Going nowhere fast

It’s hard not to think of this Labour government as the dog that has caught the car.

It’s taken them a while to work out that they are actually in charge - think of Keir Starmer repeatedly addressing Rishi Sunak as ‘Prime Minister’ - but now they are flexing their legislative muscles, there’s a distinct air of a triumphant Labrador in possession of a Ford Focus.

Opposition, as any former student politician or union activist will tell you, is great fun. There’s no need to bother with all that tedious research or fact-finding and nobody checks your workings; you just shout derisively about whatever it is that the other side is proposing and enjoy the fierce glow of righteous indignation.

When it comes to facts and figures, you are at liberty to gather them where you please, secure in the knowledge that you won’t be required to act on them or held to account in the real world - a pressure group website here, a speculative thesis there; it’s all grist to your political mill as long as it provides a stick with which to beat your opponent.

I have a horrible feeling that the lawyers, shop stewards and former SpAds of the Labour government still inhabit this abstract world where pensioners, farmers, private school pupils or small business owners are not real people but statistical constructs in the literature of lobbying campaigns and biased studies on which the party appears to be basing its policies. What is most frightening is that they don’t appear to consider relevant experience or background information to be of any importance.

Thus we have an Education Secretary imposing VAT on the independent sector while boasting that she has never spoken to its representatives or, for that matter, set foot through the door of any private school (she might have played hockey on the pitch of one but didn’t inhale) and the imposition of potentially ruinous inheritance tax on small farms while Rural Affairs are in the hands of a Streatham MP with no discernible connections to the countryside (although he does have a nice new pair of £420 wellies from Lord Alli).

The changes proposed so far do not augur well for the next few years - already we have the prospect of freezing pensioners (and the resulting pressure on the NHS), a hospitality sector and small businesses groaning under the new NI regulations, potential widespread strikes for parity with the train drivers and possible food shortages as irate farmers protest about the threat to family farms - but Labour appear to be congratulating themselves on doing a sterling job.

It must be fun, sitting with their paws on the steering wheel barking at passers-by.

The Rain in Spain

As yet another region in Spain starts the post-flood clearing up while bracing itself for another deluge, it is, perhaps, worth considering this:

The European dam removal movement achieved another record-breaking year. A remarkable 487 barriers were removed in 15 European countries in 2023 – a 50% increase on last year’s record number […] 

Spain, which had been crowned the trailblazer of barrier removal in Europe for two years in a row, was dethroned by France and now occupies second place. 

Environmentalists and fact-checkers have been quick to point out in the past couple of weeks that most of the ‘dams’ were weirs and irrigation culverts and that the amount of recent rainfall in eastern Spain was unusually large (which allowed them a happy detour into Climate Change) so the work did not cause the flooding. That may be strictly true, but removing several hundred dams, weirs and barriers in the interests of ‘biodiversity and fish migration’ can hardly have helped.

Although words like ‘unprecedented’ are cropping up in the news coverage, Spain is no stranger to catastrophic floods; the meteorological phenomenon which caused the heavy rainfall is familiar to the Spanish - so much so that they are the source of the acronym for it: DANA (Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos). Research has identified five separate flood-rich periods of several decades in the Iberian peninsula since the beginning of sixteenth century, while the success of a Roman dam in protecting a town in Aragon shows that, nearly two millennia ago, their engineers planned with an informed eye to the possibility of serious flooding. 

I’m not going to dwell on the horror and tragedy of what happened to the victims, but it is clear that the abundance of cars and lorries in a modern city has added a disturbing dimension to the dangers of a river bursting its banks in a built-up area; it looks as if much of the worst damage and loss of life was caused by water-borne debris, including vehicles, crashing into buildings or blocking the flow under low bridges and forcing water at speed into the gridlocked neighbouring streets.

Although It would be extremely difficult to prepare fully for the weather Spain has experienced, I do wonder whether, in a country prone to episodes of extreme rainfall and given the increasing potential risk to life, it might have been wise to employ at least some of the available expertise, machinery and manpower in developing more upstream water holding areas and creating overflow capacity and relief channels to protect the densely populated parts of the country below.

Sadly, the Dam Removal Europe website gives the distinct impression that, although they briefly congratulate themselves on reducing the number of swimmers and kayakers drowning in weirs and preventing the potential catastrophic collapse of decaying obsolete hydro-electric dams from the last century, humans may not be their main priority.

Dam Removal Europe is a movement of river enthusiasts, volunteers, activists, river practitioners, biologists, environmental agencies, and other actors related to water management and freshwater ecosystem restoration. […] the motor of this movement is a coalition united by one common goal: restoring free-flowing rivers.

In the light of the recent news stories, I’m not sure that’s always a good thing.

A Question of Identity Politics

There are numerous skills essential to a long and moderately successful career at today’s chalkface and not the least among these is the ability to repress one’s desire to say anything inappropriate in the presence of a class.

For me, the ultimate test of this was a mixed-race pupil who, half in jest, would invariably respond to any reprimand or rebuke with Ali G’s catchphrase, “Is it ‘cos I is black, Miss?”, to which I always wanted to reply - with a certain degree of truth - “No, Eddie, it’s ’cos you is an arsehole!”

It’s been a few years, but I immediately thought of Eddie when I read about the way Harris supporters were reacting to the election result:

“There are so many people who are against Kamala because she’s a woman, because she’s black,” said Sanaa Canady, a Howard student. (Telegraph)

Of course it is, Sanaa; what other reasons could there be? Meanwhile, social media posts have already appeared indignantly complaining about the women or minority ethnic voters who, as the authors patronisingly see it, voted the ‘wrong way’, as if sharing Harris’ ethnicity or gender should somehow outweigh the voter’s opinion on, say, her policies, integrity or suitability for office.

Part of the problem is that there is no profit for vested interests and anti-racism campaigners in, as one man eloquently put it, ‘a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’. The doublethink of the race industry has permeated the politics of the Left - both in the US and here - to a point where many of them appear to have the whole thing completely back-to-front, even while Dr King is still revered and held up as a shining example.

How future historians will regard the divisive consequences of identity politics and Critical Race Theory on politics and society is debatable - hopefully reason will eventually prevail - but we should certainly be lamenting that fact that, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, ‘no sooner had MLK knocked over the dragons of racial discrimination and segregation than activists boldly set them on their legs again in the name of MLK’.

You REALLY couldn't make it up….

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any weirder or more surreal in Westminster, the Treasury has announced the appointment of a part-time Chair of the Office for Value for Money - or, as the headlines have it, a ‘Value for Money Tsar’ - at a cost of £950 a day.

Apparently his job involves advising the government on how to ‘root out waste and inefficiency’ and ‘scrutinising investment proposals to ensure they offer value for money’, a brief for which he appears to be uniquely qualified thanks to a CV which, according to The Telegraph, includes (after two years of teaching, an accountancy course and a spell in local government finance):

• Responsibility for overseeing government investment in the delivery of the London Olympics (almost four times over budget at £9.3bn)

• CEO of London Legacy Development Corporation (major cost overruns on several building projects)

• Chief operating officer at the MOD (an estimated £4bn of taxpayers’ money ‘wasted’ )

• Leader of the Houses of Parliament Restoration & Renewal Delivery Authority (took a £168k bonus on a £311k salary despite no actual renovations being carried out during his four year tenure)

All in all, I think you’ll agree he sounds exactly the sort of chap this government would want keeping a watchful eye on their spending. Certainly they have been trumpeting his varied career history in happy press releases, although they seem to have glossed over some of the small print.

It’s not until you reach the hinterlands of the government website that you find out that this financial superhero will not be working alone; the Chair of the Office for Value for Money naturally requires an Office of which to be Chair and will thus be ‘supported by a multi-disciplinary team of civil servants’.

Now, in my (admittedly limited) experience, multi-disciplinary civil servants are unlikely to come cheap, especially when you include their pensions, and presumably, unlike their boss, they will be working full-time. Being important enough to be mentioned in the government description, they will probably be drawn from the ranks of those who toil not, neither do they spin, so I suspect there will also be a subsidiary team of secretaries and admin people attached, not to mention HR and ancillary staff to maintain their offices, computers etc.

In fact, it is likely that one of the most effective cost-cutting measures for the Office for Value for Money would be to abolish itself forthwith.

In the meantime, I think I have the perfect song for the situation….

Now… 

The techs who fix the laptops of 

The lawyers who write contracts for

The cleaners of the office of 

The clerical department for

The team of civil servants who

Are there to do the bidding of

The new Value for Money Tsar

Were just passing by…

(

(If it doesn’t play, try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MDVSHsFFh0)

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

 A question for the over-50s who grew up in Britain; how were the 1970s for you? 

This week, the Tavern’s Wise Woman described with astonishment hearing some younger friends reminiscing about a golden age of hot summers and fun - a far cry from her own memories of struggling through a decade of strikes, inflation and high taxes, not to mention mortgage rates of 15%

Perhaps the few extra years make the difference; while her juniors were still enjoying the burgeoning of pop music, cheap fashion, exotic food, foreign travel and colour television, she had moved on to domestic responsibilities - strike-generated power-cuts, shortages and transport problems might seem trivial or even amusing if you are young, free and single but rather less so to anyone with a family to support or caring for infant or elderly dependents. 

We have reached a point where the three-day week and the Winter of Discontent are more mythology than history, eclipsed for anyone between 50 and 65 - and perhaps for a number of senior Labour figures - by the positive aspects of a decade that was, in general, a fine time to be a child; it was the adults who bore the brunt of the extensive strikes by transport and haulage workers, gravediggers and refuse collectors or the NHS hospitals closed by picket lines.

With the unions flexing their muscles - even the NEU has been calling for the return of flying pickets and the closed shop - and a Deputy Prime Minister arguably promoted beyond her capabilities because of trade union backing, it looks as if we are about to see George Santayana proved right once again.

The Dunning-Kruger Cabinet strikes again

From today’s news, a chilling insight into the processes of what passes for thought in our current government; in the words of the Chief Secretary to the Treasury:

“We have inherited a £22bn black hole in the country’s public finances, including no plan to fund pay deals for millions of public sector workers. 

Strikes cost at least £3bn last year, so it was the right thing to do to end those damaging disputes.”

How comforting for those with the broadest shoulders - the impoverished elderly struggling with fuel bills, the children priced out of their schools and the people of modest means who have scrimped and saved for years to build up a nest-egg for their families - to know that their sacrifices are not being made in vain!

And how satisfying for Labour to bask in the warm glow of their own wisdom and generosity, knowing that they have saved the day by giving the doctors and train drivers what they asked for; after all, it’s not as if they or any other union would think of striking now, is it?

If only the Left had not cancelled Kipling, they might have learnt a useful thing or two…

…So when you are requested to pay up or be molested, 

    You will find it better policy to say:–

"We never pay anyone Dane-geld,

    No matter how trifling the cost;

For the end of that game is oppression and shame, 

    And the nation that plays it is lost!"

Turning the Screw

Remember Morton’s Fork; political chicanery, fifteenth-century style, from Henry VII’s Chancellor - “You’re spending lavishly so you can clearly afford to pay more tax to the King” or, “You’re spending next to nothing so you can clearly afford… etc.”? Our modern-day equivalent, for the nearly-poor over 65s at least, is Reeves’ Ratchet Reversal. 

It goes something like this: 

• The cost of living rises and finances are tight, then the pension goes up to match and you can balance the books once more. 

• The cost of living rises further, the pension rises again to match. 

• The cost of living rises yet further but, at this point, Reeves steps in: “You have a pension increase due soon, so you clearly don’t need any help with your heating costs: no WFA for you this year!

 …at which point the whole process grinds to a shuddering halt as cold weather approaches and, with it, some of the highest household energy costs in the world; all well and good if you are reasonably well-off or had plenty of warning to prepare for the loss of the expected payment, less so if you are living on £221.20 a week and it is sprung on you after the nights have already started drawing in.

Never mind that the Chancellor of the Exchequer appears to be effectively double-counting (which is not reassuring!) and that the higher pension rate was calculated based on other increases in the cost of living already in effect or, for that matter, that the ‘shopping basket’ used to calculate CPI contains many things pensioners wouldn’t necessarily want or need and their real-terms percentage increase may be higher; theirs are the broad shoulders to be burdened with the Herculean tasks of filling the black hole in the public purse, saving the NHS and preventing a run on the pound. 

It’s a poor return for the elderly without private or company pensions who have paid a working lifetime’s worth of NI in the firm belief (backed, for some, by government assurances) that the state would look after them with dignity in their old age or the women who, more than half a century ago, were expected to give up work to raise their families. While the Left bandy about the oft-repeated - and irrelevant - fallacy that a quarter of pensioners are millionaires, some two million people receive nothing but the state pension; too much now to qualify for the WFA but little enough for the loss of an expected £200 to be a significant blow.

La Niña is predicted to bring us a cold start to the winter with strong northerly winds and and possible early snowfall, so, before long, those clever little display units sitting on shelves up and down the country, intended to placate the environmental lobby by making consumers aware of their energy consumption, will become a constant source of anxiety to the impoverished elderly as they show the pounds and pence of fuel debt inexorably clocking up minute by minute. 

A report commissioned by Labour* a few years ago produced an estimated figure of 3870 extra deaths if the payment were limited to those on pension credit. While it is to be hoped that families, charities and the wider community will do what they can for those in need - though it’s shocking that this should be necessary in a supposedly civilised country - many lone and isolated individuals will still slip through the net, spending their last days in fear and despair before finally succumbing to the cold. 

With winter fast approaching, it won’t be long before our hospitals (and morgues) start to deal with the consequences of pensioners afraid to turn on their central heating. The government will doubtless disclaim all responsibility and say it is a matter of choice - after all, who, in today’s easy credit society, would understand an older generation’s visceral aversion to going into debt? - but it remains to be seen what the effect on the public will be once the deaths start mounting up.

 

According to a contemporary chronicler, Morton ‘lyved not withoute the greate Disdayne and greate Haterede of the Commons of thys Lande’; from the evidence of the past few months, Reeves looks very much on course to be doing the same.

*from the Resolution Foundation under its then CEO Torsten Bell; he is now a Labour MP and PPS to the Cabinet office, so presumably the party still stands by its findings.

“You scratch my friend’s back…”

Typical! You wait ages for a story about a Baroness and then two come along (almost) at once. This time, it’s Baroness Uddin, whose brazen request to be reinstated to the Lords so she could use the daily allowance to repay the wrongful expense claims for which she was suspended in the first place caused much amusement twelve years ago - has it really been that long? - and who was finally bailed out by four benefactors to the tune of £124,000.

Two of those donors represented the Islam Channel, a TV station with some rather dubious history and possible connections, and a third, it now turns out, was none other than Lord Alli, the Cabinet’s Universal Provider of Good Things and furnisher of designer duds and luxury accommodation to the Starmer ménage; he and the Baroness go back a long way, having both been elevated to the peerage (as Blair creations) on the same day back in 1998 and, by 2012, were clearly on “Here’s £62,000 to tide you over” terms.

Of course, it may simply have been that Lord Alli and the others couldn’t bear the sight of Baroness Uddin’s sad little face when the stern Lords of the Committee locked her out of Parliament but, given the amounts of money concerned, a cynic could surely be forgiven for looking at the fingers she has in various diplomatic and international pies and asking some awkward questions.

Fortunately for the Baroness, Keir Starmer as DPP, ruled ‘after careful scrutiny of the evidence’, that there was no criminal case to answer - despite the testimony of neighbours, household bills, Baroness Uddin’s own Facebook account, the electoral register and even her own husband and family that her claims were fraudulent - because ‘a senior parliamentary official ruled that a peer's "main house" might be a place they visit only once a month’ (presumably dating back to the time when being Lord So-and-so of Somewhere meant having a country seat with all the associated hereditary obligations [rather than a two-bedroom flat in Maidstone]).

Leaving aside that, by that definition, I could claim to be permanently resident in the compost heap at the bottom of my garden, it all seems a little odd; it could be entirely coincidental that a close associate of Lord Alli’s was once let off a serious legal hook and restored to the political stage by Starmer on a technicality of startling flimsiness but, in the light of the nature and magnitude of the subsequent personal freebies received from Lord Alli by the former DPP, surely we are now entitled to ask whether it’s not merely a case of quid pro quo but also quid ante quo.

In the light of past posts, it seems only fitting to finish with a reprise from ‘Expenses - the Musical’ (with apologies to the late, great Freddie Mercury)

She keeps a home down in Wapping,

Where subsidies help pay the rent,

A mansion in Bangladesh,

And don’t forget the flat in Kent,

Pressed for a remedy, she says she’s in penury, 

But once she’s back in Westminster then all will be fine;

Three hundred quid a day she’ll get,

She’ll use your cash to pay her debt

Extraordinarily nice!

She's Manzila Uddin, 

Baroness of Bethnal Green,

House of Lords expenses queen; 

Her arrant greed will blow your mind.

Lady Gone Red

It’s a time-honoured novel and film plot device; the girl who seems like a friend at first but gradually starts emulating another’s behaviour, clothes and jewellery and eventually hairstyle and colour, at which point things inevitably start to get creepy/violent depending on the genre.

What, then, are we to make of Rachel Reeves makeover?* Gone is the stern dark bob of her WFA announcement and conference speech and, in its place, she now sports a straightened hairdo in a shade of red all too familiar to those opposite the Front Bench, accessorised with bright red outfits and chunky gold hoop earrings.

What’s next; 4am clubbing in Ibiza? Pints of venom and multi-packs of vapes? At the very least, this is what happens when a quiet, studious fifth-former - the one who plays the violin and always hands her work in on time - suddenly falls under the spell of the class Queen Bee and starts to draw ink tattoos on her hands and wear black nail varnish.

For a nation facing an uncertain economic future, a Prime Minister who should, perhaps, have picked his friends more carefully and conflict in the Middle East, Reeves cosplaying Rayner is all a bit too ‘Gone Girl’, ‘Single White Female’ etc. for comfort - at least for those of us who’d like some sane grown-ups in charge for once.

* A clue to the reason might be found in the sudden popularity of this clip after she announced the cut to the Winter Fuel Allowance…

Hell and high water

In between 4am clubbing in Ibiza and posing for her official Praise Singer - sorry, ‘Chief Photographer to the Deputy PM and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’ - Angela Rayner has been busy launching an independent New Towns Taskforce, presumably aimed at recreating the picturesque architectural charms of Basildon or Stevenage New Town.

In the race to identify suitable sites for the ‘hundreds of thousands’ of new homes to be built in the next few years, a clear front-runner seems to be emerging in the shape of Tempsford, currently a village of some 600 inhabitants, which sits at the junction of major North-South and East-West road and (potentially) rail routes.

The site has already caught the eye of a developer, who has acquired the option to build 7,000 homes, while a think tank has argued that Tempsford should become a major city with homes for up to 350,000 people. This sounds agreeably logical in the abstract - unless, of course, you are a resident of this serene and pleasant village - but all is not quite as rosy as it seems.

As it happens, this used to be familiar ground to me; my grandparents lived nearby and, as a child, I often visited family friends on their riverside smallholding a few miles away, where the Great Ouse bursting its banks was a regular and spectacular occurrence - ensuring that the goats were safely penned up out of harm’s way was one of my favourite tasks when the river was high (the house and barn, which dated back to Tudor times, were perched on a 20ft rise above the normal river level - our ancestors weren’t stupid).

Technology has moved on since those days and it is now possible, from the comfort of one’s armchair many miles away, to get an idea of how things are going at the confluence of the Ivel and the Great Ouse. While the government flood warning map below represents the worst-case scenario, it gives a pretty good idea of the extent of the potential hazard even when most of the surrounding land is water-retaining fields and woodland rather than acres of tarmac and concrete.

I hope those 350,000 future residents can swim.

‘Appropriate’ payments…

 …no, not those ones - yet - but an old story revisited. This time it’s Baroness Warsi, who has just announced her resignation:

“My decision is a reflection of how far Right my party has moved and the hypocrisy and double standards in its treatment of different communities. I will not be gagged on a point of principle.”

How noble and high-minded! And nothing, of course, to do with the Party’s planned enquiry into her cryptic social media post in apparent support of the protester whose banner bore a caricature of Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman as coconuts or, for that matter, her forthcoming book ‘Muslims Don’t Matter’.

Prompted by her lofty mention of principle, a post from the archives came to mind:

"In the early part of 2008, for a short period, Baroness Warsi stayed with me," said Mr Khan, who later became her special adviser.

"I confirm she made a financial payment on each occasion, which compensated for the inconvenience caused and additional costs incurred by me as a result of her being there." 

According to her subsequent expenses claim, the Baroness compensated Mr Khan with ‘appropriate’ payments equivalent to the cost of a hotel, which raises some awkward questions about the nature of their relationship, to say the least. 

We certainly know it was not to help with his rent - he was, at the time, lodging rent-free thanks to the generosity (and possibly the political aspirations) of his host, Wafik Moustafa, who said he gave the Baroness lifts to and from work and took her out for meals but never received any contribution from either of his house guests towards household bills or expenses.

All of which leaves the reader wondering exactly what ‘inconvenience’ the lady could have caused to clock up compensation somewhere north of £100 a night - or what services Mr Khan could have rendered to justify the payments (at public expense) - and why the admirably hospitable Dr Moustafa was left out of the equation altogether.

Sadly, the expenses enquiry had many other fish to fry and left it at that, but it would have been interesting to the public, if not exactly in the public interest, to know.

(As an aside, the Tavern’s Wise Woman has pointed out (thanks, Mum!) that, since both Sunak and Braverman are of Hindu heritage and her powerful polemic on Islamophobia is about to hit the shelves - 'Burns with righteous anger. An urgent read for our times’: Riz Ahmed - the Baroness apparently endorsing a racist caricature of the pair becomes more than a little problematic.)

“Someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me…”

Want a pair of glasses

Or a new designer shawl?

And is last year’s summer wardrobe 

Now fitting rather small?

There’s Lord Alli:

Why not give him a call?

And if you’re in New York for New Year’s

And you want to have a ball,

Well, there’s a penthouse in Manhattan

Won’t cost you anything at all;

Lord Alli 

Will settle it all.

When your son’s busy revising

And needs a quiet place to go,

Or you need a designer number

For the Fashion Week front row

Go ask Alli,

I think he’ll know

There’s a flat in Covent Garden 

Where you rest your weary head 

But shouldn’t you be asking

What its owner wants instead?

You’ve entered where angels, full of dread,

Fear to tread.