Heroes: One For All, and All For Me! 

 

‘All day working on a truck 

Bringing the groceries up 

Not much of a salary 

No tip for the delivery’ 

 
Before we get to the main event, a few titbits you might have missed. 

Despite the ongoing Covid enquiry, the subject that hasn’t yet been discussed is the ongoing scandal around dodgy PPE,  the VIP Fastlane, and Tories helping their mates cash-in. it is suggested that > $5bn of contracts went through this route. 

Whilst is still unclear how much was spent on PPE, the National Audit Office has written off, and burnt £15 bn as unfit for purpose.  

The British Medical Journal say >£4.7bn of the total PPE spend was at ‘grossly inflated prices‘. 

The bill for storing unused PPE is said to be over £150mm per annum! 

In addition, there is the test-and-trace system, which cost C.£29bn before its failure. There is no suggestion of an inquiry into how this was allowed to happen. 

Staying with the rich getting richer, we turn to Shell, who intend to pay shareholders at least $23bn in rewards this year, despite falling profits. This comes just days after the company setting out plans to cut up to 25% of the staff working in their low-carbon solutions team. 

The payout includes a $3.5bn windfall from its share buyback programme, with the balance being dividends. 
 

‘People are sick of watching oil bosses feign concern about the planet while slashing jobs and investment in renewables and ploughing money into dividends, share buybacks, and new fossil fuel projects.’

 
The shareholder payouts are more than 6x the amount Shell plans to spend on renewable energy this year. Last year, the company invested about $3.5bn in its renewables and energy solutions business, 14% of its total capital spending. 

Shell plans to maintain this level of spending despite earlier this year reporting a record annual profit of $40bn for 2022. Shell has reported that its existing renewables and energy solutions investments have been loss-making over the first nine months of 2023. 

Unsurprisingly, this decision has angered green groups and social justice campaigners who have called for more of the company’s cash to go towards investment in renewable energy or reducing energy bills via tougher government taxes. 

Charlie Kronick, a senior climate adviser at Greenpeace UK, said: ‘People are sick of watching oil bosses feign concern about the planet while slashing jobs and investment in renewables and ploughing money into dividends, share buybacks, and new fossil fuel projects.’ 

The main event this week is the continuation of the culture wars. 

We start with the business secretary and minister for women and equalities, Kemi Badenoch who launched an attack on the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall, describing it as an example of an organisation taken over by ‘leftist’ ideas. 

‘We started going down the wrong track on gender ideology because we allowed other people to tell government about what to do. Again, ideas that came from the leftist point of view feeding into particular charities. Stonewall is the best example of this [but] it’s not the only one’. 
 

‘We need to stop getting distracted by pronouns, critical race theory, and measuring people’s skin colours‘

 
‘It’s not the same Stonewall of 20 or 30 years ago, which started advising government and saying: ‘Well, this is what you need to do in order to serve a particular community.’ And then it overreached and started giving people legal advice or advice that is certainly different from what the Equality Act says.’ 

Badenoch was speaking on the final day of a three-day summit organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a new right-wing umbrella group headed by Philippa Stroud, the influential Tory thinktanker and peer, and backed by the owners of GB News. A real hot bed of regressive thinking 

Stonewall defended its work, saying it provided expert guidance to employers to make sure LGBTQ+ people are supported to thrive at work. They added: ‘Organisations are free to implement our guidance and make it work for their contexts. It is not a question of right- or leftwing thinking to unlock the potential of LGBTQ+ employees. 

‘We have never professed to offer legal advice and it is important to represent our work accurately.’ 

Badenoch finished saying, ‘We need to stop getting distracted by pronouns, critical race theory, and measuring people’s skin colours‘.  

Saving the best to last we have the home secretary, Suella Braverman, who, seemingly bored by her failure to do anything about illegal migrants other than making nasty comments, has turned her attention to the homeless, specifically those using tents. 

Clearly Braverman has zero compassion describing rough sleeping as a ‘lifestyle choice‘. 

As part of this, Braverman plans to crack down on tents that cause a nuisance in urban areas such as high streets. The government considers the growing numbers of rough sleepers to be part of the rise in antisocial behaviour. 

To enforce this she is proposing the introduction of a civil offence, which could lead to charities being fined if they provide homeless people with tents. 

Braverman defended her proposals, saying: ‘The British people are compassionate. We will always support those who are genuinely homeless. But we cannot allow our streets to be taken over by rows of tents occupied by people, many of them from abroad, living on the streets as a lifestyle choice. 

 ‘Unless we step in now to stop this, British cities will go the way of places in the US like San Francisco and Los Angeles, where weak policies have led to an explosion of crime, drug-taking, and squalor. 

‘Nobody in Britain should be living in a tent on our streets. There are options for people who don’t want to be sleeping rough, and the government is working with local authorities to strengthen wraparound support including treatment for those with drug and alcohol addiction. 
 

‘we cannot allow our streets to be taken over by rows of tents occupied by people, many of them from abroad, living on the streets as a lifestyle choice’

 
‘What I want to stop, and what the law-abiding majority wants us to stop, is those who cause nuisance and distress to other people by pitching tents in public spaces, aggressively begging, stealing, taking drugs, littering, and blighting our communities.’ 

Bob Blackman MP, head of the all-party parliamentary group for ending homelessness, responded saying; ‘Homelessness for people from the UK is not a lifestyle choice, far from it. Every case is unique. People would have ended relationships or fallen out with parents – which is why young people end on the streets. They may have made the wrong choices in life or had an accident and be unable to work. I obviously would never use [Braverman’s] words. She should use wiser words.’ 

The shadow deputy PM, Angela Rayner, tweeted: ‘Rough sleeping is not a ‘lifestyle choice’. A toxic mix of rising rents and failure to end no-fault evictions is hitting vulnerable people. After years of delay the Tories are failing on their promises. Now after 13 years, they’re blaming homeless people rather than themselves.’ 

Homelessness charity Shelter responded by writing on X: ‘Let’s make it clear: living on the streets is not a ‘lifestyle choice’ – it is a sign of failed government policy. No one should be punished for being homeless. Criminalising people for sleeping in tents, and making it an offence for charities to help them, is unacceptable.’ 

‘The housing emergency boils down to people not being able to afford to live anywhere. The current scenario: Private rents are at an all-time high. Evictions are rising. And the cost of living crisis continues. 

‘This combined with decades of government failure to build genuinely affordable social homes is what is driving record levels of homelessness and leaving thousands of people on the streets. The government promised to end rough sleeping, but is falling short of the mark.’ 

Homelessness, poverty, and destitution are all part of one problem. A problem that has taken root though 13-yrs of economic mismanagement from government. Austerity, small state, small-minded for that matter, all driven by neoliberalism. The root of the problem is essentially Thatcherism. At best it was short, sharp fix, with a poor legacy. 

When you see data such as that contained in research on living standards by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (‘JRF’), it is hard to draw any other conclusion. Families basic needs are not being met, poverty, and all its attendant harms, is getting worse. 

One report that found 1 million UK children lack their own bed, whilst the JRF found that 1.8m households, including around 1 million children, went without some combination of food, heat, housing and other essentials last year. One in 20 people (3.8 million out of a population of 67.3 million) now fall into the category of destitute.  
 

‘1 million UK children lack their own bed, whilst the JRF found that 1.8m households, went without some combination of food, heat, housing and other essentials last year’

 
And, in the short-term things are likely to worsen. The BoE predicts that inflation won’t drop to the ‘normal level’ of 2% until the end of 2025, whilst food price inflation will be C.10% at Christmas. Our inflation rate is the highest in the G7. Despite an almost identical growth rate, France is unhindered by a tax-to-GDP ratio of 48%, compared with the UK’s tax take of 33.5%, which proves that you get what you pay for.  

The Institute for Government’s survey of UK public services reveals that almost all of them are declining, crippled by 13-yrs of austerity. Councils’ services, such as social care, care of children, homeless accommodation, libraries and leisure centres are collapsing. Spending plans for after 2025 make the outlook even worse for all services, whilst the Tories, desperate to remain in government. clamour to use the £13bn the Treasury gains from extra tax receipts owing to inflation for tax cuts. 

There is no solution to this crisis that does not involve raising benefits, though housing and wages must play a part. The JRF and the Trussell Trust recently proposed a legal floor below which benefits should not be able to fall – the level to be set by an independent body. In reality, there is no likelihood of either main party adopting this; as Starmer keeps reminding us; ‘tough decisions‘. 

Whilst the British Social Attitudes survey shows that public attitudes to benefits have softened in recent years, only 37% believe benefits should rise, which allows politician to duck the issue saying this is what the electorate wants.  

To me this suggests ‘priorities’. Rather like the NHS, we can have the service we want, or the one we are prepared to fund. We can’t pass the buck on this, we are either all in it together or we aren’t. 

This is why the example must come from government.  

Can we have a PM constructing his own heated, indoor pool when local councils are closing public pools? 

Can we have government making their mates rich with dodgy, overpriced PPE?  

Can the wealthy be continually allowed to use tax loopholes whilst the rest of us cough-up our dues? 
 

”Cause the boy with the cold hard cash 

Is always Mister Right’ 

 

The King’s Speech delivered nothing but divisive policies designed to back Labour into corners, and a continuation of the culture wars providing more red meat for the hard-right.

Sunak just doesn’t get it. Perhaps he’s too rich and cannot identify with others. He certainly doesn’t lack intelligence, therefore I can only assume the “have nots” aren’t his priority. Put another way, he doesn’t care.

Suella clearly doesn’t. Anyone who thinks homeless people, rough sleepers do it out of choice is either stupid or evil. You decide.

As I keep writing, it’s all about priorities. Sunak is a technocrat, who loves shiny new toys, with too much money to indulge himself. Win or lose his future is assured. Not so for some others in his party.

Which is why some Tory MPs have accused Rishi Sunak of “offering the electorate dystopia” after interviewing Elon Musk, during which the billionaire warned that artificial intelligence (“AI”) could take everyone’s jobs and leave them searching for meaning in their lives.

Many MPs were left baffled by the PM’s decision to conduct an interview with the Tesla and X (formerly Twitter) owner at the end of the AI safety summit at Bletchley Park. However, some are furious about the event, which painted a bleak picture of the future.

“I despair at No 10’s naivety,” said one senior Tory. “People are worried about their finances, climate change, pandemics, war in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and now the PM has provided Elon Musk with an interview platform to say, sometime soon, that they and their children will not have jobs, a life without meaning.

“For crying out loud, we have a general election inside a year and the PM is offering the electorate dystopia. Thick, thick, thick.”

Rishi isn’t thick, he doesn’t care. He’s having his 15-mins of fame before going back to making money.

Lyrically we head to NYC. We start with “I Wanted Everything” by Rishi the Ramones, and end with “Material Girl” by Mrs Sunak Madonna

 
@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

Click on the link to see all Brexit Bulletins: