Dickens novel’, blaming shorter attention spans due to use of social media and TikTok ‘dopamine hits’. One academic asks ‘how can students absorb complex ideas and develop their critical thinking if they can’t read long books?’ While one British commentator says what a terrible indictment of education and parenting it is, another says the demise of reading has been regularly predicted but there are signs of hope because trade data show that the keenest customers of book shops are of Gen Z. Perhaps the most convincing diagnosis is that these days tv box sets and podcasts compete with books for pleasure and the acquisition of knowledge. It seems to me that reading is alive and kicking amongst the middle aged and older people, many belonging to book groups of varying kinds. Perhaps younger people will resort more to such enriching gatherings when they get older!

Saturday 16 November

Having been buffeted by various political maelstroms in recent weeks, which can tax our sense of mental wellbeing, perhaps we’re now in a phase of digesting and adjusting to the effects of these key events including the new government’s first Budget and the election of Donald Trump in the US. Add to this the far reaching Assisted Dying Bill, the various NHS reforms proposed by the Health Secretary, COP29 once again focusing attention on the climate catastrophe, the election of yet another new Conservative Party leader, the damning expose of royal finances by the Sunday Times and Channel 4 and the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury… – so there’s no shortage of subjects to occupy, confuse and/or rile us.

As always we have to recognize the power of the (mostly) right wing media to set the narrative and a noticeable example regarding the Budget has been the relentless message (promulgated especially by the Conservatives) that ‘tax is bad’. ‘Labour will put your taxes up’ scream the headlines in such predictable organs as the Daily Mail and Telegraph, with zero recognition that major steps were necessary to repair public services after 14 years of cuts and austerity. The latest manifestation is alarm being whipped up about council tax going up – of course it has to because local  government has had millions removed from their budgets by successive Tory administrations, at the same time as demands on council services are rising. The reason there’s such a contrast is that Conservative budgets in recent years have perpetuated the pretence that no tax rises were necessary and National Insurance could be cut because we could rely on ‘increased productivity’ – clearly not the case as the threadbare state of so many public services has made only too clear.

Although the government has been praised for some Budget measures, some have come in for severe flak, especially from some vested interests. Besides the Winter Fuel  Allowance one we already knew about but which data showed that not many recipients actually needed (and those who do are mostly on pension credit or eligible to apply), there was also the long trailed VAT on private school fees, manipulatively billed by critics like Kirsty Allsop as ‘a tax on education’. An X user observed: ‘Labour ‘going after private schools’ = just making them pay tax. Did you know this is now raising £9 billion? No wonder the Tories wanted to keep it in the pockets of the already rich. This money will now be redistributed into public services’.

Two related issues currently causing much alarm and anger are the inclusion of pension pots in inheritance tax liabilities (only exempt since 2015) and changes in IHT tax relief on agricultural property. The first measure seems sensible to those in favour of tackling inequality because in recent years people have been increasingly using (misusing?) pension pots to hand wealth down to family members rather than the purpose for which pensions are intended. The government also had to tackle the tax dodge increasingly being used by wealthy people like James Dyson and Jeremy Clarkson, who bought farmland to avoid inheritance tax. (Almost half the £1bn cost of APR went to 63 estates of median value £8m). Since the Budget imposed 20% tax (half the normal 40% IHT applying to other assets) on agricultural property worth over £1m many farmers are up in arms, saying that farms handed down over centuries to the next generation will have to be broken up and sold to pay the tax, that the measure will jeopardize food security and that ministers don’t understand the rural economy. A huge protest organized by the National Farmers’ Union is due to take place on 19 November, involving lobbying of MPs at Westminster and there have also been threats to blockade ports and supermarkets. And today at the Welsh Labour conference in Llandudno Keir Starmer has been greeted by a noisy farmers’ protest, alongside a massive convoy of tractors.

While Environment Minister Steve Reed insists that the government won’t backtrack on this and that three quarters of farms won’t be affected, farmers say that Defra’s  own figures suggest that 66 per cent of farm businesses are worth more than the £1m threshold at which inheritance tax will now have to be paid. Tax experts have advised farmers to take out a life insurance policy to cover the IHT but this strategy is much harder the older the individual is. Useful contributions to this controversy are two episodes of Radio 4’s Farming Today (5 and 6 November) which featured, respectively, Steve Reed and an agricultural tax expert who has developed a ‘traffic light’ model to determine the best way to deal with the new policy depending on the age of those involved.

In defence of the change, it’s been pointed out that Agricultural Property Relief was only introduced in 1986 (complete exemption only since 1992) and prior to this the full amount of IHT would have been due; that the reason the price of agricultural land has risen so much is the increase in wealthy hobbyists buying up the land, which is then farmed by tenants and that the IHT payment can be spread over 10 years. What’s also fuelled those annoyed with farmers is that ‘farmers voted for Brexit’. This situation doesn’t look like being resolved any time soon. Urban dwellers shouldn’t think this won’t affect them: we will soon feel effects of protests and shortages in the shops and in our pockets.

The lack of action on a wealth tax and on social care was seen as disappointing to say the least and the government should have immediately addressed the Tory rot at the core of the BBC. The right wing bias constantly emanating from this once admirable organization will only continue to undermine the government. As an X user tweeted: ‘Sadly, the BBC is now playing an active role in undermining the health of the country due to its assumed combative approach to news-making. It’s not measured, it’s not informative, it’s not impartial’.

Another missed opportunity, in my view, is levying a steep rise in aviation tax for frequent flyers: research showed that a relatively small group of people account for a substantial number of flights. And maybe a separate tax for private jet travel: data showed that besides the US (top at 69% of flights) the UK, alongside Canada and the US, was in the top 10. A private jet takes off every six minutes in the UK.

https://tinyurl.com/mv9herrf

Two further tweets which capture the nature of this Budget, in my view:

‘Reeves deserves enormous credit for committing to settle compensation for the victims of the Infected Blood and Post Office scandals four months after inheriting ZERO set aside for it. The right wing media ignore it – obviously – but well done folks’.

‘Kudos to the Chancellor for investing for the long term. The payoffs are beyond the political cycle and great to see her bucking trend of the past when such long term considerations have given way to short term politics’.

And in Starmer’s own words pre-Budget, conveying the difference between a real budget and a pretend one: ‘It’s time to choose a clear path, and embrace the harsh light of fiscal reality so we can come together behind a credible, long-term plan. It’s time we ran towards the tough decisions, because ignoring them set us on the path of decline. It’s time we ignored the populist chorus of easy answers … we’re never going back to that.’

https://tinyurl.com/9tacxbzx

Meanwhile, following a long drawn out contest which the media relentlessly covered but which only 31% of voters cared  about according to a poll, Kemi Badenoch was declared victor and immediately made a series of risible, barrel-scraping appointments such as Chris Philp as Shadow Home Secretary, followed by poor performances at Prime Minister’s Questions. Moving further and further to the Right, as they have, will only condemn them to years of Opposition. Tories have been keen to portray this win as an indicator of how progressive they are – first black leader of a major UK political party, second Tory leader from an ethnic minority etc – but none of this is relevant when it’s her intellect, ability and acceptability (or otherwise) of her small state, low regulation Britain views that really count. Meanwhile, the increasingly irrelevant Conservatives continue to snipe at the government from the sidelines, manufacturing causes for outrage on a daily basis,

The hearts of so many of us collectively sank at the news of Donald Trump’s victory in the US election, a victory that included the popular vote, House of Representatives and the Senate. Although we’re now aware of so many reasons for the Democrats losing, there were certainly times when a victory for Harris looked possible. It’s astonishing that a convicted criminal was even allowed to run and Trump’s sexism, racism and mental instability have been plain to see. But (as in the case of Boris Johnson, which took some of us a while to see) narcissists see such qualities not as a cause of shame, a normal reaction, but as a badge of honour, with some sections of the electorate viewing them as indicators of strength.

Of course the US election is a very important event but the excessive amount of media coverage has been striking, going back even before the primaries, when other world news was also pressing. The BBC already has many staff based over there but the US-obsessed Today presenter Justin Webb has spent several weeks there and was given hours of airtime to speculate about this or the other aspect of it. The other channels weren’t that different. Many were appalled that Boris Johnson was invited to participate in Channel 4’s coverage and one of the best pieces of tv I’ve seen in ages is when the charlatan, after ignoring requests to stop plugging his book (Unleashed was constantly shoved at the camera) was first shredded by Emily Maitlis then sacked. No surprise that he later slammed Maitlis on X and said he had to leave early to catch a plane. Forever the liar.

In the (Radio 4) Today podcast, the US election Q&A one dated 7 November) it seems to me that the three presenters made an extraordinary admission: something many listeners have long thought about their ‘journalism’ but one which seemed to strike these BBC veterans  for the first time. This was in response to a key question as to why the Democrats lost and it was suggested, based on CNN broadcaster Scott Jennings’s theory, that they, like much of the media, were obsessed with the polls and focused on things that seemed important to them (in what could be seen as a media/political bubble), like ‘the isms – sexism, racism, transgenderism etc’ – but NOT issues of concern to most voters. Voters’ main issue was seen to be rising inflation, which the Biden administration was seen as not sufficiently reacting to.

Generally acknowledged factors cited in the Harris failure include Biden stepping down far too late, meaning that the primaries were omitted; Harris herself seeming to lack impact; Democrats seen as being out of touch with voters’ real concerns, Harris getting celebrity endorsements and the strength of Trump’s messaging. A friend recently said the voters of ‘middle America’ had put two fingers up to the East and West coast ‘elites’. Trump made the most of this scepticism about politicians by branding himself as a non-politician.

A writer who attended over 100 Trump rallies since 2016 said: ‘Travelling many miles across multiple states, I saw Republicans united in their disdain for facts – and a Democratic party far too relaxed about challenging them’. The phrase ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’ comes to mind with just one example cited by this writer – a woman emblazoned with ‘Arab Americans for Trump’ apparel, a senior figure in the Michigan Republican party’s outreach to Muslim voters. She accurately predicted that Detroit’s majority-Arab suburbs would swing decisively for Trump. And yet…… ‘This is the same Trump who has pledged to reintroduce a travel ban for several Muslim-majority countries. The same Trump who has urged Israel to “finish the job” in its war with Gaza and who will block any refugee resettlement from the region. ‘He promised he would end the destruction and end the killing…He’s going to end all wars’.

This syndrome not only illustrates the gullibility of so many American voters but their preparedness to lap up Trump’s extravagant and unrealistic promises to ‘end inflation and make America great again’. Why did they not stop to consider whether his policies actually run counter to the specific needs and desires of sections of the electorate? Why did they not stop to reflect on the extent to which his 2016 promises were kept? And why are they so intellectually lazy that they allow themselves to be seduced by someone they want to see as a saviour? Part of the answer will be the same that applies here – political ignorance and the power of right wing media but it’s also thought Trump’s messaging was clever.

‘It is telling how little “stolen” elections have been mentioned since Trump’s second victory. But it is within these lies that Trump’s chaos calibrates itself, inside a unified and powerful ecosystem of rightwing news, online content and viral disinformation that has grown more powerful throughout this era, spewing the same falsehoods in unison day after day, on repeat, for years. It is the “political technology” by which swathes of the population have voted in effect to anoint a king in the belief it will amount to more freedom’.

https://tinyurl.com/2p9k26jy

Meanwhile, Trump is making a series of weird and disastrous appointments, including Elon Musk tolead the new department reviewing government contracts, including, ‘in an arrangement open to spectacular corruption, contracts with his own companies’;vaccine sceptic and conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jnr as Health Minister (‘He’s gonna make America healthy again)’;Matt Gaetz for Attorney General (for two years under federal investigation for child sex trafficking and statutory rape, with a separate House of Representatives investigation into allegations of underage sexual abuse, illicit drug use, displaying to colleagues nude photos and videos of previous sexual partners, converting campaign funds for personal use and accepting gifts banned under congressional rules); and the list goes on. Says Jonathan Freedland: ‘He wasn’t kidding. Donald Trump really does want to rule as an extremist strongman, with contempt for the planet, for America’s allies and for the rule of law’.

One of the latest: ‘As director of national intelligence, overseeing 18 separate intelligence agencies including the CIA and NSA, Trump has turned to Tulsi Gabbard, a fringe Democratic congresswoman before she defected to the Republicans, best known for meeting Bashar al-Assad while the Syrian dictator was busy slaughtering hundreds of thousands of his own people, and for parroting Kremlin talking points’. All these appointments have yet to be approved by Republicans in the Senate but the writing is clearly on the wall, the ‘direction of travel’, to use that annoying phrase. Trying to establish Trump’s rationale, there are several possibilities, a key one being Trump valuing loyalty over qualifications. ‘Some hope it’s no more than an opening bid by Trump, the arch-negotiator: offer the Senate something obviously unacceptable, then haggle from there. Others wonder if it’s part of a dark, deliberate strategy, by which Trump, the agent of chaos, appoints those who are not so much disruptors as wreckers, men and women who can be relied on to make the agencies they lead collapse in failure. When the federal government is a smoking ruin, then all power will have to reside in the single man at the top’. It will be interesting and frightening to see what happens. As one X user said: ‘Some very awful people will feel empowered in America today. It will be a country of bullies and misogynists and racists all feeling legitimated by this election’.

https://tinyurl.com/bdfr7h6j

Back in the UK, many have been shocked (why, like the Post Office Horizon scandal, does it take television to make common knowledge what should have been known before?) by the Channel 4 Dispatches expose of the royal family’s exploitation of tenants and public sector organizations, profiteering from the Duchy of Lancaster (King Charles) and the Duchy of Cornwall (Prince William). These two, forever protected by the mainstream media and the armies of hangers on, have particularly been exposed by the joint work undertaken by Channel 4 and the Sunday Times, revealing them as slum landlords and ones which presided over charging cash strapped public sector bodies like the NHS and charities like RNLI massive amounts for use of Duchy land. Until now many have not understood that besides the sovereign grant, which was raised substantially this year, the royals also benefit directly from the duchies, which are termed ‘private estates’, income not going initially to the Treasury and on which no capital gains tax or corporation tax are paid. Amounts raked in by the King include £28 million alone from wind farms because of a feudal right to charge for cables crossing land belonging to the Duchy of Lancaster.

One of the most telling aspects of this documentary (since taken down from the C4 streaming platform – due to Palace pressure?!) were the interviews of the duchy managers by the Commons Public Accounts Committee, both men demonstrating a haughty level of disengagement. One even said ‘I don’t see why this (the Duchy’s affairs) should be anything to do with this Committee’!!

Of course this prompted the usual amateurish fightback from the Palace PR machine, feeding the complicit media stuff about Prince William’s absurd homelessness campaign and  Earthshot gig, the Princess of Wales’s appearance (from a balcony) at the Cenotaph remembrance service, Queen Camilla’s interestingly timed ‘chest infection’ preventing her own appearance, further attacks on Meghan Markle, and the latest: King Charles marking his 76th birthday by visiting a food hub in South London, where the children of that poor community were got to sing to him and donate cards. Just utterly sickening – feudalism in plain sight which this country can ill afford.

The Guardian’s investigation of these issues about 18 months ago (The Cost of The Crown) also found exactly what this team has just found – a huge lack of transparency. It took all three organizations months to build up a picture of the duchies’ holdings. The very least that should happen now is a reassessment of the cost of this family besides procedures to bring these two duchies under Treasury control so that their modus operandi can be properly investigated and changed. Ultimately this archaic institution of monarchy needs to be abolished, but that will take a bit longer.

https://tinyurl.com/3phtfw92

Royal scandals don’t end there, of course: the media are constantly telling us how under pressure Prince Andrew is – determined to stay put in the dilapidated Royal Lodge on the Windsor Estate when the King has now withdrawn his brother’s allowance because he wants to eject him to a smaller property while allocating Royal Lodge to Kate and William. Now we suddenly hear that after all this time someone has stepped forward to support the cash-strapped prince and the archaicly titled Keeper of the Privy Purse has okayed it and with it, of course, the secrecy surrounding its provenance. Of course they would – but what this journalist points out is that it could compromise the UK’s security because of what the donor would expect in return.

‘But in a world awash with dirty cash and decidedly murky geopolitical interests, not to mention billionaires looking for back-door ways into the British establishment – well, let’s just say parliament might like to make some urgent inquiries, and make them more strategically than usual. The mistake MPs have made in the past is to follow public money, demanding to know what taxpayers are being forced to spend on the royals’ upkeep in a cost of living crisis, rather than following the strategic interest and asking who exactly is now bankrolling them instead’.

https://tinyurl.com/2s3938hm

Two weeks after the appearance of reports of MPs calling for the statutory regulation of counselling more articles have appeared. ‘MPs with experience in mental health have urged the government to introduce statutory regulation for all psychotherapists and counsellors, warning that the current system is leaving people vulnerable to harm. Unlike most other healthcare roles, “psychotherapist” and “counsellor” are not protected titles nor statutorily regulated professions in the UK. Only art therapists and art psychotherapists, drama therapists and music therapists are protected titles. This means that anyone can set themselves up as a therapist without qualifications, and can continue to practise after misconduct’.

So many people don’t know this and because of shortage of NHS mental health services they seek private help and it’s a wild west because the only ‘regulation’ is not statutory and enforceable but so-called ‘accredited registers’ of practitioners maintained by the professional bodies. (Who don’t want to lose their authority in this profit making area). As a former therapist I pressed for statutory regulation years ago but came up against a brick wall, the then Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, saying that this was not ‘in the public interest’. Of course it was….and is. Current Health Secretary Wes Streeting must respond to MPs pressure – many of us have cause to watch closely.

https://tinyurl.com/mvfr9e2s

On a lighter note, it’s very good news that the former farmhouse home of Ronald Blythe, author of the famous Akenfield, ‘a classic account of rapidly changing rural life in the 1960s, was left to Essex Wildlife Trust. It will take some time for the house to undergo all the repairs needed (on the author’s death last year it was found he’d left quite a lot of money in various accounts which could be used for this) but the plan is for ‘Bottengoms, an overgrown garden home to badgers, hornets and the occasional singing nightingale, to be opened up as a sanctuary for people and wildlife – a place of education and inspiration for writers and artists, young and old’. Parts of the house date back to the 15th century. Both house and its owner sound very interesting. ‘Blythe was born in 1922 and grew up in grinding rural poverty – so poor his family relied on straw from their cousins to stuff their mattresses. Lacking a university education, he read voraciously, and became friends with a lively bohemian artistic set including EM Forster and painters John Nash and Cedric Morris, whose home, Benton End, is nearby.

Akenfield, Blythe’s stark and poetic portrait of a Suffolk village at the time of the second agricultural revolution, was a smash hit: 15 million people watched the film adaptation when it was broadcast in 1975’. I’ve not read the book or seen the film so these are omissions I must rectify in the not too distant future!

https://tinyurl.com/mtw3mv5x

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.

https://tinyurl.com/22bsnfuf

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.

https://tinyurl.com/3f69trf8

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’.

https://tinyurl.com/ra48dnct

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.

https://tinyurl.com/3t3k74m8

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.

https://tinyurl.com/yseyxj9e

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.

https://tinyurl.com/sur6xwuu

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!