Sunday 31 December 2023

As the year ends it’s increasingly clear that nothing is working under this Conservative administration – from the NHS to railways, from the creaking justice system to impoverished schools, from the non-functioning regulatory system to our polluted coasts and rivers, everything’s worse. (It’s been suggested that it will take 10 years to clear the backlogs in the NHS and the courts). Add to this the pressures of inflation, rising debt, a flagging economy, the HS2 debacle, broken asylum system and the extent of cronyism revealed by the Covid Inquiry. Yet Sunak and ministers continue to demonstrate their inadequacy by jetting around the world pretending to be world statesmen and boasting in Parliament about policies to cut National Insurance and ‘the death tax’ – desperately grasping at straws as they prepare for election year, ‘straws’ which despite Pinocchio Hunt’s bullish talk will only benefit the already better off.  

The Conservative Party’s authority has leaked even further by further revelations of unacceptable behaviour resulting in more MPs losing their seats, triggering more byelections in 2024. Every week we see examples of reprehensible conduct, the latest being James Daly blaming the state of ‘struggling children’ on their ‘crap parents’, yet worse examples like James Cleverly’s latest gaffe carry no punishment. That is, until it’s clear that people aren’t ‘moving on’, as in the Braverman case, and the offender is eventually sacked by this weak and procrastinating PM. (The Guardian’s Catherine Bennett captured that increasingly popular and sickening politician’s habit: ‘In his time in office, Rishi Sunak has done much to popularise an intensifier favoured by men wanting to advertise their commitment to women’s interests while effacing any earlier indifference: “As a father of daughters.”)

But it could be argued he has a good excuse for putting off the decision: who would take the over-promoted Home Secretary’s place? Sunak has had to scrape the barrel so much that there’s virtually no one left. A clear example of this is appointing Victoria Atkins to the post of Health Secretary: married to the MD of British Sugar (no conflict of interest there, of course) she alienated medics and many others days after her promotion by her media round allusion to striking junior doctors as ‘doctors in training’.

But you have to seriously wonder who’s advising these people: Christmas seemed to bring out the worst in the Conservative HQ PR strategy. First we have our PM ensuring, of course, that cameras were present as he bought mince pies at King’s Cross station to hand out to key workers, setting off a succession of Tory MPs similarly tweeting their ‘thanks’ to NHS and other workers as they dropped off Christmas ‘treats’. As many X users tweeted, it would have been better to pay these people sufficiently so they could purchase their own mince pies. But no, this would have spoilt the Lord or Lady Bountiful act. Yet worse was to come: a self-promotion video in which Rishi was filmed alone in Downing Street, wandering from room to room, even recruiting Larry the Cat at one point. Sunak can’t have seen the tweets from that account.

Speaking of cronyism, the epitome has been seen on Saturday as the New Years Honours were published (actually leaked on Friday and as predicted, the Liz Truss ones were cynically slipped out at the same time). Of course there are some worthy ones, but the corruption underpinning this outmoded system is only too clear to see: at least seven Tory donors are in the list, Sajid Javid and Tim Martin (the Brexiteer Wetherspoons boss for ‘his services to hospitality and culture’!) have been knighted and the Archbishop of Canterbury has been knighted ‘for his role at the Coronation’. What a marvellous result, two outmoded institutions in one go.

The regular honours are bad enough but the peerages are a more serious issue: people have not ‘moved on’ from the elevation of 29 year old Charlotte Owen (still the subject of a press super injunction) and democracy is seriously undermined by promotion of unsuitable candidates to the second chamber. An X user tweeted: ‘It’s one thing for PMs to be allowed to hand out pointless gongs like knighthoods and CBEs etc but quite another to be able to put chums and sponsors into the Lords for life where they have the power to decide on laws’. Another said: ‘5 of the last 16 Conservative Party treasurers have [become Lords] after donating more than £3m to the party [including] Lord Cruddas, who took his seat after… Boris Johnson rejected the advice of the House of Lords Appointments Commission’. Another: ‘Liz Truss, accepted idiot, national laughing stock and unaccountable temporary Prime Minister, made many disastrous decisions, so let’s allow her to choose her own people to populate our political establishment? Next, why is Britain the sick man of Europe again?’ It beggars belief that Jacob Rees-Mogg (already absurdly knighted, of course) has gone on the airwaves to defend from criticism the elevations of Tory donors, citing services to ‘the Party’. As ever with the Tories, it’s all about The Party: their concern is not without foundation, though, as their divisions are so marked it could be the end of them, especially with Richard Tice’s Reform Party snapping at their heels. Well, we can hope…

Meanwhile, Tories may have hoped but the festive season hasn’t made us ‘move on’ from the Michelle Mone PPE scandal and the Mone/Barrowman car crash BBC interview, during which Laura Kuenssberg for once did a robust job. It took at least 20 minutes but Mone finally had to admit that yes, she and her children had benefited from the massive Medpro profits from PPE that never worked. We have to wonder who was advising the pair as apart from their appearance (he with the ill-fitting shirt and she glistening rather than glowing and with a good deal of cosmetic ‘work’ clearly done) their strategy (and the comparison has been made) wasn’t dissimilar in some respects to that of Prince Andrew in his disastrous Maitlis interview – the protestations of innocence, victim card playing and endless denial. They started with Mone stressing her desire to ‘help’ the Covid PPE effort (‘help’ that carried a hugely expensive sting in its tail), then continued with Barrowman claiming to be ‘a private person’ and that’s why he’d decamped to the Isle of Man tax haven and both distancing themselves from the vast amounts they accumulated by stressing the trusts the dosh was put into.

Before this interview Mone had finally admitted lying to the press about her involvement with Medpro but kept maintaining that it was to ‘protect’ her family from press intrusion: it didn’t seem to occur to her that this ‘intrusion’ into their profiteering was a legitimate area of public interest and the press were doing their jobs. When pressed on this Mone said, reflecting the new post-truth climate, that lying to the press was ‘not a crime’. And her longstanding denial must have made things worse for her family anyway. She also had the nerve to use the same excuse for the appalling use of lawyers to threaten those intending to go public on their findings. I wonder how the National Crime Agency investigation of this affair is coming along. One of the few cathartic aspects must be the Guardian’s unusual decision to name the lawyers involved in the intimidating tactics: their reactions were interesting. One claimed to have been ‘misled’ (great sense of personal responsibility there) and the other two pathetically played the client confidentiality card.

‘In late 2020, when the Guardian began making inquiries about Mone’s links to PPE Medpro, Jonathan Coad, a well-known media lawyer, said his client “never had any role or function” in the company. He also said “any suggestion of an association” between Mone and the company would be “inaccurate”, “misleading” and “defamatory”. Contacted for comment by the Guardian this week, Coad said he was not aware until recently that he had been misled, and apologised for unwittingly misleading the media’. Astonishingly, he claimed to be ‘a devout Christian’ and to ‘hold to the values of truth and integrity’ as faithfully as he could. He sounds about as ‘Christian’ as Rees-Mogg. We have to wonder, following the Guardian’s outing of these three, whether other legal folk will be so keen to participate in such shameful charades in the future. Another aspect of this scandal is its provision of more evidence that the gentlemen’s agreements governing parliamentary affairs aren’t fit for purpose: many, including fellow peers, have called for Mone to leave the Lords, but it shouldn’t be her choice. We need enforceable rules which would promptly remove such people who bring the institution into disrepute.

Yet another loaded tentacle of this unsavoury creature was brought centre stage with Mone feeling she was being scapegoated, leading to Mone, Michael Gove and Jim Bethell fighting like ferrets in a sack on Twitter. One of the many having denied access to their Whatsapp messages during the Covid Inquiry, the then health minister, Jim Bethell, had quoted some of Mone’s messages to him emanating from that time, prompting many to observe how selective his ‘access’ to messages had been when previously he claimed to have lost his phone and lost messages.

http://tinyurl.com/bddc98u9

This year we’ve heard much about cash-strapped councils and some have gone bust: it seems a complex picture because some of this will be down to mismanagement by people not sufficiently skilled to manage finance and large projects, but equally much will be due to the massive cuts made to local government by Westminster. In the Sunday Times Robert Colville added another explanation of why ‘local government is falling apart’. He cites ‘the frightful four’: adult social care; homeless accommodation; children’s services and school transport. Providing these is a statutory duty so it must be done, but costs ‘are shooting up’, in one case amounting to 75% of the council’s budget. ‘If we don’t find a way to reduce councils’ legally obligated spending, the frightful four will swallow the system whole’. Using the term ‘frightful four’ is a bit loaded anyway but surely we also need to consider why such costs have escalated so rapidly and the answer is clear: some at least will be due to social breakdown and the fact that despite many promises over the years the social care funding conundrum has never been resolved.

We’ve been getting used to problematic situations presented as the fault of this organization/that group of workers, etc, when actually it’s the government’s austerity measures and damaging short termism at the back of them. The latest example is the UK’s hunger and malnutrition crisis: an article by health inequalities expert Michael Marmot, author of the authoritative Marmot Reviews on social determinants of health, suggests that Britain’s hunger and malnutrition crisis could be easily solved – yet politicians choose not to. Surely this amounts to a kind of social control. An alarming number of hospital admissions have been due to malnutrition (a fact that’s gone under largely under the radar) and the latest statistics (from June) indicate that ‘9 million adults in the UK, 17% of households, experienced moderate or severe food insecurity (a massive rise from 7.3% in June 2021)’. When the government is called upon to respond to such findings, they always say they’re putting ‘more money’ into this or that (more than what and when?) and big up some half-baked measure as the answer when it’s far from adequate. ‘Unicef’s latest “report card”, which examined changes in relative child poverty between 2012 and 2021, found that the UK was the worst performer among 39 high-income countries’ – this would be good for a media interviewer to wheel out since ministers are forever talking up UK performance in this or that area when evidence doesn’t bear out their claim. ‘As 2023 ends, Britain may not be facing a famine, as people are in north-eastern Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen or Somalia, but that is a low bar. The UK’s current levels of food insecurity will damage physical and mental health and increase health inequalities for years to come’.

http://tinyurl.com/bddea54y

By now most will have heard of the Post Office Horizon scandal, thought to be one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in this country, involving the prosecution and conviction of hundreds of subpostmasters and subpostmistresses for fraud when all along errors were due to the faulty Horizon computer system. But it’s taken a lot of work to get to this point due to Post Office denial and secrecy and, by the sound of it, government collusion. On the Today programme this last week Justin Webb had the nerve to claim that they had covered it long ago when I’m pretty sure they didn’t. The first I heard of it was in 2020 via the excellent Radio 4 podcast produced by freelance journalist Nick Wallis, though I’m told Private Eye covered the scandal extensively. It’s astonishing what Post Office senior staff got away with, especially the then CEO Paula Vennells, who maintained a long silence but when summoned by the Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee maintained that nothing was her fault.

Here we see yet another example of police being asleep at the wheel: lawyers for the wrongly convicted people said during the public inquiry that there was enough evidence for police to investigate senior staff but surely there was sufficient evidence years ago. Barrister Paul Marshall said that in his view the Post Office was engaged in ‘a sustained attack on the rule of law itself’. In another boost for public awareness, next week, on four consecutive nights, ITV is screening a dramatisation, starring the excellent Toby Jones. One of the tragedies of this case is the sheer amount of distress, relationship breakdown, illness and premature deaths the victims had to go through before it even got to public inquiry stage. Let’s hope the police do their jobs, those responsible don’t continue to get off scot free and that staff are adequately compensated, although we hear, astonishingly, that the amount set aside for this has been halved.

http://tinyurl.com/4ccpteba

The Week tells (reminds?) us that modern aristocrats like to forage for mushrooms, make their own cheese and bread, keep bees and rewild their estates ‘all in pursuit of a more Romantic rural life’. Now ‘society Bible’, aka The Tatler, has endorsed a new label for such folk, one of the leaders being King Charles: ‘Bopeas’ (shudder), a contraction of Bohemian peasants, apparently ‘cultivate meaning and status in ways that expand the ideals of success beyond conventional material accumulation. It’s all about the niche, the hyper-local and the mythic’. Hmmm – only the relatively well off would have the luxury of the time and wherewithal for all these pursuits and in any case it’s easy to dismiss ‘material accumulation’ when you have it all anyway – or could. How about ‘faux peasants’?

Ironically, a source of the King’s income publicized recently could be said to be the modern equivalent of said peasants his foraging hobby aims to emulate: until recently it’s not been commonly known that bona vacantia has been allowed to persist. If you die intestate within the boundaries of the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall your estate goes not to the Treasury (or charity, as the duchies said) but to the Duchies themselves. Too many still aren’t aware that the proceeds from those Duchies already go straight into the royal coffers and many won’t have known about this other ancient arrangement. Apparently the money has often been used to do up Duchy properties let out commercially. ‘Unclaimed estates of former miners from the Lake District are being used to spruce up the royal property portfolio. It’s an outrageous feudal anomaly’, opines the Guardian.

Finally, some very good news from the medical field, in that a trial is now taking place of ‘a potentially groundbreaking test for sepsis’ using a technique which looks for high levels of DNA fragments associated with this hard-to-diagnose condition. Let’s hope the 18 month trial goes well because sepsis is responsible for a staggering 48,000 deaths a year in the UK.

Happy New Year and thanks, as ever, for reading!