The Politics of the Nursery

A perceptive journalist (Matthew Lynn, Telegraph) compared the instigator of the current petition asking for a general election (2,644,897 signatures and counting) to the small boy who points out that the emperor has no clothes on; naive and simplistic, maybe, but getting straight to the point and hitting a chord with the public.

Reflecting on the events which have brought us to this, it starts to become clear that, as well as dispensing with the necessary prior research or consultation, this government has set about introducing measures which are not only of doubtful benefit but which, in extent and timing, are calculated to inflict a maximum of pain and hardship, stripping bare its destructive and malicious intentions for all to see.

For example, Starmer could have kept the Winter Fuel Allowance for all but higher-rate taxpayers (or for those paying over a certain amount of income tax), which would have spared a great deal of anxiety and financial difficulty for the two million or so pensioners who have no other income than the basic state pension.

Likewise, a threshold for VAT on school fees - perhaps at the equivalent of the sum the state would have spent on the child - would have reduced the impact on the least well-off fee-paying parents, people in ‘ordinary’ jobs who are investing their scant disposable income in their child’s education at the less expensive end of the market, often because the state system does not meet their needs, while taxing the more affluent.

Thirdly, the farmers; remember the gag from ‘Austin Powers’ where a criminal mastermind, reanimated after spending 30 years frozen in space, announces dramatically that he will acquire a nuclear warhead and hold the world to ransom for ‘…one million dollars!’? There’s a similar incongruity to the new inheritance tax threshold for the land and ‘agricultural assets’ of a working farm, apparently decided upon in complete ignorance of the cost of infrastructure, livestock, equipment and machinery needed to yield even a modest income from food production; in any case, it would surely have been possible to exempt round-the-clock, hands-on farming families while achieving the stated aim of targeting tax-dodging outside investors.

Even before considering the timing, all three of these policies give a distinct impression of being fuelled by malevolence towards the elderly, private school pupils and farmers (one key Labour adviser even advocates state ownership of farmland; presumably they hope to acquire it via seizures in lieu of unpaid tax); it’s no coincidence that all three groups have been repeatedly portrayed by Left-wing media and campaign groups as undeservedly wealthy, which makes you wonder why they set the thresholds so low. When you also look at the timescale within which the policies are being implemented, there is no room for doubt at all.

For instance, the WFA cut could have been deferred until next year, giving those affected time to plan ahead, instead of being sprung on them when the nights were already drawing in. A cold winter was being predicted by then (La Niña) and Labour themselves had previously announced that linking the WFA to Pension Credit would lead to thousands of extra deaths; even allowing for opposition hyperbole, to press on with the policy this year suggests either shameless mendacity or spectacular callousness.

With school fees, it is wilfully irresponsible to implement any reform mid-year in the knowledge that most public exams require two full years of teaching (many including interim modules), and an added refinement of cruelty to give such short notice, ensuring that any child forced out will have little chance of getting into a highly-rated or sought-after school - bad news for poorer pupils who moved to independent schools to escape bullying or because of the state’s inadequate support for their special needs. 

Meanwhile, the government suggests that farmers should plan ahead and take advantage of the seven-year rule but, leaving aside the fact that farming is one of the most unpredictable and dangerous jobs around, that isn’t much help if age or illness make the present incumbent unlikely to last another seven years - hence the distressing talk of a ‘suicide window’ for elderly farmers in poor health to ensure that their estates are settled before the changes come into force in April 2026. 

It’s hard to imagine the sort of person who would propose or wholeheartedly support all of this knowing the potential for harm - unless, that is, one considers the mind of a child. Children below the age of responsibility, as our law takes into account, are generally self-centred and don’t have the ability to evaluate the long-term consequences of their actions or fully appreciate how they will affect other people; they simply lash out and hurt or spoil things.

Whatever their legal and financial qualifications and experience (or lack of it, Ms Reeves?) it is becoming clear that we are being governed by a Cabinet of selfish and vindictive children, eager for designer goodies and treats, happy to reward their friends - £135m to the train drivers this year - and looking for ways to hurt anyone they don’t like.

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)