uk politics
‘Media Attacks on NHS Translation and Diversity Spending Completely Miss the Point of the Health Service’
This week, the Express published an article headlined 'taxpayers billed £100 million for NHS translators – could pay for 3,000 nurses'. The story completely missed the point of what the health service does.
The standfirst went on to explain that taxpayers "pick up the bill" for translation and interpretation" to ensure that the NHS can be "accessed in languages other than English”.
Given health and healthcare access inequalities, surely spending money to ensure people get the right care they need is a good thing – not to mention a legal requirement.
The Express article published on 2 April about NHS spending on translators
The Express packaged the story to suggest that it had uncovered a scandal. It included data revealed through Freedom of Information Requests (FOI) to 251 NHS trusts and 42 integrated care boards, which “routinely convert standard hospital and health literature into languages including Romanian, Arabic, Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi”.
The article included comments from a Reform Party spokesman, claiming that translation and interpretation services "were simply not necessary" and that artificial intelligence apps, such as Google Translate, could do the job – or that patients could use family members to translate for them.
The Express article followed the Mail’s report last week on National Trust cafés selling “woke scones” (made with margarine and not butter). It was another example of 'stories’ aimed at stirring up problems, rather than solving them.
The Mail article published on 31 March on 'woke scones'
Helping those in need be heard appears to be a bizarre issue to weaponise in manufactured 'culture wars’.
For starters, the total NHS spend in England for the last financial year was more than £180 billion, with a further £20 billion in local government spending on social care. So £100 million on translation might sound like a big number, but it is a tiny fraction of expenditure and would make little dent in nurse staffing across all NHS organisations.
Citizens or legal residents who don’t speak fluent or even basic English are, just like people with hearing loss, learning disabilities or cognitive impairment, as entitled to NHS care as the rest of the population. And there is already considerable evidence that they are not getting it, with health and healthcare access inequalities between different ethnic communities.
Denying people written information in their own language will only make matters worse.
When people who are sick, scared, vulnerable, distressed or have symptoms to discuss, treatments to understand, or complex psychosocial factors to explain, how can the quality and safety of the care they receive be improved if they can neither express nor understand key information?
There are also legal considerations. To provide valid consent to treatment in common law, patients must have sufficient information about the details, risks, potential harms and benefits of a proposed treatment (which could in some cases involve major surgery, powerful drugs or admission to intensive care). Language barriers must be overcome to make this a reality.
The Mental Capacity Act states that all reasonable efforts must be made to establish decision-specific capacity for treatment or care – which may include overcoming language barriers.
If patients lack capacity, then speaking to those closest to them is a key part of establishing their best interests for further decision-making. Again, this may require translators or clear written information in their first language. We do this for people with hearing loss via written communication or sign language.
Regulatory codes of practice for healthcare professionals are also clear that we must treat people equally, irrespective of characteristics including race, religion or nationality.
Using AI translation apps of variable reliability has its limits in a time-critical or emotionally-charged and challenging situation. And relying on family or friends to translate isn't always possible as not every patient is accompanied. If they are discussing personally sensitive or intimate information, they may be inhibited from doing so. If there are safeguarding concerns regarding abuse or neglect one could suspect the person translating of being coercive when doing so.
The thinly-veiled xenophobia and racism being whipped up by the Express (even against people who pay tax and National Insurance contributions and have precisely the same entitlement to care as native and confident English speakers) is part of a wider set of 'wedge issues’ being pushed by right-wing media outlets and sections of the Conservative and Reform parties.
They share a similar fixation with 'woke’ diversity managers or diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies in the NHS or other public services. Several Government ministers have lined up to call for a 'war on waste’ to remove such posts and policies.
Steve Barclay, when Health Secretary in 2023, wrote to integrated care boards in England instructing them to stop recruiting staff as dedicated EDI managers, arguing that the money should be spent on “frontline staff” instead.
The Express has published a number of articles lamenting 'wokery’ in the NHS – including, in January in a story headlined 'NHS spends £40 million on woke non-jobs that could pay for 1,150 nurses'.
Last year, the Spectator ran a FOI-based story showing that, out of an NHS workforce of around 1.5 million people, there were only 800 employees in dedicated EDI roles – yet called for those roles to be abolished.
Again, those employed in such posts account for a small fraction of 1% of the entire NHS workforce or spend. Their presence is de facto required due to the Equality Act and Equality Duty on public organisations and protections in employment law.
NHS organisations do have a very diverse workforce, yet there is clear evidence of ongoing and endemic discrimination towards minorities within it. There is also consistent evidence of discrimination and care inequalities between different ethnic and socio-economic groups the NHS serves.
The idea that a focus on EDI is somehow a bad thing and a distraction from real work, or that organisations should not employ a small number of people to oversee it, is not so much a dog-whistle as a wolf-klaxon. It is a classic distraction from the real issue – the 14 years of Conservative-led mismanagement of health and social care and of wider public health.
This decline has been well-documented by the Institute for Government think tank; as well former King’s Fund chief executive Professor Sir Chris Ham, who set out in expert detail the rise and decline of the service from the late 1990s through to the 2010 election and the current crisis in performance and public satisfaction.
Blaming our NHS crisis on the cost of translation and interpretation services, and diversity and inclusion managers, foments hostility against people from ethnic minorities, white people with poor English skills, and even those with full entitlement to use our public services and who contribute towards their costs.
They aren’t all rich enough to pay for their own personal translator or digitally equipped enough to auto-translate NHS information documents into their own languages.
I don’t see commentators on the right arguing against hospitals in France or Spain finding translations for ill white British expats or embassies around the world employing translators to help British citizens who have found themselves in a spot of bother with the local law. I wonder why.
‘Rishi Sunak’s Delay in Calling an Election May Help the Conservatives – But it Could Benefit Labour More’
Governments trailing in the polls tend to wait until the last possible moment. Like Gordon Brown in 2010 and John Major in 1997 before him, Rishi Sunak appears to have decided to delay the inevitable in the hope that ‘something will turn up’.
His Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is already talking up a further ‘fiscal event’ which seems all but certain to include more unfunded tax cuts, despite repeated evidence that what the public wants is investment in the NHS and other struggling public services.
There may be some wisdom in Sunak going long.
In both 1997 and 2010, the governing party did slightly less badly at the five-year mark than they would have done 10 months earlier. But there is no guarantee that history will repeat itself. The public are more sick of Sunak and his party than they were of Major’s Conservatives or Brown’s New Labour.
Rishi Sunak appears to have decided to delay calling an election. Photo: Imageplotter/Alamy
For Keir Starmer's party, the delayed election brings challenges as well as opportunity.
The additional time will help Labour prepare for power. Shadow ministers are meeting with civil servants in readiness for a handover. Labour still has candidates to select in many of its less winnable seats, the list of retiring MPs is yet to be finalised, and candidates selected or appointed.
Beyond the practical, Labour’s most pressing need is to further solidify its relationship with the public – thinking not just about winning votes on polling day, but about building a bedrock of support that will sustain it through what is likely to be a difficult Parliament.
Giving Labour pause will be the fact that politics has become more volatile since 1997. Labour lost the ‘Red Wall’ because, in 2015, 2017 and 2019, the Conservatives’ coalition had changed – doing less and less well among affluent, economically right-wing voters with college degrees but better among skilled manual workers and voters without degrees.
The Conservatives’ new unpopularity is seeing the party lose its new voters without regaining its old ones: a perfect storm.
The question is whether Labour’s resurgence in the Red Wall will mark a reversion to type – voters tried the Conservatives once, but won’t make that mistake again – or whether these seats will now swing with every election like a perennial marginal such as Crawley.
If it’s the latter, the UK will become a much more volatile democracy – one in which even very bad defeats like Labour’s 2019 rout can be recovered from in a single term as a matter of course. This presents Labour with a challenge: the extended terms in office won in 1979, 1997 and 2010 maybe a thing of the past, and big wins like 2019 may be more likely to be followed by a big loss unless the party in power meets public expectations.
Compounding Labour’s challenge is the fact that while all but certain to win – both Labour and Starmer are far more popular than the Conservatives and Sunak – both party and leader are less popular and trusted than previous opposition leaders who successfully took power from the opposition.
Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and David Cameron all started their premierships well ahead of the predecessors they replaced and with their approval ratings in positive territory. In contrast, while Starmer easily beats Sunak, his ratings are in negative territory – -18 according to Ipsos’ latest count.
But the public’s reticence is not confined to Starmer. While his party is seen as significantly more competent than the Conservatives, here too Labour is in negative territory – by -14 points to the Conservatives’ -47.
A different time – then party leaders John Major, Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair in 1995. Photo: Neil Munns/PA/Alamy
In part, this negativity may reflect lasting voter anger over the Jeremy Corbyn years and Labour’s flight from electability. Even if it is, the party still has to win greater public confidence if not to win the election but to enable it to take the country through what will remain challenging times.
Labour’s leadership is acutely aware that there are no simple solutions to the country’s plight.
When Blair came to power with a swiftly growing economy, Labour had to avoid messing things up. This time, the challenge is far greater.
Labour will come to power after 16 years of economic stagnation. Had economic growth continued on its 1955 to 2008 path, GDP per head would now be 39% higher. The UK has not been the only high-income country to have fallen into stagnation, but its fall has been among the steepest.
Similarly, while public services were in a parlous state in 1997, they are far worse now. The ongoing – and permanent (unless things change) – economic harm of Brexit plus labour shortages and lost inward investment add further challenges.
Labour needs to both effect an economic transformation that will, in turn, enable it to renew public services, and to win public support both for its programme and the time it will take to implement given there are no quick fixes.
That it understands this challenge is clear. Both Starmer and Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves have used set-piece speeches to tell a narrative of Conservative failure as the cause of the nation’s ills and to limit expectations of what a Labour government could achieve.
Reeves has argued that the Conservatives had made four big mistakes: misunderstanding the role of the state in helping to drive growth; austerity; the failure to borrow more during the era of ultra-low interest rates; and Liz Truss’ unfunded tax cuts. Put together, she said, these errors strangled the economy, starved public services, and led to the recent rise in interest rates – adding costs for both government and the public.
To restore growth, she argued for a new model of economic management guided by three imperatives: stability; “stimulating investment through partnership with business”; and reforms to unlock productivity including reform of the planning system.
Starmer used his local elections launch to attack the Conservatives for their failure to 'level up’ and to temper expectations by arguing that Labour cannot “turn the taps on” to fix councils’ £4 billion funding gap.
This is all sensible politics, as is Labour’s refusal to make big spending commitments which it knows it would be unable to meet. And yet, the twin challenges remain.
While economists welcome Reeves’ prescriptions – particularly her commitment to reform the planning system – some query whether they will be enough to bring about the transformation required. Once in power, and faced with both real need and public desire for swift change, the pressure to raise spending and taxes will be hard to contain.
There is pressure on Labour not to go into too much detail. Specific pledges can win support and court opposition or raise questions over how they will be paid for – hence Labour’s step away from big commitments such as the £28 billion it had planned to spend on green infrastructure.
But to win public enthusiasm, as well as benefit from public revulsion at the current Government – and to win public consent for real change to take a full term or more – Labour will need to be more explicit about its plans, priorities and the limits of what can be achieved in the short-term.
The stakes are high. Reeves made clear in her speech her fear that, without widely shared economic growth, democracy itself could be in peril. Rebuilding trust in her party is necessary to rebuild public confidence in politics itself.
The task is not an easy one, but given what is at stake for our country’s economy, public services and faith in democratic politics as the best way to solve collective problems, we should all wish Labour good luck – and seek to play our part in political renewal.
‘Telegraph Takeover Bid Backed by UAE Doesn’t Matter – Because there’s an Agenda at Every Newspaper’
Many years ago, I was a junior business reporter on Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times. It had been decided that I was to write that weekend’s main editorial based on an official report castigating Mohamed Al Fayed over the purchase of House of Fraser which included Harrods.
Fayed, it seems, had been deliberately opaque about the true origins of his funding. We were having an editorial meeting, me and the paper’s much more senior executives, about what the leader should say, when who should walk in but Murdoch. We all leapt to attention. He made a gesture for everyone to sit down, and then asked what we were discussing. They said that I was just explaining the importance of the report and that it was going to be the paper’s leader and I was going to write it. Murdoch turned to me, inquisitively. Thanks guys.
Murdoch fixed me a stare. “Son, who cares? Why does it matter?” he inquired softly and slowly. Nobody else said anything. I was on my own. I was sweating but the room felt chilly. Gulp. I blathered about how we could never be too careful, how it was vital that people didn’t lie about the source of their wealth, how we had anti-money laundering rules to prevent this sort of thing, how organised crime was a growing problem and we had to be more on top of it, and drugs and terrorism…
Murdoch looked blank. I could feel the ground opening beneath my feet. Then, a man who was accompanying the press mogul – a tall American in black, shiny, crocodile shoes – said: “Hey, Rupe you remember that Fayed took us for 100 million, down in Texas?” Murdoch turned to him, and said, “You’re right, he did.” He wheeled round to me and added: “Son, write it as hard as you like”. With that, he and his pal walked off.
Rupert Murdoch, pictured at his annual party at Spencer House, St James' Place in London, June 2023
The Sunday Times was my first national newspaper and this was my first introduction to how proprietors secure a product that is to their taste and beliefs.
This was an overt example, where the man himself was present. Most of the time he did not need to be. It occurred subliminally – self-censorship, reporting a story in such a manner that you knew would please the bosses, would stick to an unwritten agenda and earn you an approving nod from on high.
It occurred in the same way at every newspaper where I’ve worked: Sunday Express, Daily Express, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Independent, Evening Standard. Really, it happens everywhere, in every job: you know what the chief thinks and unless you’re desperate to leave you toe the party line. Which is why it is perplexing to read so much guff about the proposed takeover of the Telegraph by a consortium backed by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, vice-president of the United Arab Emirates.
The Sheikh also owns Manchester City and, in that regard, his being a member of the UAE government is rarely mentioned; references to him in the football press tend to dwell on his fabulous wealth.
A football club is very different from a major newspaper. But, honestly, reading the howls of protest from some journalistic quarters you could be forgiven for thinking they are allowed a free hand in everything they write, that they’ve never been told to temper an argument or as I say, have done it themselves, without being instructed?
Perhaps they are, in which case, I must be an oppressed rare species – on my own, wandering through the media landscape, subject to the inability to express myself. I am not, because most articles do not touch the management floor.
There have been occasions, though, when I’ve been encouraged to pursue a subject in which the owner has a ‘special interest’. Again, I ask, has anyone else not experienced the same, and provided what I write is true, is it that bad?
To that list of titles, I could have added another, The National. That’s right, for the last four years I’ve written a weekly column for the UAE newspaper owned by one Sheikh Mansour. Ah, I hear you cry: "he’s told you to write this, you’re under orders." Not a bit of it. In that period, I’ve had no contact with the Sheikh or his official representatives. I do speak to the paper’s Editor-in-Chief, Mina Al-Oraibi – that’s right a woman in charge of a newspaper, a concept still unfamiliar to those main critics of the Mansour deal, the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Times.
One piece I submitted was rejected; post-COVID, a firm of consultants produced a study saying that luxury goods were over, that the outbreak had made us turn our backs on excess. I thought this would be a suitable column topic.
Colleagues at the paper disagreed; they had plenty of evidence to show the claim was wrong, that bling was very much alive. I said I would choose another subject. As it was, they were right, the consultancy was wrong. Another piece, on Al Fayed, I quoted him using a profanity against Prince Philip. It had to come out, they said, as, to be fair, it probably would have done in any British-based title.
It may hurt the anti-Mansour investment (and it is an investment, his people are insisting, saying he will only be a ‘passive partner’ in a US-run vehicle) brigade to learn this but in my experience, The National is run along professional lines. It has a newsroom of the sort they would recognise. To my knowledge there is not a UAE commissar sitting alongside Al-Oraibi and her senior team.
It's staffed too by journalists from across Fleet Street, from the Telegraph, Independent, Daily Mail and others. Its editorial offices in UAE, London and Washington DC are fully manned and well-resourced. I deal regularly with the London bureau and as far as I am aware, the editor, Damien McElroy (ex-Telegraph) is free to cover whatever he likes.
Because it’s not so tightly constrained and prone to the cycles of advertising as others, The National can keep its website open to all – a breath of fresh air in this age of paywalls and subscriptions. The paper has as its mission ‘The Middle East. Explained’.
That’s its USP, writing about the Middle East, and yes, often providing a UAE slant. Is that awful? It’s where the title hails from, it’s home. It’s no different from London newspapers seeing things through British eyes. No different either from pro-Conservative newspapers seeing things through a pro-Conservative prism. Perish the thought.
‘A Keir Starmer Government Will Trigger a Revival of the Labour Left’
Owen Jones’ resignation from the Labour party and his proposal for a form of tactical voting to support Greens has brought the subject of the left’s relationship to the Labour Party to a very wide audience. A debate that is usually reserved for the pages of left journals, or among the left on social media, has received much wider attention.
Questions of whether the left should be in or out of Labour have been building for some time. From Jeremy Corbyn's suspension from the party, right through to Labour’s appalling position on Gaza, anger and disaffection has deepened. In some quarters there are arguments against any kind of Labour vote at all, although this is not what Jones himself has said.
Yet while the debate is real, the other side of the discussion is the unarguable fact that Labour is ahead in the polls and will likely form the next Government.
There is no groundswell of warmth and support for the Labour leader. Rejection of the Conservatives, rather than untrammelled enthusiasm for Labour, is driving Labour’s huge poll leads. Straightforward class instinct leads millions of people to reject the Conservatives, who are now widely and deeply disliked. For many, Labour is the only available mechanism to remove the Conservative party from government.
Even if there proves to be a degree of fragmentation in sections of the Labour vote, leading to some independents and Greens winning seats, the overall line of march is towards a Starmer Government. But until that happens, politics in Britain is in a long intermission in which everyone knows the Conservatives are going to lose and the only question is when and by how much.
This impasse in British society is also reflected in the politics of the labour movement.
One principal exception to the impasse is the dynamic pro-Palestine mobilisation against Israel’s killing in Gaza, which has reshaped the politics of protest on a sustained basis.
For now though, with the election in abeyance, we are at peak Starmer. The Labour leadership dominates the party’s central apparatus, which it has used to clamp down on debate, block candidates for selection and withdraw the whip from left-wing MPs. Policy formation has excluded major spending commitments, and thereby debate about the economy outside Rachel Reeves’ 'Securonomics' framework. Even on that narrow basis Labour voluntarily reined itself in further, gutting its own Green Prosperity Plan. But as long as Labour is in opposition there is a tendency to give the party the benefit of the doubt. Some of the more breathless responses to Reeves’ Mais lecture are an example of that.
Labour’s proposed supply-side reforms as a precursor to growth are not a sufficient platform to cope with either the immediate spending pressures built up over years of austerity, nor with the major challenge of the climate crisis. Labour’s plans are reliant on increased private investment whereas public investment is woefully low. As the Resolution Foundation has pointed out, the average OECD country invests nearly 50% more than the UK. Stagnant wages and the attack on disposable household income amount to a massive bottle neck of pressure for higher living standards and improved pay. Many local councils are in crisis. Once in power a Labour Government will face a tension between tight spending, self-imposed rejection of a variety of higher tax options, and the pent-up problems of immediate living standards. What Labour proposes is not equal to the scale of the task it will inherit.
But while there is a mismatch between the needs of the population and the solutions on offer, the real argument about that is not going to move beyond its current terms in any fundamental manner until the blockage of the general election is out of the way. Thus however contradictory it may seem, the formation of a Labour government under the politics of the Starmer leadership is now an essential step in breaking down the dominance of those politics within the labour movement and wider population.
Since Starmer is a leader pursuing a right-wing Labour course it is necessary for that course to first be exposed to the reality of its limitations in office, so his programme and its weaknesses can seen by the largest number of people for what they are.
Until Labour is in office Starmer will continue to be the beneficiary of anti-Conservative sentiment and will receive benefit of the doubt, including within Labour’s own base. Testing the Labour right’s agenda against the realities of power will move the political discourse on from the impasse and the question of getting a Labour government, and onto concrete questions of what the Government should do over living standards, public services and inequality.
Of course this being a Labour Government in waiting, there will still be differences with the Conservatives even under self-imposed constraints. Measures such as the New Deal for Working People, the extension of public ownership for the railways, and some of the remaining green agenda are bound to be opposed within and without the next Government. Figures such as Peter Mandelson, who have sought to water down elements of Labour’s programme, will continue to do so.
But it would be wrong for the left to draw the conclusion that these policies in themselves are sufficient justification for Labour’s otherwise limited package. In its totality the Labour leadership’s trajectory is wholly inadequate to the scale of the problems faced by a majority of the population, and will place the Labour Government in deep contradiction with the needs of working class people. At the same time, a renewed Labour Atlanticism, on display most obviously over Gaza, is bound to draw continued opposition.
We do not have to wait to see what opposition to Labour’s foreign policy means. Mass mobilisation over Gaza and the pro-Palestine movement has completely shaken up a sense that the Labour leadership is impervious to any opposition. The new politics under a Labour Government will not only be fought through the institutions of the labour movement, but also on the streets. A new left politics under a Labour Government will also raise questions about the degree to which the left and the unions are able to work more closely with each other. An inability to do so would give the Labour right more room to manoeuvre than it would otherwise enjoy.
The right of the party knows full well that once in office it will face pressure to go further, or alter course altogether, which is one of the principal reasons for its efforts to immunise the parliamentary party from the left. As the limits of the Labour Government’s programme are tested so there is every likelihood of a radicalisation among at least some sections of society on both domestic and international agendas.
For all the efforts of the leadership of the Labour party to protect itself from this, some elements of that political radicalisation will work their way through Labour and the unions, including those affiliated with the Labour Party. Other movements will be entirely distinct or new.
As the formation of a Labour Government under Starmer brings the present impasse to an end, the tensions at the heart of its project will be laid bare. When that happens, the conditions for the left to rise again will be formed.
BAE Systems CEO Made Almost £1m Extra in Share Sale After Hike In Price Since Gaza war
A chief executive of Britain’s leading arms manufacturer has seen his share price sell-off boosted by almost £1 million following an increase in his company’s share value since the start of the Gaza-Israel war.
On 9 March, BAE Systems CEO, Charles Woodburn, sold 331,716 personal shares of stock in the company, netting him £4,163,035. The sale was to pay income tax and National Insurance contribution liabilities from the 704,014 performance shares Woodburn received under the BAE Systems Long Term Incentive Plan.
An equivalent sale of shares before Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7 October would have earned Woodburn £3,252,807, when BAE Systems’ average stock price was £9.81 compared to £12.55 when he offloaded his holdings. That difference netted Woodburn about £910,228.
The total value of Woodburn’s 704,014 bonus shares on 8 March stood at just over £8.83 million. BAE’s share price has risen some 39% since 6 October 2023. At the time of writing, the price stands at £13.63.
The company, valued at almost £38 billion, recently issued its 2023 report noting underlying profits before interest and tax of £2.7 billion, arising from record sales of £25.3 billion. Woodburn cited “rising instability across Europe, the Middle East and other parts of the world” for global increases in defence spending.
Between 2013 and 2022, BAE Systems PLC saw more than £194 billion in sales, with a cumulative operating profit of £17 billion.
Woodburn has benefited enormously from the company's profits. He was awarded £13.45 million in 2023, a rise of 112% from his total pay of £6.34 million in 2021.
Part of this increase on the part of Woodburn’s bonus is linked to share price rises following the invasion of Ukraine and the recent tragedies in Gaza and Israel.
At least 32,142 Palestinians have been killed and 74,412 wounded since Israeli launched attacked the Gaza strip, according to the Gazan Health Ministry. The war started following Hamas’ invasion of Israel on 7 October. Around 1,200 Israelis were killed and 253 hostages were seized.
BAE Systems supplies the Israeli Air Force with weapons systems for their fleet of F-15, F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, which have in the past been used to carry out “waves of airstrikes across the Gaza strip". BAE Systems was awarded a $20.4 million contract in 2018 to supply transmitters for Israel’s F-35s and belongs to a collaborative effort with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to develop the tail of F-35 fighter jet.
In February, the Court of Appeal in the Hague asserted that there is “a clear risk that Israel’s F-35 fighter jets might be used in the commission of serious violations of international humanitarian law.” The court ordered the Netherlands government to block the export of all F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel over the "undeniable" risk.
The Canadian government has also stated it will halt all arms shipments to Israel, noting it cannot be fully assured that Israel is complying with Canada’s export regime.
The UK arms industry has come under repeated scrutiny in recent years, including legal challenges to the UK government presented by Oxfam and Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) to the High Court demanding a cease of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which had amounted to £25 billion since the conflict began in 2015.
Responding to Woodburn’s share bonuses, Emily Appe, CAAT's Media Coordinator said : "These obscene profits show exactly what is wrong with the arms trade. War, death and destruction are all good business for arms dealers. They have no interest in peaceful solutions because it is instability and conflict that drive up share prices and allow them to make even more money selling yet more weapons to fuel conflict around the world."
A BAE Systems spokesperson said: “Mr Woodburn recently exercised a long-term incentive award that vested at the end of last year. He only sold the number of shares required to fund his tax and insurance liability on exercise.”
The UK Government has previously refused to export components in 2011 and 2012 to Israel due to concerns over the country's “respect for human rights and international humanitarian law". It is not yet known whether Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, will follow through on his warning to Israel that the UK will cease arms sales if detained Palestinian suspects are denied access to the Red Cross.
Sewage No-Go Zones: Eight Out of Ten Brits ‘Not Comfortable’ Swimming in UK Waters
Eighty-three per cent of British people "do not feel comfortable" swimming in Britain’s coastline, rivers and waterways, according to exclusive new polling for Byline Times.
The survey, which was conducted this week by pollsters We Think, comes as new figures show that the number of sewage spills in British waters doubled last year to a new record high.
There were 464,056 discharges in 2023, according to data submitted to the Environment Agency.
As a result, just 17% of Brits still say they would feel comfortable taking a swim in UK waters, today's survey suggests.
Campaigners told Byline that the surge in spills was a result of deliberate profiteering by water companies.
“This basic public service over the last 30 years since it was privatised, has effectively been not run to produce a facility for ordinary people like you and I, it has been run to produce profits to be distributed back to shareholders who have effectively asset stripped the industry,” Charles Watson, founder of the charity River Action told Adrian Goldberg on the Byline Times Podcast.
“We have a failed system and what bears witness to that is the vast quantity of basically human poo, flushing down the rivers. It's a disgrace and a scandal.”
Watson added that victorious rowers in the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race had been warned this week not to jump into the Thames due to “off the scale” levels of E. coli bacteria detected in the river.
Watson said that Government cuts to enforcement of sewage spills had opened the door to the current crisis.
The budget for the Environment Agency in England, which is the principal body to protect nature and protect our rivers, since austerity was introduced 15 years ago has been cut by 75%.
“In 2012, I think there was something like 250 successful prosecutions of polluters. In 2021 there were two.”
The Labour Party this week called on the Government to impose an immediate ban on water company bosses being handed bonuses.
“The Conservatives’ are too weak to get tough with polluting water companies", Labour’s Shadow Environment Secretary, Steve Reed MP, said.
“Instead of imposing Labour’s ban on water bosses’ bonuses, Steve Barclay has weakly chosen to only talk about doing it.
“The evidence is clear. We don’t need the dither and delay of a consultation, we need immediate action."
You can listen to the full Byline Times Podcast on the Sewage scandal here.
Rishi Sunak’s Head Boy Energy
This article was first published in the February 2024 monthly print edition of Byline Times. Subscribe now to get ahead of the curve.
After the infamous 49 days of Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak was identified by the Conservative Party as the safest available pair of hands. He was a Prime Minister who could be trusted to knot his own tie and lace his own shoes, a dependable front-man for the increasingly unbalanced Conservative Brexit belief system. In short, he was Head Boy material.
Boyish and immature were qualities previously observed in Sunak’s male predecessors. Neither David Cameron nor Boris Johnson could quite carry off the role of grown-up, as if at heart both men remained fans of escapades without consequences.
Cameron had his boyishly unlined face and Johnson his unbrushed hair. He had his arch schoolboy’s vocabulary – the fourth-form Latin and ripe English poppycock – and between them the old Etonian pals looked confident of doing what they wanted and not getting caught. Or not being punished if they were.
Sunak’s boyishness is of a slightly different order.
Keen, compliant, he too gives off a sense of arrested development – the old school old boy who never grew up. The first clue is the hair.
Hair statements are a conspicuous feature of 21st Century politics and, in the hothouse of Sunak’s private all-boys boarding school, Winchester College, he’d have understood hairstyles as a form of communication, a way of giving or withdrawing consent. His neat side-parting consents to authority and to the inherently traditional values of any institution founded in 1382.
His daily care with a comb projects a message that once, in his schooldays, was graciously received: Sunak was favoured by the adults and appointed Head Boy.
As Prime Minister, he retains an unmistakable Head Boy Energy.
Importance Ingrained
In April 2022, Rishi Sunak made a donation of at least £100,000 to his old school. In an interview with Sky News, the then Chancellor said that Winchester College “helped make me who I am as a person and I’m sure it helps me to do the job in the way that I do it”. This sounds true enough, especially because since becoming Prime Minister Sunak has brought in former Winchester chums like James Forsyth as his closest advisors.
In the same interview, Sunak thanked Winchester for the “opportunity”, like a contestant on The Apprentice. He isn’t wrong to do so, because in Conservative politics an education at a grand English public school is still today a gateway to the big end-of-series prize.
Sadly for Sunak, achieving his schoolboy ambitions didn’t stop him getting stuck at Head Boy. He applies himself to public speaking, for example, as if no idea or policy is entirely his own, though his attempt at presenting as an adult should be commended considering his age.
If he continues to do his duty and work hard he’s confident of earning adult approval and an impeccable termly report. Because isn’t that what always happens?
Take a look at the Conservatives’ poll ratings, and his own personal favourability with the public, and it would seem not.
Democracy was not a feature of Sunak’s appointment to the big job, now or then.
There was no public vote to make him Prime Minister and, back in the 1990s, Winchester’s Head Boy was anointed by the Head Man. I’ve asked former pupils what the position involved, but most have only vague memories of a ceremonial function, often involving Latin. No one remembers clearly what these Head Boys did (there were two of them, which Sunak has never managed to mention) and they tended to be ‘anonymous’.
I imagine it all felt much grander and more important to those who were actually chosen; a once-and-forever Head Boyness ingrained for the rest of a Head Boyish life.
From now on, Sunak was not to be criticised but congratulated. He could have been forgiven, aged 18, for looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. As Head Boy, his presence around the quads and classrooms was exaggerated in size, at least to himself. Looking ahead, the future appeared smaller and less simple.
Now, from 2024, he can look back with the telescope the right way round – he’s learned that much at least – and school is magnified to look like the best days of his life. Worth a gift of a hundred thousand pounds, at least.
In his carefully curated biography – let’s call it the ‘Head Boy of Winchester College’ – is a widely-known, self-publicised fact about Rishi Sunak. It’s a boast he doesn’t recognise as a curse. If he did, he’d never have made Head Boy in the first place. Nor, as a schoolboy, could he have ingratiated himself so successfully if he hadn’t mastered an indifference to glaring class injustices or to the texture and traction of contemporary reality, which was refused entry at the Winchester College gates.
Sunak was proud to represent 800 years of elite plunder and token forays into the community. Later, he confirmed his horizons were so narrow and his mind so unquestioning he reliably came back with his gormless £100,000.
Representation Not Responsibility
The Head Boy, by any old school measure, was someone who made the grown-ups happy. Children at boarding schools, like Sunak at Winchester, often find themselves making an unconscious promise to their parents not to fail or get into trouble. A stonking career compensates for the parental ‘sacrifice’ and justifies the family separation.
But every step up the ladder is also an unresolved plea for attention and affection – a condition explored in 1970 by the Jamaican writer and politician Lucille Iremonger. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, like Johnson and Cameron before him, has the Phaeton complex.
Phaeton, in Greek mythology, is a frustrated child of the sun god Helios. He insists on driving his father’s chariot just for one day. When eventually he gets his chance he crashes the chariot, which in the ancient worldview explained why so much of Africa was a desert. According to Iremonger, a hunger for power was the tragic fate of children who suffered a trauma in childhood, and she developed her theory from a study of British prime ministers between 1809 and 1940. Most of them were abandoned by their parents in English private boarding schools. Phaeton’s blind sense of purpose, Iremonger notes, “could lead only to disaster for himself, and possibly for others”.
Pity the eager Head Boy. His character already compromised by boarding school adaptations, he now embraces the corruption of prestige without power. Head Boy is Sunak’s version of Tory immaturity, which like Cameron and Johnson he can use as a reason to be excused.
In front of the COVID Inquiry, for example, he could convince himself he wasn’t included in significant decisions and that, to the best of his recollection, few communications of any importance passed across his desk. He may have been Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he was light on power and responsibility. The Head Boy always is.
What Sunak’s Head Boy persona does bring with it is a brittle neediness. He needs validation, which is what got him the job in the first place. When he isn’t liked, or when he’s challenged, his Head Boy face drops. He gets tetchy and confused when he can’t find the right answer or when his answer isn’t accepted as right.
He’s a good boy, he really is. He’s done well and worked hard, so why doesn’t he get the respect his unelected Head Boy status deserves? Why isn’t he loved? He has no idea, and if a playful Christmas video might help he’ll try it. It turns out he’s not very good at playful, not after so many years of pretending to be fully grown-up.
Due to his immense personal wealth, but also due to his schooling, Rishi Sunak is vulnerable to accusations that he’s out of touch. During his Sky News interview, for example, he appeared unaware of the fact that he was echoing the more hapless contestants from The Apprentice. Those who thank Lord Sugar for the opportunity are the ones about to leave the show.
Thank you for the opportunity, Winchester College. Sorry I couldn’t have done better.
Richard Beard is the author of ‘Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England’
Taxpayer to Pay for Radon Crisis at Prison Owned by Duchy of Cornwall – Despite Government Giving It £1.5 Million a Year in Rent
Taxpayers will foot the bill for making HMP Dartmoor safe from deadly radon gas – despite the Government paying the Duchy of Cornwall £1.5 million a year to rent the jail, Byline Times can reveal.
This newspaper revealed in January that 96 inmates in two of the six wings of Britain’s oldest jail – owned by Prince William – were being “temporarily” evacuated over fears of poisoning from the gas, which kills 1,000 people annually.
It was later reported that the number had increased to 196 inmates amid work to "permanently reduce" radon levels in the category C prison to ensure staff and prisoner safety.
While a spokesman for the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) was unable to say how much or long it would take to fix the issues, a Freedom of Information request by Byline Times has revealed that the entire bill – expected to be several million pounds – will be paid for by UK taxpayers.
While the Duchy of Cornwall receives a considerable sum from the Government to use the prison – and has a 52,450-hectare estate, mostly in the south-west of England, worth more than £1 billion – it will not contribute to repairs.
A MoJ spokesman said that was not a condition of the lease.
The Duchy of Cornwall did not respond to a request for comment.
Radon is the UK’s second-biggest cause of lung cancer behind smoking. The colourless, odourless, gas is present at the 640-prisoner jail due to the decay of uranium in the granite of its bedrock and walls built using the igneous material.
The MoJ said no inmates or staff have suffered adverse health effects at HMP Dartmoor, which houses a museum attraction in its old dairy, visited by 27,000 tourists a year who pay £4 per adult to enter. It does not turn a profit.
The evacuation follows several years of radon monitoring and comes in spite of the introduction of additional airflow and ventilation measures to combat the problem. Byline Times understands pumps will be installed under the prison in Princetown, Devon, to extract the radon and allow the cells to return to regular use.
HMP Dartmoor was set to close due to its underfunded and crumbling state before a Government U-turn in 2021.
Staff shortages had previously led to prisoners being locked in for up to 23 hours a day, with a lack of capital investment causing “safety and security issues for prisoners and staff”, according to the MoJ.
The MoJ declined to say where prisoners had been moved to, but it is another headache for the beleaguered department, which has overseen a sharp rise in inmate numbers since 1990 – a situation described by Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor in December as a “time bomb”.
Rishi Sunak Will Leave a Long List of ‘Big Nasties’ for the Next Government to Clear Up
The next Government will inherit a long list of 'big nasties' from the Conservatives which will cost hundreds of billions of pounds to clear up, a report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, warns today.
After a year when her committee examined projects across Whitehall, the NHS and schools the chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, Dame Meg Hillier, lists what she calls a catalogue of “big nasties – essential spending which cannot be put off”.
The list includes failed projects to tackle crumbling schools, hospitals, public health laboratories, outdated IT and renewing and refurbishing Parliament.
She warns: "All too often, we have seen money misdirected or squandered, not because of corruption, but because of group-think, intransigence, inertia, and cultures which discourage whistle-blowing. On occasion, the scale of failure has been seismic, such as HS2 or Horizon in the Post Office, or the procurement of PPE during Covid. Other times, there has been a systemic failure to be agile and adaptable as events unfolded.”
Unless this is tackled she warns: “my successors as chair of the PAC will be doomed to a cycle of broken promises and wasted cash in perpetuity.”
The report produces eye-watering shortfalls of money showing where short-termism by the present Government has worsened the state of public services.
In schools instead of spending £5.3 billion a year to refurbish or replace crumbling schools attended by 700,000 pupils, the Treasury cut this to £3.1 billion a year increasing the backlog.
In the NHS the backlog of crumbling hospitals has jumped from £4.7 billion to £10.2 billion after the NHS raided the capital programme to keep patient services going. Despite spending £178.3 billion a year patient services are worse, waiting lists longer, particularly for cancer patients who need urgent treatment.
A delayed £530 million programme to modernise public health laboratories which handle the most dangerous diseases such as Ebola and Lassa fever will now cost £3.2 million. Failure to implement it “would present a significant risk to public health,” says the report.
The report says a decision not to decommission 20 nuclear submarines which have been withdrawn from service since 1980 has left the ministry of defence with a £500m maintenance bill and it has run out of space of where to store them. The ministry now has a £7.5 billion future liability to dispose of them.
The Ministry of Justice now has a £900 million maintenance backlog on the prison estate and plans to create 10,000 new prison places have only seen 206 new places.
Some £100 billion of spending by local councils remains unaccountable because of a shortage of auditors and councils like Birmingham, Nottingham, Slough and Thurrock have gone effectively bankrupt.
The country’s main animal health laboratory in Weybridge, Surrey, has “deteriorated at an alarming extent". It has a £2.8 billion piecemeal redevelopment plan over 15 years but if it fails, “the UK will have no capacity to react to new and emerging animal disease threats”.
There are a large number of failures among IT systems across Whitehall -some of them impacting on the general public – notably the DWP underpaying pensioners.
The report says: “DWP has underpaid pensioners £2.5 billion,138 with errors dating back to 1985, and many more pensioners may still be under-claiming. 90% of these underpaid pensioners are women. The errors were due to outdated systems dating back to 1988.”
Public Satisfaction with NHS and Social Care Falls to Record Low
A damning new survey reveals that less than a quarter of people are still satisfied with the NHS, with satisfaction levels around social care also hitting an all-time low.
Satisfaction levels around social care were the worst ever recorded, the Nuffield Trust noted, with just 13% of people questioned thinking they were acceptable.
The annual analysis by the King’s Fund and Nuffield Trust in the past year’s British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) - carried out by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) in 2023 - and released March 27, makes grim reading for anyone who values the NHS and wants it to survive and thrive.
In the survey's 41-year history, this was the first year that less than a quarter of people were “very or quite satisfied” with the NHS. This peaked in 2010, in the last year of the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown government when 7 out of 10 people were satisfied. The fall to 24% was from 29% in 2022, and 53% as recently as 2020.
A new survey on public satisfaction in the NHS and social care has revealed some of the worst statistics ever recorded. Photo: Nuffield Trust and the King's Fund
The top reasons for respondents' dissatisfaction were long waits for GP or hospital appointments, 71%, staff shortages, 54%, and a view that the Government does not spend enough on the health service, 47%.
Respondents’ top priorities for change were making it easier to get a GP appointment, 52%, and increasing the number of staff in the NHS, 51%. Improving waiting times for planned operations, was next at, 47%, and in A&E, 45%.
Every year since 2015, a majority of respondents have said the Government does not spend enough on the health service, but this has hit a new peak of 84%.
Almost half of respondents, 48%, would support the Government increasing taxes and spending more on the NHS, with that view most prevalent in people with the highest household income, while 42% felt taxation and spending should remain the same. Some six per cent wanted cuts.
Of those satisfied with the the level of service, the top reason was because the NHS care is free at the point of use, 66%, followed by it having a good range of services and treatments available, 53%, and the quality of care, 52%.
The BSA results come just weeks after the annual NHS Staff Survey which mirrored public attitudes.
The 2023 survey, which received a massive response rate of over 50%, showed that 30% of respondents felt burnt out by their work, and 34% found it emotionally exhausting. Just over half, 57%, said their organisation took positive action on health and wellbeing.
Less than half felt able to meet the conflicting demands of their work, and only a third felt their workplace had enough staff for them to do their job properly. A quarter said that they never faced unrealistic time pressures.
These are just the conditions to create “moral distress” where staff are coming to work every day, unable to deliver the professional standard of care they want to, knowing they are letting patients down but constrained by a system lacking resources, capacity and staff.
A quarter of NHS workers said that they’d been subject to harassment, abuse, or bullying from members of the public, and another 28% had experienced it from managers or colleagues. Only half of those workers said that they’d reported such incidents.
Only 54% of those surveyed believed their organisation acted without discrimination and with fairness regarding career progression, yet we still have ridiculous weaponisation by the right of culture wards about equality, diversity and inclusion policies, training and a handful of designated staff to manage this clearly needed work.
It is especially concerning after a whole series of public care failings, scandals and inquiries and both a professional duty of candour and transparency (for clinical staff) and a statutory duty of candour for organisational leaders) that only 62% of respondents felt safe speaking up about concerns affecting patient safety in their organisation, and 50% believed that those concerns would be listened to or acted on by managers.
Most concerning of all was the finding that only 61% of respondents would recommend their organisation as a place to work, and only 64% would recommend it as a place for their friends or family to receive care.
Is it any surprise that the NHS has such a retention problem, with so many clinical staff leaving or signalling an intent to leave?
Social Care’s crisis is even more pressing. The annual Skills for Care report on the State of the Social Care Sector and Workforce for 2023 showed that 1 in 10 posts were unfilled and serious problems with retention, due to poor terms, conditions and support, compounded by the impact of immigration rules, pay and competing sectors on recruitment. This, along with the growing crisis in social care and local government funding is making provision unviable.
No wonder public satisfaction with social care is so low, further compounded by it being heavily rationed and means tested, with the Government repeatedly ducking sustainable solutions and a growing gap opening between requests for assessment, care and support and their provision.
What strikes me about these two surveys it that the staff experience - also at an all time low over the past two years’ surveys - and public satisfaction are so closely aligned. The staff know they are working in a broken system, close to a cliff edge, close to a critical transition point from which there may be no return. The public see it. And it is no fun working in a service that the patients and families are so unhappy with.
Among all this gloom, there are some points of hope and unity. The overwhelming majority of BSA respondents expressed high levels of support for the founding principles of the NHS, when asked if they should still apply in 2023: that it should be free of charge when you need it, 91%, primarily funded through taxation, 82%, and available to everyone 82%. There is no clamour for a sea change in funding mechanism or a shift to market-based provision and competition.
As for the staff survey, commitment to the NHS values and spirit remained strong. Nearly 9 in 10 staff thought that their role made a difference to patients, and 7 in 10 said that the care of patients was their organisation’s top priority.
This year's survey shows little difference between what Conservative and Labour voters want to see change - so you'd think the politicians would be pushing at an open-door and act on voters' priorities and the commitment of the staff who are still keeping on keeping on even after the traumas of COVID.