Friday 22 December 2023

After the all too brief relief felt at Boris Johnson’s expulsion and the disastrous tenure of Liz Truss, many of us might have thought in October 2022 that we’d get more a more principled premiership from Rishi Sunak. Who’d have thought that we’d actually get an even worse brand of dishonesty and private profiteering, but this is what we ended up with. As Christmas approaches we’ve seen the lying and obfuscation around Sunak’s key pledges and other important issues outed, his reaction apart from surprise at the temerity of the ‘outers’ generally being a tetchy denial or misrepresentation.

Despite Sunak and Pinocchio Hunt constantly talking up the UK economy especially in relation to other G7 members (never challenged in the House of Commons by the feeble Speaker), today we heard that we are now technically in recession (based on two consecutive quarters of shrinkage) and economists expect the economy to ‘remain subdued’ during the whole of 2024.  Yet Hunt had the nerve to appear to contradict the authoritative Office for National Statistics: ‘the medium-term outlook for the UK economy is far more optimistic than these numbers suggest….’. Here’s an example of how the PM twists facts to make his performance appear much better than it is:

‘Rishi Sunak has made growing the economy one of his key pledges. Downing Street said the promise will be met if the economy is bigger in the three-month period of October to December 2023 than it was in the previous three months’. A wag tweeted: ‘Do not panic, there’s surely a whole team trying to figure out how to blame the small boats and the EU for this “UK at risk of recession after the economy shrinks”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67799713

We’ve long seen this government denying responsibility when things go badly yet leaping to claim credit when they improve and inflation is a prime example. When inflation rises, it’s blamed on the war in Ukraine, the pandemic (yes!), the ‘economically inactive’ etc, but when we get a small drop Hunt and others allude to their hard work when actually nothing they’ve done has made the slightest difference. And inflation is set to rise again in the New Year because of increasing energy costs and the just announced rail fare rises. And ministerial braggers ignore the fact that food inflation remains stubbornly high, affecting everyone. The media can also be as bad as some politicians in clarifying that inflation dropping just means prices are rising less quickly: they are still rising.

The Conservatives are clutching at straws before Christmas. ‘…overall food prices rose by 0.3% month on month and are still up annually – by 9.2%, compared with a 10.1% rate in October. The ONS also pointed out that the cost of food and non-alcoholic beverages had risen by about 27% in the past two years, compared with an increase of about 9% between November 2011 and November 2021. ’

Onto the next fib: following Sunak’s declaration in a social media video and at PMQs in November that debt was falling, the Lib Dems Treasury Spokesperson, Sarah Olney, had contacted the office of Sir Robert Chote, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), who ‘said Sunak’s claims last month “may have undermined trust in the government’s use of statistics and quantitative analysis in this area”…Chote’s letter noted that while it was fair to use debt as a proportion of GDP rather than absolute numbers, the “average person in the street” would most likely have taken Sunak’s statement to mean that debt was already dropping and that government decisions had helped do this – “neither of which is the case”. Besides the dishonesty of such statements, what’s surely striking is the PM’s complacent assumption that no one will check and he won’t be found out. Chote said the Office for Statistics Regulation would ‘work with the prime minister’s office to ensure further statements on debt levels adhere to our guidance on intelligent transparency’. What a joke: Sunak doesn’t DO ‘intelligent transparency’. Olney rightly said that Sunak had ‘reached for the Boris Johnson playbook and is undermining trust in politics’. He didn’t have to reach far…

http://tinyurl.com/528wbnd3

Onto the immigration fibs: we hear that ‘No 10 has dropped a proposal for an end-of-year immigration update from Rishi Sunak amid concern that key policies that are meant to “stop the boats” are running into trouble’. Not half. Having gone to huge lengths, including flying the Climate Minister back from COP in order to vote in the latest attempt at Rwanda plan legislation, which passed with a majority of 44, Sunak and right wingers seemed to lose sight of the fact that this is only the first stage: much more work to come on this Bill in the Lords and in committee. But other obstacles to Sunak’s ‘Stopping the boats’ pledge were summarized by a Tory source: ‘The backlog hasn’t been cleared, the Bibby is half-full, our small boats plan is in turmoil and we still haven’t got migrants on all of the large military sites we’re supposed to have delivered. This is supposed to be our wedge issue with Labour and instead it’s a millstone around our necks’.

Not to mention the tragic death of a Bibby occupant. In short, nothing for Sunak to boast about and a Home Office insider revealed more misleading statistical manipulation to suggest that much more progress was being made with clearing the backlog of asylum claims than is actually the case. ‘…insiders say many asylum claims from the legacy backlog have been dismissed in the knowledge that they will be resubmitted but will no longer count as legacy claims. Instead, they will be defined as “secondary asylum casework”, while Sunak’s promise to clear the backlog will be realised. An insider said this amounted to ‘fiddling the figures’.

http://tinyurl.com/2k9rkuns

And on it goes…. At Tuesday’s Commons Liaison Committee, the group comprising the chairs of all the Select Committees, Sunak is on record as denying saying that he would stop the boats when this has been his mantra for months. It seems that despite the Tory chair Bernard Jenkin’s fairly gentle questioning, others were robust, one trying to puncture Sunak’s spiel that the economy and everything else was going really well. ‘He breezed in cheery enough but, as so often, his bonhomie was only skin deep. In every smile there’s the trace of contempt. He really does not like having his time wasted by people questioning his judgment. It’s beneath him.

Labour’s Sarah Champion then asked Sunak if he considered himself to be a leader on the global stage. Rish! hesitated, suspecting a trap, but was unable to resist. Who was he to quibble with all those who waited on his every word? Because, yes, he was here to tell the truth, and the truth was that he was pretty amazing. People looked at him and thought: there’s a guy bossing it on the international scene.“That’s odd,” replied Champion, evenly. “So how come no one really takes much notice of you?”

‘Nor could he possibly tell anyone how much the Rwanda scheme would cost. It was all strictly commercially confidential. Because if other countries got wind of how much we were wasting not to deport a single refugee, they would all want to sign a deal with us. As ever with Sunak, the truth and the world can be whatever he wants it to be’.

http://tinyurl.com/2t7zv8jv

On his NHS waiting list pledge, there’s no denying that the 8m waiting list shows no sign of reducing, so again, instead of accepting responsibility, the high demand is blamed on the pandemic backlog and NHS staff strikes. Following Sunak’s no hoper Cabinet reshuffle in the wake of his eventual sacking of Suella Braverman, new Health and Social Care Secretary Victoria Atkins (whose husband is top dog at British Sugar!) did a series of car crash interviews in yesterday’s media round as a fresh tranche of junior doctors’ strikes kicked off. Apart from her vacuous waffle, she attracted opprobrium for calling the strikers ‘doctors in training’. This could have been ignorance but more likely it was a Tory divide and rule tactic as she’d already claimed credit for settling pay claims from the consultants and others. All part of the narrative which the media are mostly shamefully prepared to collude with, implying that those ‘in training’ don’t deserve what they’re claiming. But what an own goal – presumably Atkins would like to feel she could do better than her predecessor, but this is highly unlikely given her preparedness to alienate the strikers so contemptuously.   

Very few would have believed that Johnson and Sunak had actually lost the potentially incriminating WhatsApp messages at the heart of recent Covid Inquiry evidence (there will be plenty of technical experts who would be able to retrieve them but we’ve not heard what’s being planned, if anything) and now it does look that some have been lying under oath. And this seems to be taken less and less seriously. Lying has been normalized. Besides Piers Morgan’s denials in relation to the phone hacking case, both Johnson and Sunak have stuck to the same line regarding their phones and WhatsApps but two recent events are strong strands of evidence against them: first Lord Bethell (who previously had ‘lost’ his phone) suddenly appearing to find texts from that time following his outing by Michelle Mone in Sunday’s car crash Laura Kuenssberg interview (more on this next week); and second, Penny Mordaunt’s efforts to get to the bottom of disappearing messages emanating from Boris Johnson.

There are many questions still to answer but no doubt the PM has already swanned off on his Christmas break, convincing himself despite all evidence to the contrary that he’s doing a jolly good job. Meanwhile, we hear that his increasingly transparent commitment to furthering the interests of his father-in-law’s company, Infosys, has been given a boost in the form of an NHS contract. Along with 24 other companies, Infosys has mysteriously been selected for a chunk of the NHS’s 2-year, £250m “intelligent automation” contract. What’s not to like? An X user tweeted:  ‘Tories have sold everything the public owned, they’ve outsourced everything, and they’ve cut funding for everything that doesn’t donate to them. Of course we’re in recession. What can you expect?’

A shocking statistic now shows what 14 years of Tory governments have led to – the number of people in England and Wales admitted to hospital with nutritional deficiencies has tripled in 10 years, now standing at 800,000 patients. With many more attending food banks and parents missing meals so that their children can eat, malnutrition isn’t surprising but it’s shocking in a European developed country. ‘The Guardian analysed rates of 25 conditions linked to poor nutrition, including vitamin and mineral deficiencies, scurvy, rickets and malnutrition. Over the past decade, there was a steep increase across nearly all of the conditions, based on primary and secondary diagnosis in hospital patients in England and Wales’. This could easily go under the radar but it’s important that it’s recognized. A senior pediatrician said:  ‘We need to know as a nation that people’s health in this country is deteriorating… We’re storing up health problems for later in life’. Even more sickening, then, is the jollified and tone deaf Christmas coverage on numerous media channels, determined to see Christmas through a solely middle class prism.

http://tinyurl.com/2s3p8zxx

So the Prime Minister will now try to get some respite, knowing that he will return to more wrangling over the Rwanda Bill, more infighting in his divided party, at least one byelection and possibly two for utterly shameful reasons and further ramifications of Covid Inquiry questions and the Michelle Mone scandal.

Finally, I was pleased to be invited to be one of the judging panel on Radio 4’s Feedback Interview of the Year  – it was interesting, if time-consuming, seeing what the listeners had cited then listening and judging them according to three criteria. I thought the best ones were Emma Barnett’s forensic questioning of Ofsted Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman on Woman’s Hour and Nick Robinson being upended by Extinction Rebellion chair Roger Hallam on Political Thinking, Halam clearly having had issues with the entire framework of the programme. You can listen to it on BBC Sounds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001tjlt

A happy Christmas to all and thanks for reading!