24 December

As happy a Christmas as possible to all readers! These are busy days for many but you may perhaps have time to peruse this mini blog post while basting that turkey or nut roast, when grabbing a crafty snifter while peeling those spuds, or during the post-lunch/dinner slump! Recently transport minister Mark Harper was trying, in view of the multiple strikes, to prepare us for ‘a virtual Christmas’, cynically trying to pitch the public against the unions by invoking the lockdown Christmas, but it seems that most who wanted to have managed to travel, except the unwell ones. Best wishes to them for a speedy recovery. So, given what some are calling a General Strike in all but name (Sky News, the Guardian and other media have a useful matrix showing who’s on strike when), perhaps we should count ourselves lucky to be having any kind of Christmas!

It seems Mark Harper expects us to count ourselves lucky that the government has made its ‘biggest ever intervention’ to keep rail fare rises below inflation, condemned as a sick joke by Labour, as fares in England, already sky high, will rise by 5.9% in March. Commentators have pointed out the contrast between these rises, deterring people from using rail, and how road and air transport are treated – fuel duty was cut and fuel on domestic flights remains untaxed.

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What’s gone under the radar somewhat is how much the government is spending (of hallowed ‘taxpayers’ money’) in order to maintain the strikes and the ideological intransigence underpinning ministers’ stance. Army personnel are being paid extra to stand in for striking workers, a shameful intervention and something they could well feel aggrieved about. The Telegraph reports having been told that the military believes it is ‘not right’ for soldiers, who are banned by law from striking themselves, to replace striking public sector workers over the festive season. In addition, senior members of the Armed Forces are understood to have also warned ministers that the plan risks weakening the ‘operational capability’ of the military to respond to threats.

In a related issue, Labour had to use FOI to uncover how much the NHS was spending to compensate for its staffing crisis. English NHS trusts paid £3bn to agencies for staff during 2021-22, 20% more than in the previous year and as much as £5,200 a shift for agency doctors. ‘In addition, trusts spent £6bn on so-called bank staff – NHS professionals paid to carry out temporary shifts, including employees looking for extra work’. Economist Richard Murphy commented on the failed economic policy: ‘….the obvious reason why the UK’s economic performance is relatively poor despite austerity…The simple fact is that the deliberate undermining of our public services has undermined our national economy and well-being. And if we want to improve either nothing will work until we invest in fully staffed, well paid and properly valued public service’. This is exactly what the government does not wish to do because of its ideological obsession with small State.

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Last week, ahead of the ambulance workers’ strike, we were absurdly told not to ‘do anything risky’, which junior health minister Will Quince, during an interview, seemed to think included driving one’s car. The government tries to spin their intransigence and refusal to sit down with the unions as being ‘resolute’ in the face of pressure from ‘union barons’, when the unions involved are not even affiliated to the Labour Party, while wheeling out the tired old discredited schtick about ‘accepting in full the recommendations of the independent pay review body’, when it’s now well known that these bodies are not independent. Although the Tory bias in many Radio 4 presenters is clear to see, Mishal Husain did very well on 21^st December, keeping Health Secretary Steve Barclay under pressure throughout and showing (he did not even know the answer) that the government had four times not accepted recommendations of a pay review body, thereby proving that the current immovable position adopted is not consistent. And this, of course, reveals the current stance as unjustifiable. It’s surprising that despite this admirable foot in the door of the government’s script, Rishi Sunak keeps going robotically round the same track, gaslighting the public about the risks to patient safety being due to militant unions etc.

Others have no doubt where responsibility lies. Two major health service organizations, the NHS Confederation and NHS Providers, have told the PM of the ‘deep worry among NHS leaders about the level of harm and risk that could occur to patients tomorrow and beyond…We’ve rarely heard such strong and urgent expressions of concern from those running our hospitals, ambulance services and other vital health services. The fear of NHS leaders is that the risk to patients is only going to get worse with future strikes planned. That is, unless your government is able to reach agreement with the trade unions to bring a swift end to the dispute. We urge you to do all you can to bring about an agreed solution, otherwise more members of the public will suffer unnecessarily’.

Can the PM and ministers really remain deaf to such a powerful message from people who know what they’re talking about? Ok, it’s Christmas, but they can’t afford to completely switch off. Also, it’s not just the risks we mostly hear about, it’s the appalling rise in excess deaths (those non-Covid deaths which are above the seasonal norm) due to service cuts and failing NHS and social care services, a phenomenon which often goes under the radar. Statistician David Spiegelhalter and Royal College of Emergency Medicine president Adrian Boyle recently said this figure was 900 per week: this is over 100 people dying younger than they should every day, ‘because social care and the NHS are starved’.

It’s struck me that one of the unspoken elements of the current situation is that ministers feel superior to union leaders, not seeing them as equals, when it’s increasingly clear that these leaders are highly intelligent and experienced people who, especially in the case of Mick Lynch, run rings around all their opponents. Besides the political intransigence, fear of these leaders getting the better of them will be a further deterrent to ministers meeting the unions.

As Rishi Sunak unwittingly continues to disprove his trumpeted mission of leading a government of ‘integrity, professionalism and accountability’, one of the latest decisions being to appoint ‘a veteran banker’ to the position of Ethics Adviser (one who, again, cannot initiate his own investigations so pretty useless), more commentators focus on the Prime Minister’s robotic manner and lack of impact. ‘Rishi Sunak is a conundrum. Schrödinger’s prime minister. The more you see of him, the less there appears to be. A man who doesn’t much care about anything. A man so rich he can afford not to be seen to even care about his wealth. His beliefs dictated by a Goldman Sachs training manual. The country just an intellectual playground for him. Its people just problems to be solved. Preferably with a PowerPoint presentation. He is a man without emotional affect. Either dead or empty inside. Or just completely disconnected’.

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An example of his tone-deaf behaviour is his ‘excruciating’ interaction with a homeless man at a soup kitchen, where the photo call had the PM dishing up breakfast. ‘After a brief exchange he asked the man whether he worked in business. The man replied that he was homeless. Sunak then discussed his background in the finance industry and, with a great sense of priorities, asked if it would be something the man would ‘like to get in to’. The man replied: “I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t know, I’d like to get through Christmas first.” Sunak used the trip to outline that the government had pledged £2bn to tackle homelessness and rough sleeping over three years’. As this faux pas trends on Twitter, former chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal observed: ‘When you’ve never met real people and understood their lives then you’re the kind of person that asks a homeless person if he “works in business”.

Perhaps some awareness of his flagging popularity has prompted the latest move, again demonstrating a conflict of interest. The PM has appointed as political secretary (whose job it is toensure that ‘Downing Street, the policy teams and MPs are more united as Britain heads towards the next election) James Forsyth, who is the Spectator political editor, Times columnist and Sunak’s friend. A key question must then be whether he will have the guts to point out and prevent missteps, assuming he can spot them coming in the first place. Remember Sunak challenging his party during the leadership contest: Unite or Die? The Conservative Party is definitely not united so this is a key policy area to focus on over the next year, assuming he lasts that long. ‘Sunak and Forsyth are now expected to focus on a series of issues that can unite the party and prove popular with the country as the election approaches. The plan has already seen Sunak focus on trying to reduce small boats crossing the Channel. He is also expected to focus on reducing the NHS backlog, improving the poorest performing hospitals, and improving technical education as the UK struggles with labour shortages’. Good luck with that, because these are all long-term projects demanding effective planning and nuanced thinking, not qualities this cynical and short-termist government has more than a passing acquaintance with.

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Meanwhile, some are still pining (and plotting) for ‘Boris’ to return, seeming to believe that he can yet save them from political extinction. Again, good luck with that, because his constituents have finally woken up to his outrageous absenteeism due to frequent long holidays and delivering of lucrative speeches. It also beggars belief that Johnson wrote in the Spectator that he was on a ‘career hiatus’ despite remaining MP for a seat of more than 110,000 people. Nothing else quite shows the level of contempt this disgraced individual has for parliamentary procedure. ‘Residents in Boris Johnson’s seat say they feel abandoned by their part-time MP, with the ousted Prime Minister appearing largely absent since leaving office. One Tory voter told Byline Times that Mr Johnson had been away for longer than Matt Hancock’s controversial ‘I’m a Celebrity’ appearance in Australia’. Not only that but the speech delivery has broken the ministerial code once more: ‘The high-paying gigs breach instructions from revolving-door regulator Acoba that he must not work for the Harry Walker Agency for at least three months after leaving office – a cooling-off period meant to avoid conflicts of interest’.

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As the controversy over Boris Johnson’s resignation honours continue and we brace ourselves for the imminent New Years honours, the discredited system is brought further into disrepute by revelations (no surprise there) that chairs of honours committees have been leaned on to accept nominations of Tory donors and others. Those not complying were let go. ‘Current and former members of the government’s honours committees have said they faced pressure from Downing Street to reward Tory donors, and that if they failed to comply with requests they were informed their services were no longer required, an investigation by Channel 4 News has revealed… Earlier this month Dame Louise Casey, chair of the community and voluntary service committee which awards the majority of honours, told the Cabinet Office, in an email seen by Channel 4 News, that she had concerns about ‘politicalisation’ of the system. It’s appalling and such a pity that the well-deserved honours are mixed up with all these others and (incomprehensible to me) career civil servants.

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Between Christmas and 2^nd January is the period during which Radio 4’s Today programme invites guest editors to take the reins. Some are great choices but we have to wonder about some of the others Every year I ask why they don’t ask regular listeners to do this: of course they’re mostly not famous but I believe their efforts would be equally interesting to listen to. This year we have Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, Jamie Oliver, Lord Ian Botham, Sir Jeremy Fleming (head of GCHQ), Dame Sharon White (chair of the John Lewis Partnership), and technologist Anne-Marie Imafidon.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-63777454

Finally, we hear much about how Brexit and other pressures are negatively affecting businesses and their capacity to export, but there’s a cheering example of one company which has bucked that trend. Tunnock’s, the Scottish family-run purveyor of ‘teacakes’, reported a 27% increase in sales to ‘a record’ £72.1m, due mostly to booming exports. For southerners, this isn’t a teacake as you know it: it’s ‘soft marshmallow on a biscuit base fully coated in real milk chocolate’. Have they cracked the secret of post-Brexit paperwork?? I think we should be told!

Best wishes to all for Christmas and the New Year.

Sunday 11 December

As ever, a fortnight is a long time in politics and for its psychological consequences. As we approach the festive season we’re having to contend with arctic temperatures, a deepening cost of living crisis and a prime minister who is surely on the ropes given the number of challenges he is facing but not resolving. The worst of these must be the strikes taking place in so many areas (border officials, postal service, NHS (nurses and ambulance staff), education and transport) that it’s no wonder General Strike is trending on Twitter. The appalling gaslighting the government is resorting to is a sure fire sign of their unease and faltering confidence in their intransigent stance: this week alone saw Nadhim Zawahi (who has form in this) suggesting that strikers are ‘playing into Putin’s hands’ by causing further inflation and Jeremy Hunt asking workers not to ‘jeopardise Britain’s recovery’ by taking industrial action. Oh and Zahawi also played the timing industrial action at Christmas card.

The intransigent government stance consists of refusing to meet the unions, fobbing this off onto ‘employers’ when it’s known the government sets the agenda, emotionally blackmailing the public by suggesting strikers are the ones causing the problem and trotting out the script about the recommendations of ‘independent’ pay review bodies when it’s known the government also sets their agendas. Another key technique is to keep citing ‘ordinary people’, ‘hardworking families’ etc when, actually, the strikers are ‘ordinary people’ and members of the public. The government’s agenda, supported by the right-wing press, is for people to take against the strikers making reasonable claims rather than the cynical politicians who could have chosen to remove non-dom status and pursue tax avoiders to boost the flagging coffers.

As topical as ever, Saturday’s Radio 4 profile is of Oliver Dowden, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, responsible for running the Cabinet Office. You couldn’t make it up that one of his tasks isn’t to help resolve the strikes but ‘to co-ordinate the government response to the current wave of strikes’. These programmes can be revealing about their subject but I thought this one was far too jolly and flattering, portraying Dowden as some kind of understated but clever strategist when the impression, I suspect, of quite a few of us is of a conventional, repressed cynic prepared to do the bidding of various prime ministers to benefit his career. One contributor suggested his latest task is a ‘poisoned chalice’ – we will see what he makes of it.

RMT boss Mick Lynch, who so far no interviewer has got the better of, has challenged Rishi Sunak to a meeting but was snubbed. It really does seem that this refusal to talk to the unions, deflecting responsibility onto ‘employers’ is the government running scared. With Lynch in particular, Sunak could well fear coming off worse and his specious arguments being exposed for all to see. The Mirror said: ‘…instead the PM upped the bitter war of words against the union as his aides accused RMT of “holding Christmas hostage with more damaging strikes.”Mr Sunak is gambling that public opinion will turn against striking rail crews, nurses, posties border guards and balloting firefighters costing a million working days this month.’ This could be a gamble too far.

And rather than deal with these problems, Sunak is now planning legislation to prevent such strikes, but this will obviously take time and won’t be available to use in the current situation. As someone tweeted: ‘The people who exploit non-dom status and offshore trusts to dodge taxes are seriously trying to tell the people who do all the work around here that industrial action is immoral’. There’s a feeling in many quarters that the Tories are breaking Britain: nothing seems to work properly and it often feels that things are falling apart.

But this is just the start of Sunak’s problems. After weeks of failing to report it, revelations about the involvement of several former health ministers and Michael Gove finally forced the BBC to focus on the scandal of Tory peer Michelle Mone, who pocketed £29m from a ‘VIP lane’ crony PPE contract during the pandemic, most of the PPE being defective, too. Mone, originally appointed by David Cameron, has now lost the whip and has taken ‘leave of absence’ from the Lords, when this will also enable her to avoid scrutiny of her affairs. The credit here (and how many more scandals remain to be uncovered??) must go to the Guardian’s David Conn, who painstakingly investigated this affair for two years. Needless to say, Sunak, on hearing the revelations, purported to be shocked. Another of his MPs, Julian Knight, has also had the whip removed, although we don’t yet know the details.

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Bringing the party even further into disrepute is fresh-from-the-jungle Matt Hancock, who has vowed to engage with people in all sorts of new ways. That this deluded narcissist believes he matters one iota to most people is hard to credit, especially when he initially confirmed his intention to stand in the next election, only to withdraw it as it’s likely he’s been offloaded by his local constituency association. As for his book (The Pandemic Diaries), the cover of which sports a picture of Matt striking an uncharacteristically macho pose, some commentators have accused him of rewriting history. Former health secretary Stephen Dorrell has identified several key inconsistencies between text and contemporary account and warned that Hancock needs ‘to be very careful’ about repeating some of the claims under oath at the ongoing Covid Inquiry. I was struck by the book being co-written by right-wing commentator Isabel Oakeshott, as if Matt didn’t trust his own writing ability. But it seems Matt is unstoppable: he’s been pimping himself out on the speech circuit for over £2,500 a throw, clearly one of the new ways in which he plans to engage with people. ‘I look forward to exploring new ways to communicate with people of all ages and from all backgrounds’.

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Sunak won’t see it like this, of course, at least in public, but the Home Secretary again recently proved herself an embarrassment. Although you could hardly make it up that the former head of the police watchdog (the Independent Office for Police Conduct), Michael Lockwood, was himself under investigation for a ‘historical allegation’, Suella Braverman, in her determination to appear powerful, wasn’t going to let him get away with resigning ‘for personal reasons’, as he’d originally framed his departure. She compelled him to either resign or be suspended, effectively boasting about taking ‘immediate action’ by forcing his resignation then outing her involvement to the media, the classic irony being that she herself should have resigned on two occasions. A classic example of projection but not one which enabled her to display any skill in that role.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-63848998

Still on the topic of MPs, and in the wake of Labour’s success in the Chester by election, it’s emerged that there are now 14 independents in Parliament. These are people who’ve lost/resigned their party whip but who aren’t (as surely they should) triggering a by election. This means their local constituencies aren’t being democratically represented as many locals would have voted for them as being committed to the manifesto of their party. Yet something else which needs addressing if/when we ever get constitutional and parliamentary reform.

We have to wonder about the timing of Jeremy Hunt’s macho new strategy to ‘grow’ the economy, via what seem very reckless banking reforms which remove some of the protections brought in after the 2008 financial crisis. It’s significant, in my view, that they been pompously badged the ‘Edinburgh Reforms’, just because his speech was made there. There seems to be a perceived need to add authority and dignity to a set of measures which will surely cause even more alarm amongst the public. ‘Jeremy Hunt is due to unveil a 30-point package of City policy changes on Friday that will involve rowing back on regulations in order to boost competition and growth. The chancellor’s announcement, referred to as the “Edinburgh reforms”, will outline how the government intends to ‘review, repeal and replace’ a host of rules that were introduced to protect savers and the taxpayer after the 2008 financial crisis, but which ministers now believe risk hindering the success of London’s banks and insurers compared with their overseas peers. The changes are Hunt’s attempt to rebrand what his predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng claimed would be a post-Brexit “Big Bang 2.0” for the City’

It seems that Hunt is clutching at straws (breaking them in the process) to ‘prove’ that Brexit has been ‘a good thing’. One of the intentions is to remove ring fencing, which forced banks to separate their retail banking and investment banking operations but some have suggested this would only apply to some banks, not all. One tweeter asks a key question: ‘Is ‘opening up for foreign investment’ just another term for money laundering?’ That certainly seems possible. That cynical manipulation of language again, eg ‘getting rid of red tape’ whilst failing to mention that said ‘red tape’ consists of important measures to protect consumers and the wider economy. Critics have called this exercise ‘a regulatory race to the bottom’. Political economist Will Hutton tweeted: ‘Financial reforms to boost City of London ‘competitiveness’ exploiting Brexit ‘freedoms’ are risky, futile, unwanted and betray intellectual bankruptcy. The City used to be the financial capital of Europe. It is becoming a regional backwater. Brexit is the cause not the opportunity’.

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As the NHS crisis worsens, an already difficult situation exacerbated by (understandable) strikes, we hear more and more dreadful stories about how patients have been left lying on the floor for up to 10 hours, even worse if this happens to them outside. This alone is enough to affect our mental health, the idea that should we need medical help urgently, no one would come for hours, if at all. It’s not surprising that even higher ‘excess deaths’ than previously have been anticipated. A macabre thing I found myself wondering (but getting no answer on) is whether hospitals now have an entrance separate from A&E for ambulances to drop off those who have died while waiting or during transit. The intertwined problems of the NHS and social care seem so entrenched and intractable that any solution will take a considerable length of time to implement, even the government’s cynical strategy to let the NHS deteriorate to such a point that it ‘has to be’ privatised.

Meanwhile, a leaked document shows the extent of the crisis…. ‘Health officials are drawing up plans to draft in thousands of extra volunteers to help the NHS cope with ambulance delays and hospital pressures this winter’. How shaming, too, that the government had to do this: ‘In August, the NHS started a £30m four-year contract with St John Ambulance to provide “surge capacity” to 10 ambulance trusts and act as an official auxiliary service for England. Under the arrangement – the first of its kind – the charity is providing a minimum of 5,000 hours’ support a month via crews with the capacity to respond to the most urgent, life-threatening 999 calls’. However, one clinician warns against this strategy: ‘What we need is a skilled and trained workforce to try to deal with the problems we’ve got at the moment. It’s not just boots on the ground…’.

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Soaring energy prices and the freezing weather have put fuel poverty even more under a spotlight and the charity National Energy Action reckons that 6.7 million household already fall into this category, with 2.4m borrowing or using credit cards to pay their bills. Both physical and mental health are harmed by this situation but whatever the household income, it seems people have feared putting their heating on and have resisted it, until now. For some weeks it’s been a regular topic of conversation: ‘Have you put your heating on yet?’The current temperatures mean those who can use their heating will but what of those who simply can’t pay? It seems terrible and primitive that in what is supposed to be a developed country people are resorting to virtually wearing quilts and dressing for the outside when they’re actually inside. Besides food banks (or, euphemistically, ‘food pantries’) it seems that ‘warm banks’/’warm spaces’, quite a few in public libraries, are also being normalised. It’s unfortunate they are needed at all but there have been some positive reports of people benefiting not only from being warm, getting a hot drink, recharging their phone, etc, but also from interacting with others. If it wasn’t so serious one tweet about this could be found amusing, a depiction of Nadhim Zahawi in his stables, the text underneath reading ‘My horses are warmer than your kids’.

Meanwhile, in a shockingly cavalier but not surprising admission, sacked Chancellor now says he and Liz Truss ‘got carried away’ on their mini budget and didn’t consider the political and economic consequences. This is just breathtaking for supposedly experienced politicians, the kind of mistake school children wouldn’t even make. How do they feel and live with themselves, knowing how much damage they’ve inflicted and stress they’ve caused people? Yes, I know, they’re far too thick-skinned to let any of this bother them, except their legacy will be dreadful and they could do with reflecting on that. ‘Kwarteng announced a raft of tax cuts without any reduction in spending in September, which led to the pound crashing against the dollar, pension funds nearly collapsing, a £65bn Bank of England bailout, soaring mortgage costs, and the cost of government borrowing increasing. He also said he would remove the cap on bankers’ bonuses’.

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The cost of living crisis and transport strikes have also been costing the hospitality industry dear, some pub and restaurant bosses expressing frustration and anger about Christmas booking cancellations when interviewed in the media. ‘The trade body UK Hospitality said it expected the strikes to cost businesses about £1.5bn in lost sales and other knock-on effects, with a lack of a breakthrough deal pushing up expected cancellations to 35%-40% from 20%-30% at present’. I certainly have some sympathy with them but many can’t afford to go out at all and many more are thinking twice about it, some of us at least not being best pleased with overpriced menus and unheated or poorly heated premises in some cases.

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The government must be feeling some relief that at least one febrile news item doesn’t have them once again in the frame, that is the reinvigorated and polarised debate about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, which has accompanied the release of their ‘documentary’ series on Netflix. The £112m deal has involved the delivery of six episodes of Harry & Meghan, ‘an up-close-and-personal documentary of their life together’. The media has been in a frenzy about it, many lambasting what they see as attention-seeking and efforts to undermine the monarchy. Some commentators have gone over the top with their declarations that it’s all so disrespectful of the Queen’s memory, how hurt she would have been and how unpatriotic they both are. The Daily Mail accused the pair of wanting to ‘bring down the monarchy’ and describing the tell-all as an ‘assault on the Queen’s legacy’. The media have reported two lots of ‘furious’ reactions: one by Prince William, as could be expected, but the other from Netflix bosses, who believe they have detected fake footage in the series trailers which they would have expected the Sussexes to flag up prior to the streaming.

One reviewer found the first episode ‘sickening’ and at least one bit I’d concur on is where Harry, alluding to the Windsors’ first meeting with Meghan, cringe inducingly says to camera ‘Maybe they were surprised a ginger could land such a beautiful woman’. I find myself ambivalent on the Harry/Meghan debate: I think there’s little doubt that they did experience a form of racism within the royal family and wider household, some aspects of Meghan’s reception were hostile, and there’s far too much sycophantic and mindless royal worship which shouldn’t be conflated with ‘patriotism’. On the other hand it’s well-known that the Sussexes need to generate income, they complain about media intrusion when their self-promotion is dependent upon the media, some of the accounts of events don’t stack up and the Californian style obsession with ‘telling our truth’ is grating. It seems to me that a mistake she made was to perceive and assume that the Royal Family was just another cadre of celebrity, a milieu she was already familiar with and that many problematic assumptions stemmed from that. Meanwhile, there’s much more anti-monarchist sentiment than the media coverage would suggest, as we saw with coverage of the Queen’s Jubilee and her death and funeral.

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Given the cost of living and housing market crises, a very interesting article (Why inheritance is the dirty secret for the middle classes- harder to talk about than sex) discusses an issue which is rarely aired – that of the haves and have-nots in terms of inheritance. Many young people benefit from family inheritance, handed down via the ‘bank of mum and dad’ but many others don’t have this opportunity. This results in massive inequality between those who can afford to buy their own property in their 20s or 30s and those who have no choice but to chase expensive rented property or live with their parents or friends. The author suggests that this is where the real social divide is, not the one often cited between boomers and millennials. One of the young people cited had her IVF treatment paid for by her parents and before that had had help buying a house her house and her student loan paid off so that she could then start saving for a pension. Such situations truly illustrate the gulf between the haves and have nots but surely also come with a disadvantage, that of such gifts perhaps being taken for granted and affording far less opportunity for the individual to stand on their own two feet and develop strength of character from having managed financial hardship.

‘Although she couldn’t be more grateful for her parents’ life-changing generosity, like many recipients of family money, she isn’t comfortable discussing it publicly…she hasn’t been upfront with colleagues about how she came to buy a house so young. It seems to me that this beneficiary gets it in one about privilege: ‘When I think of the money that’s gone into that pension, it just starts a whole cycle of privilege over again.’

https://tinyurl.com/bdz7ur4e

A bright note to end with! The cost of gas and electricity means many have cut back on using their ovens, but still wanted to make their own Christmas cakes. A generous baker in Yorkshire has kindly invited locals to use his ovens for free, the fuel for which costs £2,000 a month. ‘We’ve got to have our ovens on anyway – I just wanted to help people out a little bit’. Truly cheering and inspiring to hear about people like him!

Sunday 27 November

In the wake of the impactful Autumn Statement and as we enter the last week of November we’re faced yet again with a relentlessly depressing situation: continuing industrial action from transport workers, postmen, university staff and soon nurses; the news that by Spring millions of households will be spending a third of their income on fuel; more government corruption coming to light in the form of Baroness Mone and her £29m ‘gain’ from the PPE ‘VIP lane’; yet more bullying accusations against Justice Secretary Dominic Raab and an inquiry no doubt we will be paying for; the news that water companies are dumping sewage on beaches and in rivers even in dry weather when it’s only ‘supposed’ to happen during exceptional periods eg heavy rain preventing the normal systems from working; the continuing war in Ukraine; endless hypocritical handwringing over the political aspects of the World Cup; and continuing immigration and asylum seeker system failures despite the government giving yet more funds to the French. And if this wasn’t enough, Matt Hancock now being in the final of I’m A Celebrity, prompting one tweeter to wonder if the promotional tweets were being funded by his fee or coming out of his parliamentary expenses.

It seems to me this captures how low standards in public life have sunk, not only that this former health secretary who inflicted colossal damage during Covid is parading himself so proudly in public but also that so many viewers are voting for him. Conservatives continue to get away with repeating their soundbites based on misrepresentations and straightforward lies, challenged neither by the media nor the very weak Commons Speaker and unfortunately the gullible and those not using other news sources will fall prey to them.

The damaging effects of BBC government collusion are captured by the following tweet: ‘The BBC does amazing reporting on struggles of workers and the persecuted overseas under authoritarian governments. What happens when they report on the UK & become the tool of a destructive government against the interests of workers & persecuted? How do they explain this to themselves?’

A key example is the way strikers like the nurses and rail workers are being demonised rather than the government taking responsibility for the unrest. Most of these workers aren’t ‘demanding inflation busting increases’, as suggested in the right-wing media, but reasonable rises when in many cases their pay has remained stagnant for years. And new Transport Minister Mark Harper is being disingenuous by blaming rail unions when it was clear that the government had intervened last week to prevent the Rail Delivery Group making a pay offer – so much for ‘the employers’ being in charge. It seems a kind of hubris which prevents ministers sitting down and negotiating with the unions but now these strikes are becoming very wearing, not to mention disruptive and damaging all round. And a key factor surely is that workers no longer (if they ever did) buy the government’s argument that the country ‘can’t afford’ pay rises when for years now we’ve seen millions of pounds wasted or siphoned off by corruption.

It’s possible the Lady Mone scandal won’t be easily shrugged off, though, as the Guardian spent two years investigating the profits she and her husband made from their links with PPE Medpro, the goods supplied weren’t even fit for purpose and there’s substantial evidence that Michael Gove was involved. It’s surely shocking that it was journalists who had to uncover the story because of the weakness of current channels and a reminder that Rishi Sunak still hasn’t appointed an ethics adviser. Another thing a new adviser could get their teeth into (though, again, surely existing government machinery should have stopped this) is the news that a year since the Owen Paterson revelations about MPs’ second jobs followed by a government promise to clamp down on it, MPs have nevertheless earned more than ever this way.

‘Overall, MPs made more than £5.3m from outside work in that period, with many, including former cabinet ministers, taking on new roles as advisers and non-executives in the last year for companies that in several cases were run by major party donors. Many have taken jobs in areas they used to oversee in government. Former education secretary Gavin Williamson took on a role in June as chairman of the advisory board of RTC Education Ltd, a private education group whose chairman Maurizio Bragagni and chief executive Selva Pankaj are major Conservative party donors’. Corruption, pure and simple.

https://tinyurl.com/ysxxheup

Some are wondering why lingerie purveyor Michelle Mone was even elevated to the Lords by David Cameron. When reports emerged of her links to one of the many fraudulent PPE suppliers during Covid, facilitated by the government’s ‘VIP lane’ they were met with repeated denials and a key aspect of this story is that although it’s been covered by other media, the BBC has not yet reported it. Something to do as ever, with their DG and Chair being embedded with the Conservative Party but as this omission amounts to a kind of censorship it’s another serious breach of the BBC’s mission ‘to inform, educate and entertain’. A good example of this is that Gove wasn’t asked about his role in this affair when interviewed at length last week on Radio 4’s Today programme.

‘However the Guardian has chipped away at the edifice of the denials. A two-year investigation establishing the couple’s links to PPE Medpro culminates today with newly leaked documents indicating that Mone and Barrowman (husband) secretly received tens of millions of pounds originating from the company’s profits, which were sent to the Isle of Man’. A tweeter said: ‘Baroness Michelle Mone started lobbying Michael Gove BEFORE her husband’s company Medpro had even been incorporated at Companies House. It seems Medpro being setup at all was contingent on them getting the nod for the £203 contract. The PPE cost £46m and they pocketed the rest!’

Gove definitely sounds on the ropes as a result of this investigation, giving inconsistent responses to questions. ‘Asked in an interview on Thursday how he had responded to Lady Mone’s approach in May 2020, Gove said he had referred all offers of PPE to ‘the appropriate civil service channels’. That explanation appears to be at odds with a chain of emails previously released under the Freedom of Information Act that shed light on how the company, PPE Medpro, was added to a “VIP” lane that prioritised politically connected firms. The emails suggest that after initially being contacted by Mone, Gove suggested she contact another then minister, the Tory peer Theodore Agnew’. An additional misdemeanour (but very telling) is the use of private email addresses by all parties.

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Parliamentary sketch writer John Crace went to town on this, pointing out the very telling fact that no prominent Conservative was made available to answer the Opposition’s questions in the House, and the only one they could find was someone no one had ever heard of, one Neil O’Brien, a junior minister in the Department of Health and Social Care. He gave feeble answers to Angela Rayner’s questions, eg What due diligence had been done? How come Medpro had been granted a contract via the VIP fast lane? How come tens of millions of public money ended up in private offshore accounts? Why wouldn’t the government publish its correspondence regarding attempts to reclaim the money?

‘But he did want everyone to know there was nothing sinister about a VIP lane. It was just a way of making sure that people with access to Tory MPs were given priority treatment. But they were still subject to the same low levels of due diligence as everyone else. There were no special favours. And getting money back was proving quite tricky. There was no VIP service for the government to reclaim money that had been obtained for worthless contracts. The VIP channel was strictly one-way. The government’s way of reaching out to business’. I suspect we can safely say he won’t be invited again. Meanwhile, Mone is still trending on Twitter and the scandal doesn’t look like going away any time soon, yet another shaming burden for Sunak to contend with.

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An even more damning article in The Times (worth reading) addresses the mystery of how Mone was ever elevated, the author describing her as ‘the most chaotic person I’d ever met. You occasionally come across people like Mone in interviews. They’re narcissists, obviously — ambitious, flinty, flamboyant. But there’s something else: a nasty whiff, a flicker of anger, a sense that this person might lamp you or knife your Porsche… But it isn’t long before a huge scandal engulfs them’.

https://tinyurl.com/2p9n99my

Something else that must be very worrying for the PM is the fact that nine Tory MPs (and how many more to come?) have already announced that they won’t be standing in the next election. There’s a witty headline (‘I’m a Tory, get me out of here’) to an article which says the number could rise to around 50, as MPs have to declare their intentions soon. Those who have so far gone public include Chloe Smith, the former Work and Pensions Secretary, William Wragg, the chair of the Public Administration Select Committee, Sir Gary Streeter and Dehenna Davison (levelling up department). This cowardly departure of rats from the sinking ship so that they don’t have to face humiliation at the next election is not dissimilar to their erstwhile boss, Boris Johnson, having stepped down from the party leadership contest when he understood that if he’d stood and failed, then his fee for appearances and speeches would plummet. It’s been almost amusing recently to see that (after what must be months of absence) that Johnson has finally been putting himself about in his Uxbridge constituency. He must be feeling the cold draught of insecurity at last. You can always trust the Tories to act cynically in their own interests. Good luck to them in trying to find a job. I’m sure we’re comforted to know that the older ones will be ok (unlike many of those currently in the general workforce): said one Tory ‘Some of those are in their 60s and 70s. If they go, they’ll get a good pension and be able to do the odd bit of work here and there’.

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Of course, the economy and cost of living crisis continue to be major preoccupations on all sides of the political spectrum, especially as the UK is predicted to be in recession until some time in 2024. Something I’ve noticed recently is the gaslighting and scapegoating of the ‘economically inactive’ (as per previous blog posts). As we know, many of those not currently working and receiving out of work benefits are unwell, awaiting NHS treatment and that list is now beyond 7m. Some of them are suffering the effects of Long Covid, and there aren’t nearly enough NHS facilities to treat everyone who needs help. It seems to me that the government is not even thinking about how to resolve this workforce issue but just wants to blame those for its own disastrous mismanagement of the economy. In a speech to business leaders the Bank of England Chief Economist implied that these people are likely to be contributing to interest rate rises and that this economic inactivity ‘could force a response from Threadneedle Street’. But some have left the formal workforce of their own accord, choosing more casual work or reliance on savings, due to a number of factors including poor working conditions and bad management including bullying.

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Another cause of ‘economic inactivity’, this time in younger people, is the crippling cost of childcare, yet something else the government hasn’t addressed. ‘There is no help for mums’ says Felicity Hutchinson, who has just taken the drastic step of giving up her job in a cafe, because reduced hours meant there was no way she could cover the cost of childcare…. Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement this month, which promised to set the UK on a path to sustainable growth, made no mention of childcare – but a vocal coalition of campaigners and experts say the existing system is broken, and fixing it should be a key plank of economic policy. The UK’s patchwork of provision is among the costliest of any developed nation, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’. Of course this situation doesn’t only affect young parents but grandparents called upon who may have had to give up their own work to help with the children.

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Commentator Fraser Nelson points up the short-termism at the heart of the government’s inaction in this area, suggesting that people aren’t getting the necessary help to get back into the workplace ‘because employers and politicians are too quick to reach for the short-term fix of imported labour. We can’t carry on like this. No country can truly prosper while overlooking 13% of its working age population’.

The current situation makes a joke of Chancellor Hunt’s bullish declaration that the government’s priorities ‘are stability, growth, and public services’ when we don’t have any of those things. As for his vow to ‘protect the most vulnerable’, it’s doubtful that those relying on food banks or lying on their floor still waiting for an ambulance after 10 hours would be able to take that seriously.

Not surprisingly, we’re told that Black Friday got off to a sluggish start. Besides the cost of living crisis it might be that customers are now generally more cautious, since consumer organisation Which? said that most of the ‘offers’ were duds. Hospitality traditionally pins its hopes on Christmas as a business generator but not this year: it’s unfortunate that so many establishments are closing because they can’t get staff or afford the bills including heating, but I struggle to sympathise with the upmarket joints which charge up to £200 a head for a meal. How is that ever justifiable? One such owner is ‘very scared’ that a lot of restaurants could collapse in the months after the Christmas. ‘Aussignac’s fears are echoed in cities, towns and villages across Britain – a pattern of closures that many fear is about to accelerate as recession, rent rises and squeezed household spending combine with fraying public transport and rail strikes…. there was “nothing” in chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement to tackle the staffing crisis in the industry’. An industry survey estimates that more than a third of hospitality businesses are at risk of failure in early 2023 due to cost increases.

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So is there anything positive in this unrelenting catalogue of misery? A few things, yes, including (hoping their training will be effective) that north London Islington council is training barbers in mental health issues so they can be even more helpful to their customers, some of whom would be what used to be called ‘hard to reach’. The training has been designed to recognise when customers may be struggling with their mental health. It’s part of a £1.6m three year programme (Young Black Men and Mental Health) organised by the council and the NHS,

But it’s not new: years ago a project at the Maudsley Hospital did the same thing, with good results. ‘Black British barber shops have long been a sanctuary for black men and youth, not only to transform their hair, but to talk about love, financial woes and even mental health’. One barber observed: ‘For the black community, we don’t have a pub culture…The pub culture for the average Brit, it’s not just about drinking. It’s about socialising, it’s about communities coming together’. This work is important, having a creative approach to mental health awareness, especially since ‘black people of African and Caribbean heritage are far more likely to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Black people are also 40% more likely to access treatment through a police or criminal justice route, and less likely to receive psychological therapies. Two-thirds of permanent school exclusions are black pupils, and 60% of black people in England feel they are treated with less respect than others because of their ethnicity, according to data from Islington council’.

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Finally, in its amusing yet eye-rolling ‘spirit of the age’ section, The Week tells us that the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich is limiting visitor numbers to its Moon exhibition on Mondays, specifically to enable influencers and other social media users to get ‘the perfect Insta shot’ of the exhibition’s installation. Apparently the College hopes these people will come on Mondays and so there will be fewer on other days. So now you have it: if you can’t get a ticket on a Monday you’ll know you’ve been bumped in favour of an influencer!

Sunday 13 November

As ever, a week is a long time in politics, and any Conservatives who fantasized that Rishi Sunak would be the one to rescue them from the mire they’ve made must surely now see that as a lost cause. Right from the start his poor judgement has been apparent, including appointing and keeping on Suella Braverman given her previous and new misdemeanours, appointing the three times failure Gavin Williamson to a Cabinet role ‘without portfolio’ then accepting ‘with great sadness’ his resignation days later, then clearly having no grasp of the climate crisis but U-turning on COP27 when he learned Boris Johnson was attending. Not only that but his performances at Prime Minister’s Questions have widely found to be poor, over-relying on sound bites and predictable script (yes, including that one about the vaccine rollout being the fastest in Europe, old news) and unable to respond Starmer’s challenge about appointing Williamson when he’d known the latest about his unacceptable conduct. (What’s surely puzzling is why people like ‘Sir’ Gavin think they can get away with such behaviour, as if they believe the evidence of their incriminating messages will never come to light). The evidence that things did indeed get worse after Boris Johnson is even worse for our mental health.

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Sunak was eviscerated by John Crace, who reckoned ‘There was barely a veneer of plausibility to his leadership. Like Boris Johnson and Librium Liz before him, just lurching from one self-inflicted disaster to another. It’s what happens when you race though the gene pool of talent and wind up in a puddle. He’d chosen a duff cabinet. Of course he had. Because who could possibly have guessed that Gavin Williamson would crash and burn. After all, it wasn’t as if he’d twice previously been sacked…He’s now done three (PMQs) and is getting worse each time – you might have got more sense out of the lettuce… So much for his integrity, professionalism and accountability’. Quite – what we’ve seen so far from this administration (I refuse to call it ‘premiership’) is the very opposite: grubby, dishonest and totally unaccountable.

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We have to wonder whether those (like Education Minister Gillian Keegan this week) wheeled out on the media round to defend the indefensible ever feel a bit silly when a wrongdoer like Williamson finally resigns when the weight of their misdemeanours and colleagues’ wrath makes their position untenable. From her and people like Oliver Dowden we heard that Williamson’s toxic messages to former Whip Wendy Morton were written ‘in the heat of the moment’, when it was clear that they had actually been written over the course of several weeks. ‘He regrets it, he’s apologised’ aka ‘move on’, but many of us are not prepared to just ‘move on’: it’s not just this episode either, but Williamson has had form for years, leading to the speculation that he keeps being awarded stuff (job, knighthood etc) for no good reason solely because ‘he knows where the bodies are buried’. What an own goal – any such appointment is going to bring Parliament and Conservative Party further into disrepute.

It’s shocking that we’re having to get used to the Tory-colluding BBC not reporting issues and events which show their puppet masters in a poor light. Last weekend there was a another massive Tory austerity protest in Central London, barely mentioned by BBC News, yet the Just Stop Oil and other protests involving blocking of motorways and attacking art works get plenty of media attention, the purpose being to use them as a dog whistle to their supporters on the Right. If we’re complaining about road blockers inconveniencing us or soup being thrown at classic paintings our attention is diverted from the government’s threadbare policies on climate change and the cost of living crisis. Another shocking aspect to the protests was journalists being arrested for covering them. Not everyone will be aware that the basis was ‘suspicion of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance’, a new crime introduced as part of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act carrying a jail sentence of up to ten years. When journalists are prevented from doing their jobs it’s a threat to democracy of the kind we don’t expect to see here.

As if this wasn’t enough we have the Public Order Bill still to come (currently at Committee stage in the Lords), targeting protesters and striking workers in key industries. ‘Confirmation also arrived that the government is pursuing legal moves to introduce minimum service levels during strikes by transport workers after months of industrial action by railway workers in disputes over pay, jobs and conditions. Braverman has vowed to use the government’s public order bill to allow secretaries of state to apply for injunctions in the ‘public interest’ where protests are causing or threatening ‘serious disruption or a serious adverse impact on public safety’. It could be argued that it’s not ‘in the public interest’ to shut down legitimate protest of the kind that wakes people up to the existential reality we face – handing out leaflets won’t cut it.

The amount of flak Suella Braverman has been rightly getting over her mismanagement of the asylum system must be making her slightly nervous about her own position now Williamson has gone. This week the detail of asylum system mismanagement came to light, including the fact that ‘new recruits, hired through online advertising and high street recruitment agencies, have no prior experience or knowledge of the asylum system. Many are placed on rolling, temporary contracts, typically for three months. Despite being promised comprehensive training, decision-makers report being “left to fend for themselves” after two days, and having to conduct complex interviews and make “life or death” decisions’. These were people formerly in sales positions with the likes of Tesco and Aldi so it’s not surprising that they find it difficult to cope with totally unfamiliar work. Not only unfamiliar but frighteningly complex, with much hanging on it as they have to make decisions based on every individual’s circumstances.

But it all just shows the low priority the government is giving to this crucial area. It’s an example to bear in mind next time you hear a minister boast in the media about the hundreds being recruited to solve this or that problem. ‘There are currently 1,090 decision makers working to clear the backlog, which now stands at more than 117,000 cases. The backlog is blamed for the significant numbers of asylum seekers being housed in hotels at a cost of more than £5m a day, and the severe overcrowding at the Manston asylum processing centre in Kent’. We need more whistleblowers and former case workers in other areas to reveal what’s really going on behind the government’s often fictitious claims. Needless to say in this case the Home Office spokesman said: “The claims being made here are baseless. We have increased recruitment of asylum case workers by 80% since 2019 … All recruits must meet minimum civil service recruitment standards and are supported with extensive training and support by senior trainers and technical experts’. Which are we inclined to believe?

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A key complaint is about the helpline for asylum seekers, which ‘just rings and rings’, some callers holding for 3 hours and the line going dead after a long hold. It’s interesting (and surely not ideal) that the charity Migrant Help, which runs this line and is funded mostly by the Home Office, is, despite complaints, ‘contracted to run the helpline until 2029 in a deal that could reach £235m, according to the government’s supplier database. Why were they given such a lengthy contract when so many others are determined by the government’s short-term thinking?

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Speculation and debate about why Albanians want so much to come here continue (eg some already have family here and speak English) and two reasons recently given in letters to the press sound about right: the UK not requiring ID cards, then enabling people to use the NHS free of charge and the same thing has facilitated a large black economy in the UK, attractive to those primarily wanting to make money. Another reason suggested is the perception of their own country being a failed state. It certainly sounds like a depopulated one – it must be so depressing for people left behind in those towns and villages. Writes an Albanian in a very worthwhile article: ‘It has been a curse because, contrary to what Tory propaganda would have you believe, nobody enjoys leaving their country just for the sake of annoying people in another. Even putting aside the dangers of unauthorised crossings, and even where legal routes are available, migration tears families apart, and brain drain is an open wound’.

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On the subject of MPs’ conduct, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock must be pleased he’s still trending on Twitter after several days, but usually not for a good reason. He’s rightly received sharp challenges from other I’m a Celebrity contestants and flak from long term critics Covid Bereaved Families for Justice and others. The excuse ‘I fell in love’ is so pathetic an excuse for his hypocritical conduct but even worse is his apparent failure to grasp the enormity of what he presided over, thousands of unnecessary deaths while the families and friends of the deceased were not allowed to see them. A tweeter observed: ‘My mother was in care during Covid. Later died. Had a socially distanced funeral. My father in law died in the pandemic. No funeral at all. But Matt Hancock, the guy who put the rules in – fell in love and so we should all stand round and clap him eating a camel’s penis’. Another said: ‘When John Profumo wanted to say sorry for lying to the House he resigned from office, resigned his seat, and devoted the rest of his life to quiet charity work. Matt Hancock went on I’m a Celebrity’. It beggars belief that Hancock tells fellow contestants that he’s ‘looking for a bit of forgiveness’, that he wants to how his ‘human side’ and that he purports to be claiming he’s raising the profile of dyslexia. He’s long implied that he’s well thought of in his West Suffolk constituency but quite a few there have gone on record to disprove this.

As if he needs any more undesirable news about his Cabinet, it seems Rishi Sunak now has allegations of bullying against Dominic Raab to contend with. It’s alarming to hear that staff at the Department of Justice were offered transfers on hearing of his return to that portfolio. Ironically, an apologist said ‘Dominic makes no apologies for having high standards. He works hard, and expects a lot from his team as well as himself’. Many would struggle to see ‘high standards’ in anything Raab has done, especially his appalling mismanagement of the Afghanistan withdrawal operation.

Amid continuing industrial unrest, more strikes scheduled, there’s increasing speculation as to the contents of Jeremy Hunt’s long anticipated Autumn Statement. The independent Resolution Foundation calculates that the Truss government was responsible for about £30bn of the fiscal hole which the Treasury puts at £60bn (£10bn higher than some other estimates), and which Hunt will have to tackle in the AS on Thursday. He’s typically prepared the ground by regularly alluding to ‘eye-watering decisions’ aka cuts, and the so-called £50bn black hole in the public finances, when it’s known that a) these would be unnecessary if the government went after tax avoiders and scrapped non-dom status and b) the comparison of national and domestic finance is a false one and ‘books’ don’t have to be ‘balanced’. A tweeter riffed on one of the Tory mantras: ‘We are a resilient and compassionate country. Apparently. But not all that clever – twelve years of cuts, low investment and lazy thinking has left us in danger of. . . a further decade of cuts, low investment and lazy thinking’.

This is a convenient myth long entrenched by Conservative administrations in order to justify cuts. Yet again economist Richard Murphy has made this point: ‘Jeremy Hunt is saying we cannot max out the national credit card this morning. This is total nonsense. There is no national credit card. Instead it’s the job of government to make the money we use. And since it can always make that money it can never max out on credit.’ The Friday Independent’s number of the day was 120 – cuts expected to hit this number of government services this winter. There are fears that civil service strikes could cause these services to ‘grind to a halt’: what happens when the country more or less stops functioning?

‘On Thursday Hunt will announce £25bn of tax rises, alongside £35bn of departmental spending cuts as he aims to restore at least some of his party’s battered reputation for economic management. The vast majority of the rises will be so-called “stealth taxes”, achieved by freezing thresholds on income tax, national insurance, inheritance tax, pensions savings and the threshold at which companies have to register for VAT. By not raising these thresholds by the rate of inflation, more people are brought into the tax net or dragged into paying at higher rates’. On energy, we can bet he won’t call it a windfall tax but tax on energy company profits of up to 70% could be seen that way.

‘Hunt is also likely to impose a higher tax rate on the profits of energy companies, raising the extra levy from 25% to 30%, lasting for another six years, on top of the 40% that companies already pay, meaning an effective rate of 70%. In addition the Treasury is examining potential changes to taxes on share dividends, and looking at lowering the threshold for capital gains tax, another move that would prove deeply unpopular in the Tory party’. This is the rub, though: it’s high time Conservatives were prepared to do things which are sensible but which won’t be popular in their ranks. For a change put the country first, not the Party.

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What’s extraordinary, given the state of the NHS, is that twice-AWOL Health Secretary Steve Barclay has vowed not to ask the Chancellor for additional funds for his Department, insisting instead that economies can be made via ‘efficiency savings’. Could this set in motion a macho competition between ministers, those desperate for funds being made to look feeble in comparison, when it’s NHS staff having to bear the brunt of Barclay’s politicking and currying of favour? ‘His remarks started “robust” negotiations with NHS England, which has warned that cancer care, GPs and mental healthcare face cutbacks without £6 billion to £7 billion more to deal with surging inflation and pay rises. Amanda Pritchard, chief executive of NHS England, said in a warning to Barclay that savings from bureaucracy could “only be a margin of an already small margin”….One source said that in a meeting with Hunt last week, Treasury officials had been ‘pleasantly amazed’ by Barclay’s willingness to live within his existing budget. What hubris: of course it’s not Barclay himself who has to ‘live within his existing budget’. What more is he going to put NHS staff through?

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Following hot on the heels of his lightning visit to COP27 at Sharm-el-Sheikh, Rishi Sunak is flying to Bali (Indonesia has held the Presidency for 2022) for the G20 meeting scheduled for 15^th-16^th November. We will wait to see whether his performance there is any better than that at COP, his slot there apparently having had to be quickly shoehorned into a quiet period because of his late decision to attend. At least he won’t have Boris Johnson’s presence to contend with (as far as we know!). It was so transparent last weekend that Johnson’s main intention of attending COP27 was, as his speech showed, to suggest how marvellous COP26 which he presided over had been, such an air of positivity etc etc, and what rubbish this one is proving. Quite an expensive way of doing this but not for Johnson’s pocket, of course. Meanwhile, many are up in arms about Johnson’s resignation honours list: the honours system has long been a joke and this one makes it even more so. I noticed that some media sources have recently alluded to Williamson as Mr, not Sir: I wonder whether the latest batch of honours will carry such little weight that these Boris gongs could be disregarded. Plain ‘Nadine Dorries’, anyone?

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Recently the rapid change of prime ministers has focused attention on their choice of rousing music to accompany their campaigns and mountings of the lectern. Some examples of musicians and composers being very annoyed at their music being associated with politics they personally condemn came centre stage recently, for example Liz Truss’s choice of Moving On Up (by M People founder Mike Pickering). An interesting article analyses various other examples and Norman Cook (aka Fat Boy Slim) lamented: ‘You quickly find out that you’re powerless. The way copyright works, all you can do is ask them politely to cease and desist, but normally by the time you find out about it the damage is done – there’s that association. All you can do is go on the record saying: “It’s not in my name: I don’t agree with this.”…. Not that the band could do anything about it: the choice of music at such events is down to the discretion of the venue, not the label or artist (though it’s a different story for party political broadcasts). But just as there is a tradition of political protest music, there’s an equally long one of musicians protesting against politicians’ use of their songs’. What I don’t understand is why this is up to the venue when surely copyright law should be protecting the composers of said works? How galling it must be to know nothing in advance but to switch on the news and suddenly hear your own song blasting forth in the service of boosting a politician you despite.

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Finally, it’s good news that the street artist, Banksy, has left evidence of his presence in Ukraine, following the appearance of a series of murals in the town of Borodianka, near Kyiv. ‘One mural depicted a man resembling the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, being thrown to the floor during a judo match with a young boy’. Banksy confirmed his presence there via his Instagram account. I wonder if he deliberately chose this location because it was so badly impacted by Russian action. ‘Russian troops, rolling in from the Belarusian border 200 miles to the north, occupied the town in February. Together with Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel, Borodianka was one of the towns hardest hit by Russia’s bombardments. It was liberated in April’. I hope we get to hear what the locals think of these murals!

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Saturday 5 November

Yet another rollercoaster fortnight has passed, during which we’ve seen the accession of Rishi (which some erroneously persist in calling ‘election’); dismay in many quarters at his Titanic deckchair rearrangement including the reappointment of disgraced former Home Secretary Suella Braverman; the delay of the Autumn Statement until 17^th November; heavy media coverage of the £50bn ‘black hole’ in the public finances, softening us up for massive cuts when any shortfall (this idea of any deficit has been discredited by numerous economists) could be corrected by measures like removing non-dom status and pursuing tax evaders; legislation effectively deleting 2400 EU laws remaining post-Brexit; the progress of the draconian Public Order bill; schools, the NHS and social care in crisis; disgraced former Health Minister Matt Hancock bringing his party and Parliament further into disrepute by participating in I’m a Celebrity following the public snub from Sunak and failing to get a Cabinet job; and the continuing and deepening migrant crisis which has shown Braverman in an even worse light regarding the conditions at the Manston immigration centre. Added to this the news that the UK is up for the longest recession in 100 years as the Bank of Englandraised interest rates to 3%. Phew.

This constant state of upheaval is bad for our mental health but it’s unlikely to end any time soon. Global ‘headwinds’ are reinforcing profound weaknesses in UK governance and its economy, aggravated by the evidence that no one is really in charge. We hear that Collins Dictionary has named ‘permacrisis’ (defined as an extended period of instability and insecurity) as their Word of the Year. This phenomenon is discussed by Jenny McCartney in an editorial for The Week. Citing the British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak’s views on Western distinctions between ‘solid’ (safe and steady like the US and much of Europe) and ‘liquid’ states (where sound governance, human rights and free speech could rarely be guaranteed), she says Shafak now finds this to be an artificial distinction. Effectively we are all ‘living in liquid times’, characterised by the rise of disinformation, demagoguery and divided identifies, with the capacity to undermine any political system. Identifying the factors contributing to the UK’s increasingly ‘molten’ state, Brexit is one of the key ones, ‘opening up a glaring new chasm in society, exposing and exacerbating differences over culture, security and national identity…. ‘Changes in policies and personnel now happen at a breakneck pace on an updated Twitter thread, generating gossip and drama in their turn..But ordinary people must endure the real consequences of this jittery churn, which plays out in nervous markets, escalating bills and atrophied institutions’. To counter this, she rightly suggests that politicians need to engage in thoughtful and long-term initiatives ‘to strengthen our communal bonds’. But there’s little evidence of this government’s willingness or capacity to change from their laissez faire short termism. ‘Jittery churn’ is such a good way of putting it.

It was worth watching Braverman’s lengthy and forensic interrogation by Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, during which Braverman repeatedly used inflammatory language to describe asylum seekers and on her fibs and avoidances being exposed, tried to portray herself as the victim of a ‘broken’ system. This prompted MPs and others to demand ‘who broke it?’ when, after 12 years of Conservative government, the answer is clear. It emerged that only 4% of those arriving on small boats have their applications processed within a year and that Mitie, a company headed by a Tory donor which benefited from crony contracting during the pandemic, has the contract for running Manston (only meant to hold 1600 but accommodating 4,000 when the scandal broke). No surprise there.

Despite the Home Office denials, we now know from the police that the firebombing of the Dover processing centre was motivated by extreme right-wing terrorist ideology. Again, no surprise when we witness the escalation of incendiary language in relation to immigration by some media and organisations, a key example being Nigel Farage on GB News. What’s depressing to realise is this government has a vested interest in not improving the asylum system or conditions in immigration centres, so they can continue to use the immigration bogeyman in their messaging to supporters. Some commentators have suggested that the Tories are now doing so badly in the polls that this ‘illegal immigrants’ gaslighting is the only weapon they have left in their armoury.

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Adding insult to injury, the Independent’s number of the day on Friday was £3,500: the hourly cost of flying a Chinook helicopter, the transport selected to take Braverman the 20 miles from Dover to Manston on Thursday, where she refused media questions. A shocking example of the Home Office’s policy in tatters was the group of asylum seekers dumped outside London’s Victoria Station, with no suitable clothing and nowhere to go.What would have happened if a local charity hadn’t stepped in to help them? Curiosity has been piqued as to just why so many Albanians feel the need to make this journey when their country is not at war, a question astonishingly not asked recently of the Albanian PM, who complained about his people being unfairly associated with criminal gangs and drug dealing. A journalist based in Albania gave an interesting interview on Radio 4’s PM programme, saying that Albanians have always wanted to leave their country (as if it’s part of their culture and DNA, almost) but it also has to do with severely depressed wages, poor working conditions, the lingering effects of communism and that political upheaval, domestic violence and persecution of the LGBT community. We have to wonder what the Albanian government is doing to halt this diaspora, another interview revealing that some areas and villages were becoming depopulated.

Anyone seriously believing that ‘Rishi’ would prove some kind of saviour, ‘a safe pair of hands’ to quote that cliché, would now be disillusioned, not only by some serious mistakes within his first few days (like reappointing Braverman, demoting his climate change minister and refusing to attend COP27, only U-turning on this when it emerged that Boris Johnson was attending) but also by his poor performance in the Commons including Prime Minister’s Questions. Jacob Rees-Mogg resigned before he could be pushed and while Therese Coffey was ‘demoted’ to the environment portfolio, which many consider disastrous, Sunak saw fit to return Steve Barclay to Health and Social Care. Remember when he briefly occupied this role before and was AWOL for weeks? It seems the same thing is happening now as, unlike the others, he hasn’t appeared in the media. This is a disgrace when the NHS is in crisis and we need to know what his ideas are about its improvement. (Yes, we know the Tories want to privatise it but they can’t admit this openly so at least will pretend to be committed to resolving its intractable issues). Perhaps media-shy Barclay is still recovering from being accosted by that angry woman outside a hospital who demanded to know what he was doing about the NHS crisis before bellowing ‘You’re doing BUGGER ALL’.

As the much-criticised Oliver Dowden, Dominic Raab and Michael Gove returned to Cabinet, one Twitter user summed up the feelings of many: ‘Just by moving the pieces around board won’t fix the fundamental problems: a divided majority party in Parliament with three Parliamentary factions disconnected from its membership. Massive economic turbulence. Huge debt. Low growth. Workforce shortage’.One of the most cringeworthy performances I’ve seen in a long time is that of new Business Secretary Grant Shapps, whose chirpy ‘elevator pitch’ is available to watch on YouTube. Let’s hope that at some point the media assess his actual performance against his pitch. We sometimes get reminded that UK politics hasn’t always been like this clutch of pretentious and disingenuous lightweights. Last night Dame Margaret Beckett was on the BBC’s Any Questions, an example of the intelligent and thinking politician we used to have before the fibbing, gaslighting and scripted sound bite merchants took hold, aided by media collusion.

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Another major source of Sunak disillusionment is the unacceptable situation of having claimed ‘a mandate’ from 2019, no longer valid, but also stepping away from what he promised during his leadership campaign. TheIndependent tells us: ‘A senior spokesperson for the prime minister said he was no longer committed to any of the promises made during his bid for the Tory leadership this summer, which included a cut to 16p in the basic rate of income tax by 2029 and a massive increase in offshore wind power’. Such developments have strengthened even further calls for a General Election, and those only listening to BBC News might not appreciate the extent of this as yet again the BBC is not reporting one of the many People’s Assembly demonstrations taking place today. The Larry No 10 Cat parody Twitter account observed: ‘417 years ago today a gang led by Robert Catesby and including Guy Fawkes attempted to destroy parliament. In their memory the Conservative Party now attempt the same most weeks’.

Very good news, then, to see that Labour MP Richard Burgon has been granted a Parliamentary debate on making the constitutional changes needed to allow people to directly call a General Election when the vast majority have lost faith in the Government. ‘That there’s no mechanism for people to do this is a scar on our democracy’. Quite so. With a Tory majority this initiative is unlikely to get that far but it does raise the profile of our democratic deficit, especially when the media refuse to report on the thousands attending demos to campaign for it. Meanwhile, government corruption and cronyism continue to rule the day. Just one example is that of ex health minister Steve Brine, who took a paid job as adviser to drug firm Sigma without telling ACOBA (the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments). He then arranged a meeting between Sigma and vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi, the company later ‘winning’ a £100k Covid contract. Brine has just been made chair of the Health Select Committee.

There seems no limit to deluded ministers’ hubris: in the week we learn that hospitals and care homes have still not received any of the £500m emergency fund promised by the government in September to prevent the NHS becoming overwhelmed this winter, we see that the demoted Health Minister, Therese Coffey, wrote to thank her ministerial team, saying what a lot they achieved in 7 weeks. The background is that more than 13,000 of the 100,000 NHS hospital beds in England currently contain ‘delayed discharge’ patients, leading to A&E units becoming too crowded and ambulance staff unable to hand over patients. ‘As a direct result, thousands of 999 patients are suffering potential ‘severe harm’ every month because ambulances are stuck outside hospitals’. With NHS and social care chiefs saying things have never been this bad and calling for the new minister, Steve Barclay, to make this an urgent priority, the Department of Health and Social Care, when challenged, predictably said: ‘We are working to finalise details on distribution and these will be announced as soon as possible’. Clearly this time not working ‘at pace’ or ‘straining every sinew’.

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Describing several sources of a Westminster consensus last week, it’s worth reading this marvellous take-down of Matt Hancock by John Crace. ‘…Because the biggest outbreak of agreement was around Door Matt Hancock. You couldn’t find anyone who didn’t think he was a complete prat. His vanity meets hubris in I’m a Celebrity. Poor Matt. Delusional to the last. He wanted to connect with the real people, he said. And now was the time to do it. When the UK was still in complete chaos and no one would miss his valuable input as an MP. That much was true. It was a chance for the little people to hear about his fantastic new book, Pandemic Diaries. The everyday story about a man promoted so far out of his depth he ended up killing loads of elderly Covid patients by sending them back to care homes. A man so needy he imagined the public might fall in love with him. A man so dim he couldn’t see he would end up being made to do the bushtucker trial night after night. A man destined to disappear into obscurity as he chokes on kangaroo scrotum. Westminster won’t miss him’. Ouch!

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The book, scheduled to appear on 6 December to cash in on Christmas, has a cover picture of Hancock, posing to look macho and authoritative, which he never does in the flesh: it will no doubt attract further ire from his critics, especially the Covid 19 Bereaved Families for Justice. Interestingly, its co author is the right-wing journalist Isabel Oakeshott (he didn’t feel able to pen this on his own?) and part of Biteback Publishing’s blurb reads: ‘This unique book, based on the author’s contemporaneous records of those extraordinary months, candidly recounts first-hand the most important events and decisions as they unfolded throughout this unprecedented global emergency’. Hmmm…‘the most important events’? Will this include the crony contracting and cynical discharge of Covid patients to care homes? I can’t wait to see the reviews. The real ones, that is. The blurb already contains one we may have cause to question, by Michael Gove: ‘This candid account tells the story of what it was like to be at the heart of things. It’s the first draft of history and will help anyone fighting like we did to handle a pandemic’. Many might suggest they weren’t ‘fighting’ and they didn’t ‘handle’ it.

The government has already restricted democratic protest through its draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, enabling, for example, the police to ban demos they consider ‘too noisy’. It’s now taking its Public Order bill through Parliament (2^nd reading in the Lords last week), designed to prevent climate change and other protesters from causing disruption by ‘locking on’ etc. A petition signed by more than 300,000 people and coordinated by Liberty and Greenpeace was handed into the Home Office, demanding the Bill to be dropped. During the Lords debate Conservative peer Andrew Sharpe, a parliamentary under secretary of state for the Home Office, said: ‘Protesters can continue to have their voices heard but…they will not be allowed to wreak havoc on the lives of others while doing so’. Perhaps he deliberately missed the point that these days protesters against anything have to resort to measures some might consider extreme as it’s the only way to get people to sit up and take notice.

It’s ironic that today has seen another big pro-democracy demonstration underway in Central London which so far (as so often in the past) hasn’t been reported by the public service broadcaster (BBC), which is repeatedly stressing its impartiality during its 100 anniversary celebrations. The BBC’s mission is ‘to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain’, but nothing is ever done to address the insidious spread of right-wing bias reinforced by the appointments of the current Tory-supporting chairman (Richard Sharp) and director general (Tim Davie).

Expands the mission statement: ‘Its content should be provided to the highest editorial standards. It should offer a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other United Kingdom news providers, using the highest calibre presenters and journalists, and championing freedom of expression’. But what we’ve seen on Radio 4 at least is the steady dumbing down of ‘flagship’ news programmes, poor quality journalism exemplified by presenters taking too much at face value and failing to challenge lies, multiple contributions from right-wing think tanks without stating their mission or sources of funding, and ‘balance’ interpreted as featuring several right-wing contributors and no one from the Left. This is what you get when the public broadcaster has been politicised but the fact that many only get their news from the BBC and the right-wing press means people can be collectively brainwashed, an attack on democracy, as is evident from the inaccuracies trotted out about immigration and the economy, for example.

Finally, it’s interesting to see that two representatives of the same socio-political class which has produced many of our politicians have set up a support group for men who’ve been made to feel ashamed of their privilege or been left numb by their boarding school education. We’re told that the Privileged Man group, which charged an annual fee of £1995, holds weekend retreats and Zoom calls for its members. It’s long been known by psychotherapists who work with Boarding School Syndrome that the damage caused by early separation from parents, giving rise to a premature and emotion-denying need to survive, can be considerable. A substantial number also experienced physical and sexual abuse, leading to lifelong relationship difficulties. Many products of this education form our ‘ruling class’, the unfortunate effects we’ve seen in the behaviours of Boris Johnson and his colleagues. The Privileged Man website states that it is ‘a movement of men committed to empathy, honesty, accountability and creating positive impact. Men who join the movement have seen another way to live and are ready to commit to themselves’. Good luck to them –they shouldn’t have any shortage of members although those most in need of it probably won’t be signing up any time soon.

Saturday 22 October

Of all the stormy weeks we’ve seen in UK politics recently, this last fortnight must qualify as the most tumultuous, during which, astonishingly, we’ve seen the PM’s sacking of her Chancellor, her absence from the House for Labour’s Urgent Question, (leaving Penny Mordaunt to endlessly stonewall the inevitable questions), poor performance at her second PMQs, the resignation of Suella Braverman, debacle at the fracking vote and finally her own resignation. Far right policy, as aggressively pushed by the ERG and IEA, has manifestly failed, but significantly, the damage inflicted on the economy and household finances can’t be rolled back. Furthermore, regular government business isn’t getting done so there’s a double whammy of damage we all have to contend with alongside the continuing political and economic instability. No wonder the UK is a laughing stock abroad. When not doubling down on the political turmoil, the media are reporting the shocking state of health and social care, how a Financial Conduct Authority survey shows 8m to be struggling to pay their bills and upheavals in the housing market.

Martin Kettle stresses that this isn’t just a short term situation: ‘Traumatic events bequeath traumatised legacies. We know this in our personal lives. The same is also true for nations and their politics’. He spells out how the trauma of the Truss era will affect us for years to come, getting to the mental health deficits the political wrangling, incompetence and corruption are inflicting but which don’t get much of an outing in the media. ‘We need to ask non-partisan questions about the longer-term effect of prime ministers toppling, ministers coming and going, and the experience of watching an economy on a knife-edge. This requires us to step back and think about how the events of 2022 may shape those who will govern for the rest of this decade and beyond’.

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Despite the clarion calls for a general election, the Tories insist on clinging onto power, subjecting this country to further international ridicule via yet another leadership contest. You couldn’t make it up that besides Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt, Boris Johnson (who was, disgracefully, on a Caribbean holiday during parliamentary time) is being supported to stand. Candidates must secure 100 nominations from Tory MPs and we hear that ‘Boris’, rushing back from his holiday, has already secured the requisite number. Wouldn’t you just know that Priti Patel is one of them? It’s the only way she can guarantee a job. But there’s still the little matter of the Privileges Committee investigation of Johnson and his misdemeanours, the Committee apparently having amassed plenty of written evidence and soon to start taking oral evidence.

At least some Tories have come out with honest opinions. ‘Jesse Norman, a senior Tory MP and Foreign Office minister, said returning to Johnson would be a disaster. “There are several very good potential candidates for Conservative leader. But choosing Boris now would be – and I say this advisedly – an absolutely catastrophic decision…..William Hague, the former party leader, told Times Radio that bringing back Johnson was the worst idea he had heard in his 46 years as a member of the Conservatives, and would cause a “death spiral” for the party’.

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As he did back in August, columnist and commentator Matthew Parris not only eviscerates ‘Boris’ but also suggests that getting Truss elected was a cynical ploy to enable his own return. ‘No conspiracist in normal times, I have become convinced Johnson and his gang promoted Truss’s candidacy not because they thought she was any good but because they knew she wasn’t. Her failure was to be the launchpad for his return. I cannot disclose what has persuaded me Johnson thought she’d fail, but it confirmed all my suspicions. He knew that only against the backdrop of total mess could he look good’.

Narcissism is at the heart of his strategy, though, and this is manifestly unsuited to the PM role. ‘As for Johnson, he’s just playing with us again. If he loses, or withdraws, it’s only a game. But if he wins, it’s still a game. Whatever, we’ll be talking about him, and for Johnson that’s the thrill. Failure would be a pity but obscurity would be worse. Fame or infamy — it’s all in the mix for Johnson because both bring what Johnson most wants: attention. There’s a part of this man that would enjoy the walk to the scaffold: centre stage to the last. Weighed against the horror of being forgotten, Johnson sees the upside of a car crash’.

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A Radio 4 listener tweeted what many must be feeling: ‘At the end of the day, it does not matter which Tory becomes the next PM. They have all been part of the 12yr destruction of the economy, the lies, and corruption. It’s not just the PM, the whole Tory Party are rotten to the core’. Another said: ‘Tuning into Radio 4 Today, I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Johnson backers are slithering out into the daylight. He was a charlatan, a hedonistic libertine & a proven liar. Sixty (60) members of his administration resigned en masse – refusing to work with him any longer. No. No. No’.

Predictably, the straw grasping Daily Mail asks whether Johnson and Sunak could unite to ‘save the Tories’. Again and again we have this emphasis on the Party, the Party, revealing what the priority is in some quarters and it’s not the country. The Sun’s headline – ‘I’m up for it’- captures how Johnson sees this situation, language more suited to a mates’ booze up than a leadership contest.

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Although it’s a few days old now, it’s worth quoting veteran (and usefully outspoken) MP Sir Charles Walker, who pins part of the blame on the Party opportunists we’ve long come to recognise. ‘I’m livid and I really shouldn’t say this but all those people that put Liz Truss in No 10, I hope it was worth it, it was worth it for the ministerial red box, as it was worth it to sit round the cabinet table, because the damage they have done to our party is extraordinary’. When asked when Truss should quit, he replied: ‘Well I hope, by tomorrow … She needs to go. She shouldn’t have been made prime minister’. Meanwhile, new Home Secretary Grant Shapps is still digesting his sudden promotion: ‘There is a very important job to do.. People expect their government to ensure there is security for them. It is a great office of state. I am obviously honoured to do that role. I am going to get on with that serious role right now’. The way things are going he’ll be lucky if he has a chance to ‘get on’ with the serious role. Or worse: he might ‘get on’ with it in the same avoidant way he dealt with the rail unions in his Transport Secretary gig.

We have to wonder, though, whether politicians or the media recognise what’s going on from a psychological and organisational point of view. What we’re seeing is a classic example of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s Basic Assumption theory, which identified three kinds of defensive and unhealthy behaviour governing groups. It seems to me we are currently witnessing two of these: dependency and fight or flight. In the first, the group is always hoping and waiting for a better, stronger leader to save them from the mess. Individuals are passive, waiting to be rescued (in this case by ‘Boris’) but no leader is ever good enough and leaders are replaced over and over again. The ‘flight or flight’ behaviour is all about group preservation at whatever cost, focusing energy on an enemy, eg Labour, EU, migrants, benefits scroungers etc. Externally this group is energetic but internally it fights itself (ferrets in a sack) and abdicates responsibility. The first step of changing a damaging situation is to recognise it, but this doesn’t look like happening here any time soon.

One reason will be level of delusion amongst Tory supporters: they really want to believe ‘Boris’ can ride to the rescue and that his many lies and misdemeanours can be swept under the carpet. A commentator tweeted: “Why was Boris Johnson forced to resign as PM?” Tory MP: “Because some of my colleagues stopped believing in him.” Like Brexit and Father Christmas, you just have to believe!’

Then there’s the myth of ‘the mandate’, which has become a mantra amongst Tories and which is never challenged by collusive media presenters. COP supremo Alok Sharma tweeted: ‘I am backing Boris Johnson – he won a mandate from the electorate in 2019. We need to get back to delivering on the Conservative manifesto we were elected on’. What these people don’t seem to get is that a 2019 mandate doesn’t and cannot equate to a 2022 mandate, especially given the extent of incompetence and corruption in between.

As the weeks pass more attention is being to the need for ‘warm banks’, offering comfort to those unable to afford heating in their own homes. Libraries have been cited as a good venue for this but in my area at least there’s been no information from the council about this being in the offing. In many areas there’s been so much neglect of these important community hubs as they’ve long been seen as an easy target for cost cutting. At least there’s some guidance available, finance expert Martin Lewis having teamed up with CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) to produce a guide called A Warm Welcome. Lewis said: ‘Of course, warm spaces are far from a panacea, not everyone will be able to get to warm spaces, not everyone will want to, and people will still need to heat their homes sometimes.. Yet I think they will turn out to be crucial extra help to get a decent number of vulnerable people through the winter’. A survey earlier this year found that nearly 60% of library authorities were actively considering taking part in a warm bank scheme: I’d have thought such a survey needs updating and a listing produced detailing the various facilities. No surprise that only 4% of library leaders expected to receive any extra funding for this activity.

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Following a recent piece here about the Booker prize shortlist, we now know the winner: ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka has won the Booker prize for fiction. The judges praised the ‘ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques’. The judging panel’s chair, Neil MacGregor, chair of said the novel was chosen because ‘it’s a book that takes the reader on a rollercoaster journey through life and death right to what the author describes as the dark heart of the world…And there the reader finds, to their surprise, joy, tenderness, love and loyalty’. Sounds interesting but wonder how readable this novel is. I’ve found so many unreadable in the past.

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Finally, amid news of government ‘investment zones’ threatening environmental protections, it’s very cheering to hear about a new nature reserve being created from an industrial wasteland in Greater Manchester. Called the Flashes of Wigan and Leigh, the 738 hectare wetland was formed from flooding of land which had subsided following intensive coal mining in the 19^th century. But during the 20^th, the site has become home for various species including rare ones like bitterns and water voles. It would be marvellous to see a bittern, known for their distinctive booming call, as they’re so heavily camouflaged they’re hard to spot. The site has now been declared a National Nature Reserve by Natural England – I hope it does well for visitors and supporters!

Sunday 9 October

Another turbulent few weeks have passed, the new Chancellor and PM going AWOL for weeks after their ‘election’ before delivering a devastating ‘mini-budget’, the significant feature of which was subjected to a U-turn less than two days later. Within a month of taking office, Liz Truss was fighting for her political life, many of her own party wanting to get rid of her and this was before her wooden and cliché ridden media interviews and conference speech. Liz Truss’s Cabinet seems to be on a war footing and some commentators have raised the constitutional question as to how she could be removed. If Truss can’t get her budget through the Commons (and many of her own party plan to vote against it despite party chairman Jake Berry’s threat that they would lose the Whip), the King could dissolve Parliament and call an election. So far King Charles seems compliant, eg accepting the PM’s ‘advice’ not to attend COP27 despite having received a personal invitation, but at least one commentator has said he is entitled to exercise more constitutional power than the Queen chose to.

It seems strange that Truss and Kwarteng (lack of objectivity within their privileged bubble, surrounded by sycophants?) failed to anticipate the public and political opprobrium, panic and market frenzy which their fiscal intervention would unleash. The measures within their ‘mini-budget’ (so badged in order to evade Office for Budget Responsibility analysis) went against what so many economists recommended and ministers’ attempts to rescue it via the reminder of ‘supply side measures’ and a full Budget to come understandably didn’t cut much ice. As one tweeter said:‘The pound has crashed to an all time low, alarming the markets, experts and politicians alike. They had weeks to prepare for this, while remaining schtumm about their plans – did they seriously do no research to assess what the reactions to their plans might be??’ The tussle between the Treasury and Bank of England led to a Bank intervention to steady the ship, humiliating for Truss and Kwarteng, and we have to remember (since the sacking of Tom Scholar) that there’s a vacuum at the top of the Treasury. But no worries (joke) as Truss’s Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Chris Philp, and Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Andrew Griffith) continue to spout their ideological nonsense over the airwaves at every opportunity.

The threat to make further cuts to public services (£50bn a year according to economists) has to be taken seriously: some senior Tories (like Jake Berry and Steve Baker) have felt the need to apologise or step back from previous tactless and heartless comments. At some point robotic sycophant Simon Case, Cabinet Secretary, may have to do the same, having declared at the time of the budget that government departments needed the ‘fat’ trimming off them. Note the dog whistle assumption of ‘what taxpayers expect’: ‘There are plenty of areas where the government can become more efficient. We’re continually reviewing to make sure we’re getting good value for money and I think that’s what taxpayers expect’. What he doesn’t suggest, of course (funny, that) is the huge tax avoidance by non-doms and how massive public sector cuts might be unnecessary if the UK was to remove non-dom status.

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Of course the top rate of tax U-turn would be no comfort for those desperately worried about their mortgages or even whether new applicants could get them at all. Andy Verity, BBC Economics correspondent, said: ‘Mortgage lenders are pulling deals because the cost of borrowing over 2 or 5 years has shot up so fast along with gilt yields. That’s happening regardless of attempts at calming by BoE (Bank of England). I can’t remember seeing that before – and I’ve been reporting financial markets for 27 years’. It seems quite a few of us are now convinced the Conservatives, knowing they’re finished, are deliberately making themselves unelectable and going for broke. Nevertheless, Truss sticks to her ‘growth, growth, growth’ mantra and her dog whistle whipping up of hatred for the ‘anti-growth coalition’.

One of the oddest things about recent times is realising this government, like the last one, are immune to shame, seeing their approach as demonstrating courage and badge of honour rather than the reckless abdication of responsibility it actually is. Times journalist Matthew Parris is one of the latest to deconstruct the ‘anti-growth coalition’ bogeyman, a growing banner under which Liz Truss has placed environmental bodies such as the RSPB and National Trust, which blame her plans for ‘environmental vandalism’. Whereas Parris describes a large swathe of the Conservative Party as coming under this banner, Byline Times suggests that Truss is its real leader. ‘However, the list of people who the Prime Minister and her party have identified as the “enemies of enterprise” over the course of the Conservative Party Conference this week is rather long. By my count, it appears to include anyone who lives in north London, broadcasters, environmentalists, students, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Bank of England, financial traders, Twitter users and the former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries’. The paper details how successive Conservative administrations have worked against growth at the same time as pursuing austerity and points out that for such demonising to work people have to be on her side, whereas a poll last week showed 73% of voters have an unfavourable view of Truss.

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The media have had a field day analysing the character and approach of both Truss and Kwarteng, anonymous comments about the latter confirming what we know to be the Eton ethos: to cultivate effortless superiority. Said one Tory: ‘I found him very odd to deal with … but there is an intellectual arrogance about Kwasi and Liz [Truss] and Jacob [Rees-Mogg] and those four to five people at the top. They genuinely do think they are cleverer than anyone else and that other people’s views are slightly tiresome’. A second former cabinet minister told another MP just last week they had found him ‘extremely difficult’ to get on with and a third Tory MP who has worked closely with Kwarteng called him ‘the worst combination of laziness and arrogance’. Who does all this remind you of? Perhaps the worst example of this arrogance, though, is the evidence (apparently not investigated) of his hobnobbing with financiers over champagne, leading to suggestions of millions being made by shorting the pound. Insider trading is a crime but it’s doubtful Kwarteng thought he was ‘doing anything wrong’, or if he was aware what his behaviour amounted to, didn’t care.

What’s been shocking in recent weeks is seeing just how much Truss is in hock to the right-wing ERG (European Research Group misnomer) and even more the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank, whose agenda is to shrink the State. They run her and must have been mightily displeased at the top rate of tax U-turn. It’s not unlikely that she’s tried to placate them by withdrawing the plan (existence denied) for a public information campaign on reducing energy use, as this is antithetical to IEA’s abhorrence of the ‘nanny state’. In previous Conservative administrations this ideology was an undercurrent, exposed by certain journalists but now it’s out there in plain sight so even those who don’t keep abreast of politics will know about it. Linked to the mini budget,Kwarteng is expected to announce changes in eight areas including planning, business regulation, childcare, immigration, agricultural productivity and financial services. On the surface this sounds good but it could well be bad news as he will be influenced (dictated to?) by the Free Market Forum (FMF), an offshoot of the IEA, which wants an end to free childcare hours, the release of green belt land for housing, an end to corporation tax and removal of the requirement for teacher training qualifications for graduates.

Worryingly, the FMF has substantial Conservative support: ‘60 Tory MPs among its parliamentary supporters including Truss, Kwarteng, the deputy prime minister, Thérèse Coffey, the levelling up secretary, Simon Clarke, and the trade secretary, Kemi Badenoch. The former chancellor Norman Lamont and ex-minister John Redwood are also backers, while her No 10 deputy chief of staff, Ruth Porter, is on the advisory board’.

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Rafael Behr puts it more strongly, suggesting that Truss and her colleagues are addicted to this approach: ‘Liz Truss’s Tories are higher than ever on ideology – and they’re refusing to sober up’, spelling out the dangers. ‘Under pressure to balance the books, ministers rifle through the policy cabinet for something to sustain the ideological buzz. The hand inevitably alights on the bottle containing benefit cuts (or, as it is marked on the label, a decision not to peg welfare payments to rising inflation)…… Liz Truss’s leadership signals descent into the chronic phase, where craving for a hit overcomes all faculties of reason. The prime minister and her chancellor have already blown their stash of credibility on a binge of unfunded tax cuts. Then the debt collectors came – literally, in the form of soaring bond yields’.

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On Sunday veteran Tory ‘Sir’ Charles Walker was interviewed on Radio 4, commenting on the three articles in the Sunday papers by Cabinet ministers, all pleading for party unity. Their desperate use of the Keir Starmer in Downing Street bogeyman illustrates how much they fear losing their seats because of their policies and their infighting. Walker said, with no seeming awareness of his party’s self-obsessed conduct over the summer months, that the government must focus on the anxious population rather than its own internal affairs. A bit late for that.

So what have we got to look forward over the coming months? More of this government (even if Liz Truss is offloaded as PM) peddling its far right agenda, more Cabinet infighting, ongoing cost of living crisis, strikes in more sectors including the NHS continuing or being balloted on, three hour power cuts, a worsening Covid (and possibly flu) wave ( 9,631 Covid patients were in hospital by Wednesday), yet more Tory donors entering the House of Lords (already bigger than many countries’ second chambers) and a possibly dark Christmas (surely numerous councils won’t be funding the usual lights in high streets). Marvellous. Meanwhile, it’s surely unacceptable that Parliament was in recess for so long, during the summer while the cost of living crisis deepened, then for the party conferences, so will not start its new session until the 11^th. Of course this also hinders proper scrutiny of the government’s conduct because during this limbo MPs can’t question ministers on concerns from constituents about the cost of living crisis, including rising mortgage payments.

Not surprisingly, Labour is 33 points ahead of the Tories, yet it comes to something when longstanding Conservatives announce their intention to vote Labour, as Nick Boles did this week. How humiliating for the PM and Chancellor that Boles, who was the MP for Grantham and Stamford from 2010 to 2019, writes so frankly about them and their plans. ‘Since 2010, when all three of us were first elected as Conservative MPs, they have known what they believe – and have viewed those who didn’t agree with them, or didn’t share their unshakeable certainty, with amiable contempt. The UK is beginning to discover what it is like to be led by people who despise compromise and lack all humility. Every decision they have made in the past few weeks has its roots in the book they published as newly elected MPs, Britannia Unchained’. He goes on to deconstruct the ideology driving this government: ‘…real life and a modern economy do not conform to ideological constructs. The UK is dealing with an unprecedented combination of challenges: an ageing workforce, an energy supply shock caused by a European war, the sudden erection of trade barriers between British businesses and their largest export market, and supply chains that have been upended by a global pandemic. Claiming that cutting taxes on the richest individuals and largest companies will lead to a surge in economic growth betrays a wilful naivety…. My brief career in politics taught me a few crucial lessons. Those who are full of certainty are usually wrong. The capacity to listen, to observe, to weigh up evidence and to change your mind are some of the most important qualities in a leader. Of all the different kinds of fool, the most dangerous kind is the clever fool’. Oof!

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There can be few new prime ministers who’ve experienced as many self-inflicted humiliations as Liz Truss, including complaints from the writer of the Moving On Up dance song, cynically recruited as her conference speech walk-on accompaniment: ‘I don’t want my song being a soundtrack to lies’, said M People founder Mike Pickering. ‘Moving On Out’ as the Metro’s wags put it. Then there was the massive tax cut U-turn, media interviewers suppressing laughter at her robotic and vacuous responses to challenging questions, having to declare President Macron ‘a friend’ when her ‘jury’ had stayed out so long and now having to sack a trade minister, Connor Burns, for allegedly inappropriate conduct (touching a man’s thigh being the latest news on this) during the recent conference. The lack of personal awareness is quite staggering: we’re told that the prime minister took direct action on being informed of this allegation and is ‘clear that all ministers should maintain the high standards of behaviour – as the public rightly expects’. Rhondda MP Chris Bryant tweeted: ‘No good options for the Tories. Keep Truss and endure two years of endless embarrassment. Ditch Truss and seed even more discord in the party. Either way their reputation for sound money and sanity is permanently damaged. Clinging on without consent poisons the future’.

One of the many things Labour no doubt would have wished to challenge the government on during this long recess is Health Secretary Therese Coffey’s decision to scrap the long-awaited health inequalities White Paper. Again we see more shrinking of the State: the PM wanting to review existing and planned measures to tackle obesity, her puppet masters no doubt believing that these also smack of ‘nanny state’. But again Truss and Coffey have encountered a massive backlash, with criticism from their own side, dozens of health organisations and 26 former health ministers.

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A key illustration of health inequality is reflected in the latest excess deaths statistics – more than 330,000 excess deaths in Great Britain between 2012 and 2019 attributed to spending cuts to public services and benefits introduced by a UK government pursuing austerity policies. Notably, these stats relate to the pre-pandemic era so cannot be conflated with Covid.

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A perennial cause of inequality is poor mental health, which may get some additional media focus as it’s World Mental Health Day tomorrow. The theme for 2022 is the vaguely expressed goal of ‘make mental health and wellbeing for all a global priority’: laudable but difficult to pin down. It’s shocking that so many patients are waiting years for treatment and many are unlikely to get it on the NHS but cannot afford private help. Not surprisingly, numbers of people needing treatment rose dramatically as a result of the pandemic. According to NHS England, the number of people waiting for community mental health care has risen to 1.2 million, with the NHS missing several targets, but this isn’t the complete picture as the numbers exclude those waiting for inpatient care and other services.. In addition, the figure for those waiting for a mental health follow-up appointment or learning disability service at the end of 2021-22 was up from 1.08 million at the end of quarter three. Furthermore, the goal of getting 1.6 million into talking therapy services was missed – only 1.2m started and it’s known that despite manipulation of statistics by IAPT (Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies, aimed at those with ‘mild to moderate depression’) many drop out early on or do not complete for various reasons.

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But as stressed many times previously, a key reason for poor mental health which goes under the radar is anxiety about money, housing and access to health services, etc, and about the incompetence of a government which doesn’t try to contain these issues but actually exacerbates them. This leaves many feeling insecure and very anxious about their futures. It was really telling that numerous organisations had to work together to even get mental ill-health included in the Covid Inquiry remit.

The media and politicians so often refer to Covid in the past tense but it’s on the increase again and there are concerns about new Omicron sub-variants taking hold and also combining with flu. Last week hospital admissions were up 48% (9,631 people with Covid were in hospital as of Wednesday, according to NHS England – the highest figure since 3 August). In addition, 1m are thought to have Long Covid, often a very disabling condition. ‘Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London and expert on long Covid, described the situation as deeply disappointing, noting that while the number of people with long Covid appeared to dip over the summer, it is now clear there is a definite, ongoing, upwards trend. He said: ‘This reinforces the message that it’s really foolhardy to imagine we can laugh off a massive, growing BA.5 wave as ‘living with the virus’ and ‘no worse than flu. Long Covid and even long Covid from the 2022 Omicron waves continues to wreck lives in people of all ages. I do wish we could just remind everyone to take this seriously – get boosted, keep indoor meetings well ventilated, wear masks indoors and for travel’. Professor Altmann also pointed out that public health messaging around the need for boosters hasn’t been strong: with the IEA-driven government we can’t be optimistic about this changing any time soon.

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Not for the first time, it’s worrying that again the BBC has chosen not to cover major protests two weekends running about the cost of living crisis, dangers to the environment and (this weekend) demonstrations related to the treatment of Julian Assange. Enough Is Enough, the organisation behind the cost of living protests, ‘has five general aims: proper living-wage rises, decent homes for all, higher taxes on wealth and windfalls, and an end to poverty of food and heating. It promises to mobilise a national network of support for coordinated demonstrations and strike action on these issues’. We can only think that this lack of reporting is a result of the BBC’s increasing collusion with the government, but this is dangerous stuff for a public service broadcaster.

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It’s sobering and frustrating to read about how the UK is seen abroad. Some European newspapers are thought to be revelling in ‘post-Brexit Schadenfreude’, Spain’s El Espanol suggesting that Britain seems to have imploded: ‘It should be remembered that the British voted in favour of ‘Brexit’ in the belief that they would take control and become a stronger country if they managed to throw off the yoke of Europe. Well, the exact opposite seems to be happening. And now that they are no longer under the protection of Brussels, they have no right or access to aid from the 27. If they want to overcome the crisis in which they are immersed, they will have to do it by themselves’. A couple of papers compare the UK to Argentina, the Irish Times columnist Stephen Collins suggesting: ‘The danger facing the UK now is that it could in time become the Argentina of Europe. It should not be forgotten that Argentina was once among the richest countries in the world but generations of bad political decision-making has brought it to its current sorry state’. For its part, France’s Le Monde said Truss’s first weeks in charge had been ‘spectacular and catastrophic’. This is such a tsunami of criticism that it’s hard to know how arrogant and chipper ministers would counter it.

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Recently mentioned in this blog, the concept of ‘quiet quitting’, originally coined to apply to the workplace, has now been taken further by the Guardian’s Zoe Williams. ‘Sure, you can strive less in the workplace. But what happens when you dial down bigger things, like parenting, relationships and even showering?’ She questions the concept as it applies to work: (‘I reject the concept, from a workplace perspective: it merely means doing what you’re contractually required to do. This I would call “work”. Anything more than this is “hustle”) but wonders whether it can usefully be applied elsewhere. Such areas might include relationships, friendships, family, parenting, ‘excessive grooming’, social media and highbrow culture. This is written in a jokey way but some of the categories are certainly worth thinking about it, as so many activities are based on automatic pilot.

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Finally, talking about highbrow culture, 17 October sees the award of the 2022 Booker Prize, ‘the UK’s most prestigious prize for long-form fiction’, the winners of which have often, in my view, been unreadable. This year has seemed much more promising, with several contenders being mercifully short. This year you can see short video readings of each one, the readers including such luminaries as Jarvis Cocker, David Harewood and Anna Friel. Having read two on the list, I’m looking forward to seeing which excerpts were chosen and perhaps finding out why!

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Sunday 25 September

What a momentous few weeks it’s been, from the ‘election’ of Liz Truss as PM by a small minority of Conservative party members, following weeks of long drawn out contest when the government was effectively absent, the death and funeral of the Queen after a 70 year reign, to the announcement of key government policies on the economy and health. The make-up of the Truss Cabinet is depressing, transparently illustrating a move even further to the Right including the shedding of Sunak loyalists. Two of her close friends (Kwasi Kwarteng and Therese Coffey) were given key roles, as Chancellor and Health Secretary respectively, and it’s been noted that Truss’s Conservative Party is now run by the far right ERG, party donors and lobbyists. Truss is determined to ‘do things differently from the last government’ (except it’s the same government) but now it seems even more imperative to look out for their measures not being designed for the public good but instead for the benefit solely of the better off. Journalist George Monbiot believes ‘the prime minister is in hock to a group of rightwing lobbyists who are themselves indebtedto oligarchs and corporations’ – this is a frightening dependency position to place the country in.

He suggests that ‘the more loudly a politician proclaims their patriotism, the more likely they are to act on behalf of foreign money’ but places Truss in an even more extreme category than her predecessors: ‘Every recent Conservative prime minister has placed the interests of transnational capital above the interests of the nation. But, to a greater extent than any previous leader, Truss’s politics have been shaped by organisations that call themselves think tanks, but would be better described as lobbyists who refuse to reveal who funds them. Now she has brought them into the heart of government’. The media again are at fault here, too, because we often hear interviewees from these organizations on our airwaves but very rarely the political affiliations and sources of their funding, a frequent and alarming example being the far right Institute of Economic Affairs.

‘An investigation by the democracy campaign Transparify listed the IEA as “highly opaque” about its funding sources. We know from a combination of leaks and US filings that it has a history of taking money from tobacco companies and since 1967 from the oil company BP, and has also received large disbursements from foundations funded by US billionaires, some of which have been among the major sponsors of climate science denial’. It’s interesting that shortly before her selection Liz Truss received a sizeable donation from BP. This is nothing short of terrifying, not least because our feeble Constitution has no effective mechanisms to clean up our politics: ‘But now the think tanks don’t need a roundabout route. They are no longer lobbying government. They are the government. Liz Truss is their candidate. To defend the interests of global capital, she will wage war against any common endeavour to improve our lives or protect the living planet’.

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We barely had time to come to terms with these changes, without the general election many thought should take place, when it became clear that the event which some have long dreaded was now imminent. The Queen’s death will surely be another John F Kennedy/Princess Diana moment, when we remember for the rest of our lives where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news long prepared for by the government and media. Even republicans will feel the effects of this massive change, adding to the political uncertainty and world politics to create a chasm. The Queen was a symbol of stability in an increasingly uncertain world and this country is now in new territory, with King Charles and Liz Truss.

What’s been striking during this time is the appalling coverage by the media, which effectively resorted to brainwashing and gaslighting us with wall to wall sycophantic coverage uttered in hushed and hallowed tones to the exclusion of other important news, constantly informing us that we were ‘a nation in mourning’ for a sovereign who devoted 70 years to duty and service, etc, and allowing no alternative views to be expressed. Social media had plenty of views on this but it seems the mainstream media would not even wish to acknowledge that the monarchy itself is a huge symbol of inequality, which the Establishment has a vested interest in perpetuating. So many of those seduced by all of this might have been enlightened by the inclusion of different voices and views: instead we endlessly heard absurd and hyperbolic views like that of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, who described it as the biggest event we will ever see! After a 70 year reign, during which the country has seen much change, it was time for a national conversation as to whether or not people wish to continue with the monarchy, but no such opportunity was given or prepared for.

Of course, this is a major event the media needed to cover and cover well and it’s revealed the lack of capacity in many quarters to separate the individual to whom respect can accrue from the institution (monarchy). But the exclusion of other news and of anti-monarchist sentiment in favour of endless focus on the Queue, vox pops with mourners and inviting the views of anyone, it seemed, who had any interaction with the Queen (how many times did we have to hear the story of Theresa May and the cheese?) was unacceptable. Amongst many others, one angry listener tweeted: ‘Radio 4 now in its 40th straight hour of pumping out inane repetitive royal drivel while literally ignoring every other news story from around the world. Stop now. It’s deranged’.

I think the BBC did do a good job with the broadcast of the funeral itself but the takeover of all their tv and most of their radio channels by this subject for 10 days was indeed disproportionate. We did not hear till two days in about key developments in Ukraine, let alone other important news. Radio 4’s The Media Show on Monday analysed the BBC’s coverage of the death and funeral and, besides the predictable commendation by the House of Lords contributor, there was marked criticism of it for excluding dissenting views, one contributor saying that ‘journalism went on holiday for the duration’. The lack of diverse views in the media was alarmingly echoed ‘on the ground’, by people being arrested even for holding up signs (hence not the policing bill verboten ‘noisy protest’) indicating anti-monarchist sentiment: a contradiction of the free speech this country has always espoused.

Veteran investigative journalist Michael Crick tweeted: ‘Absolutely right. The past days, with a few honourable exceptions, have been a shameful period for British journalism, in which scrutiny, challenge, perspective, balance and common sense have been ditched in favour of fawning banalities’. Another issue, amid so many observing that this country does pageantry well (the taxpayer, not the Royal Family, will be footing the £8m funeral bill and King Charles will pay no inheritance tax) is that there is surely something faintly ridiculous about this degree of pomp and ceremonial splendour exhibited in what is a country in marked decline. It might have suited the ethos of former imperial ages but needs seriously questioning now.

Two issues are worth reflecting on and not just assuming and accepting. One is the constant reinforcement of the message that the royals are symbols of duty or sacrifice to the nation. Amongst others Labour MP Clive Lewis went public (despite Keir Starmer’s instruction to the contrary) on his belief that this is ‘a lie’ which, by casting such behaviour as exceptional, allows elites to break rules and continue serving their own narrow interests ‘of which the monarchy is a part’. The other is the different reactions and motivations which made up what the media kept telling us was the mass outpouring of grief at loss of the Queen. Behavioural scientist Professor Steve Reicher, who specialises in crowd behaviour, analyses the key reasons, including projection of our own losses onto a public figure (very notable in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, the desire to witness history in the making, able to say they were there (eg in that famous Queue), those wanting to confirm a feeling of Britishness which the Queen represented to them and those wanting to endorse what they considered the Queen’s values of service and hard work.

‘They have gathered, we are told, ‘to pay their respects’. They are there ‘to thank the Queen’. Above all, they are ‘united in grief’. In this way, a picture is built up of a homogenous national community defined by its love of monarch and monarchy. But things are not that simple…… It follows that anyone who departs from this view is not of “us” and risks exclusion from the national community. This has a chilling effect. It means that certain things (such as challenging the hereditary transfer of power and wealth) cannot be said, not only through direct repression (as in the arrest of those expressing republican views) but also through self-censorship. For if we are led to believe that everyone else loves the monarchy, and demands due deference to the monarch and the monarchy, we will be more reluctant to challenge such views for fear of a backlash; and that in turn will reinforce the impression that these views are universal – what has been called a ‘spiral of silence’. That’s a very good term for it.

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If it wasn’t so worrying and dangerous it would be almost amusing to hear, as we did during Friday’s Today programme, Simon Case (Cabinet Secretary) dancing on the head of a pin to justify supporting the new economic measures when these are so much at variance with what he and his colleagues had supported during the Johnson regime. It points to considerable face-saving opportunism. Many have challenged the myth of this being ‘a new government’ when it’s still claiming to have a mandate from the former one, one observer tweeting: ‘Simon Clarke is trying to reconcile ‘we’re a new government with a new PM and a new direction’ and ‘we have a strong mandate from the old government and the previous leader’ – when these are irreconcilable positions. It seems that the prime ministerial Twitter account is continuing to churn out the same kind of fantasy – no change there. Liz Truss today: ‘I have a clear plan to build a Britain where everyone everywhere can realise their potential. We will usher in a decade of dynamism by focusing relentlessly on economic growth’. Chris Bryant, Chair of the Commons Privileges Committee, tweeted: ‘It feels like pretty much anyone with a brain, a conscience and a work ethic has been purged from government either by Johnson or Truss. It’s an empty vessel of a government – loud, noisy but dangerously vacuous’.

One commentator suggests that when we don’t think someone is very competent we can easily overlook what damage they can do. Even before her administration (I refuse to use that grandiose term ‘premiership’ in this context) took off it was revealed that her Chief of Staff, Mark Fulbrooke, had not passed vetting because he’s been interviewed by the FBI in connection with a bribery case they are pursuing. What happens if someone doesn’t pass vetting? Based on how the last few years have rolled out, absolutely nothing, another failure of our feeble Constitution. Truss has no ethics adviser and as yet we’ve not heard the outcome of the Fulbrooke situation. But what we have to worry about more is the explicit intention to shrink (eliminate, even) the State: so where would public services come from? ‘And when they say ‘state’, of course, they mean us. They plan to shrink us, our opportunities, our lives. Don’t underestimate them. You don’t have to be competent, still less logical, to make a hell of a mess’.

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On assuming the role of PM, Truss, who had demurred for weeks in committing to specific plans and policies, lost no time in reiterating what she’s ‘about’, ‘growing the economy’ by (she believes) cutting corporation tax for business, cutting National Insurance, lifting the cap on bankers’ bonuses, creating low tax zones, reducing stamp duty for home buyers and very probably deleting the anti-obesity strategy. All these measures are clearly designed to benefit the better off and no plans have been put in place for those who do not pay tax. A downer she could have expected this week was being forced to admit, despite having bragged about this, that there was no trade deal in sight with the US, since President Biden had ruled out any chance of it given the continuing conflict over the Northern Ireland Protocol. Not only are these survival-of-the-fittest policies worsening the mental health of many but the government continues in its practice of avoiding scrutiny, for example the ‘fiscal event’ or mini-budget was not termed Budget because this would have necessitated analysis by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

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Very worryingly and contrary to normal practice in government, Truss immediately sacked Tom Scholar, permanent secretary at the Treasury (clearly seen as a symbol of the economic orthodoxy Truss wants to challenge), leaving a big vacuum in this key policy area and many civil servants feeling uneasy. Robin (Lord) Butler, who had the same role in under Thatcher, Major and Blair, accused the PM of treating the civil service ‘improperly’, pointing out the need for such experience at a time of a new PM and new monarch. But surely this is the understatement of the week: ‘I think the politicians are beginning to forget the constitution’. They have been ‘forgetting’ it, aka deliberately disregarding it from the start of Boris Johnson’s regime. ‘Scholar’s predecessor Nick Macpherson called him ‘the best civil servant of his generation…sacking him makes no sense. His experience would have been invaluable in the coming months as government policy places massive upward pressure on the cost of funding’. It will be interesting to see how the ally Truss appoints will make out.

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Kwasi Kwarteng is our rookie Chancellor yet there’s been radio silence in the media about his shocking behaviour in Westminster Abbey during the lead up to the funeral service. To my knowledge he’s not been asked to explain his bizarre and disrespectful conduct – laughing, fidgeting and gurning, clearly seen on widely circulated video clips, some of those commenting believing these were signs of drug use.

Claiming that we are now ‘in a new era’, Kwarteng outlined his ‘mini-budget’ package in the House on Friday, reversing decades of Conservative fiscal policy in order to focus on ‘growth’ rather than redistribution, including a basic tax rate of 19p, deleting the top tax rate altogether and raising the level at which stamp duty is payable on home purchases, the biggest clutch of tax cuts in 50 years. Kwarteng and colleagues seem to believe they’ve been smart but economists and the markets reacted immediately to what could be deemed reckless: on the announcement the pound lost3% of its value against the US dollar and amongst others the Institute of Fiscal Studies declared the plans unworkable.

Yet you’d never think so if you’d heard the fast talking Chris Philp, now Chief Secretary to the Treasury defend these policies in the media and insist on a new definition of a new government (not most people’s understanding but one ‘with a new PM and Chancellor’). Right – reminiscent of the Alice in Wonderland trope (a word means whatever I want it to mean). These plans have a 2.5% growth target but Philp kept saying he wouldn’t ‘speculate’ about this or that including when such a target might be realised. It’s not a target if those setting it refuse to state a date by which it might be realised. And his Friday tweet was pure fantasy: ‘Great to see sterling strengthening on the back of the new UK Growth’. Any credibility he may have had was rather shot during the recent Newsnight rail strikes interview, when Mick Lynch repeatedly told him ‘you’re a liar, you’re a liar’. We have to wonder how long he will last, since it’s thought a sex scandal is about to explode around him and he could be Truss’s equivalent of Johnson’s Chris Pincher.

Tory backbenchers are already voicing disquiet – it will be hard for them to sell these policies to their constituents, not to mention the aversion to Liz Truss many of them already harboured. Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget will prove ‘politically toxic and economically dubious’, one said as they lambasted the extra £72bn of borrowing needed to pay for massive tax cuts that will disproportionately benefit the better off. Whereas previous administrations have been more subtle about this agenda, this government is unashamedly pursuing such a policy in plain sight. Labour MP Chris Bryant tweeted: ‘It’s more bonkers than Boris! I wouldn’t mind the government risking its own future, but it’s household budgets, business opportunities and the future of our nation that’s at stake. I’ve never known such an irresponsible and reckless approach to public money’. The Financial Times believes this budget ‘will ‘leave the Treasury with no money’ and veteran Tory and former Chancellor Lord Clarke weighed in with his own concerns. Yet the BBC repeatedly invites on to ‘flagship’ news programmes deluded Tory donors and the like, such as Sir Rocco Forte (the hotelier) who thought the new measures were marvellous and that the ‘government has hit the ground running like no other’. What planet?

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Kwarteng’s plans are getting flak from more quarters, too, for example conservation organisations who believe plans for 38 ‘investment zones’ will constitute an attack on nature because of current regulations relating to the environment will be withdrawn. The RSPB tweeted: ‘Make no mistake, we are angry. This government has today launched an attack on nature. As of today, from Cornwall to Cumbria, Norfolk to Nottingham, wildlife is facing one of the greatest threats it’s faced in decades’. Other organisations including the National Trust also expressed concern, resulting in a gung ho word salad defence from the Treasury: ‘Investment zones will enable locally elected leaders to set out bold new visions for their areas, and we want to ensure that they have every tool available to them in driving forwards local growth. The government remains committed to setting a new legally binding target to halt the decline of biodiversity in England by 2030’.

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Still on environmental concerns, the issuing of umpteen licences for fracking has been condemned in numerous quarters. Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Climate Change and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, eviscerated the smooth-talking (but increasingly seen through) Jacob Rees-Mogg in the House of Commons, tweeting: ‘Fracking is dangerous, expensive, and unsafe. Jacob Rees-Mogg is ripping up the Conservatives’ manifesto promises and imposing a Charter for Earthquakes on the British people. Labour will fight this all the way. We need clean power for Britain – not dirty fracking’. The Guardian’s parliamentary sketch writer, John Crace, carried out his own evisceration of the ‘new’ government and its disrespectful dismissal of evidence not fitting its extreme ideology. ‘So she’s had a look at the science and decided that the science has got it wrong. What’s needed is new science. One that agrees with her. And guess what? She’s now redefined the science and we’re all systems go. The power of magical thinking’. On the Miliband and Rees-Mogg exchange: ‘Miliband treated Rees-Mogg as if he was a halfwit. Most people do these days. Long gone are the times when MPs were impressed by his faux politeness and smug self-confidence, squeezed into an oversized undertaker’s suit. Now people see him for the needy fraud that he is’.

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Therese Coffey, Health minister and deputy prime minister, was the second to do the media rounds this last week, publicising her ‘ABCD’ proposals for the NHS (A for Ambulance, B was for Backlog, C for Care and D was for Doctors and Dentists), which of course don’t stand scrutiny. You would not think that Coffey’s was the same government which underfunded and undermined the NHS for 12 years, causing the very problems she purports to be planning to rectify. Attracting alarm and derision in clinical and political circles, her media performance was platitudinous and really needed challenging. It’s well known that hobbling the NHS and allowing privatisation by stealth have long been the agenda but as a good number of Tory voters value it they can’t announce they’re abolishing it. Instead they will force it to fail. I don’t think the proposals include addressing the key problem with doctors and GPs retiring early and going part-time, that of their pension-related tax liabilities. Years ago a civil service team could have been put to work on some solutions to this, rather than allowing the workforce to become so seriously depleted. As one commentator tweeted: ‘Did Coffey really imagine setting some more targets that wouldn’t get met was the answer? Thérèse looked miserable. Because it turned out that’s precisely what she did believe. Truly we are screwed’.

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The government has been getting its privatisation agenda underway for quite some time, more and more patients (a shocking one in ten during the last year) feeling forced to seek private treatment because of long NHS waiting lists. For nearly half of these patients, going private meant having to go into debt, using up savings planned for another purpose or cutting back on general spending. Healthwatch England found these findings ‘very concerning’. ‘People on the lowest incomes are the most likely to wait the longest for NHS treatment and will have a more negative experience of waiting. In turn, this leads to a worse impact on their physical health, mental health and their ability to work and care for loved ones. Tackling the NHS backlog is a huge challenge but decision-makers must find a way to do so without exacerbating health inequalities, the extent of which has been laid bare by the pandemic’.

https://tinyurl.com/44m5jwke

One of the most interesting pieces I’ve read this week has been the Times article about the numbers of people, clearly assuming that the Working From Home trend would continue, had moved from towns and cities to the country and seaside locations. Now many are suffering ‘buyer’s remorse’ and moving back again, disillusioned by what they hadn’t realised about their new location and lifestyle changes. ‘They just don’t want to tell anyone about the biggest, most expensive mistake of their lives. In 2020 Londoners bought 73,950 homes outside the capital, a four-year high, according to Hamptons; in the first six months of 2021 a further 61,830 bought homes elsewhere, the largest half-year figure since the estate agency started compiling records in 2006…. Some who fled the city now admit that they panicked and didn’t think through what relocating far away from friends, support networks and convenience would entail’. Interestingly, what the article doesn’t mention regarding coastal locations is the appalling discharge of raw sewage into the sea by water companies, a strong disincentive to the swimming and walks along the shore which many of these movers could have looked forward to previously.

https://tinyurl.com/yc6usem9

It was topical and interesting this week to learn of the Museum of Homelessness, established in 2015, getting its own home in 2023. The current socio-political situation makes it likely that homelessness will increase so it’s timely for this initiative to come under the spotlight. The Museum aims to ‘make tomorrow’s history by building the national collection for homelessness; take direct practical action in support of the community; fight injustice with independent research and campaigning and to educate on homelessness by working with artists and creatives to ‘make unforgettable art, exhibitions and events’. Good luck to them in their endeavours.

https://tinyurl.com/3uth3be8

Finally, it was poignant and cheering to hear that farmers from war-torn Yemen (where coffee originated, not South America as many assume) came over to London recently to attend an auction, the intention of which was to introduce coffee traders to Yemeni coffee directly rather than through a series of middle men. They wanted to reinstate the status and reputation Yemen as the original coffee producer as it has been generally overlooked by experts. ‘….a group of farmers in ceremonial dress, replete with daggers in their belts, visited a London coffee-roasting firm, bent on restoring Yemen’s status as the birthplace of good coffee. The farmers brought 28 samples for tasting and, within days, had sold their beans to buyers from Europe, Australia, the Middle East and east Asia at the inaugural National Yemen Coffee Auction…… Modern coffee cultivation is said to have begun in Yemen in about the 15th century, with trade passing through the port of Mocha. But by 2020, it ranked 61st in coffee exports, selling $21m of beans compared with Brazil’s $5bn’.

One of the buyers said: ‘We believe that supporting Yemeni coffee, one of the most unique and amazing flavours within the coffee world, will bring back Yemen to the global coffee industry and at the same time provide economic security for coffee farmers’. A win win situation. I was reminded of visiting a small exhibition at the British Museum last November, on the importance of coffee in the Islamic world, and this is when I discovered coffee had originated in Yemen, not Peru or Colombia. It’s maybe unlikely in Costa or Starbucks but let’s hope we see Yemeni coffee on the menus of some artisan coffee purveyors soon!

https://tinyurl.com/2tm55un

Sunday 4 September

This last week, the end of August and start of September, is often characterised by a poignant change in the light, signalling the end of summer, returns to school, college and work and perhaps the necessity to face up to harsh realities which holidays can obscure. But there’s no sense of any new beginning in our politics: the vanity project Conservative Party leadership contest went absurdly into its seventh and final week, the likely successful candidate, Liz Truss, being considered the ‘Johnson continuity candidate’. Yet again, when we might think Boris Johnson couldn’t do anything worse, he embarked on a ‘farewell tour’ (funded by the taxpayer?), making ridiculous speeches, one of which included the ‘advice’ to purchase a new kettle. Meanwhile, ‘Boris is so out of touch’ has been trending on Twitter and the cost of living crisis continues apace, the absent government doing precisely nothing except promising action once the new PM is in post. Too little, too late and such a contrast to some European countries.

https://tinyurl.com/3u8en7m8

During a Radio 4 interview former Cabinet Minister Rory Stewart cut through the Johnsonian grandstanding: ‘I’m afraid he has an extraordinary ego and he believes that he was badly treated. He doesn’t see the reality, which is that he was a terrible prime minister and that he lost his job because of deep flaws of character….I think we need to remind people why he left. He should have gone much, much earlier. What he did was deeply, deeply shameful – and dangerous…He’s going to be hovering around, hoping for a populist return…I fear we’re going to end up with a second Berlusconi or a second Trump trying to rock back in again’. Several commentators predicted as much months ago, as the narcissist cannot bear having been rejected and being out of the public eye, making all the trumpeted ‘farewell’ coverage a bit of a nonsense. Conservative peer Lord Marland is the latest to suggest that Johnson is building up his financial reserves in order to facilitate a comeback. Needless to say, Johnson himself has been careful not to publicly commit himself to anything. One of the feeblest ‘last’ comments he made must be this one: ‘We’re going to get through; I just want to give people a sense of hope and perspective’. So this is all he’s got? Some may believe the first but he’s demonstrably incapable of the second.

https://tinyurl.com/yckykshw

Again colluding with this narrative (it seems the Emily Maitlis revelations about Tory bias in BBC news coverage have made no difference whatsoever) we hear one Johnson hagiography after another, including predictably deluded comments from Nadine Dorries: if you didn’t know otherwise you might think he’d been quite a good PM. This is the only news some people follow, leading to a dangerous deficit. But some commentators have been quick to supply reminders regarding Johnson’s catalogue of errors, poor judgement, serial dishonesty and corruption. As two new phrases enter the political lexicon (Boris-washing and Long Boris, very fitting) one tweeter summed it up: ‘Breathless hagiography from Sarah Vine in the Mail’s latest instalment of Boris-washing. We’re invited to imagine him as a “potential colossus” brought low by his flaws and the petty jealousies of lesser men rather than a fraud and a self-serving distracted clown’. It’s depressing to learn that even after all we’ve seen, 40% of Conservative voters still believe the party did the wrong thing by removing Johnson.

https://tinyurl.com/2n8vyutf

Of course, Tory bias doesn’t only apply to coverage of Boris Johnson. All the time now the presenters of so-called ‘flagship news programmes seek to defend the government and big business when ministers and CEOs make no effort to make themselves available for interview. It sounds like sophistry to me but it seems there’s a debate about what constitutes ‘impartiality’ and ‘balance’, the BBC claiming to represent the latter approach. As someone tweeted following an example of this collusion: ‘There’s no problem with testing an interviewee’s position by putting a couple of opposing points, which might come from the government. There is a problem with presenters taking the side of the government, almost embodying the government’. Another said: ‘If the government of the day won’t send out people for interview then they should say ‘The Truss administration sent out a press release but it fails to answer the questions we wanted to pose them so we won’t be reading it out’’.

I am part way through watching (a must-watch) three episode series on BBC2 called Days That Shook the BBC, presented by veteran broadcaster David Dimbleby. It’s widely been noted that he has benefited hugely from the BBC for years, but to hear him regularly state that the BBC is ‘independent’ (from government) is a joke, likewise claiming that people ‘trust the BBC’. Because of what we’ve recently witnessed and which has been made clear thanks to Maitlis, such claims should surely not go without challenge. The dangers cannot be overestimated: because so many only get their news from the BBC they could end up with a worryingly skewed idea of what’s actually happening.

One way of avoiding addressing the cost of living crisis is to pretend it doesn’t exist. Former MP Edwina Currie, who often seems addicted to controversy, as if this is clever, got into an ill-advised spat with finance expert and consumer champion Martin Lewis. Look at this patronising wording: ‘I would like you, Martin, to stop using words like ‘catastrophe’ and instead advise people take sensible steps to reduce the effect on their families and businesses’. Lewis came right back: ‘It is a catastrophe, Edwina’….. then stressing how energy bills in January could on average cost more than half the full state pension and an even bigger proportion of the basic Universal Credit payment. Quoted in the Independent, Lewis got it in one: ‘To allow people to stare into the pit of financial doom that is coming this winter without offering them the torch at the end of the tunnel and saying ‘help will come’ and being specific is terrible for people’s mental health’. The vital mental health element has largely been ignored by this government.

This last week the emphasis has moved from solely domestic coverage of the crisis to how businesses and organisations could be affected. There are some frightening scenarios which could be realised, eg NHS, libraries and council buildings being without sufficient energy and businesses being forced to close, with damaging consequences for their staff and customers. This will even further jeopardise the plan for ‘warm banks’. Edwina Currie was continuing a longstanding narrative reinforced by ministers recently, especially Liz Truss, pretending there’s nothing wrong, there’s no crisis, nothing to see here and so on. The worst gaslighting is to suggest that those who recognise the crisis are ‘talking Britain down’. ‘Crisis, what crisis? The right’s love of pretending nothing is wrong may have dire consequences come winter’ suggests the Guardian.

The writer isn’t the only one to comment on what a poisoned chalice Johnson’s successor will inherit. Many would baulk at it but such is the magnitude of the egos involved the nature of the chalice won’t prove an obstacle. ‘The easiest way to justify doing next to nothing to help the public through an impending socioeconomic catastrophe is to convince them that it isn’t really happening’. Apparently she told one hustings audience: ‘I don’t agree with these portents of doom. I don’t really agree with this declinist talk. I believe our country’s best days are ahead of us…. We can unleash opportunity here in Britain’. We can imagine that went down well with that audience – all we need to do is ‘unleash opportunity’.

Meanwhile, the Institute of Fiscal Studies has followed other organisations like the Resolution Foundation in finding serious fault even with plans for the economy which Truss has so far deigned to disclose. ‘Without a capable prime minister, it is not doomsaying to understand what lies ahead for Britain: mass fuel poverty, broken public services, rocketing bills, and an ever-increasing risk of social unrest. Britain may be Truss’s poisoned chalice, but it will be the rest of us who are forced to drink from the cup’.

https://tinyurl.com/y7a6xm22

A Liz Truss eulogy (‘Comment’ ie no identifiable author) appears in The Telegraph, which seems wrongheaded from the first paragraph, describing her as ‘principled, classical liberal, pro-market, well-read, economically literate and policy-driven…..She believes in freedom, material prosperity, the power of choice and the importance of economic – as well as social, cultural and political – liberty’. What planet? But now we have it – this author reckons her critics (and heaven knows, they have good grounds) just don’t get her. ‘Her enemies don’t understand any of this and, often suffering from Truss Derangement Syndrome, underestimate her’. The worry is that many readers will just lap this up. At the same time, a Tory MP has called her ‘the worst possible choice at the worst of times’ and we hear a group of them are planning to table a vote of no confidence within a week of her taking office.

https://tinyurl.com/5956pym5

Needless to say, the poignant death of Mikhail Gorbachev was cynically used in some quarters to further mythologise Margaret Thatcher and to attempt to associate the current Tory administration with hers. As ever in these situations, world leaders and commentators fell over themselves to acknowledge Gorbachev’s legacy, not least in the context of the war in Ukraine and Putin’s conduct. Angela Merkel described Gorbachev as ‘a single statesman who’d done more to change the world for the better than any other’ – a description which could never be levelled at any UK ‘statesman’ at present, least of all Boris Johnson, who contributed his own eulogy (including recognising Gorbachev’s ‘courage and integrity’) with apparently no sense of irony.

Meanwhile, would our political class regard as heresy the suggestion to cancel the MPs break for the party conference season? Do these conferences actually serve any purpose or have any public benefit? Or are they just an excuse for a jolly, backslapping echo chamber presented as ‘networking’? Campaigner Gina Miller’s proposal seems a no brainer, with the crises ravaging the country and given MPs have already had a long recess, with others on the horizon. Miller wrote to both leadership candidates: ‘As the candidates for prime minister, you should urgently speak to the leaders of other parties and agree conference recess will be cancelled so MPs can work on the immediate challenges facing the country’. She believes that the Common should sit for a minimum of 40 weeks a year and criticised politicians for ‘partying whilst millions face destitution…You should be spending your time working for the people of the UK who elect and pay for you, not your party’s members’. Oof! Not surprisingly, it appears that no response was received from the candidates’ teams.

https://tinyurl.com/2va9vvsf

As barristers and BT workers join the ranks of those taking strike action, an equally frank piece from the Resolution Foundation’s Torsten Bell stresses that political business as usual won’t any longer suffice, yet we continue to see only this from ministers including the leadership candidates. ‘The emergency created by soaring energy prices is so grave that normal politics doesn’t apply’ he warns. ‘Our leaders must wise up – and fast’. This is a two stage process, though: leaders must act but first they have to intellectually grasp and process the severity of the situation which demands extraordinary measures. And here’s one for the put on another jumper brigade: ‘We also do not want ever stronger incentives for people to turn off the heating: cold homes lay behind 8,500 excess deaths in 2019’. The government needs to stop giving ground to short-term distractions and to challenge their adherence to market-led ideology as ‘there’s nothing free about a market being manipulated by Putin to further his war aims’. It’s questionable whether the current calibre of ministers (and Truss’s predicted Cabinet appointments just re-arrange the chairs on the Titanic’s deck) have the insight and intelligence to do the necessary. The last few years haven’t filled us with confidence.

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Notwithstanding all the above important news, jeopardising our welfare and mental health, what I’ve found most intriguing and appalling in equal measure this week is the transparent attempt by the government machine to undermine two legitimate processes which have shown themselves and other key figures in a disgraceful light. One is the sudden ‘finding’ by Sir Thomas Winsor (going back on previous findings) that Met Police chief Dame Cressida Dick was forced out by London Mayor Sadiq Khan not ‘following due process’. The truth, as we know, is that Dame Cressida had long been criticised and under scrutiny for the problematic culture within the Met, going right back to their treatment of the Stephen Lawrence murder and their unlawful killing of Jean Charles de Menezes back in 2005). The longstanding accusations of institutionalised racism and sexism continued but what possibly made the most significant impacts recently were the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer, when he had already been investigated for previous sexual offences, and the bizarre reaction to Partygate, declaring that they could not investigate historical events.

As others have said, it was surprising Khan didn’t offload Dick before, given her errors since her appointment in 2017 and inaction over clear wrongdoing amongst her force, one of the worst examples being officers taking photos of two murdered sisters in a London park. Khan stated: ‘On the former commissioner’s watch, trust in the police fell to record lows following a litany of terrible scandals. What happened was simple – I lost confidence in the former commissioner’s ability to make the changes needed and she then chose to stand aside’. One commentator tweeted: ‘Cressida Dick has *never* accepted democratic oversight. She blocked and refused to cooperate with investigations into corruption and murder. Sadiq Khan was quite correct that London had lost confidence in her. In fact, it was long overdue – and she was only protected by Patel’. Another said: ‘The inquiry into the mishandling of the Daniel Morgan murder found that the Met is institutionally corrupt and that Cressida Dick personally attempted to obstruct that inquiry, did it not? She should have been dismissed at that point’.

The second attempt to undermine legitimate process is the ‘legal opinion’ (requested by the government and for which the taxpayer is footing the bill) from QC Lord Pannick suggesting that the Commons Privileges Committee, in its investigation of Boris Johnson allegedly misleading Parliament over Partygate, would risk paralysing democracy by disregarding whether or not the misleading was ‘intentional’. A key aspect of this (and the Dick accusations) is surely the timing: it’s almost as if the Tories know Truss will be a disaster so they’re already preparing the ground by undermining opposition figures who’ve been involved in bringing them or their appointees down. Journalist and commentator Jonathan Lis made a key point about inappropriate judicial involvement: ‘There was zero reason to commission legal advice on the committee. Its remit is entirely a matter for parliament and outside all scope of the courts. Johnson spent £130,000 of public money to try to apply pressure on MPs holding him to account. The word for that is corruption’. Another tweeter commented on the lack of media coverage: ‘Why is Radio 4 Today not talking about the scandalous Trumpian exercise being carried out for a fee of £130,000 by Lord Pannick?’

It will be interesting to see if either of these belated ‘opinions’ are allowed to gain any traction.

An investigation of the state of parks in England could make us see their neglect as a metaphor for the entire country at present. Access to these open spaces is so important for our mental health, yet this is rarely officially recognized. Of course, it’s cheaper and convenient not to recognize it. Local authorities vary as to how well they look after their public spaces but huge cuts to their budgets by central government have put such expenditure at risk and many of us have seen councils raise money by allowing parks to be used for festivals and the like, the resulting damage taking time to recover from.

‘Last week a Guardian investigation found that local authorities in England are spending £330m less a year on parks in real terms than they were a decade ago. The study found that less affluent parts of the country have been hit the hardest by austerity, with parks in the north-west and the north-east suffering in particular. Our urban parks are the last vestiges of truly free public space in an age of privatised squares…They offer robust support for our mental as well as physical health, they offer us solace through solitude and joyful social space without an obligation to buy anything – they are democracy rendered in three dimensions, with jumpers for goalposts in the background’.

It’s really depressing to walk around a neglected park, with overgrown paths, depopulated flower beds and dried up fountains full of litter: instead of just tolerating this status quo councils could, as they have in some areas, come to an agreement with local volunteers whereby the local authority agrees to purchase (using their bulk buying leverage) supplies of plants and bulbs and the local groups undertake to improve and maintain that space. If some can do it (including some very cash strapped) surely others can too. It’s a win win situation, as gardening is well known to be beneficial to mental health.

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Those interested in nature and conservation might be pleased to hear that despite appearing on its online menu, grouse will no longer be served at the Ritz. The prestigious London hotel and restaurant attributes this to ‘supply issues’. ‘The glorious 12^th’, 12 August, marks the start of the grouse shooting season, very unpopular with environmentalists because of the disturbance caused to local ecosystems. ‘Around 700,000 red grouse are killed throughout the season, which ends in early December. Shooting parties can pay up to £14,000 a day to participate in the activity’. It’s thought that 40% of shot birds suffer a slow and painful death and that many other moorland animals are wounded in traps and snares. Campaigners can celebrate the removal of grouse from the Ritz menu but have some way to go because other traditional restaurants will still be serving it.

https://tinyurl.com/57vw9mrb

More mixed news for conservationists comes from Nature England, which has recorded the successful fledging this year of 119 rare hen harrier chicks in northern counties including County Durham, Cumbria, Lancashire, Northumberland and Yorkshire. This is the highest number in more than a century but these chicks nevertheless face a hazardous journey to survival, since the parents feed their young on red grouse chicks, a problem for the grouse shooting estates. Although hen harriers have been officially protected since 1950, this could not have been enforced as these birds have apparently been persecuted for years. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is very pleased with the latest findings but remains concerned about the lack of law enforcement. ‘….the risk of these young birds being illegally killed after leaving the safety of their nests remains very real. That is why we are calling on the UK government to provide resources to support the conservation of hen harriers and ensure that existing wildlife protection laws are better enforced’. Good luck with that, as Conservative party landowners are more than likely to prioritise their income from shooting parties.

https://tinyurl.com/2uwvhx6n

Finally, we hear that the latest domestic item to be in short supply is the Mars bar. Journalists trailed around North London supermarkets and consulted some of their websites and more often than not found empty slots where those items should be. It’s been noticeable during the last six months that quite a few of the shortages affect less than healthy items so perhaps some consumers might start thinking they’d be better off without them. The message from the manufacturer, Mars Wrigley, seems quite ambiguous, first saying ‘We are experiencing high levels of demand on a number of our treats’, then adding ‘We are producing significant quantities and want to reassure the British public that our much-loved brands are still available nationwide’. We could wonder where these ‘significant quantities’ are and how far some may be prepared to travel (from North London at least) in order to track down their Mars bars!

https://tinyurl.com/33k9ea57

Sunday 28 August

Even this time last week it would not have been too late for the government to heed the many calls for them to recall Parliament in order to urgently address the cost of living crisis, a large part of which is attributable to energy costs, but no. The dim-witted limpet-like attachment to laissez-faire ideology had to prevail, as did ministers’ and the PM’s holidays, leading to the shocking but predictable news on Friday of the energy price cap rising by 80% from October to £3,549. Yes, 80%, just not a realistic situation and this only reflects the unit price of energy so you could end up paying much more. We’re told ‘Ofgem decides the price cap by observing what wholesale energy prices do over several months’. What a reflection of this crazily privatised market so much work went into selling us years ago. All week people have been asking where Johnson, Truss and Sunak are on this as there’s been no plan from any of them and the fact that it’s a Bank Holiday hasn’t hushed the voices of economists, who continue to demand urgent action. Even Chancellor Zahawi, despite his egregious attempts to blame prices on the Ukraine war, has come out and said it’s not just ‘the most vulnerable’ who will need help but middle class families too. The shameful best Zahawi can come up with is suggesting households should think about reducing their energy use. Fiddling while Rome burns has never been truer.

Tweeters didn’t hold back about the terrible situation this puts the UK in. ‘Don’t expect any significant intervention from this Government over energy and household bills. Remember, they’re fully signed up free-market ideologues. The ‘invisible hand’ of the market will make it all come good.’ ‘Talk to your energy supplier’ – it’s far too late for this con debunked by Martin Lewis that this would make any difference. The system was broken years ago including the feeble regulatory system’. ‘Yes, Ofgem CEO Jonathan Brearley is more or less admitting the regulatory system isn’t fit for purpose, though he denies this. It’s criminal the government didn’t heed the many demands last week to recall Parliament to address the cost of living crisis’.‘BREAK: Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has emerged from his bunker to urge the desperate and vulnerable to ‘remain resilient’ in order to give more to ‘the war effort.’ Possibly the greatest single attempt of despicable Tory gaslighting in a long line of despicable Tory gaslighting.’

Experts have predicted it will lead to destitution and avoidable deaths. An increasingly angry Martin Lewis said: ‘If we do not get further government intervention, on top of what was announced in May, then lives will be lost this winter’ and think tank Resolution Foundation’s Torsten Bell declared: ‘Winter energy bills are set to average around £500 a month, while prepayment customers will need to find over £700, more than half their disposable income, to keep the heating on in January alone. These costs pose a serious threat to families’ physical and financial health’. Environment Minister George Eustice (and you could swear some presenters say ‘Useless’ by mistake but with unconscious meaning) excuses the inaction by saying it’s ‘right’ that the next prime minister waits until they take office to weigh up ‘all of the options’ and that it’s not long to wait now. This is so out of touch and infantilising, rather like parents trying to reassure fractious children who keep asking during a journey ‘are we nearly there?’ The fact is it is indeed too long to wait, the whole of this month, as at least one desperate caller conveyed, speaking on Five Live’s Stephen Nolan programme last night, even implying that they would not be able to carry on.

https://tinyurl.com/rm8z4cc5

So what’s the answer to all this? It seems the government hasn’t even considered the various solutions proposed. While many are proposing renationalising the utilities, this takes time and neither of the two leadership candidates would go anywhere near it at the same time as having no realistic plans themselves. The Resolution Foundation proposed a new social tariff under which people claiming benefits or where no one in the household earned more than £25,000 would receive a 30% bill reduction. Another proposal is for the government could decide on a universal cut in bills partly offset by a solidarity tax, taking the form of a 1% increase in income tax that would fall most heavily on those on higher incomes.

But Dale Vince of Ecotricity, a purveyor of green energy, argues, ‘Britain makes 50% of the gas it needs in its North Sea. We allow global commodity markets to set the price, which had gone up 5-10 fold… So we should have a price cap on North Sea gas… which would collapse its price.’ But here’s another way out for one lucky household…you could hardly make it up that the Mail has offered as a prize the payment of the winner’s energy bills for a year – how tasteless is that? There were noisy protests outside the Mail’s offices, the London Economic saying ‘Nothing sums up ‘Broken Britain’ quite like the Daily Mail’s latest front-page offer’.But never mind all this doom and gloom, as our AWOL prime minister has told us he’s absolutely convinced ‘Britain’s bounceback will be golden’. Is there anyone left in the country who’s convinced by Boris Johnson being ‘convinced’?

https://tinyurl.com/2br5jdn9

Meanwhile, more and more groups of workers are considering striking, the latest being criminal barristers, making a general strike in the autumn more than a possibility. Our local postman, on strike on Friday, says the Post Office is expecting them to work till 10 pm 7 days a week in order to compete with private operators. But the PO was never set up for this and it’s well known the private operators cherry pick, not to mention often falling way below expectations on customer service. How often do you hear complaints or have problems yourselves with parcels wrongly delivered or not at all? Around here some operators have thought they were clever leaving a parcel inside the food waste bin on collection day, so when the customer gets home there’s no parcel, instead a problem to resolve with the retailer. ‘Britain is facing a wave of coordinated industrial action by striking unions this autumn in protest at the escalating cost of living crisis…A series of motions tabled by the country’s biggest unions ahead of the TUC congress next month demand that they work closely together to maximise their impact and “win” the fight for inflation-related pay rises’. Perhaps it’s surprising that the government hasn’t said words to the effect of count yourselves lucky inflation’s ‘only’ 10% – it’s 70% in Argentina’.

https://tinyurl.com/j2hwkrd9

Alongside industrial action the Enough is Enough movement is gathering momentum, with 50 rallies planned for next month. Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, is backing the movement, which was set up by trade union leaders including the RMT’s Mick Lynch and which now has 450, 000 supporters. The movement has a number of demands including ones many would consider no brainers: a cut to the energy price cap to the pre-April level of £1,277 a year; a real-terms public sector pay rise; a reverse to the national insurance hike; and a £20-a-week universal credit increase. Enough is Enough has inevitably attracted criticism from some quarters, for example that the financial undertakings would be unaffordable, but what cost the alternative? More destitution and deaths? One of the organisers seems to convey the key point, that participants aren’t ‘the traditional leftwing activists, they are ordinary people. We are providing the platform for people to start organising and take on these issues’. This is really important because so often those making up this largely supine nation have not felt able to protest.

https://tinyurl.com/2p8j6xsw

Despite the travel chaos still being witnessed on roads, rail and at airports, many might understandably feel at this time of year, perhaps having gone without holidays in recent years, that they can at least escape problems for a few days and enjoy some hours on the beach. But now, in England at least, that’s much harder because of the recent shocking revelations regarding raw sewage dumping in rivers and at coastal locations. This is really going to hit the tourism industry hard and seriously upset the many who’ve long booked their holiday and looked forward to it. Needless to say, though, Environment Minister George Eustice, interviewed quite trenchantly on Radio 4’s Today programme, stuck firmly to trotting out the usual script, starting with the shameless suggestion that this situation was basically the fault of poor infrastructure, when the argument given to privatise water supply years ago was investment in renewal of said infrastructure. One tweeter attracted nearly 50 likes and numerous retweets for this: ‘No, George Eustice, ‘the first thing to say’ is NOT that this sewage scandal is due to the Victorian infrastructure etc etc. You should apologise to the whole nation for this disgusting situation and the way it’s been covered up’.

‘Swimmers have been warned to stay away after sewage was discharged on beaches across England and Wales, predominantly in the south. Pollution alerts have been issued to beachgoers by the Environment Agency, and on some beaches signs have been put up to warn people. The environmental campaign group Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) has collected data that suggests storm sewage discharges have taken place in the waters of beaches in Cornwall, Cumbria, Devon, Essex, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Northumberland and Sussex’. It certainly looks as if this country is once again ‘the dirty old man of Europe’ as it was pre-EU membership days. What an achievement for this government.

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I thought (and I won’t be the only one) that one of the most important news items this week, spreading its tentacles far and wide, was the revelation by broadcaster Emily Maitlis of what many of us have known for some time: the presence of a ‘Tory agent’ (the chair, too) within the BBC. Robbie Gibb has morphed between media and politics in ways which should have caused alarm bells to ring years ago. We have witnessed the insidious infiltration of BBC news and political coverage by the Tory narrative. This is regularly manifested in cynical manipulation of language, presenters’ attacks on opposition parties, interrupting opposition politicians during interviews, and cutting off interviewees who say it like it is (as this would be off-message). An obvious current example is narrative presented as fact eg wage rises are inflationary, public services are ‘a cost’ rather than crucial investment and so on. The huge danger of all this is that many only get their news from the BBC so, without the benefit of other news sources and views, tend to believe the state broadcaster, with knock-on effects on their thinking and voting patterns. Many just will not recognise what they hear as Conservative propaganda.

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The Times reports that Maitlis has since been supported by ‘BBC insiders’ regarding her claims, saying she was right to call out Sir Robbie Gibb as an ‘active agent’ of the Tory party who interfered with editorial matters. ‘Without naming him, Maitlis, 51, said in an Edinburgh TV Festival speech on Thursday that Theresa May’s former communications chief, 58, was ‘acting as the arbiter of BBC impartiality’ from his seat on the corporation’s board. The words resonated with insiders, who voiced concern about Gibb’s eagerness to challenge editorial matters, even when not fully apprised of the details. Others said his concept of impartiality was impossible to separate from his political allegiances’.

https://tinyurl.com/4m8anny5

Astonishingly, despite these public revelations and BBC staff’s support for them, some presenters at least have continued to practise what’s just been outed, suggesting that they think we don’t know or that their editors have told them to carry on regardless. Very striking was Today’s interview with veteran broadcaster David Dimbleby, who sought to minimise the Maitlis claims and their widespread effects by trying to make it all about the Newsnight episode which Maitlis had used an example. Some listeners made very clear their views of his stance, tweeting: ‘Maitlis’s lecture was much, much bigger than ‘the Newsnight thing’ Mr Dimbleby. You have just demonstrated one of the pieces of self-censureship that she spent 90% of the lecture explaining’ and ‘Man whose family has benefited from the way the BBC operates for generations defends the way the BBC operates’. The BBC’s very choice of interviewee speaks volumes. Even more than before it behoves us to carefully filter for Tory bias everything we hear from this broadcaster.

Our Awol prime minister continues to enjoy his last few weeks in office, mostly on holiday and apparently planning more parties at Chequers, but perhaps it wasn’t surprising that, unable to resist another ego boost and farewell gesture opportunity, he decided to visit Kiev to join the marking of Ukraine’s Independence Day. One of the most gaslighting, egregious things he’s ever said must be his conflation of the UK’s energy price crisis with supporting Ukraine, exhorting us to ‘stay the course’…… we have high energy bills but Ukraine is paying in blood, the implication being if we complain about these bills we’re unpatriotic and anti supporting Ukraine. ‘Boris: we must ‘endure’ fuel bill pain to defeat Putin’, said one newspaper headline: that narrative again, of course not mentioning that a key reason for these high prices is his government’s mismanagement of the energy market.

Meanwhile, both leadership candidates continue to demonstrate exactly why they shouldn’t be PM, for example Liz Truss’s ridiculous response on the Macron friend or foe question, not committing to appointing an ethics adviser and being reported to the Cabinet secretary for using Chevening for a campaign meeting, and Rishi Sunak’s ignorant right-wing appeasing condemnation of ‘scientists’ who ‘screwed’ the country with lockdowns. Other ministers have also embarrassed themselves, reinforcing the impression of an incompetent bunch totally incapable of reassuring the public that there’s anyone really in charge. Examples include Priti Patel, despite her macho talk, having to confront the fact of the highest ever daily number of migrants arriving here on Monday (1300) and Health Secretary Steve Barclay, finally emerging from his bunker to give a press conference, being confronted by an angry woman asking what he was going to do about the NHS problems and telling him before stalking off that in 12 years they’d done ‘bugger all about it’.

https://tinyurl.com/4m8anny5

The cost of living crisis has brought the contrast between society’s haves and have-nots further under the microscope and an interesting example which could change the way we view access to nature is the latest right to roam initiative. Those pushing for this rightly state how we need access to nature for our mental health and wellbeing (brought more to the fore during the pandemic), yet in many cases over the years, access has been restricted or prevented by landowners. Radio 4’s Positive Thinking series recently featured campaigner Guy Shrubsole, author of Who Owns England and founder of Right to Roam – a campaign to improve access to privately held land.‘ According to Shrubsole, in Britain (excluding Scotland) we are excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of its waterways. Yet the Covid lockdowns highlighted how much we crave green spaces and how many of us do not have the privilege of easy access to nature. In 1932, the Kinder Scout mass trespass in Derbyshire ultimately led to the establishment of our national parks in mainly upland areas – including the Peak District, the Lake District and Snowdonia. Public rights of way were further enshrined in law in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000’. Shrubsole advocates mass trespass to put pressure on the government. This reinforces the message that change is unlikely to happen without protest, but this now needs to be ‘peaceful’ for another insidious reason, the passage of the policing bill which outlaws ‘noisy protests’.

Interesting and ironic, then, that 150 campaigners, many of whom were in Morris dancer type dress, recently ‘visited’ the Berkshire estate belonging to Richard Benyon, minister in charge of access to nature. They called upon him to open up access to his estate to the public. ‘The 12,000-acre (4,860ha) Englefield estate, which has been in the Benyon family for hundreds of years and is the largest in West Berkshire, contains land that was once a common, before the Enclosures Act meant it could be absorbed into the private estate. It also, according to the Ramblers, contains lost footpaths. This is where the dancers and musicians were heading. Although those assembled were breaking civil law by trespassing, the gamekeepers did not intervene and watched the strange, mystical spectacle from atop a hill from their SUV…As minister in charge of access to nature, Lord Benyon was involved in the Agnew review, which looked at broadening access to the countryside, but which was shelved with little explanation. Just 8% of England’s land has free access, including coastal paths and moorlands, and campaigners want this to change’. That 8% figure is pretty shocking so it will be interesting to see if anything comes of these campaigns. Unlikely under this government, I’d have thought, as so many are landowners themselves and will not wish to challenge the status quo.

https://tinyurl.com/5n744cnd

Most of us by now may have been unable to obtain a food or household item because of supply chain problems, the war in Ukraine increasingly cited as another factor. Now the Economist has written about the dismay in France being felt on account of a lack of Dijon mustard – a big problem for them since the French are said to consumer a kilo of mustard per head every year. Not everyone would have known that Canada is the source of 80% of brown mustard seeds used to make this particular mustard, and apparently the French don’t rate the milder ‘French’ mustard used liberally in America. They use Dijon for mayonnaise, vinaigrette, steak tartare and no doubt plenty of other dishes. But the double whammy of a poor harvest due to drought in Canada and the war preventing French use of Russian or Ukrainian sources has brought the situation to a head. Stocks are not expected to improve until 2023, though, so French cooks will have to devise solutions, including, perhaps, capitulation to ‘French’ mustard. Or maybe, mon dieu, less consumption of those items considered central to French cuisine. References to something ‘cutting the mustard’ might soon take on a whole new meaning.

Finally, an item which never seems to be in short supply is ice cream, whether it’s the basic stuff in huge supermarket containers or artisan crafted gelato using an ingenious range of ingredients. Very timely given the recent heatwaves is a collation of readers’ recommendations, mostly in the UK but a few citing venues in Italy, Spain and Greece. The ‘winning tip’ is the new Shepherds Ice Cream Shop in Abergavenny (Monmouthshire), described as a ‘Wes Anderson-styled drop-in, complete with classic Neapolitan ice-cream colours and a little hatch to fetch your favourite flavours from. The twist? It’s all made locally from sheep’s milk, the business is run by two generations of a family that has some sort of tradition around a golden scoop. Shepherds often pop up with a vintage ice-cream trailer at festivals and events around the UK. It’s my family’s year-round Friday treat’. Since late last year the canny owners displayed a notice on the premises alerting locals to its opening the following April, building expectations, and they must be doing well to branch out from their shop and cafe in nearby Hay-on-Wye. I also think it’s a great idea to serve hot drinks as well, which some visitors might prefer to ice cream. No doubt they’re hoping for a bonanza during the upcoming Abergavenny Food Festival so best of luck to them!

https://tinyurl.com/yc58wkkp