A Bitterly Disappointing Year

 

During my week’s holiday (walking in Conwy with an Anglo-German group) I’ve completed reading two short books which I picked up almost by accident during my stint as a volunteer in our local library.

The first, by Michael Peel (a journalist with the Financial Times and formerly their foreign correspondent), has the rather lengthy title  “What Everyone Knows about Britain, Except for the British” and argues that we look at ourselves intercostally though a trick mirror, but from abroad we are seen not as the “Great Power” we think we are (and maybe used to be) but as a seedy, incompetent "has-been"and something of a laughing-stock.  The book is, in my view, uneven, and spends rather too long on uncomplimentary comparisons with such as Thailand and Nigeria, but is packed with useful information and perspectives.

Here’s one: “In 2023 the [Conservative} government raised the personal pension investment annual tax-free allowance from £40 000to £60 000 – a perk worth up to £9 000.”  (footnote on page 24).   

For the past 48 hours our Labour government has been desperately trying to reduce the money we spend on allowances for disabled people but, as far as I’m aware, has as yet done nothing to reduce this absurd favour for those rich beyond most people’s wildest dreams.

The second book is a novel by the former Labour MP and Minister Chris Mullen entitled “The Friends of Harry Perkins.”  Published in 2019, three years after the Brexit referendum, it tells  the story  of what the history of the Labour Party, still in Opposition, might have been.

After an unstated time period the fictional new Leader of the Opposition addresses the Shadow Cabinet as follows:

“. . .[We] have to go into the next election with an economic programme  entirely distinct from that  of the current management.  We all know that Brexit is a disaster.   An increasing number of our voters are waking up to that reality.  The issue can no  longer  be  fudged.    An handful of zealots have manoeuvred our country into this position and it is time we stood up to them.”

Instead, in real life,  Sir Keir Starmer and his  Cabinet has spent their first year on a programme which  seems largely indistinguishable from that of the “previous management."

To be fair there have been some progressives moves.  The minimum wage has been increased and the remaining hereditary peers have been kicked out of the House of Lords. 

 But we continue to tax the wrong things (employment with the increase in NICs); fail to tax the right things (land, pollution, extraction of scarce resources)); waste money on vanity projects (the Lower Thames Crossing,  fancy aircraft to carry H-bombs we shouldn't use but  can’t anyway  without America’s permission); maintain poverty-creating measures  (the two- child benefits limit and harsh elements of the PIP system); kowtow to the US (a Royal visit for Trump!); fail to make any substantial overtures to our nearest in dearest in Europe (rejoining the Erasmus scheme if not the Customs Union); and cut back on our “green “credentials  (issuing licences for the further exploitation of North Sea oil and permitting the expansion of airports.)

Although Sir Keir Starmer continues to give some projects aggrandising  titles (“Great” British Railways) and to make his announcements  flaunted between two oversized Union Flags, the government  continues connive at the damage being done to the four areas in which the UK can still validly claim to be among the world leaders.  These are:

 

1.    1.  Information: The BBC is the jewel in our crown, still the world’s  most trusted source of information, yet the funding of its overseas services is reduced, the domestic service similarly threatened with “defunding” and bullied by accusations of  impropriety because it “accidentally” allows a few inappropriate criticism of the  IDF to be broadcast.

2.    2. Higher Education: Our universities still have great international reputations (though not for much longer if they continue to debase the quality of their degree classifications), yet they are starved of funding, some to the edge of bankruptcy , and overseas applications to study here are impeded in order to reduce headline immigration figures.

3.    3. Overseas Development: Again, a reputation of effective development assistances among the best in the world, but instead of reversing the Tory cut of funding from 0.7% to 0.5% of GDP, funding is further reduced to 0.3% of GDP, much  of that spent in the UK to house asylum seekers – hardly development.

4.    4.  The Arts: British  TV programmes (especially comedy), films, music both “pop” and classical, are  admired and enjoyed in many parts of the world, but defunded, hamstrung by visa restriction and squeezed out of the school curriculum

Truly a bitterly disappointing first year.

 Things can only get better. 

On one way for them to do so would be for labour’s leaders not only to listen to their own MPs, but also to the Liberal Democrats and Greens. (See previous post, “The Vision Thing” 4^th November 2024).

Government by “winner takes all” fiat  is failing  even when the intentions are good.  Now we need to move on from talk of “U turns” towards democracy which is “government by discussion.”