I was out of bed early yesterday morning.

I walked down to the Metro station, where I waited longer than I used to for the train: so many of the 43-year-old trains have fallen apart that the timetable had to be altered some time ago to remove some services.

I alighted at Newcastle station, intending to travel to a hospital for a meeting. The train was badly delayed, and eventually terminated early, before my stop. I took a taxi the rest of the way, arriving about 45 minutes later than planned.

As the taxi pulled in to the hospital, it passed a picket line of striking healthcare assistants.

After my meeting, as I huddled with patients in the small station shelter waiting for the delayed return train, they talked amongst themselves about how they couldn’t afford train tickets. The trick, they said, is to buy a ticket for a single stop, and to get off at the nearest station to your destination that has no ticket barriers. The hospital always talks about people not turning up for appointments, they observed, but who can afford to travel to hospital in a cost-of-living crisis?

Back in Newcastle, I trudged in the pouring rain from the station to the office, asked three times by homeless people for money. The broken paving splashed muddy water up my legs over and again, and I witnessed one nasty fall on poorly repaired, uneven surface.

As I walked past boarded-up shops, I reminisced about the times Wendy and I used to pop into them.

I cut through Eldon Square and M&S, where a ‘store protection’ staff member chased a member of the public out into the rain.

Once I’d restarted my work laptop a couple of times, I sat and listened to another online meeting about another reorganisation of a government body. I wondered about the point of it all, and pondered who would possibly think that this was the best use of my time.

As I trudged home in the rain, I listened to the radio. A bloke standing in the street outside his house in the pouring rain, having failed to equip himself with an umbrella, complained about another bloke’s inability to plan.

The Prime Minister told us that he’d spend the ‘next few weeks’ earning our trust. He made the same promise in the same location in October 2022, but has perhaps made less progress than he’d hoped—polling suggests his trustworthiness has fallen over that period.

The man who once promised to ‘to put your needs above politics’ chose not to stick around long enough to see through the smoking ban he claimed would ‘save thousands of lives and billions of pounds’—because politics got in the way.

As he talked about how his plan is working, I couldn’t help but reflect on the day and wonder: Which plan? What’s working?

And just as the Prime Minister reached the end of a particularly rambling 53-word sentence, the broadcast cut to John Pienaar.

“We may… we may have lost the sound there… oh no… no… I think that’s it. Yes, the Prime Minster has turned his back. He’s finished.”

It’s hard to disagree.

Last year, I reflected a little on Civil Servants being encouraged to bring their ‘whole self’ to work. I wouldn’t have guessed that the very next year, under the same political leadership, the same workforce would be told to ensure that ‘your beliefs remain at the front door’ (because heaven forfend that someone should wear a non-standard lanyard).

Yesterday, I was interested to read Zoë Schiffer’s piece on Platformer about a similar—but altogether more thoughtful—change in the culture of technology firms.

It’s intriguing to watch the pendulum swing.

In The Times last week, Matt Chorley wrote about a focus group’s reaction to the Government’s oft-repeated plea:

In the meantime, Sunak presses on, vowing to listen to voters while refusing to change. “Stick with the plan that’s working.” On our most recent Times Radio focus group of swing voters, we asked about that slogan. “Which plan’s that?” scoffed one. “And what’s working?” said another, before they all descended into guffaws.

This was still ratting around my mind when I saw this laminated sign above a hospital bed—not in deepest mid-winter, but on a glorious spring afternoon:

This isn’t a one-off: it has become the norm in many NHS hospitals these days. It’s this graph of the relative collapse capital spending in the NHS made photographic:

‘Which plan? What’s working?’ might be the most apposite piece of political commentary in years.

Two weeks ago, the Conservative Prime Minister delivered a ‘major speech’ decrying Britain’s ‘sick note culture’ and promising punitive reforms to get people back to work. He expressed his profound disappointment that sick notes had become a ‘lifestyle choice’ for some.

Yesterday, the Conservatives had their first election victory in Newcastle in more than three decades, securing a single council seat. The newly installed Conservative councillor is a former GP, once suspended for falsifying a sick note to cover the holiday of an undercover Sunday Times journalist.

It’s a funny old world.

In an article published on the Financial Times website yesterday, with the fantastic headline ‘Sex and dogs and heads will roll’, Simon Kuper observes that:

One in 20 MPs elected in 2019 had left parliament, been suspended or had the party whip removed after misconduct allegations by December 2023.

It’s a jaw-dropping statistic which gives context to Kuper’s discussion of how scandals have changed over the years. Thanks to the unprecedented pace of social change, things which were resigning matters in the 1990s are not today—and vice versa. It’s astonishing to remember how recently homosexual relationships were considered scandalous, while overt racism was not.

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.