Beginning to See the Light; ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’

 

‘Are we not men?

We are Devo’

 
The much anticipated ‘partygate’ report is now available, well, sort of, as much is missing while the Met investigate. I don’t think we should hold our breath for their findings!

The report didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, but it did confirm some things:
 

• ‘There were failures of leadership and judgment by different parts of No 10 and the Cabinet Office at different times.’
• ‘…..Tight knit groups of officials and advisers worked long hours under difficult conditions in buildings that could not be easily adapted as Covid secure workplaces….’those challenges, however, also applied to key and frontline workers across the country who were working under equally, if not more, demanding conditions, often at risk to their own health.’
• ‘Every citizen has been impacted by the pandemic. Everyone has made personal sacrifices, some the most profound, having been unable to see loved ones in their last moments or care for vulnerable family and friends.’

 
No.10 is our generation’s Studio 54. All that was missing was Tina Brown writing it up in Tatler the next day as Bianca Jagger rode in on a horse, whilst Diana Ross, Halston, and Warhol looked on.

Following its publication, we were treated to the usual mealy-mouthed apology from Johnson, oozing with the sincerity of a gameshow host. What really irritates me is all the apologists saying, ‘oh, but they were working hard and needed some fun’; WTF do they think the rest of us were doing?

‘Partygate’ doesn’t look like being the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It doesn’t look like there are 54 Tory MPs with the balls to send the letters, they are all waiting for this, that, or Godot!

This cowardice, this reluctance to do the right thing sums up where the party is, putting itself before voters and the country.
 

‘I wasn’t allowed to see her for her birthday and then we see the people in charge were on the piss? It’s a joke’

 
The local elections in May represents an opportunity for the electorate to voice their feelings. If the following comments from voters of Tonge Fold, a white working-class community in the constituency of Bolton NE, are anything to go by Johnson will get his marching orders.

Bolton NE is one of the ‘red wall’ seat the Tory’s won in 2019. The majority was a mere 378 majority, and its MP, Mark Logan, has been publicly critical of the prime minister over the ‘partygate’ saga

One constituent said he was ‘fuming’; ‘My gran is 84 and I wasn’t allowed to see her for her birthday and then we see the people in charge were on the piss? It’s a joke.’

Another said, ‘You just can’t have different rules in Downing Street. It’s appalling. You see Queen Elizabeth doing the right thing, following the rules, sitting alone, and it seems that none of these rules were applicable to the government itself.’

However, ‘partygate’ is only a small part of what is a catalogue of lies, errors of judgement, and failures that this government has delivered.

Their latest failure is their inaction as households facing spiralling heating costs. Today it was revealed that households will pay an average of 54% more for energy this year than in 2020. To combat this, other countries are helping consumers:
 

• Holland: cut energy taxes to save households an average of €400 (£332.79) a year, plus C.€150m set aside for home insulation. A further €500m will be used to compensate small firms in the form of lower energy taxes. Total cost €3.2bn
• France: the government has already cut some electricity taxes at an estimated cost to the state of €8bn
• Germany: the government will cut a green surcharge that appears on home energy bills from 6.5 cents per kilowatt-hour to 3.7 cents, plus a €130m package of one-time grants to low-income households.
• Spain: last September they removed taxes from home energy bills until May, funded by a windfall tax on utilities profiting from soaring energy market prices
• Italy: cutting tax on gas for all consumers and reducing charges that finance subsidies for renewable energy, in addition to extra grants for low-income families. Overall, state support f is C. €8.5bn.
• A very belated Rishi £200 discount to households and £150 rebate on council tax for Bands A-D. And the £200 is a ‘loan’.

 
Johnson defends himself claiming, ‘We have got all the big calls right’. That’s rubbish, or, as he prefers, ‘piffle’.

The credit for the rapid development and distribution of vaccines belongs to scientists and the efficiency with which the NHS administering the jabs. Johnson’s ‘big call’, the timing of lockdowns was so poorly judged that Britain has the highest death toll in Europe.

And then there is billion of public funds from the VIP lane for his mates to fatten their wallets supplying us with PPE, some that didn’t work, and was overpriced.

Dido Harding was parachuted in to oversee ‘test and trace’, £44bn later she failed the test, and the cash can’t be traced.
 

‘the timing of lockdowns was so poorly judged that Britain has the highest death toll in Europe’

 
Putting Covid to one side, there are two other episodes that define this government: Brexit and ‘levelling-up’.

Anti-EU sentiment had been festering in the Tory party ever since we joined. The ascent of UKIP and Nigel Farage, who’s appeal to white working- class voters terrified the Tories, led to Cameron agreeing to the referendum.

As the referendum approached Johnson jumped on the vote ‘leave’ bandwagon, effectively becoming its figurehead. If Farage was the catalyst for Brexit and the referendum, our second protagonist, Dominic Cummings, was the man who delivered it.

Cummings understands voters and elections, he realised that that ‘leave’ had C.40% of the vote, another 40% were ‘remainers’ who wouldn’t be swayed, therefore he concentrated on the 20% ‘swing voters’. The campaign was based on a lie,’ £375m a week extra for the NHS’.

£375m was our gross contribution to the EU, secondly, where has it gone? Why are we facing increased NICs to bale out the underfunded NHS?

In addition, the campaign had a simple slogan ‘taking back control’. Perhaps Cummings realised he was dealing with simple people?

One of the sectors expected to benefit from Brexit was agriculture, which was promised that any post-Brexit free-trade deals would include permanent protection for domestic food producers.

Despite this promise, the terms of the December’s UK-Australia deal, mean that their beef and lamb farmers will gradually gain more access to the UK market over the first 10-years, before all tariffs and quotas on imported meat are removed. Similar arrangements have been agreed for Australian dairy products, with a five-year transition period, and 8-years for sugar.

Minette Batters, leader of the National Farmers Union (‘NFU’) said, ‘It does feel like a betrayal. My greatest fear was that we would be used as a pawn in trade deals and effectively that is what’s happened.’

Going forward these agreements have set a dangerous precedent for talks with much larger food producers such as the United States, Canada and Brazil.

Leave’s success proves the adage; If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

Theresa May’s attempts to negotiate Brexit were sabotaged from within her own party by the hardliners who regarded a ‘hard’ Brexit as the only true path.

To deliver this the Tory’s reverted to their usual cynicism appointing Johnson leader despite many realising that he was a liability, and totally unsuited to the job. Johnson bought in Dominic Cummings to mastermind his landslide 2019 election victory. ‘Taking back control’ was replaced by ‘getting Brexit done’, and ‘levelling-up’.

The election success was underpinned by white working-class voters in the ‘red wall’ constituencies. The 57 seats taken from Labour formed the difference between a working majority and a minority government.

Levelling up was the next lie; yesterday the government announced its 12-points which are long on what with no mention of how.

Last Friday, the government released a press statement saying that 20-towns and cities would benefit from a ‘new £1.5bn brownfield fund’. The release said the 20 areas ‘will benefit from developments combining housing, leisure and business in sustainable, walkable beautiful new neighbourhoods’.

After investigations it turned out that this was government spin aimed at deflecting attention away from ‘partygate’. This was not ‘new’ money only the levelling-up funds announced by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, in last autumns spending review.
 

‘this was government spin aimed at deflecting attention away from ‘partygate’’

 
On top of this are the cuts to the proposed HS2 project, and the funding aimed at improving bus services in these areas.

Other than avoiding levelling London/SE down, the other issue will be how support is allocated.

To date, analysis shows that some of the wealthiest parts of England, including areas represented by government ministers, have been allocated 10x more money per capita than the poorest. For example:
 

• Sajid Javid’s constituency, Bromsgrove (Worcestershire), one of the wealthiest areas in England, will receive C. £15m (£148 a head).
• Another wealthy area, Mid-Bedfordshire, partly represented by the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, has received £26.7m (£91 a head).
• Other relatively affluent areas that have received much larger awards than poorer areas include Lewes in East Sussex (£443 a head), South Derbyshire (£229) and South Ribble in Lancashire (£226).

 
By comparison, 8-local authorities that are among the poorest in England have received less than £10 a head from the four funds announced to date. These include Swale in Kent; Tendring in Essex; Barking and Dagenham; Southampton; and Knowsley in Merseyside.

Knowsley, the third poorest local authority in England, has been rejected by three of the funds, despite being identified by the government as top priority. It was named on Tuesday as one of the government’s ‘educational investment areas’ to be outlined in the white paper.

Graham Morgan, the Labour leader of Knowsley council, said levelling up had been ‘nothing more than a slogan so far’ and suggested the area was being punished because it was a Labour stronghold: ‘The people who actually work for the government on these schemes can’t find any box which we haven’t ticked. So there is some other reason – a political reason – why Knowsley isn’t getting the support which local people need.’

At this point, I found myself asking why? What caused the discontent that persuaded the 20% swing voters to support ‘leave’. What happened in the 57- ‘red wall’ seats to make them turn their back on Labour?

My conclusion; the GFC of 2008.

The wealth gap had been increasing since the 1980s, however economic policies post-2008 exacerbated the situation to untenable levels.

Looking back at 2008, regulators avoided the near collapse of the global financial system, banks were resuscitated, and a global recession largely avoided. It looked like we had got out of jail free. But we hadn’t.
 

‘It looked like we had got out of jail free. But we hadn’t’

 
Globally, central banks slashed interest rates to historic lows and flooded economies with liquidity via QE. This created a slow, stealthy recession that went almost unnoticed, and inflated an unprecedented asset bubble that, at some point, must either burst of be deflated.

As a result ‘rentiers’, those with assets, prospered, whilst the poorest in society got poorer

In the UK, the newly elected Tory government favoured austerity, which led to many workers experiencing a ‘real’ (inflation adjusted) fall in their wages. By 2016 many were worse off than they had been prior to the GFC.

These people, often referred to as ‘forgotten’, became puppets in the hands of snake oil salespeople, ready to blame entities such as the EU for their misfortune. By the end of 2019 their lot had got no better. Cumming’s simple electoral message of ‘getting Brexit done’ convinced them that Johnson could deliver an exit that would see them prosper.

Added to this was ‘levelling-up’ which convinced them that Labour, the party many had supported all their lives had let them down, whilst the party that had sought to keep them down would be their saviours.
 
I wonder what they think now.
 

‘Walkin’ among our people

There’s someone who’s straight and strong

To lead us from desolation

And a broken world gone wrong’

 
Inevitably ‘Partygate’ features in this week’s missive and as the latest news reveals that the police have a photograph of Boris with a can of beer at his birthday, its impossible not to wonder how we have stooped so low; the endless round of sycophantic toads doing the media round and pledging to ‘move on’ and ‘get on with the job’ is truly nauseating. 

The fact that only a handful of letters have made it to Graham Brady’s desk is surely not entirely disconnected from the almost unbelievable incompetents waiting in the wings; Boris’ back-office team have been less coy as they headed to the exit, including a withering parting shot from ‘Boris’ Brain’ Munira Mirza.

Running out of fridges to hide in, Boris decided to play the international statesman and show Vlad who’s boss; let’s hope they keep their shirts on.

Fortunately for him, Liz Truss wasn’t using the jet that day on account of having contracted Covid – along with the rest of those crammed into the front row in the commons without masks – despite the fact that the government has declared the pamdemic over.

Boris additionally used it to show that his pledges on the environment are as hollow as Nadine Dorries’ cranium by taking the kite on a little jaunt up to Blackpool.

Nothing makes those in the north feel levelled up more than being allowed a glimpse of Boris’ £75m Airbus with its £900,000 paint job; apparently the William Morris wallpaper kept peeling off.

If the cost of living crisis gets any worse, maybe he could have the old girl converted to drop sacks of grain and bottles of Dog; just spare us the Bob Geldoff come back tour.

Of course, the hammer blow to families will come from the soaring cost of energy; whilst M Macron has one in each hand, dictating that EDF must supply at 20% of the market rate, Mr Sunak has come up with a plan to lend people a few quid, while they get back on their feet.

Quite how many people will be dealt a fatal financial blow when hiked energy costs filter down to virtually all goods and services remains to be seen; with interest rates nudging up, NI increases inked in and the prospect of inflation at 7% by mid-year, there is a worrying feeling that we’re in free-fall.

Philip’s ‘temporary-57’ can’t be relishing the prospect of getting back on the stump given the strength of feeling that there is one rule for the Tory elite and one for the rest of us.

Anxious to show that we’re all in this together, Bank of England boss Andrew Bailey cautioned against ‘excessive’ pay demands as people try to keep their heads above water; it does make you wonder how the poor lamb would manage if his salary were to be pegged at the current £575,000. 

There is certainly something dicomfiting about Shell announcing record, £19bn profits on the day that the energy price cap was hiked to send 4m people into fuel poverty; but Mr Sunak has no appetite for a windfall tax.
‘In conclusion the root cause of all of this is the GFC, and the stealthy recession that saw too many people’s income fall. Many of these are the very people who voted ‘leave’ and Tory in 2019. The lesson is simple; you can’t have an economic crisis of that proportion and expect to have no recession. This time around it looked different, and everyone missed the fact.
Simples!
Musically, we start with Devo and ‘Joko Homo’ aimed at the spineless Tory’s who are ‘not men’. I didn’t have room for the spat artists are having with Spotify, instead we finish with Neil Young’s ‘Looking for a Leader’. Very apt.’ Enjoy!
 

 

Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.

Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s

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