Yesterday, in his press conference about the Government’s plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda, Rishi Sunak said:

If Labour peers had not spent weeks holding up the bill in the House of Lords to try to block these flights altogether, we would have begun this process weeks ago.

There are 790 peers, of which 173 are Labour peers. Labour peers alone do not have the majority required to pass amendments and hold up the bill in the House of Lords.

Sunak also told us:

The only way to stop the boats is to eliminate the incentive to come by making it clear that if you are here illegally, you will not be able to stay. This policy does exactly that.

More than 6,000 asylum seekers have crossed the English Channel so far this year, a less-than five-month period. Rwanda has agreed to accept 1,000 asylum seekers over a five-year period… or about 83 per five-month period.

In his press conference yesterday, our Prime Minister claimed that:

the patience of the British people ‘is worn pretty thin by this point.’

I agree with him, though I think our patience is being worn through by him. I think that Ali Smith perhaps put it better in Autumn:

I’m tired of the vitriol. I’m tired of anger. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of selfishness. I’m tired of how we’re doing nothing to stop it. I’m tired of how we’re encouraging it. I’m tired of the violence that’s on its way, that’s coming, that hasn’t happened yet. I’m tired of liars. I’m tired of sanctified liars. I’m tired of how those liars have let this happen. I’m tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I’m tired of lying governments. I’m tired of people not caring whether they’re being lied to anymore. I’m tired of being made to feel this fearful.

In 2008, Dame Carol Black said:

Replacing the sick note with a fit note would switch the focus to what people can do instead of what they cannot.

Gordon Brown’s government subsquently replaced the ‘sick note’ with a ‘fit note’ which put a new focus what people could do instead of what they could not.

Yesterday, Rishi Sunak said:

We need to change the sick note culture so the default becomes what work you can do – not what you can’t.

It might seem like money for old role, but nevertheless, let’s focus on what Sunak can do, not what he can’t.

In 2008, 2.4% of all working hours in the UK were lost to sickness absence. By 2022, this had ‘spiralled’—Sunak’s word—to 2.6%. For what it’s worth, at the demise of the last Tory government in 1997, it was 3%.

In 2008, 2.6 million people were waiting for NHS treatment. By 2023, that had almost tripled, from 2.6 million to 7.7 million.

Here’s what Sunak, and perhaps Sunak alone, can do: look at those figures and conclude that people are staying off work too readily, and that the welfare system needs to be—Sunak’s word—’tightened’.

Since I spent far too much time looking at the Conservative Party’s 2019 manifesto when writing yesterday’s post, here’s another astonishing insight.

Only one of the 22 Conservative politicians pictured in the 2019 manifesto serves in the current Government.

It’s Kemi Badenoch, if you’re wondering… and even she’s resigned from the government once since the last election.

On the front page of yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, a Conservative source is quoted as saying:

The Government was democratically elected on a mandate to stop small boat crossings. It is a fundamental threat to our democracy if an unelected overseas court is stopping that delivery and leaving the European Court of Human Rights must be on the table if it is the only option to uphold that promise to the British people.

Small boat crossings weren’t mentioned in the Conservative Party’s last election manifesto, so I’m not sure where that mandate came from.

The phrase ‘get Brexit done’ appeared an astonishing thirty-three times. Jeremy Corbyn received thirteen mentions—his plans were a ‘recipe for chaos’, something we can hardly claim to have avoided. Even the phrase ‘We love Boris’ appeared once—the clownish egotism promised by its inclusion was delivered in buckets.

Migrants crossing the English Channel, however, didn’t make the cut. For what it’s worth, small boats in the Mediterranean were mentioned in Labour’s manifesto, even if they weren’t on Conservatives’ minds.

On the other hand, human rights made six appearances in the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto, including this committment:

Getting Brexit done will allow us to do more on the international stage. We will continue to be an outward-looking country that is a champion of human rights.

Threatening withdrawal from the world’s most effective international court on human rights would be a peculiar approach to keeping this promise.

Things have reached a pretty pass when a Government seeking re-election can’t accurately recall what it promised last time around.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Sixteen years ago, in March 2008, I predicted that David Cameron was ‘cycling towards election victory’. I was wrong: the result in May 2010 was a Hung Parliament.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to revisit that post with a 2024 mindset. My argument was that the incumbent in any election has an automatic advantage.

People inevitably like to vote for something known over something unknown. Political parties all too often forget that people don’t vote on the basis of promises, but on the basis of actions: Telling people you’ll do all of what they want can never rival the power of actually doing some of what they want.

On top of this, the incumbent has the advantage, by default, of being the more Presidential or Prime Ministerial figure – exactly the kind of figure one would want leading a nation.

And yet, there are rare moments where the incumbency becomes a millstone.

Now, in 2008, Labour’s greatest achievements no longer resonate. We’ve tired of hearing of the New Deal, the minimum wage is old news, and NHS reform has been done to death. It seems like this government has nothing new to do – it’s done it all before, and we’re comparing Labour’s current promises with Labour’s previous delivery.

Indeed, even systemic failures of government – such as the recent furore over MPs’ expenses – now enter the public consciousness as failings of Labour by default, as they are in government, even though they are often cross-party failings which should tar the Parliamentary machinery as a whole.

It’s easy to make a case that Brown’s lament has been inherited by Sunak. Perhaps Sunak doesn’t get a fair hearing as a result of the millstone of the Conservatives’ record dragging him down.

I think I was onto something when I talked about ‘comparing Labour’s current promises with Labour’s previous delivery’. These days, the litany of broken Conservative promises makes it challenging to set any store by Sunak’s pledges. I moaned earlier this week about passport price fluctuations indicating a lack of a plan, which I think feeds into the same narrative.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Like me, you may have a dim recollection of Monday 3 September 2012. The Minister for Immigration was thrilled to announce a £5 cut in the cost of a standard UK passport, a result he attributed to his hard work in driving efficiency at the Identity and Passport service.

So good was his performance that the very next day, he was promoted to become Minister of State for Policing and Criminal Justice.¹

As of next Thursday, the passport fee will increase by £7, capping off a total increase of £27.50 since that 2012 announcement. The fee will reach triple figures for the first time.²

You might note that next week’s £7 increase isn’t being promoted nearly so much as that £5 decrease. We got a fiver off, but then stung for the better part of thirty quid over the ensuing years.

Let me be clear: I don’t begrudge the increase in the passport fee. I’d happily pay twice the price if it protected some of the essential services that are no longer financially sustainable thanks to this Government’s choices.

It’s more that cutting the price then jacking it up gives the impression that there’s no strategy: no ‘long-term economic plan’, no ‘plan that we need to stick to’. And when repeated across, well, basically all areas of Government policy, that begins to feel like something of an electoral challenge.

1. It wouldn’t be until five years later that he’d be sacked for having pornography on his work computer and lying about it, issues which were uncovered during an investigation into alleged sexual harassment. ↩
2. There is an £11.50 discount for applying online these days, but it doesn’t take a mathematician to work out that you’re still much worse off. ↩

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Sitting at the Harrods Champagne Bar last week, I overheard a conversation between two customers. One pulled a book of stamps from a handbag—“Ten pounds! And there’s only eight in it now, not twelve! Can you believe it?!”

“Talk about the cost of living!”

Today, they’d be even more appalled: the price of a first-class stamp rose to £1.35 this morning, so the book of eight sticky portraits of the King now costs £10.80.

If this interaction had been filmed and played to Rishi Sunak, I’m fairly sure he’d deny responsibility. And in a technical sense, he’d be correct: the price of first-class stamps was deregulated by his Prime Ministerial predecessor, and current Foreign Secretary, David Cameron. In 2012, when that decision was taken, a first-class stamp cost 46p; a book of twelve, £5.52.

For the Prime Minister, if the cost of living crisis—aka “cozzy livs”, apparently—is the topic of conversation in Harrods Champagne Bar, you’ve probably already lost the argument. Hailing a “new economic moment”, as Sunak was yesterday, probably isn’t going to cut the mustard.

But then, I don’t know what could save the Prime Minister now. As one Sunak-supporting MP said this week,

We’ve got to stick with the plan. I don’t know what it is, but we’ve got to stick with it and it’s working.

Ho-hum.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Council of Europe Boulevard is a road running between Stockton-on-Tees and Thornaby. It runs over the River Tees via the Princess of Wales Bridge, still locally known as the Diana Bridge. I had always assumed the bridge was named as a posthumous tribute, but in fact, it was named in 1992 and opened by the Princess herself.

But it’s the road I want to write about today. Until the late 1980s, it was called Trafalgar Street, but as the area began to set its sights higher and wider, it was renamed to reflect the spirit of European co-operation exemplified by the Council of Europe.

Over the coming years, the acknowledgement of Europe co-operation in a road name became ever-more relevant: Teesside became a huge net beneficiary of European Union funding, with hundreds of millions of pounds spent in the area even as national Government funding for the area dwindled. Indeed, the bridges immediately up- and down-stream of the Diana Bridge—the Millennium Bridge and the Infinity Bridge—were both built with European funding.

Yet, current Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen has said:

There is hardly a more prominent, but inappropriately named road in Teesside than ‘Council of Europe Boulevard’.

I struggle to follow his logic as to why the name is inappropriate. Given that the UK remains a member of the Council of Europe, the specific choice of name remains apposite even post-Brexit. Houchen has spoken at length about the importance of protecting Teesside’s heritage, and European co-operation remains a key plank of that heritage. One can’t even make a post-rational argument that the name was inappropriately ‘bought’, given that the Council of Europe and the European Union are entirely distinct entities.

Nevertheless, Houchen would prefer the road to be renamed again, this time after Stanley Hollis, a war hero with no connection to Stockton or Thornaby.

The Mayor of Thornaby, Steve Walmsley, disagrees: he has observed that a different war hero—Edward Cooper—was born in Stockton and lived in Thornaby. Cooper might therefore be the more obvious choice, but as Walmsley has acknowledged:

We should recognise these people, but this just seems a bit silly.

It’s hard to disagree.

So here’s a question that occurred to me today: with more and more Local Authorities in financial straits, are we likely to see fewer overnight counts in the forthcoming general election?

The answer is ‘no’, for two reasons.

The first is the law. In the run-up to the 2010 election, when a quarter of councils proposed leaving counts until the next working day, the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill was passed. It had a provision requiring counts to start ‘as soon as practicable and within four hours of the close of the poll’.

The second is money. For general elections, councils can reclaim the cost of counting votes, so it doesn’t come from limited Council resources. The funding for local elections does come from council budgets, but given that starting the count within four hours is also a legal requirement for those, it seems likely that even the most financially embarrassed councils will be required to do so.

Whether or not that’s the best use of money is debatable.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Fintan O’Toole is always worth reading, and his latest for The TLS is no exception. I particularly enjoyed this paragraph, which does a great job of summarising the failure of the current Government while setting out the challenge for the next:

Comparatives make Starmer look good, but they also make his task, if he wins, look overwhelming. Income inequality is higher in the UK than in any other large European country, with the exception of Italy. Typical households are 9 per cent poorer than their French counterparts and the poorest households are a staggering 60 per cent poorer than their equivalents in Ireland. Almost a third of young people in the UK are not engaged in any formal education by the age of 18 – compared to just one in five in France and Germany. UK hospitals now have fewer beds than all but one OECD advanced economy. Since 2005 UK companies have invested 20 per cent less than those in the US, France and Germany, placing the UK in the bottom 10 per cent of OECD countries in this category. Since 2008 the UK’s productivity gap with France, Germany and the US respectively has doubled to almost 20 per cent. It is quite possible for an incoming Labour government to do much better than all of this without doing nearly well enough to get the UK back on a par with the countries it used to be able to regard as its peers.

I’ve written many times before about how I could never be a politician, so this is never likely to be a problem for me: but where on earth do you start on sorting out this mess?

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.