Knowledge and Competence

Yesterday the Tory Health Secretary Victoria Atkins launched a bitter and ignorant attack on Junior Doctors, diminishing their medical experience by describing them as "doctors in training" as if they're not properly qualified doctors. The reality, of course, is that Junior Doctor is the term for a fully qualified doctor who is doing a 2 year clinical foundation, or has not specialised yet, meaning they're supervised by consultants in their area of practice. If Victoria Atkins was really concerned about medically unqualified people within the NHS, perhaps she should look at the Tory Department of Health, including herself and her junior ministers.

Victoria Atkins, herself, worked as a barrister before becoming a career politician. She has no medical qualifications.

Junior health minister, Helen Whatley, did a couple of years of management consultancy and then a stint at the Internet dinosaur AOL before becoming a career politician. She claims to have volunteered at NHS hospitals in her youth, but has no medical qualifications.

Junior health minister, Andrew Stephenson, was an insurance broker before becoming a career politician. He has no medical qualifications.

Junior health minister, Andrea Leadsom, was a debt trader for Barclays Bank and then an investment banker before getting on the Tory career politician gravy train. She has no medical qualifications.

Junior health minister Nick Markham was a businessman with his fingers in a lot of pies. One of his most notable ventures was his chairmanship of Inview Technologies which went bust in 2020 costing investors over £20 million. He was parachuted into the unelected House of Lords so he could be made a junior health minister without the bother of even getting elected. He has no medical qualifications.

Of the six Tory politicians who run the Department of Health, only one has any real NHS experience. Maria Caulfield worked as an NHS nurse for a couple of decades before turning to politics.

In light of the alarming dearth of medical training and experience within the Tory-run department of health, it's a bit damned rich for Victoria Atkins to try to diminish the expertise of trained and qualified NHS doctors, isn't it? But since when has any Tory adminstration bothered with knowledge and competence as criteria for high office? Certainly not this one. Liz Truss, anyone?

School trips with a difference

Would you believe that we regularly played in and out of these wagons?

I was born and grew up in a Welsh mining village, in the Rhymney Valley, just a couple of miles from Caerphilly. Our local pit was the Bedwas Navigation Colliery, that had the reputation of yielding good quality steam coal for the maritime sector - the clue is in the name 'navigation'. It seemed that every village around us had had a pit at one time and each village had provided hundreds of men and boys to help hew the coal from the ground. Coal brought prosperity, albeit at a pretty low level, to our village, but at a cost. At one end of the spectrum were the fatalities, not that many but there were regular accidents. At the other end, I remember that miners were covered in little blue scars, like tattoos. If you got even the smallest cut down a pit, the dust got in straight away and turned it blue forever - and there was nothing you could do about it. The dust got in to your lungs too but these are part of a story for another day.

The primary school I attended, between 1952 and 1959, was Bedwas Junior Mixed. It was a typical mining village school, with most of the pupils' fathers (most mothers stayed at home in those days) having some connection with the pit, either directly as colliers or indirectly as supplying some service to the pit. Our school outings were very limited, in stark contrast with what my grandchildren have experienced. We had an annual trip, by steam train, to Bristol Zoo, and the occasional charabanc outing to St Fagans, nowadays the St Fagans National Museum of History, at Cardiff. And we also had, for two or three years, a unique day-trip - a visit to our local pit!

Who in their right mind would take young children down a working coal mine now? It would never be allowed in today's litigious and safety-conscious times. And in retrospect, it was a pretty mad thing to do. But, within the context of the zeitgeist, it was a little like a 'take your child to work day'.

We walked the mile or so up to the pit in crocodile file and, after some 'pop' and a biscuit in the pit canteen, we were taken to the pit head under the winding gear. There we were all crammed in the cage and snuggled up against each other. The man in charge of the ascent and descent was Len the Pen and he was a neighbour of ours in Bryn Fedw. I think he said something like "are you ready for the ride?" and then we gasped as the floor fell away. Len let the cage drop a while and put the brakes on. It was dark and he said that we were stuck. Much screaming at this point and then we dropped again. I thought the cable had snapped but the brakes came on again as we got near to the bottom of the shaft - Mr Google tells me that the shaft was around 2000ft deep, and it felt like it. When we reached the bottom, everyone outside, and Len the Pen, were doubled up with laughter. They obviously enjoyed playing this trick on innocent children. It must have livened up an otherwise dull day down the mine.

We didn't venture far from the cage and I can still smell the dank, foetid odour, the likes of which I haven't encountered before or since - a very distinct combination of strange gases. Lights were switched out for a short while and we were shown how miner's lamps were used. At one point, in the distance we heard a long, wailing siren, followed by a bellowing, full-throated roar. Shot blasting at the coal face! It could have been my dad doing that as he was a shot firer for a while. And then it was back in the cage and up to the surface and more 'pop' and biscuits.

If I wanted to be dramatic, I could say that, sometimes, even now, I wake up with my head throbbing and my ears ringing, as if my skull has been tightly clamped in a vice all night. I haven't been to the doctor's about it. It wouldn't do any good. It isn't depression, or stress. It isn't a migraine, or a hangover. It's nothing physical at all. But that’s not true. It's just a memory - a memory from childhood. It is just a memory of a dank, smelly, sweaty, claustrophobic place. I hated the foul, festering hell-hole the moment I set foot down there. I could say that I decided that day that I'd never end up down the pit like my grandfather, dad and others. I could say that I decided that day I'd never set foot in a pit again as long as I lived. I could say that I decided that day I wanted something better. 

But that would be completely wrong. There was never any chance that I would end up down the pit. My parents would never have allowed that, and they often told me in no uncertain terms. And for that, I am eternally grateful.

Looking up to the pit from the bottom of our street - Bryn Fedw. The tips are likely to be reclaimed in the relatively near future. Recovered coal will be recovered and sent to steel furnaces and cement works, with the remaining landscaped back to its’original topography’ - and who can remember what that looked like? Well before my time but I presume that plans exist somewhere.

Moaning about Mone

 

Scottish Tory peer Michelle Mone, who was awarded a seat in the House of Lords by David Cameron for her services for trolling for the Tories during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, has been in the news recently over allegations about her role in a so called VIP lane contract for PPE. PPE Medpro, a company owned and controlled by Mone’s husband, was awarded Government contracts worth more than £200 million to supply personal protective equipment after she made use of the so called VIP lane to recommend it to ministers. Much of the equipment supplied was later deemed to be unfit for use. Mone and her husband stand to gain millions of pounds from the deal.

Mone at first denied she had any involvement in the contract, sending aggressive and threatening legal letters to journalists reporting on facts that Mone now admits were true. On Sunday Mone and her husband appeared on the BBC in a softball interview with Laura Kuenssberg which had apparently been set up by the same press advisor who told Prince Andrew that the best thing to do was to appear in an interview that the allegations that he’d been involved with a sex trafficked teen with whom the sweaty prince appeared in a now notorious photo could not be true as he was unable to sweat and in any case he’d been in a Pizza Hut in Woking at the time. That interview worked well, didn't it? The takeaway from this interview is Mone and Barrowman’s claim that they don’t have the money from the PPE, it’s just resting in their trust fund. Doing what, exactly?

The simple fact remains uncontested no matter how Mone tries to spin it. There was a global catastrophe during which millions died, 200,000 in the UK alone, countless millions of others had their lives blighted, jobs lost, families destroyed and grieving. The natural response of any normal decent human being when faced with tragedy on such an immense scale is sympathy, grief, empathy, and compassion. That, however, was not the reaction of Mone. Their response when confronted with unthinkable human tragedy, was to profiteer from it and take advantage from it in order to enrich themselves. It’s obscene behaviour. Just because others did the same thing that doesn’t mean that it’s OK. It means that Mone and her husband are just as nasty and bereft of a moral compass or a basic grasp of human decency as they are.

Kuenssberg did not ask Mone about the legal threats she’d been making to journalists for reporting on facts Mone now concedes were true. Instead Mone, yet again, was allowed to play the victim. The excuses she gave were as convincing as Prince Andrew’s sweating story and equally likely to backfire. Her only sin, she claimed, was to lie to the press about her involvement, which she pointed out was not a crime. She insisted that she was being made a scapegoat for the gross incompetence of the Conservatives, a party she was happy to support until very recently.

Mone and her husband are currently being investigated by the police for their role in this sordid affair. Both vehemently deny any allegations of wrongdoing. But they are just the latest in a long line of awful, greedy, entitled, amoral opportunists who automatically assume that their wealth and status will insulate them from the laws and obligations that bind the rest of us. And, the truly appalling thing is, they’re right.

Irrespective of the outcome of the police investigation, none of this would have happened had David Cameron not given Mone a seat in the Lords or if the Tories had not opened up a preferential route to lucrative government contracts for friends and associates of cabinet ministers. Both of these events point to the rotten corruption at the very heart of the Westminster system. The House of Lords is institutionalised cronyism. it makes cronyism and patronage a central tenet of government. The Lords doesn’t need to be reformed, it needs to be abolished. We all know Starmer will do neither. Mone is what you get when cronyism becomes an institution and a central pillar of government. We are so used to this way of doing things that we no longer appreciate just how corrupt the British state is, to its very core.

While we’re all face palming over the audacity and rank entitlement of Mone and her husband, there was another very British example of audacity and rank entitlement which you might have missed. Keir Starmer is very fond of telling us how much he’s changed the Labour party, an assessment with which former Tory MP and erstwhile Conservative leadership candidate Rory Stewart wholeheartedly agrees. On Sunday Stewart announced that he’d be happy to serve in a government led by Keir Starmer. Stewart saying he would be open to serving as a minister in Keir Starmer’s cabinet shows that Labour is the new Conservative Party and the original Conservative Party is the new BNP. Eton and Oxbridge educated upper middle class white men are so dripping in entitlement that they believe they have an automatic right to prominent political positions, and Labour, under Starmer, is now so right wing that it’s a party that a man who stood for the leadership of the Tory party only four years ago feels that he’d be comfortable in. Stewart’s biggest problem is that he’s probably too left wing for Starmer to be comfortable with him.

Peace For Our Time : But What Time?

Despairing at the total absence of any signs of peace in the Middle East, my mind turned to earlier peace efforts and that most famous return flight from Munich: the one undertaken by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on the 30th September 1938. Amongst other things, I wondered how long the journey took him. Why such a ridiculous question should have come into my mind at a time when the difference between life and death in Gaza seems wafer thin, I have no idea. But I was determined to discover the answer.

There is a lot of information available about that journey. Chamberlain was returning with a meeting with Hitler, Mussolini, and Prime Minister Édouard Daladier of France: a meeting at which the future fate of Czechoslovakia had been decided (without the active participation of the Czech Government). On his return to Heston Aerodrome*, Chamberlain waved his famous piece of paper and spoke of peace. Later that day, in Downing Street, he issued his famous promise of "peace for our time". We know what kind of plane he flew in (a Lockheed 14 with the registration number G-AFGN), we even know Chamberlain's ticket number (BA/WS 18249: the actual ticket was re-discovered a few years ago). But how long did the flight take?

I eventually found the answer within an archive recording from the BBC. The clip is from the original report made as the plane landed at Heston and features the sonorous tones of the famous reporter, Richard Dimbleby. Near the beginning of the broadcast, Dimbleby comments on the poor weather in England but says that the Prime Minister had good weather for most of the return flight which took "something like three and a half hours - a little less than that actually". You can find the full nine minute broadcast from September 1938 on the BBC Archive website - it makes interesting, but poignant, listening.

Around the same time that Chamberlain was making his three and a half hour flight, the German poet Bertolt Brecht, living in exile in Denmark wrote a poem entitled "From A German War Primer" One verse from the poem says:

When the leaders speak of peace

The common folk know

That war is coming.

When the leaders curse war

The mobilization order is already written out.

War grows from their peace

Chamberlain ended his famous "Peace For Our Time" speech with the following request to his audience: "And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds".  A verse of the Brecht poem seems to almost echo the thought:

It is night

The married couples

Lie in their beds. The young women

Will bear orphans

Much maligned ever since, I think the importance of Chamberlain's apparent 'appeasement' of Hitler is underestimated. It did buy time for British forces to be better prepared for a war than they otherwise would have been. But that's a debate for another day.

* Despite a widely held belief, Chamberlain did not land at Croydon Airport. It was Heston, to the west of London, not far from Heathrow, and now buried under the Heston Service Area on the M4.

They must think we are all idiots

It's unbloody believable. Do they really think that we are all idiots?

Both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have claimed that they've lost all of their WhatsApp messages from the Covid pandemic period. Conspirancy theorists would say that it's strange that this coincides with the time when they caused the premature deaths of thousands of people by allowing the virus to spread like wildfire in care homes, and squandered billions of pounds in fraudulent covid contracts and support schemes.

Now, pretty much anyone who has ever got a new phone knows that it's easy to transfer app data such as old WhatsApp messages as these are stored on cloud servers and not locally on the phone. So their excuse that the messages were lost when swapping phones is absolute twaddle. Furthermore it's beyond belief that they're seemingly going to get away with conducting government business via WhatsApp and then overseeing the destruction of the records of what they were up to.

Imagine if ordinary people like you or I had caused even one death, or lost a thousandth of the cash the Tory government wasted on covid fraud and dodgy PPE scams, then tried to escape responsibility by insisting all of our communications from that time period somehow got "lost". We wouldn't just find ourselves up in court on charges like manslaughter or fraud, they'd probably throw perverting the course of justice at us too for the deleted messages.

But somehow the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time are seemingly getting away with nothing more than a ticking off from the covid inquiry for their outrageous behaviour and subsequent deletion of crucial records, because the whole system is rigged in favour of well-connected establishment elitists. Where is the challenge to what they've claimed to be the case? Where is the report from the forensic IT specialists? As is so often the case, it's one set of rules for ordinary people, and another infinitely laxer set of rules for the establishment insiders who actually have the power to destroy countless peoples' lives and waste billions of pounds in public funds.

Summer Holiday 2023: Swaledale Part 3

Normally, I write my posts on walks fairly close to when we've actually done them and when the memory is at its freshest. But I'm continuing describing aspects of our North Yorkshire stay several months after we've returned home. And I'm rather enjoying doing it this way. It's giving me the opportunity to look back on the photographs I took at the time and relive the landscapes we walked through. Perhaps this is a better way of doing things?

This walk I'm about to describe is one of the iconic Swaledale routes - up Gunnerside Gill. A small valley branching off Swaledale into the moorland north of Gunnerside. It was the site of intensive lead mining in the 18th and 19th centuries and still contains much evidence of its industrial past. Just our sort of place for a walk and it was a cracker.

First of all though, perhaps I should explain some of the local terms for landscape, or topographical, features. The little valley we’re heading for in is a ‘gill’, which comes from the Norse word ‘gil’, meaning ravine or gully. The stream running through a gill is a beck, from the Norse ‘bekkr’. This one we'll be following is Gunnerside Beck. Look at any map of the Yorkshire Dales or the Lake District, and you’ll find more Norse words. Examples include ‘foss’ or ‘force’ for waterfalls and ‘fell’ from ‘fjell’ meaning hill or mountain. Even the word ‘dale’, meaning valley, originates from an old Norse word, ‘dalr’. Norse people first settled in these uplands more than 1,100 years ago and they've certainly left their mark.

A straightforward route: follow the gill for a few miles, climb up a steep bit and then follow a track back to the starting point in Gunnerside. The elevation profile tells it all - up for 3.5 miles and then down for about the same distance. Overall, I would rate the walk as high moderate. Most of it is fairly easy, but there are some steep bits, a lot of undulations, rugged terrain, and some very thin trails with steep drops. Well worth doing.

A rather beguiling gate, offering an invitation to move into the woodland bordering the beck. I like these transitions from one phase to another.

Lots of water coming down the beck which as rocky a streambed that I've come across. I presume that the steep gradient of the flow means that anything small is quickly scoured away.

And in amongst the ferns, the footpath winds its way alongside the beck.

And we come to the first substantial remains of the lead mining industry that played such a key role in Swaledale’s history. I'm standing on what’s known as a dressing floor. Do you see those open-sided stone chambers up above? They’re known as bouse teams and that’s where the mined material was stored before being ‘dressed’. In this process, women and boys, some aged as young as nine, separated the valuable ore from the worthless waste. It was a very labour-intensive task and that’s one of the reasons why the mine owners used women and children – they were cheaper than men. Can you imagine how busy, noisy and dusty this place must’ve been back then? Dozens of people would’ve been toiling away beside the beck, smashing up the rocks by hand and sifting through it for the precious ores of lead. It was a very demanding physical process and the noxious lead would probably have poisoned many of those working here in one way or another. Lead poisoning is awful and is associated with abdominal problems, learning difficulties in children, memory loss, kidney disease, high blood pressure, reproductive issues and problems relating to the central nervous system. And this sort of exploitation is still going somewhere in the world.

Looking up from whence the beck flows. The steep slopes leading down there are composed almost entirely of rubble and spoil from the workings. This is part of the Bunton ‘hush’, where water would’ve been used to enable open-cast mining. As in most hushes, this one followed the line of an existing, natural streams. although a few hushes would’ve followed an entirely man-made water course,  In either case, a dam would’ve been built at the top of the slope and water released, either to expose the ore vein or to wash away debris as miners went to work with pick and shovel. The water’s still there and the exposed bedrock remains. There are hushes on the other side of the valley too – rocky ravines that cut into the hillside aren’t the result of natural processes. 

Water, water, everywhere. And this wasn't even a stream. Just overspill from the recent rains.

This photograph shows the two different methods of accessing the ore-bearing rock at Bunton Mine. This old adit entrance is the only visible sign on the surface of a level driven into the hillside to reach deeper veins of galena, the lead-bearing ore. The deep gash of rubble  in the hillside above is the hush, the result of water being dammed above the lead seam and released in a rush. The overlying debris would be washed away, exposing the ore-bearing rock, which could then be extracted at the surface with picks and chisels.

Looking downstream with the waste heaps prominent. The scale is quite amazing and compares with anything we've seen as a result of tin mining back home in Cornwall.

I think this photograph says it all! It was quite a slog to the highest point of around 1700 feet on the walk. To be fair, this relaxation was only momentary and Mrs P was soon back on her feet, raring to go again.

A rather dramatic sky over the moors.

A little more blue sky in this view. Give it a few more weeks and the heather will be in flower. Should be quite spectacular: shame we are going to be back home when it comes out.

Our walk was just a few days before the 'Glorious 12th August' when the moors would resound to the sound of gunshots blasting Black Grouse such as these out of the skies. And they call it 'sport'! 

Looking down over Gunnerside to the patchwork of fields and barns leading down to the Swale. Villages like this are rooted in the landscape and merge seamlessly with their surroundings. Shame that all urban developments couldn't achieve the same.

Right at the start/end of our walk looking up the beck from the bridge in Gunnerside. 

And where is the accountability?

It was always obvious to anyone with a grain of sense and half a brain cell that Boris Johnson was shockingly unfit to serve as Prime Minister (especially after his shambolic stint as Foreign Secretary). His appearance at the Covid Inquiry this week has done nothing to dispel that view and has merely underlined his unfitness once again. As satisfying as it was to see him grilled over his half-arsed and incompetent handling of the pandemic, it was still profoundly frustrating for several reasons. Not least of which is the suspicion that this inquiry will, instead of holding politicians to account for woeful decision making, turn out to be yet another example of establishment immunity.

Despite the Tory care home scandal, the billions of pounds lost in corrupt "VIP lane" covid contracts for Tory cronies, Rishi Sunak's insane "Eat Out To Help Out" scheme, and billions more squandered on covid support loans to fake companies and fraudsters, a light grilling by their establishment peers is as bad as it's ever going to get for the likes of Johnson and Hancock.

You'd have to ignore so much in the past to believe that this time it will be any different. That this time, their feet will be held to the fire. That this time, the precedents will be proven wrong. Here are some examples of what I have in mind

Tony Blair's actions lead to countless thousands being killed in Iraq and created the world's largest terrorism breeding ground, and the worst he faced was the Chilcot Inquiry exposing his lies. And then what?

Cameron and Osborne caused the premature deaths of innumerous people via their austerity agenda, and they haven't even been told off. They've got off scot-free because the establishment elitists are still as addicted to economically illiterate austerity ruination as they ever were.

Theresa May completely got away with introducing the unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment" which destroyed the lives of countless Commonwealth Brits and their families, to the extent of deporting British citizens who actually died in exile overseas.

It's sickening that the worst Johnson and his ilk are going to face is a bit of a telling off, rather than the jail time they deserve, but that's just how the British establishment order operates.

Another profoundly frustrating aspect is the faux shock and outrage from Labour politicians and their liberal-capitalist media outriders. They knew exactly how bad Johnson was all along, but that didn't stop them sabotaging the Labour Party from within. These people worked tirelessly to hand power to Johnson and his Tory rabble, because they saw it as a price worth paying to achieve their primary objective of taking control of the party for themselves.

Their outrage is doubly fake because they don't want to set the precedent of jailing political leaders for crimes of governance (why isn't there a crime of 'Government Manslaughter?) and corruption, because they want to retain the same establishment immunity for themselves when they get into power.

Without serious consequences for the profoundly corrupt architects of bad governance, the Covid Inquiry is destined to be just an empty performance. And we all deserve better than that. Or am I jumping to a premature conclusion?

Princetown in the snow

Things can only get better? Under Starmer?

 

Last week, as thousands demonstrated in the street outside his constituency office in protest against his refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, Keir Starmer unapologetically tweeted: “I've changed the Labour Party and if I’m given the opportunity, I’ll change the country too.” Yes, indeed. Keir Starmer has changed the Labour party, he has changed it into the Conservatives.

His Labour party occupies approximately the same political space as that which was occupied by the Tories a few years ago. Labour is now an overtly Anglo-British nationalist party which wraps itself in the British flag, opposes rejoining the EU, supports privatisation in the NHS, and heaps more misery on the poor and the marginalised.

During a recent episode of the i newspaper podcast, Labour’s Plan For Power, Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary said that, far from protecting the NHS in England from the creeping privatisation it has endured under the Conservatives, he wants to speed the process up and increase private sector involvement in the provision of healthcare on the NHS. Streeting said he would “hold the door wide open” to the NHS for the private sector if the Labour party was to win the general election. He said that NHS England had “started to move in the right direction” by increasing the amount of private sector involvement in healthcare delivery, but he wanted to see a Labour government “put our foot on the accelerator”.

We always knew that the NHS was not safe in the Conservatives’ hands. Now we know it’s not safe in the hands of Keir Starmer’s Labour party either. Labour will speed up the erosion in England of the core ethos of the founders of the NHS. 

Last week, the Tories announced that they are going to make the already difficult lives of those struggling to survive on benefits even more difficult in order to find extra cash which they plan to use for tax cuts for those who are already comfortably off. The plan is not to raise benefits by the rate of inflation, which is an effective cut in the already inadequate money that claimants have to subsist on. However, to heap on the cruelty even further, it was also reported that the government plans to stop the current entitlement of means tested benefits claimants in England, to free prescriptions and dental treatment. The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, said the move is necessary to stop “anyone choosing to coast on the hard work of taxpayers.”

This is an unspeakably vile and nasty move. Even former Tory Deputy PM Michael Heseltine has accused the Conservative government of fuelling ‘hate politics’ over its plan to strip the jobless of their entitlement to free prescriptions. It’s a measure which holds people’s health to ransom. Heseltine said ministers should not “use the health service as a sanction.” Former Conservative health secretary Stephen Dorrell also spoke out against the plan, saying that all governments face the difficult question of who should receive benefits, “but making a virtue of withdrawing healthcare support from people who, by implication need it, is deliberately unpleasant”.

Poverty has a major impact on health. People struggling to survive on destitution levels typically have worse health and suffer higher levels of illness than those living more comfortable lives. The Conservatives propose to deal with this by denying the unemployed access to vital medications and leaving them to suffer the agonies of toothache.

You might think that the Labour party would be loudly condemning this egregious cruelty that even former Conservative Ministers under Thatcher and John Major think is a hateful and unacceptable exercise in nastiness for the sake of nastiness, designed to pander to the basest prejudices of the far right media. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, you would be wrong. Not only has the Labour party said that it will not oppose this offence against humanity and common decency and will not reverse it when in power, but Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall reportedly told The Times newspaper that in her view the Conservative plans did not go far enough.

Labour’s move to the right is a consequence of the broken system of British politics and the first past the post system for Westminster elections so beloved of both the Labour and Conservative parties. It’s a system which repeatedly forces voters to choose the least worst option, as the Conservatives move to the right, Labour moves rightwards in order to appeal to the former Tory voters, whose support it needs to win the election. This, in turn, nudges the Conservatives to shift even further to the right, and with every election the depressing cycle repeats itself. We get the toryfication of Labour and the Conservatives slide into extreme right wing authoritarian populism.

Labour is now where the Tories were under John Major, while the Conservatives are now an extreme right party advocating policies which were beyond the pale of political acceptability only a few decades ago. Now many Tories advocate leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, something which not even UKIP dared to push for prior to the Brexit referendum. Meanwhile the Conservative assault on civil liberties continues.

The Tories have now normalised extremism, aided and abetted by a British media which is now presenting Nigel Farage as a colourful character on a reality TV show and not for what he is, a dangerous fascist. Labour refuses to undo Tory policies once it gets into power and the rightward decline of British politics continues unabated. Not in my name, not in my name.

You couldn't make it up.

Rishi Sunak’s big revelation was that he was the ‘change’ candidate. Remember, just a few short weeks ago he was telling the Tory party conference that British politics have been locked into a cosy and damaging short termist consensus for the past thirty years and that he was the guy who was going to change all that and shake things up. It was never a convincing claim at the best of times, relying as it did on us all collectively forgetting that the Tories have been in power since 2010 and that Sunak himself has been either Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer or a government minister since 2018. But then patronising the public and demanding that we ignore the evidence of our own eyes and ears has very much been the stock in trade of the Conservative party for many years now. That much at least did not come under the umbrella of those things about British politics that Sunak was determined needed to change.

However, Sunak can no longer pretend that he’s the ‘change’ candidate, as he has brought back David Cameron into a senior role in Government. Cameron, a man best known for being the architect of austerity, allegedly sexually molesting a dead pig’s head (I know he’s repeatedly denied this but…..), and holding the disastrous Brexit referendum in order to get himself out of some internal party difficulties with the spittle-flecked, Brexit-loving, frothing right wing extremist end of the Conservative party. As we all know he lost that referendum, and immediately ran away from the consequences of his failure, leaving the rest of the UK at the mercy of a Conservative party which had been fully taken over by the spittle-flecked, Brexit-loving, frothing right wing extremists. All of Britain is still paying the price for that, and by sacking the dangerously incendiary Suella Braverman from her post as Home Secretary, Sunak has given the spittle-flecked, Brexit-loving, frothing right wing extremists a new reason to feel aggrieved.

Braverman will now return to the back benches from where she will continue her manoeuvring for the party leadership after Sunak takes the Tories to inevitable defeat at the next general election. Now free from the constraints and discipline of the doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility, Braverman is likely to become even more extreme in her attention seeking pronouncements as a back bencher. Should the UK Supreme Court rule later this week that her plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda is unlawful, she will be leading the Conservative calls for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, which if successful would amongst other things allow for the restoration of the death penalty.

In Braverman’s eyes, if her plan is deemed to be cruel and inhumane and in breach of an international treaty on human rights which a previous British government was instrumental in designing and implementing, the problem lies with the legal guarantee of human rights, not with her performative cruelty. Braverman might have gone, but the constitutional and political vandalism she represents remain very much at the heart of the Conservative party.

Sunak had no choice but to sack her. But it wasn’t her calling homelessness a lifestyle choice favoured by people with foreign accents that did it for her. It certainly wasn’t describing asylum seekers as an invasion. It wasn’t calling pro Palestinian demonstrations “hate marches”. And it wasn’t even claiming that the police favour left wing protestors over those on the right and making the violence seen from fascists over the weekend more likely. No, what really signalled the end of her tenure as Home Secretary were the reports that she had, as protocol demands, submitted a draft version of her incendiary article in The Times to Downing Street for approval and had then refused to make the changes to it which the Prime Minister’s office had asked of her. It showed that Sunak was unable to control his own cabinet, reinforcing the already widespread impression of a weak Prime Minister who is being led by his party rather than leading it.

Braverman’s comments led to right-wing demonstrators going on a rampage in London on Saturday, but the BBC focused on the placards and chants of those protesting against Israel’s collective punishment of the people of Gaza. Now the Tories are once again talking about cracking down on the right to protest.

By bringing David Cameron back as Foreign Secretary, Sunak is making a desperate gamble. He is trying, rather desperately, to shift the political dial in his favour, given that his conference speech and the King’s Speech were miserable flops. He is almost certainly about to reignite calls from the far right of the party for his resignation. And while appointing Cameron as Foreign Secretary, via his hastily contrived elevation to the House of Lords, is certainly attention grabbing, ensuring that on the day of the reshuffle press attention was mainly on Cameron and less so on the sacking of Braverman, it’s a move which comes with many risks. The appointment comes just two years after a parliamentary inquiry found that the former prime minister had shown a “significant lack of judgment”over a lobbying campaign for a financial services company in which he held a personal economic interest, Greensill Capital, which collapsed in 2021. But not until after then Chancellor Rishi Sunak had pumped £5 billion in public money into the company as a result of Cameron’s lobbying. But never mind any of that, it's in the past and Cameron is a good chap. An old Etonian, don't you know?

The inquiry found that Cameron had not broken any rules in this sordid and grubby episode, but it was clear that the rules were woefully inadequate. Of course nothing has changed, and now the lobbyee has brought the lobbyer back into the heart of government, in a manner which ensures that Cameron will never have to face any democratic scrutiny or accountability. It’s all within the rules, and it’s the epitome of all that is wrong with Westminster, rules which Starmer’s Labour party has no intention of changing. But Sunak is gambling that this sleazy deal won’t come back to haunt him. Let's hope it will. What's that saying? "What goes around, comes around".

Now the man who gave us austerity and whose vanity gave us the Brexit referendum is back in the heart of government, still smug, still glib, still having learned nothing or having suffered any consequences for the havoc and chaos that are the lasting legacy of his term in Downing Street. That’s the real message of this reshuffle.

Just as Sunak’s claim to be the real candidate of change is a bad joke, fingers crossed that Starmer’s promise to be the ‘change Britain needs’ will be not revealed to be equally hollow.