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For the fourteen years from 2010 when Cameron became Prime Minister of the UK, we were subjected to multiple worse moments in history than even we endured under Thatcher, who bloody well started it all. As I write this, the current Labour administration has held power for less than a year, and while I’m unhappy with some of the things it’s being reported they are doing or about to do, and appalled at the incompetence of their Press Office, I also know that whatever they do will not come close to the destructive and inhuman policies of those last fourteen years.
As the saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, and the nation seems both to have lost all perspective and developed acute memory loss. In 2010, there were just 62 food banks in the UK. There are now more than 3,000, together with 3,000 ‘warm banks’. We have walked away from our closest and biggest market, with Brexit doing irreparable damage to our economy, trashed even further by 45 maniacal days under Liz Truss, jobs for the boys Covid scandals during which a Prime Minister and his Chancellor were both fined for breaking rules the rest of us had to follow, four Chancellors in four months in 2022, clapping our NHS farther into the ruinous hands of private enterprise, and a new status of Billy-No-Mates in the international world. Wars on multiple fronts may be great for the newfound interest in having our own steel industry, but all that is actually shit for the one truly existential threat faced by our planet. Climate Change. I could go on, but really? Is that not enough to encourage us to give the new administration time?
From my 35 years as an international business professional, traveller, trainer and tutor, I learned that good things take at least two years to achieve. In those terms, this Labour government is about half way there, and like everyone else I want to see more positive, well-managed policies that even our right wing media will have little choice but to swallow. One of Blair’s achievements, love him or loathe him, was to get the media onside early in his tenure. Starmer’s erstwhile failure to do the same could end up being his achilles heel. The media in this country is obsessed with Farage becoming the next Prime Minister. It is their self-fulfilling prophecy, and it is a real and present danger. Even Starmer has acknowledged, rather foolishly, that Reform is this government’s main Opposition. Gun. Foot. Bang!
The national broadcasting media, for which many of us pay an annual licence fee, have been falling over themselves for decades to appease right wing politicians, and gave way more air time to Reform in its UKIP infancy than they ever did to the LIbDems and the Green Party, both of whom were larger at that time. In order to pander to apparent fairness, BBC voxpops interviewed a Labour voter, a Tory voter, a UKIP voter, and if you were lucky a LibDem for almost every topic. Fairness my arse! The Green Party didn’t get a look in until the election of 2024. The biggest problem of all is that when people don’t believe the mainstream race-to-be-first media, they take comfort in the uncontrollable race-to-be-first of amateurs on social media platforms. The fascists have absolutely loved it. Misinformation, manipulation, and massive pork pies!
I don’t want charismatic politicians. I don’t care that they look good, smile nicely, have an attractive partner, or were once on telly in a jungle eating cockroaches. I want politicians to do the job they’re elected to do, and to do it well. Although the jury may be out on the current Labour government, anyone who has lived more than five years on this overly expectant planet should also understand that new governments tend to get the bad news out of the way in the first half of their tenure so they can focus on bringing the electorate back onside in the second half, with warm and cuddly policies and promises they may neither be able respectively to bring to law or to keep. I hope they do. They may yet fail. But that, I’m afraid, is life.
Peace.
John