Rishi Sunak continues to repeat that taxes have been cut. This is that word that my editor dislikes my using, a lie. But here we can use it freely since we have confirmation from none other than the Office for Budget Responsibility that it is a lie. They explain that in fact taxes have gone up.
On the face of it, Mr Sunak is an unlikely street corner shyster tempting the voting public to ‘find the lady’. What has happened to him? Once he was just your average avaricious, ambitious and out-of-touch Conservative MP. There was little to distinguish him. He was not obviously any more corrupt or self-serving than any other Tory backbencher.
Now, the polls show that nobody believes a word he’s said. So has power corrupted him? What has happened to the boy Rishi? Well, nothing really, that’s the point. The runaway train of Tory delusion and untrammelled self-interest has had 14 years to gain momentum, and there really is no way of stopping it. He isn’t in control. Nobody is in control. To attempt any change would not only wreck the whole business of government but also have to admit that everything the Conservatives have done, beginning with austerity, has been a catastrophic mistake incurred with malice aforethought.
It’s too late for Mr Sunak, too late for his government, too late for any of us. But it’s we – not them – who will probably be paying for it probably for much of the rest of this century. A fine inheritance for our grandchildren and beyond. What we need now is wisdom, imagination and courage, to fill the gaps where our politicians lack all of those qualities. Frankly, your correspondent doubts we will find it. The British are much better at complacently claiming those things.
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Last week, Pecksniff forecast that, given the risible position of both Labour and the Liberal Democrats on Brexit, 2024 will become the year when an increasingly exasperated public begins to by-pass both parties and look for sense elsewhere. Their cowardice in refusing to tell the people the truth about Brexit is made all the more embarrassing this week, with a poll from Focaldata for Best for Britain, which shows 45% want closer ties with the EU, and less than one in 10 want greater divergence. This trend is common across the country.
Most telling, Focaldata have identified a million don’t-knows who would vote tactically to get rid of the government. They key point is that this huge group, enough to make a difference between winning and losing, seem even more frustrated at the two parties’ squeamishness on Brexit than the rest of the electorate. So by refusing to confront the idiocy of Brexit, Labour are actually putting their electoral chances in peril.
The importance is underlined by just who these voters are: of working age, mostly women, educated and equally split between those who voted for and against Brexit. But for shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves (MP for Leeds West) at least, the telling factor is the terror that gripped Labour after the referendum, that they might lose ‘their people’ in the Red Wall. To Labour’s leadership, few other voters seem to matter.
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The entry above was written earlier in the week, and may prove prescient. Yesterday EAB reported on publication of a shocking new study on the adverse effects of Brexit on the economy: ‘New research proves damning economic effects of Brexit’. The entry repeated a forecast Pecksniff had made the week before: “2024 will become the year when an increasingly exasperated public begins to bypass both parties and look for sense elsewhere”.
Elsewhere. The CamEcon report will be difficult to ignore, though the leadership of both Labour and the Liberal Democrats will try to accomplish that feat. But it features one Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, a doughty champion of EU membership. Will he and all the might of London become the focus of our determination to join Europe again?
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There are few more manipulative or disingenuous politicians than James Cleverly (Braintree), our home secretary. To remind readers, this is the man who declared that the Rwanda deportation scheme for asylum seekers was “batshit”, but enthusiastically goes about pursuing it anyway. He knows it will prove hugely expensive, that it won’t work and it will ruin the lives of hundreds or thousands of already terrified people. But it’s more important to him to improve his standing within the Conservative Party.
Hasn’t the boy come a long way? We have been privileged spectators of his meteoric rise from junior minister at the Foreign Office – remember that posed photograph of Mr Cleverly trying to look busy in an empty chamber of the United Nations, while the janitor waited impatiently in the background to lock up? He has made his way through the ranks, learning as he did so, gaining confidence, knowing how to look imperious instead of sweaty.
Why is he so keen on polishing his party credentials? Surely he isn’t another wanting Rishi Sunak’s mantle as leader after the election. Anyway, which faction would he choose?
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The triumph of the Turnip Taliban? EAB has reported in the past how relations are rather strained within the Liz Truss constituency of South West Norfolk. Ms Truss was imposed on them by Tory HQ, but however ridiculous she makes herself look and however brazen her personal ambition, most of the local party have known their place and stuck by her. Even when she insults them by calling them the Turnip Taliban, and abandons her constituency in search of personal advancement, her voters know their place.
At least, most of them do. A few have spoken to EAB – off the record, naturally – suggesting many daren’t raise their voices against her. But we hear this week that she is to be challenged at the general election by a Tory rebel, no longer a member of the party, one James Bagge. Mr Bagge makes it clear his platform will be the MP’s abandonment of her constituency.
Now Mr Bagge is hardly your average man in the street. He is true blue, a former deputy lieutenant of Norfolk. So if there are forelocks to be tugged, one would guess that – in a choice between Bagge and baggage – an awful lot of them may be tugged in the direction of Mr Bagge.
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Two colleagues, Clare and Aidan, were sufficiently amused at the stirrings in South West Norfolk that they were moved to pen a limerick. There is something about Liz Truss and her embarrassing shenanigans which positively invites a limerick, don’t you think?
An old-fashioned Tory grandee With a very impressive CV Is keen to oust Truss Which would cause a huge fuss And be splendid on late night TV
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The National Audit Office report into the proposed East West Rail Project, from Cambridge to Oxford, was published during the Christmas period and so escaped much attention. Which is a pity, since some of its findings are damning. (Let us not be so cynical as to believe this may account for the timing of its publication.)
It declares: ‘It is not yet clear how the benefits of the project will be achieved nor how it aligns to other government plans for growth in the region.” But the full statement is worth publishing here:
So to few people’s surprise, plans to build over large swathes of Cambridgeshire are driven by the prospect of somebody trousering a great deal of moolah. A prominent public figure, whose name is usually spoken of in conjunction with controversial plans involving huge sums of public money often not well spent, is said to have told dismayed councillors who were aghast at one huge project: “If you think you can stop something which is going to make so many people so much money, you must be mad”.
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Priti Patel (Witham) has boasted this week about how she has supported sub-postmasters during their dreadful ordeal. She claims: “Since I was elected in 2010 I have fought their cause in Parliament.”
In fact, she has never even mentioned sub-postmasters in the Commons before making her claim.
Also, while home secretary she presided over Home Office attempts to use the Official Secrets Act against them. Mr Justice Fraser, in summing up in this week’s case, concluded: “I find it … potentially oppressive, that the Post Office could seek to use the Official Secrets Acts in this way. I do not see how, in a routine case, these Acts could possibly apply in the way suggested by the Post Office in this contract.”
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And by the way, the chairman of Fujitsu has donated £300,000 to the Conservative Party. Meanwhile his company has received £10 billion a year in government contracts.
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Steve Barclay (NE Cambs) professes to leap to the defence of British farmers, those same farmers were gulled into supporting Brexit because the Tories that many voted for told them to. So what chance they will believe any other of Mr Barclay’s claims? (Spoiler: bloody right they will.) Shoppers may have noticed a new label appearing on foodstuffs: “Not to be sold in the EU”. This is necessary since the food our government may permit to be imported and flogged here could fall below the quality required by the EU, who are concerned it may sneak into the bloc via the Northern Ireland border arrangements.
So Mr Barclay has hit upon the wheeze of introducing another label, purportedly supporting British standards (however low they are allowed to plummet these days.) At the same time he ignores the label just introduced, which on every occasion you see it tells you this food may not meet EU standards – which of course used to be ours too.
“Not for EU”: more red tape to meet Brexit delusions
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As hysteria grips the parliamentary Conservative Party, we have Anna Firth (Southend West) claiming the discovery of promising shellfish grounds in the Thames Estuary is somehow another triumph for Brexit… The clip is not recommended viewing for those with a low threshold of embarrassment.
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Do you live in Cambridgeshire and you’re looking for somebody to blame for flooding? Under the Conservatives, in five years the county council didn’t clean the drains and the gullies once.
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This week the annual ranking of the world’s passports by Visa was published, calculated according to its value when being used in countries across the world. Remember the Leave campaign’s boasts about the almost mystical value of having a British rather than an EU sanctioned passport? Well, at the time of Brexit the British passport was ranked 3rd in the world. It is now 28th.
Spain is 1st, Germany 2nd, Ireland 19th. The British passport is now ranked behind Slovenia and Croatia.
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EAB has written extensively on Thurrock Council, but there is much still to tell, and so many questions still to ask. (Like: how is it the people of Thurrock voted to return the same council, after they had lost half a billion quid by giving it to a bloke down the pub to put on a dog.)
One of the most intriguing mysteries concerns the National Investigation Service (NATIS), which according to reports acts rather like a police force, and a particularly belligerent one at that, but appears from its website to be a bit of private enterprise by Thurrock Council. According to the website, its purpose is: “providing law enforcement capabilities to public sector organisations, local authorities and central government departments”.
It has a police email address, yet a freedom of information request declares that it is a department of the council. Yet it has “law enforcement capabilities”? Really? On the other hand, can a council department use the official police logo, which NATIS clearly does?
Be sure we shall find out, though progress is likely to be slow since, somehow, many of the minutes of meetings involving NATIS appear to have gone missing…
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It is fascinating how some old favourites never go away. One of them is the Bunterish Richard Bacon (S Norfolk). Your correspondent is grateful this week to Susan, who chose to remind us all of how we will miss the old gentleman when he is gone. (A pint of the throwing bitter will be quite sufficient, dear lady.) Readers will recall he has decided not to stand at the next election. Or perhaps that should be ‘he has been decided’ not to stand, since the decision was not, shall we say, of his own volition. Hardly had he declared that he was looking forward to becoming the longest ever serving Norfolk MP than his local party made clear they had other ideas, prompted – be under no illusions – by the efforts of EAB to hold him in constant ridicule and contempt. So instead, Fatty Bacon let it be known that he had been thinking of leaving Westminster for some time.
His constituents will be particularly entranced to read that: “My greatest satisfaction as an MP is that through my constituency surgeries I have been able to help many, many people,” since his complete absence from any kind of constituency involvement was what began the revolt against him.
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But we digress. The point of this entry was to have been to show how in touch Tory HQ is with the requirements of a rural seat in leafy Norfolk. Mr Bacon’s successor is one Poppy Simister-Thomas, a former City oil trader and a consultant at McKinsey. (They speak of little else but backwardisation and a roll-lock swap at the Diss Saracen’s Head.)
Ms Simister-Thomas dresses in ways which would have wowed Woman and Home in the 1950s and are probably chosen by her mother. One does so hope we shall hear more of Poppy.
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An alarming issue has arisen and is, horror of horrors, in the hands of the planners of East Suffolk. A pub came up for sale, the Brandeston Queen, and was bought by a couple who immediately made it clear they had no intention of actually running it as a pub. They wanted it as a house. ‘Private’ notices went up, the kitchen was torn out, the village bottle banks were removed and there are demands that the bus stop on the edge of the property should also go.
Imagine the outrage at the Muckrakers when the wise men realised the future of a nearby pub was left in the hands of the East Suffolk planners! The implications are clear.
The pub might have sold for £400,000, but as a house with extensive grounds it would be worth double that figure. The planners – as one would expect – are being dilatory in insisting on planning regulations being followed. But if they should be incompetent enough to allow the change of use, not a pub would be safe. Any hostelry which comes on the market could be snapped up and closed. A pub no more.
Over 200 objections have been lodged already, and that is even before the wise men of the Muckrakers enter the fray. Let the planners think on.
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Thanks this week go to Neil Murphy and Susan.
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