uk politics
Government Phases Out COVID Funding as Hospital Admissions Rise
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Ministers are phasing out most of the funding to tackle COVID-19 just at the point when hospital admissions from the virus are starting to rise again, according to figures from the United Kingdom Health and Security Agency.
These show an accelerating trend in COVID cases in the week before Christmas, with the number of hospital admissions rising to 3,203 from 2,622 the previous week and the number of new cases up to 7,164 from 5227 the previous week – a rise of 36%. The biggest rises have been in London and south-east England
The figures are still a fraction of the numbers when the pandemic was raging but do suggest an upward trend in the virus this winter.
The Government’s autumn COVID vaccination programme aimed at the elderly and vulnerable has been taken up by 68.8% of eligible people, showing that nearly a third have not had the vaccination.
The national online vaccination programme was closed by the Government in December though some local GPs and pharmacies can offer vaccinations to eligible people until 31 January.
Regular testing is not being conducted in hospital cancer and transplant wards which contain vulnerable immunocompromised patients.
Surveillance has been scaled back, and will be reduced further in the next financial year due to the change in funding.
Long COVID clinics are funded from the NHS budget and won’t be affected by this change and funding for vaccines will also remain separate to the core budget.
This financial year will be the last year ministers fund the UKHSA tackling COVID under a separate budget. Some £430 million was set aside until April. After that, the money will come from the UKHSA’s core budget that it receives from the Department of Health and Social Care. The UKHSA said it was in negotiations about this but it is expected to be a fraction of this year’s budget.
Tommy Greene and David Hencke report on a number of worrying NHS dismissal cases
Tommy Greene and David Hencke
The considerable upcoming reduction in spending calls into question the Government's 'Living with COVID’ strategy.
Sir John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford and a former member of the Government’s vaccine taskforce, has warned of “an absolutely dramatic reversion to what existed before the pandemic” and that “our clinical research environment is actually much, much worse than it’s ever been in my living memory”.
Kate Bingham, who has been praised for her work leading the Government’s COVID vaccine taskforce, has also warned that the UK is failing to bring scientific and commercial expertise into the Government, and not pursuing the creation of bulk antibody-manufacturing capabilities in the UK. She has also questioned why the Novavax vaccine, which uses a protein subunit like many other vaccines, has not been made available in the UK.
The UKHSA said it is implementing the Living with COVID policy and that the UK has a sufficient supply of COVID-19 vaccines for anticipated booster campaigns this year, holding a contingency stock in the event that vaccination beyond these campaigns is required.
Altogether, 34.4 million vaccines were stored in warehouses at the end of October but some of these vaccines will expire in April. A Whitehall impact statement said in May 2022 that will be disposed of because “these doses have no feasible alternative use”.
The UKHSA could not say how many doses will be destroyed.
It said it was committed to maintaining resilience against significant COVID-19 resurgence or new variants, and protecting the NHS from unsustainable pressure. This includes the ability to reintroduce vaccination (surge response) for the most vulnerable, if required.
The Government also sold off a new £200 million research and manufacturing vaccine facility, before it was completed, in Oxfordshire to US pharmaceutical firm Catalent in April 2022. The centre was set up as a not-for-profit company with the aim of combining vaccine research and manufacturing in one place.
The new owners, which manufacture drugs worldwide including in China, said: “We continue to be excited about the strategic opportunities for the Harwell site and are looking at the best options available for biologics manufacturing at the site, including vaccines.”
‘Culture Thrives On Dialogue and Difference’: Seasons Greetings From Byline Times
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'A Civilisational Moment'
Christmas came early for those who have been worried about the rise of national populism in the UK. For a second time in a year, Stella Braverman was sacked as Home Secretary for infringing the Ministerial Code. Braverman’s departure was welcomed by many, including former special advisor Nimco Ali, who described her as “delusional” and concluded that she “made this country unsafe”.
But, however much the Prime Minister disowns Braverman now, Rishi Sunak enabled her short but destructive tenure in the Home Office, during which she extended Therese May’s ‘hostile environment’ and Priti Patel’s attack on asylum seekers to a much wider war against British civil society.
An early adopter of the imported alt-right conspiracy that “cultural marxism” is a transnational threat, Braverman pursued a class war with little class, belittling the “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” for their “luxury beliefs”, claiming homelessness is a “lifestyle choice” and, of course, taking the demonisation of asylum seekers to an unlawful extreme with her Rwanda deportation policy.
But the issue that sealed Braverman’s fate was her untenable interference in operational policing matters around the Gaza ceasefire march on this year’s Armistice weekend. She not only undermined the ancient rights of assembly by describing pro-Palestinian protests as “hate marches”, but interfered in operational policing matters by accusing the Metropolitan Police of favouritism and taking sides with the left.
The essence of the right-wing culture wars of the past seven years has been to seize on any random, but highly visible, event (such as the England football team taking the knee at the 2020 Euros) and then turn it into a wedge issue to foster internal division.
Inflation rising? Wages flatlined? Trade declining? Hospital waiting lists going up? No problem: just focus on a polarising ‘us and them’ spectacle and encourage people to hate each other rather than try to cooperate and improve things.
Weaponising the conflict between Israel and Hamas, and trying to stoke division between our Muslim and Jewish communities, was Braverman’s last great hurrah. And in her demonisation of ‘hate marches’, she was joined by key figures who shared a stage with her at the National Conservatism Conference in London earlier this year.
The academic Matthew Goodwin called the collision of Remembrance Sunday with the ceasefire protest a “civilisational moment”. In a medley of his favourite inflammatory themes, Goodwin invoked the “rise of radical Islamism” with “years of mass, uncontrolled immigration” and the “rapid rise of a radical ‘woke’ ideology which has been embraced by the new, left-leaning class who dominate our elite institutions”.
Another National Conservatism speaker, author and Spectator columnist Douglas Murray echoed these apocalyptic warnings about the ‘hate marches’. He praised Braverman as one of the few honest politicians left in a period of “near universal deceit”, claimed the Met Police had been “infiltrated”, and demanded “the people of Britain must come out and stop these barbarians”. These sounded less like dog whistles to the far-right and more like full-throated battle cries.
Some right-wing extremists took up the call, particularly rallying around former EDL Leader Stephen Yaxley Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’) who led a few hundred through London.
Despite the warnings from the populists, the main incidents of the day did not come from the hundreds of thousands on the ceasefire march, but from the far-right who violently pushed past police barriers around the Cenotaph before the 11 am moment of silence.
This was, then, the main legacy of Braverman’s culture war: a weekend devoted to the memory of the war dead – many of them lost in the Second World War and the fight against fascism – noisily interrupted by fascists.
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Though she might have crashed out of government, Suella Braverman rode on a tide of national populism and the underlying belief – voiced by Goodwin and others – that the key conflicts of the present are about immaterial matters such as identity and ethnicity, rather than economics or citizenship.
In their attacks on multiculturalism – as Chris Grey has pointed out in these pages – they see culture as somehow monotonous and unchanging rather than dynamic and diverse.
For many communities – especially those left behind by globalisation and now suffering from the impacts of Brexit – the feeling that change comes at an economic cost and some cultural diminution is understandable. We can look back at the past as a better, more familiar and comforting place, forgetting that the past itself was once new and unfamiliar. After all, fish and chips was imported by Spanish and Portuguese Jewish immigrants to Britain in the 19th Century.
But cultural change only becomes a zero-sum game if communities are deprived of resources and aspirations. Your Polski sklep doesn’t have to mean my local farmer’s shop is closed down. Your Irish pub serving Thai food doesn’t have to threaten my Yorkshire local. There’s no reason your African music centre must drown out my English folk song evening.
This either-or approach is a result of poverty and a lack of equal opportunities: the very problems ignored or even exacerbated by the national populists.
Christmas enshrines multiculturalism and the cross-fertilisation of customs and beliefs in ways many of us may not even be aware of.
Our current British version is full of American imports like Turkey from the 20th Century, Germanic elements from the 19th, and of course the genius of Charles Dickens who almost single-handedly serialised it.
There are doubts whether the older Christian tradition was a variation of the Roman Saturnalia – it might even go back to even older celebrations of the winter equinox – but there is little doubt that Latin traditions were preserved by the Catholic Church. And of course, the underlying elements go back to early Judaism, with a Messiah story heavily influenced by ancient Egyptian theology, and a genesis myth which – as Stephen Greenblatt explores in The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve –was taken and adapted from Babylonian traditions.
Every year, right-wing newspapers and pundits try to stir up seasonal ill will by claiming some local institution has ‘cancelled’ Christmas – a fake news story that has now become as traditional as turning on the lights in Oxford Street. But every year, it goes ahead: Christians and Hindus, Muslims and Jews, and the great swathe of non-believers celebrate the festive season in a myriad of different ways.
This is how traditions are kept alive, revitalised with new songs and themes, rather than preserved in formaldehyde on a museum shelf. And this is how culture thrives – through dialogue and difference, competing protestors on the streets, different music from different bars – rather than the bland monotony of a monoculture.
And with that, best wishes for Christmas – however you celebrate it – from the whole Byline Times team.
‘A Disunited Kingdom? For Younger Minorities, Britishness is an Identity We Can Work With – A Quest for Englishness Must Confront This’
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I am a Londoner. I am the Sikh Punjabi daughter of immigrants. I am British.
My parents were born and raised in countries of the British Empire: my mother two years after partition in Delhi; and my dad in Nairobi, where he lived under British rule in one of British East Africa’s stratified societies (the whites above; the Kenyans below). 'Great Britain’ was a country they, like many Asian immigrants, then came to; aspired to thrive in, were proud to be part of. The mother country.
Having long explored Britain’s imperial project with my parents growing up, I have never bought into the uncritical exceptionalism of Britain’s ‘greatness’ but the acknowledgement of my Britishness is a sort of recognition of my parents’ history. And how this history was and is British history. Those times may have passed, but for some of us they haven’t. They are living legacies. More British than the British.
And it was the British National Party that had its headquarters, disguised as a bookshop and meeting room, opposite the house I grew up in south-east London, where I was born. And it was the Union flag its supporters carried when they rioted with police outside my living room window following the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in nearby Eltham in the 1990s.
For the generations who came before me, that flag is a terrifying symbol of the violence of far-right extremism in modern Britain: p*ki-bashing; the National Front chasing black skin. It wasn’t their flag. But their struggles, historic and continuing, made my journey easier and helped change our country. So I was frightened too: why were these rioting hooligans carrying my flag?
And it was ‘Cool Britannia’ the tabloids talked about when New Labour came to power and the Gallagher brothers went to Downing Street. And when Geri Halliwell wore the Union Jack dress at the Brit Awards.
The Spice Girls reunited years later for the London 2012 Olympic Games. It was a moment many of us felt proud, perhaps, never more British: outward; diverse; plural; confident.
And it’s good old British goodwill I think of when strangers daren’t jump the queue or pull together on a packed, packed-up train. Or when I think of the NHS and our welfare state. Decency.
Art work/graffiti in Waterloo, London. Photo: Hardeep Matharu
But what is it, to me, to be English?
Unlike the other nations of the UK, it is true that England does not have as strong a sense of a distinct identity. England is the only nation in the Union not to have dedicated political representation outside of Westminster. One compelling analysis of Brexit was that it was an outlet for a kind of unheard English nationalism.
For me, the United Kingdom is a last expression of England’s imperial project. And so I personally believe that if the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland see their futures as independent countries or united with other independent countries, that is their right. But I am also conflicted.
If the Union and Britishness is a limitation of their beings, this I understand. But the same identity that limits them, brings for me expression and expansion.
Why?
Because in Britishness is the notion – however this has emerged in me – of diversity; plurality; difference; inclusivity; outwardness. For me, these thoughts and feelings don’t show themselves when it comes to Englishness – with its inwardness; isolation; exclusion. Englishness is something I have never felt part of. Little England. How many of us from similar backgrounds, people of colour, minorities, living the legacies of Empire, have?
I have my own reasons – for identity is not either political or personal; it is both. But, in a wider sense, because the negative associations of England with the far-right have not been replaced by anything more positive or inclusive, Englishness is not an identity that has ever really been presented to me as me.
That's not to say that 'Englishness' isn't on my radar. The quaintness of formal hall at Cambridge University felt very English. Whenever I speak to Americans, Britishness isn’t a thing (she was the Queen of England, Elizabeth II). A recent Christmas carol service at Southwark Cathedral, Shakespeare’s local church back in the day, felt more English than it did British – and I was part of it, alongside (some) other diverse faces. And the occasional Sunday roast never feels very British (while I do love the odd English breakfast)…
On a substantive level, an example which has been instructive – and which, I believe, points a way forward – has emerged in football and our current England team. Marcus Rashford, Jordan Henderson, Raheem Sterling, Harry Kane … During the 2020 Euros, the Migration Museum tweeted that “without players with at least one parent or grandparent born overseas, England would be down to just three players”.
Many of us relate to and are so proud of that diverse England team that is achieving such success, which is embracing its togetherness and differences, where there is solidarity, tradition and evolution. Taking on those young men taking the knee was one culture war this Government could not win. And that is saying something.
As the England manager, Gareth Southgate, said in his open letter ‘Dear England’ when those players were being condemned by the likes of Priti Patel and Boris Johnson for raising awareness of racism and structural injustice through sport: “I feel like this generation of England players is closer to the supporters than they have been for decades. Despite the polarisation we see in society, these lads are on the same wavelength as you on many issues.”
For me, these players are both English, when they play for the England team, and British – because they represent the values I associate with this. And that's the point: our identities are multiple. We don’t, and shouldn’t, have to choose one or the other.
On the deeper constitutional analysis as to why Englishness needs to be given political expression, I am not an expert. But I believe we need to consider our identity associations with the heart, not just the head.
What does embracing Englishness and feeling ‘more English’ mean? And how would it happen? Why hasn’t it happened so far?
Of course, for some, it will have always meant something; always have been an identity that speaks to them. But from where will this affiliation have developed?
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While the political dimensions of Britishness and Englishness may be alive for some, I suspect for many more that the question of our identities is an exploration of the many forces that shape us on a personal level.
The matters of Westminster and regional representation are not, I believe, outweighed by our experiences cultural, social and individual. Most of my reflections of my Britishness are personal reflections. And so merely giving England more political representation will not, in itself, change the state of my attachment to this identity.
I ask the same questions of my Punjabiness. If I am to be ‘more Indian’, what exactly am I supposed to be connecting with? And according to who and what? For some in my community, I’m not Indian enough even though I am Indian. Identities are complicated and not always knowable – to ourselves or to others.
One of the reasons I identify with Britishness is its plurality – for me, it doesn’t tell me what to be or what I need to be. Identities should not be imposed, but be created. They are reflections of the stories within us. The ideas we view the world with.
Could we not, then, create an Englishness that sits alongside our Britishness?
Could we decouple Britishness from its more imperial overtones and, alongside this more modern version, also develop a sense of Englishness – which appeals not just to the head but to the heart? Which is not merely about politics but personal? Not imposed but made available?
Because I don’t think we need to choose. And neither Britishness nor Englishness needs to be fixed in what we have thought it was in the past.
In this age of the hyper-weaponisation of identities, the blood of tribalism, and the stoking of people’s baser instincts with division, we need to encourage an understanding of ourselves based on the idea of the multiple identities within us – the different, sometimes conflicting, sometimes shifting, aspects of who we are that sit side by side. That this is true but this is true too.
Britishness and Englishness are political and personal. Both can be part of our stories. But we have to be free to choose them.
Hardeep Matharu is the Editor of Byline Times. This is an edited version of her speech at the 'Break-Up of Britain? Confronting the UK’s Democratic Crisis’ Conference in Edinburgh on 18 November 2023
‘A Disunited Kingdom? Britain is Built on Forgetting Our Imperial History’
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Of the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell each other, and the stories the powerful and the political class tell the rest of us, the last one is of particular interest to me. Why?
We know those who control the past control the present. Therefore, the stories we tell ourselves about our past will determine the parameters of what today is considered politically possible and what’s ruled out. And it partly explains, for example, why England can have Brexit but Scotland can’t have independence.
It’s clearly powerful.
Why else do you think the Faragist-right of this country – the intellectual inheritors of Enoch Powell – are so intent on waging and winning their ‘history wars’. It’s because they understand that maintaining the illusory story of what Britain was, is integral to the illusion of what Britain is and the maintenance of their political and economic hegemony.
I switched on BBC News earlier this year to see the Trevelyan family (British aristocrats) apologising and paying reparations to the Caribbean island of Grenada. They were doing so for their ancestors’ part in the enslavement of thousands of Africans – including some of my own ancestors, it transpires, on my father’s side.
It’s led to a podcast, Heirs of Enslavement, which charts the story of Britain’s transatlantic chattel slave trade and plantations, all the way through to today and the continued exploitation of the same people by the same banks and financial institutions that made their money from that brutal exploitation in the first place.
Otto English charts the different strands of English identity over the years and how a dark turn may now be giving way to something altogether more inclusive, decent and inspiring
Otto English
The former BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan, my co-presenter, told me something which stuck in my head because its redolent of a wider truth. She explained how her family had told itself for generations that they were part of the good and the great of British history (the Irish potato famine aside). They were renowned historians, civil service reformers and even Labour Party secretaries of state. But the realisation they had enriched themselves through the longest, most brutal, and exploitative crimes against humanity ever perpetrated, from what I could discern, was like being woken up by a bucket of cold slops; a shock to the system.
But it opened eyes – including my own. It’s allowed me to see that there has been a deliberate forgetting of our history. Whether the usual sanitised story of slavery that focuses on abolition to the assertion that Empire really wasn’t that big a deal (and if it was, well, it brought the rule of law to the world).
A deliberate forgetting. But why?
To cover up a crime scene that spanned the globe and hundreds of years.
To completely disconnect those crimes – and the wealth and power they generated – and how it ended up in the hands of the wealthy, corporations and financial institutions.
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To enable the construction of a new, national post-Empire narrative of Britain.
Together, I think they help explain a big part of our democratic crisis. 'Britain’ is a construct born of that empire. As post-war decolonisation took place, those sat in the driving seat of Empire PLC needed a new story of what Britain was.
Enoch Powell, the first parliamentarian to embrace neoliberalism – and best known for his Rivers of Blood speech – is less well known for his role in this transformation. In 1950, he exclaimed that "Britain without an empire is like a head without a body".
By the time he wrote his 1965 book, A Nation Not Afraid, he claimed that the Empire was simply an invention that never really happened; that Britain had never set out to conquer the world and that instead it had been landed with the colonies.
Rather, Britain was a pioneering Island where the laws, constitution and systems of government had been unbroken for a millennia. Powell and others gave birth to the lie the British state was born by immaculate conception, then growing organically into the modern day construct we now see. Plucky Britain, so different from its European neighbours.
If that’s the story we tell ourselves then of course the crisis of democracy makes no sense. Its like trying to square observational data of planetary orbits, holding onto the belief the Earth is at the centre of the solar system.
Therefore, this’ forgetting’ is crucial to both the maintenance of the British state as is – the monarchy, the Union, an unwritten constitution, and even our voting system.
It covers up the origins for the gross wealth inequality within our country. Why the city of London, the banks, the financial institutions wield such wealth and power over us. Why a racialised immigration narrative is so deeply embedded into our political culture. Why human rights commitments are now under attack. Why the Union is so fragile.
Everything begins to make sense when we tell ourselves the truth of how we got here. And by doing that, we can better work out what it is we need to do to tackle the crisis of our democracy.
Clive Lewis is the Labour MP for Norwich South. This is an edited version of his speech at the 'Break-Up of Britain? Confronting the UK’s Democratic Crisis’ Conference in Edinburgh on 18 November 2023
‘A Disunited Kingdom? Reclaiming an Englishness Hijacked by the Right’
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While the death of the extraordinary Tom Nairn this year was widely acknowledged in Scotland – with Nicola Sturgeon, Alex Salmond and Gordon Brown all sharing fulsome eulogies about his significant influence on their own thinking – strangely it barely registered among England’s political leaders.
That’s a particular shame since much of his analysis was actually about my homeland and its seemingly permanent state of political crisis.
Perhaps it reflects the fact that few of England’s political elite are willing to accept they are just English, let alone to contemplate the logic of Nairn’s argument: that the break-up of Britain – the mutual liberation from the crumbling political construct which he famously called "Ukania" – might just be good for all of us.
What’s the nature of the democratic crisis we face?
Seen in one way, the problem is our political institutions.
The archaic and undemocratic 'first past the post’ voting system; an over-centralised governance system; the unelected House of Lords; the populist abuse of sovereignty; the vast networks of patronage; the stuffy and outdated conventions and public school atmosphere – the whole damn lot of it.
But, seen in another way, it is about nationalisms and identity. And specifically about how England, in particular, has struggled to find its way in the modern world. How we cling to our delusions of imperial grandeur, pretend that we’re so much more than just English – and how the devastating consequences of that are all around us.
It was English exceptionalism that drove Brexit, for example. In one way, the EU Referendum campaign seems a lifetime ago. We’ve gone through so much since then and, if anything, the alienation and polarisation are much greater today than they were back in 2016.
But the truth was clear even then: that Brexit was the result of division, and would make those divisions worse. And it has deepened the democratic crisis within the United Kingdom.
The fact that England and Wales voted to leave, and Scotland and Northern Ireland to stay, has put incredible strain on the myth that the United Kingdom is an equal partnership of four nations.
EXCLUSIVE
The Story of Brexit is the Story of Empire: Why Did Asian Immigrants Vote to Leave the EU?
The complicated love-hate relationship of immigrants from former colonies with the British Empire cannot be ignored if lessons are to be learned in post-Brexit Britain, says Hardeep Matharu
Hardeep Matharu
The Government in London decided what form Brexit would take without any reference at all to the elected governments in Edinburgh or Belfast, or indeed, in Cardiff. Unsurprisingly, as a result, support for the reunification of Ireland has grown. The pressure for a second independence referendum in Scotland remains strong. And in Wales, a new sense of national identity is on the rise. The future of the United Kingdom itself is now in doubt.
Yet we left the EU, primarily, because of what had happened in England. Outside of the capital, every single English region voted for Brexit. It is no disrespect to Wales, I hope, which voted by a majority of only 80,000 for leave, to say that it was an English vote that drove Brexit.
In the months following the referendum, I travelled to as many leave-voting areas in England as I could to hear from people first-hand and face-to-face why they had supported Brexit. Sometimes this was difficult. One reason was that those who benefitted economically from EU membership, and from the UK becoming a more open and diverse society, did not do anything like enough to share these gains fairly and often sneered at those with a more traditional view of England.
But these conversations were also refreshing and reassuring because there was so much more that we agreed on than held us apart. Many people were angry. Of course they were. But if you took the time to go, and paid them the courtesy of listening, then common ground could emerge.
One theme that continually arose throughout this listening exercise (which my small team filmed and shared as best we could, and which came to be known as ‘Dear Leavers’), was about people’s sense of pride in the places where they lived, but – simultaneously – their feelings of powerlessness.
I was told countless times that London, and the power that was held there, was so far away that it might as well have been on another planet. They felt unheard and ignored.
This was about more than an economic complaint, however corrosive this country’s grotesque inequalities of wealth and opportunity undoubtedly are. It was also about culture and identity.
Many resented how some expressions of Englishness were allowed, while others were not. It was acceptable to love the English countryside, English humour, English music and English literature, and to see these aspects of Englishness as welcoming, humane, full of energy and creativity. But the moment Englishness took a political form, it apparently turned into the opposite.
Even mild forms of patriotism were frowned on. The English flag was acceptable fluttering from a church tower in a picturesque village, but was instantly interpreted as a form of racism if hanging from someone’s window on an estate.
Yet Englishness should not be something to be scared of. Or suppressed within the notion of ‘Britain’ as if this will contain it safely. On the contrary, as Brexit shows, it doesn’t.
We need to recognise that many people who see themselves primarily as English feel they are without a voice, including a political voice. There are no institutions that represent England equivalent to those in the three other countries of the UK. Nothing to give political expression to our complex, rich and sometimes raucous reality, or where differences can be expressed and, perhaps, resolved.
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A New Story
The so-called ‘English problem’ is not only one of culture and identity, but also – profoundly – one of democracy.
And we need to ask ourselves what kind of England do we want now and in the future, either within the United Kingdom or as an independent state, a reborn Kingdom of England?
Will it be a smaller, diminished version of what we have now? Will imperial delusions and exceptionalism continue to shape its sense of itself? Will it be inward-looking, resentful of lost glories, held back by social and economic injustice, and run for the benefit of a narrow elite?
Or could it become a genuine democracy, confident, outward-looking, inclusive and recognise our future necessarily involves being part of Europe?
These questions have taken on an even greater urgency as xenophobic nationalism continues its rise across Europe, from the success of the Sweden Democrats and True Finns to the growth of the far-right in France, Italy and Hungary.
At the same time, propelled by the outcome of the Brexit Referendum and the 2019 General Election, in the UK the populist-right strengthens its grip on an increasingly extreme and out-of-touch Conservative Party.
If a progressive alternative to this national populist agenda is to be successful, it needs to do more than offer bolder, more ambitious policies, vital though those are: it needs to unify, rather than divide; to offer hope, rather than despair. And one of the most effective ways of doing that is by telling more compelling stories of who we are and who we can be.
And so my answer to the question of how do we get out of the current democratic crisis is not only about constitutional answers. It’s not just about a proportional voting system, an elected House of Lords, an end to political patronage, the drafting of a written constitution. It’s also about telling more compelling stories about who we English are so that we might – finally – be more comfortable in our own skin, less intent on subduing our neighbours, whether they be within the UK or across the Empire.
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Because I would wager that, when we English do finally settle with our own identity, we’ll discover we’re much more progressive than we’re ever led to believe.
Right now, Englishness has been hijacked by the right. The dominant version of our national story solely serves their interests. The only people who dare speak of ‘Englishness’ are cheerleaders for isolationism and imperial nostalgia.
But there are other stories, equally compelling, about who we are: about the English people’s radical inclusivity, their ancient commitment to the natural world, their long struggle to win rights for all. Stories that put the Chartists and the Diggers in their rightful place alongside Nelson and Churchill. That draw inspiration from the Agreement of the People, from Tom Paine, and from Shelley, Milton and Blake. That draw on medieval writers and Romantic poets who emphasised the sanctity of the environment. That recognise and celebrate England’s ancient multicultural heritage.
My forthcoming book, Another England, sets out to tell those stories. Because I believe that rediscovering those stories of an England at ease with itself and with our past – forward-looking, open, more equal, diverse and multi-ethnic – and identifying the policies that can help to realise them, has become a political project every bit as important as investing in infrastructure or levelling-up.
A country without a coherent story about who and what it is can never thrive and prosper, it can’t extract itself from its own democratic crisis, and certainly can’t rise to the existential threats of our time – the climate and nature emergencies.
As the writer Ben Okri puts it, “nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings".
Finding and telling stories that speak to the truth of England’s past and present, and inspire us to imagine and pursue new and better futures, might turn out to be one of the most transformative acts we can undertake. And one of the greatest contributions to a healthier democracy across all of these islands.
Caroline Lucas is the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion. Her book 'Another England: A New Story of Who We Are and Who We Can Be’ will be published in 2024. This is an edited version of her speech at the 'Break-Up of Britain? Confronting the UK’s Democratic Crisis’ Conference in Edinburgh on 18 November 2023
‘A Disunited Kingdom? It Is Time to Tell an Inclusive English Story’
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A new era in British politics began on 18 November in Edinburgh. It will take a decade, perhaps two, to reach fulfilment.
The historic legacy of entrenched attachment to 350 years of greatness is so deeply embedded in English institutions, there is no easy discarding of it. But, finally, the effort needed to genuinely renew Britain has started to take shape, as a multi-national political undertaking independent of any party or faction.
In these pages, Byline Times is publishing a series of three of many significant interventions made at the recent 'The Break-Up of Britain?’ Conference in Edinburgh which was also a salute to the late Scottish political theorist Tom Nairn.
Caroline Lucas, the UK’s only Green MP, stunned the conference with her opening address.
‘A Disunited Kingdom? Reclaiming an Englishness Hijacked by the Right’
At the heart of our political crisis is how England, in particular, has struggled to find its way in the modern world, writes MP Caroline Lucas
Caroline Lucas MP
She was followed by Labour MP Clive Lewis, who spoke with a freshness desperately lacking in his party's official discourse.
‘A Disunited Kingdom? Britain is Built on Forgetting Our Imperial History’
Maintaining the illusory story of what Britain was is integral to the illusion of what Britain is – and the maintenance of political and economic hegemony, writes MP Clive Lewis
Clive Lewis MP
Later, Byline Times’ Editor, Hardeep Matharu shared her ambivalent attachment to ‘Britishness’ and reluctance to see herself as English, in a plenary, which I chaired, on whether England ‘can recover from Great Britain’.
Developing a stronger sense of Englishness cannot merely be looked at through a political lens – our identities are personal and multiple, conflicting and shifting, writes Hardeep Matharu
Hardeep Matharu
What is the transformation the conference pointed towards?
All of the people of these isles – of what Fintan O’Toole in a special video contribution to the event described as our “archipelago” – can re-join the EU. But how? To do so, we have to be citizens of a member state. On paper we have only three options.
The first is to reverse Brexit and return as we were. But the EU won’t want to offer opt-outs that preserve Westminster’s historic attachment to its special sovereignty. Nor should we want to wind the clock back to how things were, as it led to Brexit in the first place. It’s a dead end.
This leaves two other options, both transformative.
One is for Britain to become internally a European country with fair elections and a democratic constitution. A modest change that appears to be so vast no major party makes it a priority. Nor does it offer political bliss or economic redemption. It is simply the starting point to being a modern country.
The second is that we all re-join the EU as independent nations and replace our membership of the British Union with the European one. It is an option much more conceivable in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where majorities already think of themselves as Europeans – that is to say as Scottish Europeans, Welsh Europeans and Irish Europeans, because you can’t just think of yourself as ‘just European’.
It is a way forward that demands considering how we work together. One that sees ‘independence’ as a collaboration in a joint enterprise to re-enter the EU.
As the conference discussed it, the Brexit discourse of enmity, contempt, polarisation and sullen fatalism was replaced with a different kind of engagement. In terms of the UK’s current political culture, this alone was a real achievement. As Neal Ascherson observed there were “no tired clichés, no self-pity” and no evasion.
But what of the all-British option of becoming European, which I suspect most English Byline Times readers still instinctively prefer?
This too demands our jointly recognising each other’s national rights. For we cannot hope to re-enter the EU while the UK is, in effect, a prison of nations. No domestic, democratic constitution is conceivable that does not give member nations the right to succeed to become EU members for themselves. Either way, progressives, liberals, socialists, greens, democrats and republicans alike will need to tell an inclusive English story. This is something that Caroline Lucas begins to do.
For the EU is not a hobgoblin devouring self-determination or the terminator of national identity as conjured up by Brexiters. Rather, it has rescued the nations of Europe and is a berth for national democracies in a market world, which is why Ukraine is fighting to join it.
Now it is England’s turn. Whether the nations of the UK re-join the EU jointly as Britain or independently we English must become a normal country. How we achieve this is a debate that we failed to have in the last century. The Edinburgh conference initiated it in this one.
These three outstanding contributions, two from English politicians and one from an English Editor (however else she might describe herself), show it's a debate to be enjoyed and relished.
Anthony Barnett was the chair of the steering group of the 'Break-Up of Britain? Confronting the UK’s Democratic Crisis’ Conference in Edinburgh on 18 November 2023. He is a writer and journalist and the co-founder of openDemocracy
The Mone Scandal Shows New Laws Around Offshore Ownership Aren’t Working
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The furore around the Conservative Peer Michelle Mone and her concealment of involvement in a £203 million Covid contract shows that laws requiring offshore companies to list their beneficial owners are being ignored.
In 2022, the Register of Overseas Entities (ROE) came into force in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the Government pledging to “require anonymous foreign owners of UK property to reveal their real identities to ensure criminals cannot hide behind secretive chains of shell companies”. However, research by Byline Times shows that many companies that own property in the UK continue to obscure their real owners.
Held by Companies House, the ROE “requires overseas entities that own land or property in the UK to declare their beneficial owners and/or managing officers”, and promises “severe sanctions for those who do not comply”.
A beneficial owner is “any individual or entity that has significant influence or control over the overseas entity”. However, many businesses seem to be avoiding the new rules, with only 40% of offshore companies having registered by March 2023. LSE researchers revealed in September that “70 per cent of properties held via overseas shell companies (109,000 out of 152,000) still do not publish information about who really owns them”.
The new legislation is useful from a journalistic perspective because it allows us to check company records with publicly available information about who benefits from particular companies. Tory peer Michelle Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman are connected to a number of companies that don’t appear to list them as their ultimate owner.
COVID Cronyism and Mone – The Tip of the Iceberg: Byline Times’ Full Story of the PPE Cash Carousel
Byline Times has been unravelling the dealings behind the procurement of personal protective equipment (PPE) in the UK since the very early days of the pandemic. Here’s what we learnt – and what we still need answers to…
Josiah Mortimer
While PPE Medpro doesn’t seem to own property in the UK, it currently lists Arthur John Lancaster as its beneficial owner, who the website Tax Policy Associates says is “an accountant who is closely connected to Douglas Barrowman and the Knox Group. Lancaster was recently described by a tax tribunal as “seriously misleading”, “evasive” and “lacking in candor”.” Tax Policy states that if Barrowman intentionally hid his ownership of PPE Medpro, “then criminal offences were committed.”
Tax Policy Associates also reported this week that Barrowman and Mone hid their ownership of a house in Belgravia through two British Virgin Islands companies and a trust, none of which name them as the beneficial owners on Companies House.
Following their interview with the BBC, the broadcaster reported that “Mr Barrowman said that he had led the PPE Medpro consortium, even though he is not listed at Companies House as having any connection to the company. He told the BBC that he was, in effect, the ultimate beneficial owner of the firm”.
What about the Russian oligarchs whose activities in the UK were the reason for the introduction of the ROE legislation? The Cypriot website Philenews stated in February that “Only four Russian nationals under British Government sanctions appeared on the [ROE] register as of Thursday morning. They were: Vladimir Potanin, one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen; Russia’s former first deputy prime minister Igor Shuvalov and his wife; and Alexander Frolov, the former chief executive officer of Evraz, a Russian steel and mining company.”
Bloomberg reported in February that the register revealed Frolov’s property in Knightsbridge and St George’s Hill in London
Oliver Bullough, author of the book Butler to the World, told Byline Times that wealthy oligarchs would generally not bother using shell companies in offshore jurisdictions like the Isle of Man, which is known as a location for registering private jets. Instead, they are more likely to use trusts to hide their ownership of UK property. While HMRC holds information on who the beneficiaries of trusts are, this information is not public.
However, it doesn’t seem that some Russian oligarchs with known property in the UK are abiding by the legislation either. Oleg Deripaska, for example, is known to own a property in Belgrave Square, whose registered owner according to the Land Registry is a company based in the British Virgin Islands, and not registered on Companies House.
Beechwood House in Hampstead, previously owned by sanctioned Uzbek-Russian businessman Alisher Usmanov, was reported to have been transferred to a trust in 2022 before he was hit with sanctions. The Land Registry title deed gives its owner as Hanley Ltd, a company that lists its beneficial owner as the Swiss based Pomerol Capital Sa, and its correspondence address as another Geneva company which is part of the Summit Group, “a leading independent provider of personalised fiduciary and administrative services”.
Usmanov's lawyers told Byline Times that he does not own Beechwood House, and that it was transferred to a trust in 2008, long before sanctions were imposed. He claims to no longer be a beneficiary of the trust as of 2022, and that the transfer of assets to the trust was done to benefit his relatives.
One offshore property owner who does seem to have complied with the legislation is Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates. The Guardian revealed in 2020 that he had a £5 billion London property empire, and judging by the title deed to his Berkeley Square properties, the company which owns them, Berkeley Square Holdings Limited, does in fact register that its owner is the ‘Private Department Of The President Of Uae’.
EXCLUSIVE
Michelle Mone’s Lawyer Distances Himself from Baroness’ Claim She Lied to the Press on his Advice
A lawyer acting for the lawyer of Baroness Michelle Mone told Byline Times it would be defamatory to suggest David McKie ‘knowingly represented a false position’
Iain Overton
Besides oligarchs and oil sheikhs, property developers who own UK property through offshore companies also need to comply with the ROE legislation.
Byline Times has looked at dozens of companies based at the same address in the Isle of Man, many of which are linked to the property tycoon Asif Aziz and managed by the company Golfrate, which Aziz founded in 1991. The Times reported in 2020 that “Golfrate is run by Aziz's family and controls 900 properties”.
A number of companies registered here were reported by Private Eye in 2015 to be involved in buying up pubs in London and turning them into luxury apartments. Planning documents from 2023 show that Golfrate is still acting for companies registered in the Isle of Man, such as Hamna Wakaf Ltd. Many of the companies registered at the address list another offshore company, Circumference Fs (Cayman) Ltd as their owner.
In a recent House of Commons debate on the Register of Overseas Entities, Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh, said, “Journalists have revealed that the family of Asif Aziz, a landlord to my constituents in Britannia Point, Colliers Wood, manages a large property portfolio registered under dozens of companies on the Isle of Man.” Britannia Point is owned by another company registered at the same Isle of Man address which also lists Circumference Fs (Cayman) Ltd as its ultimate beneficial owner.
Asif Aziz’s lawyers insist he has “never closed down a pub” and “is not the beneficial owner” of companies managed by Golfrate. Listing a Cayman Islands financial services company as the beneficial owner of another offshore company may not be against the Register of Overseas Entities rules, but raises the question about whether those rules themselves are effective.
Sunak’s Government is throwing out plans to get dirty money out of the UK
Josiah Mortimer
Analysis by BBC News and Transparency International in February suggested that “almost half of firms required to declare who is behind them failed to do so.” At that time, Transparency International said around 52,000 UK properties were still owned anonymously.
The Department for Business, responding to a Freedom of Information request sent by Byline Times, said “Companies House has begun enforcement against overseas entities that have either failed to register or have failed to provide their annual update on time. For the offence of failing to register, 3190 warning notices have been sent, which has brought a number of overseas entities into compliance, and 45 penalties to a total value of £2,100,000 have been issued so far (data as of 17 October 2023).” How much money has actually been collected in fines is unclear.
Although new reporting requirements have been introduced for companies where the Beneficial Owner is a trustee of a trust, LSE reported that “In an overwhelming 87 per cent of cases, where the researchers found that beneficial ownership information was missing or inaccessible to the public, it was due to deliberate choices by Government to keep the information out of scope of the legislation, rather than rule-breaking by overseas companies.”
A spokesperson from the Department for Business and Trade said, “The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill will bear down on kleptocrats, criminals and terrorists who abuse our open economy, strengthening the UK's reputation as a place where legitimate business can thrive. We are committed to publishing a consultation before the end of the year on how to make trust information more transparent”.
Labour peer Lord Coaker, responding to the passage of the Economic Crime and Transparency Act, which tightens up reporting requirements for the ROE, said “The Bill is an important step forward, but the enforcement of it is everything. If laws that have been improved are not enforced, much of the debate and discussion we have had will not be as valuable as it should be.”
This article was updated on 25/12/23 with more information on Alisher Usmanov’s connection to Beechwood House
‘Stopping Male Violence Must Focus on Men: Why the Government’s New Spiking Measures Continue to Fail Women’
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In the 12 months to April 2023, police had 6,732 reports of spiking in England and Wales, and charged four people. Not 4%. Four people.
The new spiking initiatives that the Government announced this week are paltry.
The measures – which include “research into self-testing kits, more training for door staff and better education for young people, to raise awareness about the threat” – will not help increase charging and arrests of perpetrators.
A club having a test kit to see if you were spiked doesn’t identify the predator. It’s not even preventative. Ministers aren’t making spiking a specific crime that police can charge.
What we will see is a low-level roll-out to pubs, clubs and restaurants to give them some spiking kits. A couple of hundred venues will be dodged by perpetrators, when there are thousands potentially affected.
When the Government’s strategies addressing male violence against women aren’t directed at men they are part of the problem. Predators aren’t afraid to spike women, because they are almost guaranteed not to get caught – that’s what needs fixing, not women testing their drinks.
Our safety should be a priority to the Government and police but, once again, they are starkly demonstrating that our lives are not worth prioritising.
All of these half measures make no demonstrable difference to women’s safety but allow politicians to pretend they care about women’s safety.
So often, when we talk about spiking, we only talk about consequences and how to protect ourselves – not about the men that are drugging and raping us. This is on them to stop, not me.
If our standing on a soap box solved the violence against us, it would have been solved a long time ago.
EXCLUSIVE
Revealed: Police Forces Subject to Record Misconduct Complaints Amid Officer Abuse Scandals
The time taken by investigators to look into serious allegations against police officers has tripled in recent years, Andrew Kersley reveals
Andrew Kersley
Seeing is Not Believing
None of these measures matter when police do not believe us when we report our attackers.
There is a 1.7% conviction rate for rape. On a collective level, checking to see if our drink was drugged is not going to make us substantively safer or more believed by authorities.
The former Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police reportedly told women at the helm of Operation Soteria – in a meeting about why the rape conviction rate is so low – that the “bulk” of rape is “regretful sex”.
Is a kit proving you were drugged going to make police speak to us like we are human? That’s how low the bar is.
In the largest study of its kind of rape and sexual assault victims with experience of reporting their attacks, the women said they wanted to be treated like they are human. That simply isn’t happening.
We aren’t believed. We are told we would make bad witnesses. That it is our word against theirs. That we have to give the police our phones. That our therapy sessions could be used against us.
Part of the amazing work of Operation Soteria – a research and change programme that aims to transform the way police forces investigate rape and serious sexual offences – is shifting the focus of rape prosecutions from the victim to the man responsible. How this is a new and novel approach is infuriating, but it is desperately needed.
Missing the Point
Three years ago, I gave my first lecture to the UK Centre for Events Management Students at Leeds Beckett University. As a result, the students did a major piece of work around women’s impact on the night-time economy in Leeds and what needed to be done to address their safety concerns.
The students I spoke to talked about it as a horrible rite of passage – about using hair scrunchies to cover their drinks, of only drinking out of bottles to keep their thumbs over the tops, and mostly about being on watch for each other.
None spoke about RSE lessons talking about why men think they are entitled to our attention and consent.
We know that misogyny in the police makes us hesitant to report. As women, we are just grateful for getting home in one piece. But we often don’t consider why drugs to spike us are so readily available on college campuses. Or how we go after the men doing the drugging and raping.
Is the distribution of testing kits just there to create a sense of vindication when we testify about being spiked? Half the student bars in Leeds are run by students or recent graduates. Are we really making them responsible for a woman if she is spiked? Are they meant to get her home?
A big part of being spiked is also not being conscious or able to take care of yourself. How are you meant to go and ask for a manager who then is digging around in a back office for a kit while you are passed out in a puddle in the ladies’ room?
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Half Measures
During one of my lectures I brought up the example of Ask Angela: posters on the back of pub doors informing women that if they are on a date and feel unsafe “ask for Angela” at the bar and the team will swoop into action to make sure you are protected.
Any cursory ask-around will show you it is not part of any meaningful training and most of the people behind the bar, although well-meaning, would not have the first clue how to help a distressed woman in front of them asking for Angela.
One of the students asked for Angela in a number of Leeds pubs and exactly no staff responded in the way we are told they are meant to. Us getting home alive and safe isn’t on the barmaid.
These new measures don’t actually make it clear that spiking is illegal or set out the custodial penalties for spiking. I am tired of measures that put the onus of responsibility 'not to get drugged' back on to the victims – instead of dealing with the men we aren’t safe around.
A reminder: four people are charged a year for spiking. Yet, every young woman at Leeds Beckett I spoke to said they had been spiked, some multiple times.
Women will continue to employ strategies to keep ourselves safe and alive, and look out for our friends. And we will continue to live with a pervasive fear, knowing that we have to try to keep ourselves alive because the police and government certainly aren’t going to do it for us.
Men need to stop drugging, raping and killing us. Any strategies around stopping male violence against women need to focus on men. Not me.
‘Those Who Enjoyed the Post-1945 Social Progress of the West Were Made Complacent By It: We Forgot Its Price is Vigilance’
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On New Year’s Day 2024 ‘DEI’ will end at all 33 publicly-funded higher education institutions in Texas. ‘DEI’ stands for ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ and is the programme aimed at ending racism, sexism and anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination while promoting multiculturalism and inclusion. Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed the anti-DEI Bill into law in June, and already many institutions have dismantled their DEI resource centres and reassigned their staff.
As a move in the culture wars, this is pretty blunt – only one step short of banning people of colour or difference of sexual preferences from campuses outright (people who do not feel welcome will ban themselves; that’s part of the plan), and – in my view – two steps short of lynching them, which was once, and not that long ago, the option of choice in the US’ southern reaches. This fact has to be mentioned because the direction of travel indicated by ending DEI points that unpalatable way – for the simple reason that it’s the direction from which conservative moral thinking comes.
‘Conservative moral thinking’ is a kind way of putting it, because thinking is not what underlies moral conservativism.
What underlies it is feeling: emotions not of empathy and kindness, understanding and acceptance – but of tribalism, xenophobia, racism, fear of change, fear of difference.
Simplistic binaries – white-black, good-bad, male-female, right-wrong – lie at the source and limit of these feelings. Any gradations or nuances upset conservatives and must therefore be stamped on.
One of the major attractions of religion to conservative moralists is that it offers strong rules in relation to anything that does not observe the binaries – the more simplistic the better.
The political wing of conservatism is not, however, quite so unthinking.
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From its followers’ point of view, the great inconvenience in life is what they regard as the wrong kind of liberty. Whereas being free from taxes and federal laws, free to carry a pistol and own several assault rifles, free to exploit workers, free to cheat customers, and free to say hateful things about people different from them is the kind of freedom they like – they do not like protests and strikes, people voting in support of their opponents, the law protecting people unlike themselves, and they emphatically do not like paying taxes for other peoples’ health care or education.
This point of view has been frankly and openly voiced in America for decades. But it is only in the last decade or so that this agenda – from 1945 a mostly sleeping virus in Europe’s immune system – has broken through the skin like leprous ulcers in the form of Hungary’s Orbán, Italy’s Meloni, the Netherlands’ Wilders, Austria’s Kickl, France’s Le Pen, Germany’s AfD, and the enablement of the British Conservative Party’s capture by the UKIP/Brexit Party.
The current UK Government has placed limits on protest, set out to ban strikes, introduced mandatory voter ID, shifted billions of pounds from public service budgets into cronies’ pockets, allowed the NHS and local government to wither (so that they can be bought cheap by ‘private providers’ one suspects), protected the Thatcher-sold utility companies with profit-gouging and poor services matched in ambition only by the further billions of debt that have accumulated in order to pay dividends, plan to introduce dozens of ‘freeports’ and ‘special economic zones’ in which private corporations will be effectively be the government and will sell to the local population, for profit, what once were public services – and so wretchedly on, in full asset-stripping, civil-liberty-limiting, anti-democratic mode.
Rishi Sunak attended a gathering in Italy recently, along with Viktor Orbán and Steve Bannon, as a guest of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Bannon’s presence is significant. The ‘Bannon playbook’ for right-wing politicians is brutal in its simplicity and effectiveness. It is: cause chaos, disrupt, frighten and anger people about immigrants, wokeists, gay people coming for their kids; roil them up; embroil them in difficulties caused by anarcho-capitalism (privatisation on steroids) which makes them paddle faster and harder in the rising waters of debt and insecurity, and put the blame for their plight on the immigrants (mainly) and the wokeists, bien-pensants and ‘liberals’.
Anarcho-capitalism, very bad for the have-nots, is very good for the haves – there’s profit in chaos, lifting bonus caps and selling public assets cheap. While this is going on ‘the state can be rolled-back’ and those pesky civil liberties and democratic restraints that make governing difficult can be ‘disapplied’.
The aim is to reverse the idea that government is the servant of the people’s interests; the people are to be made to serve the governor’s interests. Rulers must rule – without following any rules – and the little people must not get in the way. Their role is to be milked, ceaselessly, mercilessly, impotently.
We see all of this unfolding before our eyes, plain and clear. There is a mighty battle already under way.
Donald Tusk in Poland, Pedro Sanchez in Spain, and Keir Starmer in the UK appear to buck the Bannoning trend. The EU is structured on the progressive and liberal principles of the post-1945 immune time, but in the 2024 European Parliament elections a Bannonish majority might win. Alas: those of us who enjoyed the increasingly open and inclusive social progress of the West after 1945 were made complacent by it; we forgot that its price is vigilance.
The former Home Secretary showed no interest in urgent threats to the UK as the National Security Strategy Committee reveals that Vladimir Putin made attempts to interfere with the last General Election
David Hencke
Though highly allergic to conspiracy theories, I find it ever harder to resist thinking that there might be something to the allegations of a Russian connection with the Bannoning of politics in the democracies of the West. Putin, Orbán, Trump, Republican reluctance to help fund Ukraine’s war, Boris Johnson and the Lebedevs, Russian donations to Britain’s Conservative politicians, Russian interference in elections, Russians murdering Russians on British soil without much consequence – these are a spattering of dots that beckon one to wonder whether they join up.
If there is a connecting line it is to be found in the answer to this question: who stands to gain most by disunity in, even the fragmentation of, Europe? The answer is: Vladimir Putin.
It is a longstanding and well-known aim of his. To some, it is plain that Brexit was his first great success in this endeavour, with the added bonus of considerably weakening the UK itself. The UK, when both in the EU and a strong ally of the US, was once a formidable thorn in would-be resurgent Russian flesh, if you look at it from Putin’s point of view. Now it is a rusting hulk drifting offshore, and the task of picking off others in the convoy is easier.
The connection between moral and political conservatism? Attacks on immigrants and wokeism and the rest do a double job and do it beautifully: they fire up the base, and distract them from the agenda of making them the subjects to an anarcho-capitalist system in which they have few rights, but pay for everything with and beyond their last pennies.
It is not too late to resist what is happening.
Get the UK out of the Putin-helping (whether intentionally or not) Bannoning trend, return to the task of helping to build a strong and Europe committed – as it constitutionally is – to human rights and civil liberties, and resume vigilance thereafter. This is the least we must do.
COVID Cronyism and Mone – The Tip of the Iceberg: Byline Times’ Full Story of the PPE Cash Carousel
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We still don’t have the full picture of the chaos of the COVID years – the billions wasted, the lives needlessly lost, and the decisions facilitated through WhatsApp messages that have mysteriously vanished.
But Byline Times has attempted to shed some light on the years of scandal, before the public inquiry got underway.
We hope our reporting stands as testament to the need for vigilant journalism, to shine a light on the murkiest days of the pandemic.
This is a snapshot of our reporting on the Coronavirus ‘cash carousel’ and what happens when cronyism seeps deep into British politics.
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The Crisis Begins
Within weeks of the first lockdown, Nafeez Ahmed on Byline Times became arguably the first journalist to break the story of the emerging personal protective equipment (PPE) scandal.
On April 2 2020, he exposed how lucrative contracts were being awarded to Conservative Party associates.
Boris Johnson’s Government had appointed a giant haulage firm with financial ties to the Tory Party to be in charge of a new supply channel for PPE to the NHS. Its founding executive chairman was Steven N. Parkin, a top Conservative Party donor who has attended exclusive ‘Leaders Group’ meetings and donated almost £1 million to the party in the preceding five years.
This set the tone for an extensive investigation into COVID-19 contracts, shedding light on a concerning trend of cronyism.
That May, Stephen Delahunty on Byline Times revealed that another Conservative donor was involved in the COVID-19 contracts.
Europa Worldwide Group – the managing director of which was a personal donor to Johnson – was found to be arranging PPE supplies for the NHS and manufacturing testing kits.
No one would begrudge firms being involved in ‘helping’ the emergency effort. But the lucrative profits secured off the back of many of these deals, often going to Conservative-linked figures, began raising eyebrows.
This newspaper continued – pretty much alone – in examining these contracts.
In July 2020, Delahunty revealed that companies with no prior experience or expertise were inexplicably receiving multi-million-pound contracts. This was despite the looming threat of legal challenges over what was to be dubbed the ‘VIP Lane’: pathways for firms to win government contracts with little oversight and through referrals from well-connected politicians.
EXCLUSIVE
Respected Health Professionals Feel ‘Duped’ into Appearing in Michelle Mone PPE Documentary
A film about the PPE scandal did not declare to some contributors it was being funded by a company that won £203 million in Government PPE contracts
Tom Latchem and Dan Evans
Brexit featured too. That same month, Stephen Komarnyckyj discovered that an award of a PPE contract to a company that had no cash stemmed from the UK choosing not to join the EU-wide PPE purchasing scheme.
In quick succession, we found that a recruitment firm with just £322 in net assets had received an £18 million Government contract. By this time, legal campaigners at Good Law Project were on the case. But their revelations and ours were still largely going unreported in the rest of the established media.
Three more contracts emerged in July, going to a fashion company, a trade consultant and a gambling company. It was beginning to look desperate – and fishy.
Using a legal loophole designed for emergencies, the Government was able to award these huge contracts without any competition. And, it seems, without even basic due diligence checks.
A New Phase
Things got even weirder that August, when Byline Times revealed the companies linked to the exclusive Plymouth Brethren religious sect which were mopping up huge COVID contracts. And still the warning signs kept flashing, as we dug up dormant firms which emerged from seemingly nowhere to win millions in PPE deals.
All these contracts could be justified if they were effective in saving lives. But in August 2020, we began to see the true picture: much of the PPE purchased at vast sums couldn’t actually be used. It wasn't up to scratch. Meanwhile, NHS staff continued to complain of shortages and shoddy equipment.
Labour MP Dawn Butler was among the first politicians to sound the alarm following our reporting. She told Byline Times that summer that the award of the new contracts to unheard-of firms was “yet another example of questionable procurement contracts” by the Government and that “the list seems to be growing day by day”.
“There is no competitive tendering and no transparency,” she added. “The full extent of this scandal must be brought to light, with full details published of all contracts, so this does not happen again. We all deserve to know how our public money is spent.”
Did ministers listen?
It seemed not. September came around, and Sam Bright reported that the Government spent more than £300 million on overalls for NHS staff – at a cost of £840 per bodysuit actually delivered.
EXCLUSIVE
‘VIP’ Firms Referred by Tory MPs and Peers for PPE Deals See Profits Soar
Hundreds of millions of pounds have been earned by companies channelled through the expedited procurement route by Conservative politicians, Sam Bright reports
Sam Bright
By this point, questions were being asked in Parliament. Our findings of the Government awarding £122 Million in PPE contracts to a one-month-old firm appeared to trigger probing at Prime Minister’s Questions.
At this point, we could piece together the picture from the first months of the pandemic – and it was not a pretty sight. Government spending on PPE deals to Conservative backers had hit £364 million.
And still, health professionals continued to call for adequate protection as the second Coronavirus wave approached.
Another Wave of Sleaze
In 2021, the COVID cash machine just kept giving – to a select few.
Pulling together a year of evidence, Byline Times and The Citizens revealed that deals worth at least £2 billion had been awarded to top Conservative Party associates during the Coronavirus crisis.
A firm that gave £400,000 to the Conservatives won a £93.8 million PPE deal. The figures being handed to the Plymouth Brethren sect alone hit £1.1 billion.
And, as before, vast amounts of the PPE were useless.
In what was dubbed “perhaps the most shameful episode of the pandemic”, £4 billion in PPE went up in smoke: burned as unusable, while NHS staff continued to feel burnt-out and abandoned.
Meanwhile, profits quadrupled for the Conservative donor companies. There was nothing stopping them continuing to donate more to the Conservative Party. Byline Times’ Peter Jukes dubbed it a “state-subsidised oligarchy” – a corporate takeover of government.
It was in this context that PPE Medpro – tipped to Michael Gove for a contract by Conservative peer Baroness Michelle Mone – could prosper.
Her representatives threatened to sue us for reporting the facts. Now the truth is finally out
Josiah Mortimer
This newspaper was the first to reveal Mone’s links to the firm – links which were vigorously denied under threat of libel action, but which we now know to have been true. (Mone and PPE Medpro are under investigation by the National Crime Agency but deny any illegality).
It was one of many companies that were referred by Conservative MPs and peers to the expedited ‘VIP Lane' for PPE contracts during the pandemic.
PPE Medpro took in the region of £60 million in profits. Much of its PPE was also deemed unusable by the NHS.
Overall, the value lost to dodgy PPE was nearly £9 billion – a quarter of the annual UK budget for housing and the environment put together.
Is there any other country in the world that has witnessed sleaze and scandal on such a scale around COVID contracts?
And did the £200 million-plus COVID 'bungs’ to the press – the Government's ‘All in, All Together’ public information campaign subsidising profitable newspapers – help Johnson's administration get away with it?
What We Know Now
A series of damning reports by the National Audit Office, the Public Accounts Committee and more have conclusively vindicated Byline Times’ reporting.
The Government lost billions of taxpayers’ money to dodgy contracts, waste and fraud, after suspending its usual procurement processes during the pandemic.
Johnson’s Government relied heavily on a highly secretive ‘VIP Lane’ for procurement of goods such as PPE, with £8.7 billion of public money wasted on buying unsatisfactory, unusable or overpriced PPE.
Subsequent Labour Party analysis showed that £3.5 billion of pandemic-related contracts were awarded to businesses that were directly linked to the Conservative Party or have donated to them.
To do this, the Government ignored fraud warnings and advice about the lack of basic checks on COVID support schemes.
Former Treasury Minister Lord Agnew described "schoolboy errors" and resigned from over his frustration at the lack of action on tackling COVID fraud. Kemi Badenoch has since criticised Rishi Sunak’s lack of interest in COVID fraud when he was Chancellor and claims he dismissed her concerns.
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And so it wasn’t just about PPE: the trail of wasted cash ran through the Government’s COVID support schemes too.
The latest estimate for COVID-related fraud in Government support schemes is estimated to be to be £7.2 billion, according to House of Commons Library analysis of Government reports.
This includes fraud losses across business loan and grant schemes, and fraudulent use of the furlough and Rishi Sunak’s 'Eat Out to Help Out’ schemes – the latter of which is credited with triggering a surge in COVID cases in summer 2020. Taxpayer losses from COVID fraud could even reach as high as £10.8 billion.
Stronger checks on who was getting this money could have saved £2.6 billion – roughly equivalent to the total cash that went to Conservative allies.
According to internal documents from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), seen by Good Law Project, VIP Lane suppliers like PPE Medpro were paid on average 80% more per unit than other suppliers. Some contracts were agreed at more than four times the average unit price.
Even the ‘clean-up’ operation is costing a fortune.
The DHSC employed a 'commercial advisor' on 1 April 2022 at a rate of £1,100 a day to help its recently established 'contract dissolution team' extricate the department from the wasteful contracts signed with PPE suppliers.
With a total fee of £242,785 for 220 days work, only the Chief Executive of NHS England was set to be paid more by the DHSC this year, according to Labour.
What Happens Next?
The House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee revealed that only 2% of COVID business grants lost to fraud has been recovered to date. Labour says that, if elected next year, it will pursue “every pound of public money” that has been inappropriately lost from pandemic related contacts, fraud and waste. Under the party’s plans, a COVID Corruption Commissioner would tackle the waste, fraud and dodgy contacts signed off by the Government during the pandemic.
Efforts at recovering the money are hampered by the fact that the UK is out of step with other countries such as the US, Canada and Australia, in having no offence of “fraud against the public purse” – except in relation to welfare and tax fraud.
But in the end, it’s not so much about the money, as the lives that would have been saved had Britain had well-stocked PPE supplies and proper checks on whether the supplies NHS workers were demanding were up to standard. Money can be clawed back. Lives cannot.
That baton is now held by the COVID Inquiry, which will begin its third module in the new year. Part of its remit is looking at how the spread of COVID-19 within healthcare settings was prevented – or not – including the adequacy of PPE.
Byline Times wishes it every luck in its digging – and for the hope that, one day, there might be some accountability for the cronyism and catastrophes of the Coronavirus pandemic, which, to date, has resulted in more than 230,000 people in the UK dying.
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Josiah Mortimer also writes the On the Ground column, exclusive to the print edition of Byline Times.
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