Heroes: How Low Can We Get? 

 

‘Drifting into my solitude 

Over my head’ 

 
We start this week with Dominic Raab, one of the few that got what was coming to him. His resignation letter can be summarised thus; it wasn’t his fault, he didn’t do it, and he wasn’t there, It will live long in the memory as a masterpiece of self-pity. 

He had many finest hours; the bored and useless Brexit minister, bullying justice minister, but, in my opinion his finest, or worst, depending on how you view it was the 2021 evacuation from Afghanistan. 

Civil servants in the Foreign Office said that ‘people had died‘ in the Afghanistan evacuation because of Raab’s refusal to review documents in formats he didn’t like.  

He was on holiday and didn’t really want to be disturbed by an emergency withdrawal that Rory Stewart described as a ‘total betrayal‘. This was followed by the decision to give airport facilities for Pen Farthing’s pet rescue, Raab’s colleague Tom Tugendhat observed: ‘We’ve just used a lot of troops to get in 200 dogs; meanwhile my interpreter’s family are likely to be killed.’ Remarkable, or more unremarkably, Boris Johnson called the botched Afghanistan withdrawal ‘one of the most spectacular operations in our country’s post-war military history’! 
 

‘We’ve just used a lot of troops to get in 200 dogs; meanwhile my interpreter’s family are likely to be killed.’

 
However bad that fiasco was, I am really struggling to comprehend how the government can even be considering taking striking nurses to the high court in London for a ruling that the action on 2nd May is illegal. The health secretary, Steve Barclay, claims that that portion of the industrial action that is due to take place that day is illegal because the RCN’s legal mandate to go on strike runs out at midnight on Monday 1 May. 

This is, of course, the same court full of ‘leftie judges’ the government usually despises. 

The RCN’s general secretary, Pat Cullen, said the government’s ‘threat‘ was ‘wrong and indefensible’, adding: ‘The only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them … including in court.’ 

The RCN called this weekend’s strike earlier this month when its members rejected the government’s improved pay offer for 2022-23 and 2023-24 in a ballot. Of the 61% of RCN members in England who voted, 54% rejected the deal, which the union had endorsed, but the other 46% voted to accept it. 

Barclay, who must now be in the running for public enemy #1 muttered the following: ‘I firmly support the right to take industrial action within the law. But the government cannot stand by and let a plainly unlawful strike action go ahead nor ignore the request of NHS Employers. We must also protect nurses by ensuring they are not asked to take part in an unlawful strike.’ 

The government simply doesn’t care about the nurses. Most don’t and won’t vote Tory therefore they don’t count, they, like millions of others, are second class citizens, pure cannot fodder. 
 

‘The government simply doesn’t care about the nurses’

 
While millions wonder whether to prioritise heating over eating, the PM is readying his new swimming pool for the summer months, and the Royals are cadging another £100m from us so we can all watch Charlie put his crown on. Something is very wrong! 

And, speaking of food, that’s the new luxury item.  The government is fast running out of excuses as the cost of the weekly grocery shop is rising at its fastest rate since 1977. Inflation in food and non-alcoholic drink is now C.19.1%. 

Poorer families spend a larger portion of their income on food and other basic essentials. Even before the cost of living crisis 4.7 million people were in food insecurity, with Britain already a nation of rising in-work poverty and families – including 800,000 children – forced to turn to food banks. 

Putting Covid, war in Ukraine, and global warmings impact on crop harvests to one-side, there are some issues that were self-inflicted. 

According to Jacob Rees-Mogg, Brexit was supposed to bring about a  20% cut in food prices, instead, the opposite has happened. In addition, there has been no flood of cheap produce from the rest of the world. 

Adding to the problems caused by Brexit is the weakness of the pound post the referendum, followed by ever greater weakness due to Trussomics, driven up the cost of imports.  
 

‘the Royals are cadging another £100m from us so we can all watch Charlie put his crown on. Something is very wrong!’

 
Even though C.50% of the food we consume is produced domestically, British farmers warn that the government is failing to take adequate steps to support domestic production. Brexit has compounded labour shortages, E.G., a lack of seasonal agricultural labour and skilled butchers,  

Globally energy prices have collapsed, and the price of food on international commodity markets is coming down too, meaning that we can no longer blame Vladimir Putin. Nor can we blame junior doctors, as both the IMF and ECB have concluded that higher wages are not driving up prices. 

Instead their research shows that companies have been able to use the crisis to drive up prices and boost profit margins, sometimes referred to as ‘greedflation’. 

Karen Betts, the chief executive of the Food and Drink Federation, denied companies were profiteering from basic essentials, saying her members had experienced a 21% rise in production costs last year but had increased prices by about 10%. ‘We know we have responsibility to keep food and drink affordable, and companies are taking that very seriously. Their margins are genuinely being squeezed,’ Betts said. 

Nevertheless, the price of some lines of staple foods such as cheddar cheese, white bread and pork sausages have soared by up to 80% in some shops over the past year, as much as eight times the headline rate of inflation. 

The government is sticking with the old wage price spiral narrative. At least week IMF meeting, the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, commented that whilst he understand  the junior doctor’s anger, agreeing to their demands for a 35% pay increase would merely make the problem of high inflation more persistent.  
 

‘companies have been able to use the crisis to drive up prices and boost profit margins, sometimes referred to as ‘greedflation”

 
This is the Tory’s doing what they always do, seeking to politicise everything; whilst growth in annual average earnings has increased, wage increases are well below price increases.  

The IMF’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, said: ‘Should we worry about the risk of an uncontrolled wage-price spiral? At this point, I remain unconvinced. Nominal wage inflation continues to lag far behind price inflation, implying a steep and unprecedented decline in real wages.’ 

Unite, one of the UK’s biggest unions, published a report in March that blamed systematic profiteering across the economy for fuelling the cost of living crisis. Energy companies, supermarkets, shipping companies, car dealers and food manufacturers had all cashed in on drought, war, and strong demand after the pandemic to ‘push prices and profits through the roof‘. 

Whilst the government appear unconcerned about ‘greedflation’, the ECB has highlighted the fact that weakening economies and higher energy prices have lead to higher corporate profits, typically they should be lower. The eurozone’s central bank found that between 1999 and 2022, profits were responsible for one-third of the inflation rate on average, whereas in 2022, profits contributed to two-thirds of the rise. 
 

‘blamed systematic profiteering across the economy for fuelling the cost of living crisis’

 
Inflation in the eurozone is C.6.9%, lower than in the UK, although core inflation – which strips out volatile food and energy prices – is similar, and German food prices are rising even more sharply than those in Britain. 

But whereas the ECB is cognisant to the threat posed by greedflation, we are still chanting the old pay mantra, and largely ignoring everything else. 

Rather than looking at the need for competition investigation, or seeking to protect consumers, we continue with the tired old blunt instrument of raising interest rates. Each increase sucks more demand out of the economy and reduces upward pressure on pay through job losses. The higher rates go, the greater the risk of a severe downturn being triggered.  

Of course, all of this is secondary to stopping the boats. The PM has so much political capital wrapped up in this that, as I wrote in ‘‘Tis the Year 2024′, he has sold his sold to the devil,  more accurately the hard-right, and promised to side-step the ECHR. 

Unusually, this move was contra to the advice of his chief whip. Sunak could have challenged the right-wing just as he did  last month over the Northern Ireland protocol vote. Sunak is coldly calculating, I believe this is another of his stalls set out ahead of a forthcoming election, firing up the Conservative electorate over asylum seekers. His taunting of the human rights court for being the playground of ‘London lawyers‘ is a veiled dig at Starmer, and for ‘Strasbourg judges‘,  read foreigners. 

If there is such a thing as a ‘beneficiary’ of policies of this nature it is the home secretary, Suella Braverman. His effective endorsement of her policies only makes her position stronger. She is only in the government because, after breaching the ministerial code and being forced to resign last year, her support in the leadership contest last autumn mattered more to Sunak. Another one of his dirty deals. 

This week he’s meeting another of his soulmates, as Italian PM Georgia Meloni visits London.  

Meloni’s first 6-months in power have been worryingly successful. Overseas media has ceased to criticise her politics, and domestically her poll ratings, and those of her party, are higher than at the autumn election.  
 

‘the prime minister’s small-boats posturing is dragging Britain in the same direction’

 
Her use of judicious caution and astute positioning, has enabled her to achieve the kind of influence and respectability that has always eluded Marine Le Pen.  

We shouldn’t be fooled. Her, determination to take on the ‘LGBT lobby’, for example, has resulted in pressure on municipalities not to allow most same-sex couples to register their children, a move that has been censured by the European parliament. 

In response to the rising number of irregular migrants crossing the Mediterranean, she has declared a state of emergency, allowing ministers to bypass parliament, use special powers to set up detention centres, and remove specific protections and rights. Her brother-in-law and agriculture minister, Francesco Lollobrigida, claimed last week that the combination of a low birth-rate and high immigration was risking the ‘ethnic replacement’ of the country’s population, often referred to as the white replacement theory. 

Rhetoric and policies of this nature, have more in common with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán than mainstream European values. The fact that Sunak’s illegal migration bill is lauded in such circles is an example of how far the prime minister’s small-boats posturing is dragging Britain in the same direction. 

‘Baby, I’ve been, breaking glass in your room again 

Listen 

Don’t look at the carpet, I drew something awful on it’ 

 
 
An ode, or perhaps a lament to Broken Britain from Philip this week; it’s a very neat, and distrurbing summary of where, and perhaps more disturbingly, doesn’t offer much hope of improvement.

In the same way that most mainstream media managed to ignore it, there’s no mention that 140,000 people from hundreds of environmental campaign groups came together for the ‘Big One’ as the escalating climate crisis will inevitably add to our woes. 

I’ve often wondered if the B-side to D:Ream’s election anthem was ‘Things can Only get Worse’. What was he thinking?

‘A strange few days. Seemingly nothing seismic happened, but perhaps that is because we have become immune to all but the worst events. Everything now just seems like the new normal.

Dominic Raab reluctantly fell on his sword. Reading his resignation speech I felt sympathy with him, he clearly had done nothing wrong! I mean how can be blamed for bullying a few idiots who send him documents in the wrong format.

Ironically, he got away free and clear with the mess that was the withdrawal from Kabul.

The cost-of-living crisis just rumbles on. The government has done little to help anyone. Their posturing about wage increases being inflationary is hogwash, even the IMF and ECB disagree.

Once again, the failed model that passes for capitalism has been found wanting, as energy companies and food businesses continue to benefit at the expense of the majority. This is just another issue that worsens income inequality.

I often talk about the rise of the hard-right and this week we have the Italian PM in London. The fact that Sunak is hobnobbing with the likes of her, and that she is praising his stance on stopping the boats endorses how far to the right we have swung.

However, the business of the government taking striking nurses to the high court is the most disappointing. I never thought that even this shower could stoop so low.

The NHS and the nurses in-particular have been used and abused for years. Covid, was perhaps the most obvious example of what they unflinchingly provide under the most difficult and testing conditions. To see them treated this way is incomprehensible, callous beyond belief.

This is now a country run only for the benefit of the few. Just think, in 2-weeks’ time we will waste £100m on a coronation just so an over-privileged billionaire can put some bling on his head.

Where will it all end?

Lyrically, we pick-up the theme of low, with Bowie’s seminal album of the same name. “Low” became one of the soundtracks of post-punk, and influenced change in early-80s music. Perhaps the low we are currently experiencing will presage a similar change.

We start with “Sound & Vision”, and play out with “Breaking Glass”. Enjoy!

 
@coldwarsteve
 

 

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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