Beginning to See the Light; Rotten to the core

 

‘The sun beams down on a brand new day,

No more welfare tax to pay

Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light,

 Jobless millions whisked away

At last we have more room to play,

All systems go to kill the poor tonight,’

 

We start this week with a recommendation of what to watch, ‘Uprising’ the documentary by Steve McQueen currently showing on BBC iPlayer. It tells the story of black people in the late-70s culminating in the New Cross fire which killed 13-young people.It depicts a terrifying level of racism, lead ably by the police who seemed more racist than the National Front (‘NF’).

One lowlight is the NF march on 13^th August 1977 which became known as the Battle of Lewisham, which was little different to the Blackshirts march in October 1937, that became known as the Battle of Cable St. Yet again the police were found wanting and siding with the racists.

As last years’ Black Lives Matter protests showed not much has changed. Worse still the government still appear clueless, if I’m less charitable I would say this simply don’t care and are only concerned with pandering to the ageing racists that vote for them.

Why else would Johnson use ‘kind and loving’ to describe using and ‘enhancing’ stop-and-search powers. S.60 of the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act is the infamous stop without suspicion, ‘SUS’; last year this was used 18,000 times yet only 255 of those stopped had weapons. Under SUS, black people are 18 times more likely to be searched overall than white people.

 

‘More policman come dung

Dem beat me to the grung

Dem charge Jim fi sus’

 

Whilst fighting crime should be everyone’s priority, it should not be a stick to beat minorities with. Reports published by the Home Office and the College of Policing highlight the inefficiency of SUS, providing evidence to dismiss the approach announced by the government, one thing is clear it doesn’t need to be enhanced.

By now governments should understand that we cannot ‘police’ our way out of the societal issue of violence and in particular ‘street crime’; enforcement has been tried for years and has made no difference. All SUS does is put the blame onto many innocent people and cause unnecessary bad feeling.

This is a typical Johnson initiative, all rhetoric and grandstanding to his culture warriors and the fawning right-wing media. It has the added benefit of distracting people away from the internal arguments in government about public spending, taxes, health and social care, all Tory’s love a dose of law and order.

The only strategy is creating headlines and to frame public debate. Johnson knew exactly what he was doing with his racially targeted remark that antisocial offenders should be ‘out there in one of those fluorescent chain gangs visibly paying [their] debt to society’. The headlines and the argument duly followed.

 

‘out there in one of those fluorescent chain gangs visibly paying [their] debt to society’

 

There was nothing new or innovative in Tuesday’s announcements, the intent wasn’t to innovate or make a difference, this was about visibility, pandering to their voters and fawning media. The Daily Mail duly obliged on Tuesday, with the headline – ‘Priti: I’ll make yobs clean the streets’. Like Trump she glorifies in the politics of cruelty, which is politics without policies whose sole purpose is to intimidate those viewed as threats.

So much that is rotten in this country stems from the top, the corrupt, inept government, the wealthy media tycoons ‘guiding’ government policy, and the royal family. Anyone that reads this column will know I am anti the monarchy, however, to date, I have grudgingly accepted that the Queen did a good job.

That has now ceased; the Guardian has revealed that the Queen’s lawyers secretly lobbied Scottish ministers to change a draft law to exempt her private land from a major initiative to cut carbon emissions, documents reveal. The Queen is one of the largest landowners in Scotland, and the only person not required to facilitate the construction of pipelines to heat buildings using renewable energy.

The bill was viewed as a key piece of legislation to combat the climate emergency, enabling the construction of pipelines to heat clusters of homes and businesses using renewable energy, rather than from separate fossil fuel boilers. It is expected to help cut emissions, reduce fuel poverty, and create green jobs.

Once again the queens lawyers have exploited an obscure parliamentary procedure known as Queen’s consent, which gives the monarch advance sight of legislation, a subject I talked about in the article entitled ‘Plus ça change, Plus c’est la même chose.’

Her actions appear at odds with the royal family’s public commitment to tackling the climate crisis, with both Princes William and Charles campaigning to cut emissions and protect the planet, what it does tell us is who wields power and that there is one rule for her and one for everyone else

 

‘what it does tell us is who wields power and that there is one rule for her and one for everyone else’

 

On the 17^th February, after ‘suitable’ amendments had been made, a courtier told the Scottish government the Queen had given her consent to allow the bill to be passed.

Five days later, when MSPs debated the bill, Wheelhouse (the former energy minister) put forward an amendment that applied only to land privately owned by the Queen, which specifically prevents companies and public authorities from compelling the Queen to sell pieces of her land to enable the green energy pipelines to be built.

During the debate over the parliamentary bill, Andy Wightman, then an independent MSP, objected to the amendment, arguing it was wrong to single out the Queen for preferential treatment.

Wheelhouse responded that the amendment was ‘required to ensure the smooth passage of the bill’. However, he did not disclose that the Queen’s lawyers had lobbied for the change. The amendment was passed with Wightman and a handful of other MSPs opposing it.

After being informed about the new documents, Wightman said he was ‘shocked to discover that the amendment was made to secure Queen’s consent, and that this was omitted from the debate.

A Buckingham Palace spokesperson said: ‘The royal household can be consulted on bills to ensure the technical accuracy and consistency of the application of the bill to the crown, a complex legal principle governed by statute and common law. This process does not change the nature of any such bill.’

In a short statement, a spokesperson said: ‘Scottish government policy is that the crown should be subject to regulatory requirements on the same basis as everyone else, unless there is a legitimate reason for an exemption or variation. However, crown consent is required by law if a bill impacts the private property or interests of the sovereign – and that is what happened in this case.’

Our next destination in this trip around our rotten society are the lauded, applauded, and woefully under-remunerated nurses.

Figures produced by the TUC show that remuneration for nurses, community nurses, medical secretaries, speech therapists, physiotherapists, paramedics and radiographers will have dropped by between 7.3% and 7.6% in real terms in just over a decade, even after factoring in the 3% rise offered last week. The 3% offer for NHS workers was an improvement on an initial figure of just 1% submitted by ministers to the NHS pay review body.

The TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, told the Observer: ‘It’s easy to understand the anger from NHS staff when you see what’s been done to their pay. It’s not just about the 3% – it’s the way their wages have been held back year after year. All our key workers deserve a decent standard of living for their family. But too often their hard work does not pay. And after the hardest year of their working lives, they deserve better. The prime minster must follow through on his promise to ‘build back fairer’ with fair pay for all key workers. It’s not only about valuing them properly. The spending boost from pay rises will help our businesses and high streets recover faster. It’s the fuel in the tank that our economy needs.’

 

‘after the hardest year of their working lives, they deserve better’

 

Ah yes, ‘build back fairer’, which, along with ‘level up’ is yet more hollow rhetoric.

As the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy wrote in a recent report; ‘the current available documents show a wide-ranging and disjointed programme of random policies from an obesity strategy, an increase in police officers, to funding on A-roads and the creation of freeports. Although these policies are all very interesting and welcome, it is difficult to see how they all tie together under one overarching strategy. The cohesion of the whole has not been well described to identify how these fit together. If the government is serious about levelling up and for it to be a substantive strategy rather than merely a slogan, it must spell out a coherent plan as a matter of urgency.’.

Johnson originated this claptrap as part of his bid to become the Conservative party leader in 2019, and in his subsequent election manifest pledged, ‘levelling up every part of the UK – not just investing in our great towns and cities, as well as rural and coastal areas, but giving them far more control of how that investment is made’.

Earlier this month he made a speech in Coventry where he said he wanted to end the idea that ‘Whitehall knows best’, setting out a vision for locally accountable mayors across England who would be ‘the yeast that lifts the whole mattress of dough, the magic sauce, the ketchup of catchup’.

His speech was criticised as providing ‘nothing new’ by thinktanks, including the Institute for Fiscal Studies and IPPR North, which said it was time for ‘deeds not words’.

The report found that disparities in income levels could be found within regions as well as between regions. This was highlighted in a report by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2016, which found that that the UK had the sixth highest regional economic disparities among 30 member countries with comparable data.

 

‘the yeast that lifts the whole mattress of dough, the magic sauce, the ketchup of catchup’

 

London is oft cited as doing too well; in 2019, London accounted for 22.7% of the UK’s national income (GDP), and the SE 14,8%; meaning that 37.5% of UK GDP is generated by 26.8% of the population.

This, however, gilds the lily, in a 2019 league table of all English regions London had the largest percentage of people in relative poverty, and only the fourth highest average level of disposable income once housing costs were factored in.

Perhaps commentators aren’t the only people to sense the hollowness of Johnson’s words. Even though he has an 80-seat majority, and to date has faced little meaningful threat from the opposition, there is a rift opening within the party revealing a new animosity towards him. And with good reason, the vaccination bounce that gave them a 13-point lead over Labour in June, has now fallen to 4, according to a YouGov survey last weekend.

We must always remember that the Tory party has but one goal, the pursuit and maintenance of power and keeping hold of it. Proposed legislation such as increasing the NI rate to pay for NHS and social care is not the policy of orthodox conservativism, even his fawning media are anti the idea.

The headline in the Sunday Telegraph was, ‘This government is losing its grip’, they continued with, ‘Tax increases should not even be on the table, and the brakes need to be slammed on public spending’.

Robert Colvile, the director of the Thatcher-founded Centre for Policy Studies, bewails Johnson’s ‘disturbing faith in big government’, and a ‘strong streak of nannying and intervention’ in its proposals. Whilst the Free Market Forum’s head, Emma Revell, called for ‘eliminating inefficiencies within the NHS’.  In her Telegraph rallying cry, it’s time Johnson ‘returns the Conservative party to its roots and starts delivering lower taxes’.

At the Spectator, Johnson’s former stamping ground, Fraser Nelson wrote ‘Nanny Boris: the PM’s alarming flight from liberalism’, accusing him of ‘hoping to sneak through a fundamental change in the nature of the relationship between individual and the state’. He continued, ‘Big Boris is watching you’ and ‘finding new ways of eroding our freedom’, he insists that vaccine passports are ‘the start of a biosecurity state’. Where is the lost Boris, the mocker of health and safety and seatbelts who ‘would once have mercilessly lampooned all of this’?

 

‘Nanny Boris: the PM’s alarming flight from liberalism’

 

The right seems to live in a permanent state of fears; they see lockdowns, masks, and quarantines as the beginning of ‘big government’. Other hates include, net zero carbon emissions, social care, tax rises and levelling up. But calls for ‘cutting the fat’ of spending are forlorn when public services have already been pared beyond redemption over the past 10-years.

Covid aside, Johnson’s problems are of his own making, perhaps more accurately that should read Dominic Cummings making. Their election campaign was too clever, it promised everything to all, raising expectations exponentially. There is a harsh reality, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies says; expect the Treasury to make up to £17bn of additional cuts to public services. A new era of austerity might be his gift to those new Tory voters.

The dissent in the ranks come down to a battle between a fiscally tight chancellor and a spendthrift PM. Sometime soon this will have to be dealt with, there is no kicking the can down the road, or fudging the issue that is workable.

What are Johnson’s options?

He can abandon all pre-election promises, explaining that Covid changes everything, and this is an emergency requiring spending to rescue the NHS, education, and social care. This would be a return to pre-Thatcher Conservatism, which would be an anathema to many if his party who are Thatcher’s children, their preferred response would be to do nothing, and recite the old mantra, cutting ‘red tape’, ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘inefficiency’ will return us to Tory nirvana. Their disciples include former leader William Hague, who warns that any step towards Keynsian big-state borrowing risks exposing his right flank to a ‘NewKip’, Faragist insurgency – low-tax, small-state, anti-immigration.

The alternative, a return to austerity will undermine the new ‘red wall’ Tory voters who were seduced by his promises to ban the very word ‘austerity’.

As I have written many times before the Tory’s are the masters of change, bending to the wind as circumstances require to deliver the goal of being in government. This time it will be fascinating to watch, the very future of the country depends on it.

Do we slide deeper into regressive politics, with a leader constantly citing the EU and woke campaigners as the enemy, or do we progress into a more coherent, caring, inclusive society?

 

‘One child grows up to be

Somebody that just loves to learn

And another child grows up to be

Somebody you’d just love to burn’

 

When you get an article with a preamble that includes: ‘This week I had to stop half-way through and rewrite some of this. If not, we would have both been locked-up’ it’s going to get some attention. No histrionics from Philip – having seen the focus of his attentions this week, I think being hauled up before the beak could have been the least of our worries; I’m thinking the Tower!

Philip starts with Steve McQueen’s shocking documentary ‘Uprising’ which as a stepping stone between the Cable Street riots and the BLM movement suggests that things have changed really very little in the last 80 years; the recurring theme of culture wars that has frequented the column remains pertinent.

Mr Johnson and Ms Patel’s pledge to clap offenders in irons and have them publicly atone for their misdemeanors may carry a bit more clout had the Police Federation not recently declared ‘no confidence’ in the Home Secretary and declined the opportunity to provide props for yet another exercise in self-aggrandisement for Boris (shurely ‘attend a drinks reception at No10?’……..Ed).

I wonder how many members of the thin blue line were chortling quite as heartily as Boris’ trusty attack dog when he felt obliged to make a spectacle of himself by wrestling with an umbrella because the 1,500 officers that had fallen in the line of duty were hogging his limelight at the national memorial arboretum.

Philip then turns the crosshairs on the royal family, and indeed squarely at HRH; regular readers would never accuse Philip of being a royalist, but I think it fair to say that he had treated Brenda with due respect to date.

However, he found himself unable to resist rising to the bait on this occasion, and it has to be said that the story that had hitherto passed me by does rather perpetuate his ‘pigs is equal’ theme; I’m not sure that ‘equality’ is a realistic ambition when it comes to a lowly pen-pusher and the head of the monarchy, but maybe it shouldn’t be shooting to the moon not to want to be mugged off.

When it comes to the treatment of NHS staff, it feels that there is an inevitability that things will end badly; staff that were undervalued before the pandemic are unlikely to be embarrassed by the generosity of a pay settlement when there is the likelihood of further austerity. More worrying should be the prospect of pieces of the service being sold off at mates’ rates to mates that stuffed their chops with PPE contracts, or ‘once went to a titty bar with the Donald’.

Philip’s assessment of Boris’ historical performance have rarely strayed from being recognisable; possibly the biggest challenges he now faces are from within his party, but as a master of bloviation you wouldn’t bet against him repelling all boarders (as opposed to withdrawing all borders which appears to be the current strategy). 

The ‘vaccine bounce’ may be dwindling but pro tem Boris still seems capable of keeping Sir Keir at bay; with the half of the world that is not on fire currently underwater, will COP26 be Boris’ undoing?

This is not a government that appears sincere in any way when it comes to the environment, due in no small part to the fact that Boris is not sincere in any way. However, as hosts of possibly the most important climate conference ever, the last thing that will be accepted will be hollow promises, followed by zero action with Sir David Attenborough being paraded as a bauble.

Boris ignores Greta Thunberg at his peril; she is everything he is not and that is meant as a great compliment to her and hopefully comes as a source of comfort to Mother Earth.

Three tracks this week, just for fun – and he’s pulling no punches:  Dead Kennedys with ‘Kill the Poor’, Linton Kwesi Johnson with Sonny’s Lettah’ and Sly and the Family Stone with ‘It’s a Family Affair’. 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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