uk politics
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.
Outsourcing and Our Hollowed-Out State: A Story of Dependency Without Delivery
This article was first published in the March 2024 monthly print edition of Byline Times.
Subscribe now to get ahead of the curve.
A major part of the pervasive sense that ‘nothing works in Britain anymore’ is that public services don’t work – meaning not just that they are crumbling under pressure, but that they are systemically dysfunctional and crisis-ridden.
So whichever party wins the next election will face demands to fix them, while being constrained by tight ‘fiscal rules’. Whether those constraints are regarded as self-imposed or necessary, their consequences are real.
It’s a lazy cliché to say the solution isn’t just to ‘throw more money’ at public services, which readily morphs into the implication that it isn’t about money at all. That’s absurd.
The cumulative impact of underfunding is undeniable, especially in the austerity years, which saw public spending as a percentage of GDP fall from 46.3% in 2009-2010 to 39.5% in 2019-2020 just before the pandemic.
Yet those figures don’t tell us everything, as they start from the high caused by the financial crisis, whereas it had been 40% for the previous three years. Now, following another large spike caused by the pandemic, public spending stands at about 45% of GDP. That’s less than Germany (49.7%) and much less than France (58.5%), but similar to the Netherlands (44.6%) and Japan (44%), and more than Norway (38.5%).
So, while recognising that international comparisons are tricky, because there are many variables, it is legitimate to ask: why do we have a relatively large state but public services which are widely regarded as inadequate?
Typically, politicians of all governments ascribe this to public sector inefficiency. But this both ignores and justifies the way the British state, including local government, has come to rely on outsourcing public services to the private sector.
Outsourcing has always happened to an extent, as it does in most countries. However, since the 1980s, it has increased precisely as a result of the ideology that the private sector is definitionally more efficient, with market competition the key to making it so.
Crucially, the state has increasingly become a commissioner and regulator of services, rather than a provider – a hollowed-out state rather than a smaller state.
According to an Institute for Government report, there’s no reliable measure of total public services subcontracting, but public sector procurement spending, which includes such subcontracting, now accounts for about a third of total public spending.
The early Thatcher years saw many ancillary services, such as hospital cleaning and council waste collection, outsourced. This intensified under the Major and New Labour Governments, not just in scale but in depth and complexity, so that outsourcing came to include core state functions such as running prisons and hospitals. Some local councils, such as Barnet and Northamptonshire, adopted a model of near-total outsourcing. Even policy-making, the very epicentre of state administration, has become increasingly reliant on consultancy firms.
Some argue this doesn’t matter to the public if the outcome is high quality services. As the New Labour slogan had it, “what matters is what works”. But far too often it doesn’t work.
There have been a litany of scandals and failures in outsourcing – from Army recruitment to the probation service – in every public service sector. Even if not ending in abject collapse, the quality of provision is often poor in the most essential of ways. A recent study in the Lancet, for instance, showed that the outsourcing of NHS services was associated with increases in treatable mortality rates.
Indeed, scratch the surface of just about any public service failure of recent years and outsourcing features as a key cause. The National Audit Office endlessly produces reports documenting the waste involved, which may be ‘only’ a few million pounds here, or a billion there, but it cumulatively adds up to a constant drain on effective service delivery. On top of that, billions end up in the coffers of the super-wealthy, regardless of service failures.
These multiple shortcomings aren’t coincidental or inexplicable.
The fundamental reason for them is that outsourcing is predicated on the free-market theories that profit is a payment for risk and that competition between contractors ensures high standards. In practice, neither is the case.
Risk is never really transferred to the contractor when it relates to core public services, which the Government will always, ultimately, have to deliver. A high-profile example was the need to use troops to provide security at the 2012 London Olympics because the contractor, G4S, failed to provide enough staff. In less high-profile cases, the risk is borne by users, who have to cope when services aren’t delivered to a decent standard.
Equally, the market isn’t really a competitive one. It is an oligopoly whereby a handful of firms, despite their repeated service failures, continue to be awarded new contracts. That’s partly because of the byzantine nature of the bidding processes, which effectively excludes all but the big outsourcing specialists.
It’s also because of cronyism and the quasi-corruption of a weakly-policed ‘revolving door’ between the politicians and civil servants who commission services and the firms that bid for contracts. This not only means that service delivery is more likely to be inadequate, it also reduces political accountability for such inadequacy. It makes blame-shifting easier, while making it harder to know what is being done with public money because contracts are typically shrouded in commercial confidentiality.
Many of these deficiencies were exposed by the spectacular collapse of outsourcing giant Carillion in 2018. Some thought this would be a turning point and, to a limited extent, it was. Since then, the Government has been more cautious about outsourcing, and there has even been a degree of insourcing, with the reversal of the disastrous outsourcing of the probation service being a major example.
But the Carillion debacle also revealed just how reliant the British state has become on the remaining few large firms, some of which are even more deeply embedded than it was in service delivery. What may have started as a convenience has become a dependence.
Certainly, for all that the shine may have come off it, outsourcing continues across a whole swathe of public services.
The Conservatives had a chance to address some of these issues when the party passed last year’s Procurement Act. This, for once, was accurately billed as an opportunity to use post-Brexit freedoms because the UK has left the EU public procurement framework. However, the Government refused to make private contractors liable to Freedom of Information requests or to create an independent body to evaluate the value for money of contracts awarded. It also ignored demands for a public interest test to be applied to public service outsourcing.
So there is now both an opportunity and a challenge for the expected incoming Labour government.
Locally, when Labour took control of Barnet in 2022, it comprehensively reversed the “failed experiment” of its ‘EasyCouncil’ model. Nationally, in her conference speech the same year, Deputy Leader Angela Rayner promised “the biggest wave of insourcing for a generation” if Labour comes to power, and there have been suggestions of reforms to the procurement system. Sticking to this in government may be another matter.
Outsourcing can be tempting as it sometimes creates superficial savings in departmental budgets, even if it displaces costs elsewhere. Moreover, there are already reports of outsourcing firms lobbying the party.
There will always be a place for outsourcing some public services to private contractors. But, some recent reversals notwithstanding, the scale and depth of its use over the past four decades has created the worst of all worlds: the inefficiency and lack of market accountability which the right associate with the public sector, and the greed and lack of public accountability which the left associate with the private sector.
That won’t be easy to unpick, but doing so would go some way to resolving the paradox of having an ostensibly relatively large state and yet public services which do not work.
Chris Grey is Emeritus Professor of Business and Management Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He writes the Brexit & Beyond blog and is the author of Brexit Unfolded
The Conservative Party’s Disinformation Machine
"There needs to be greater awareness among the public of the risks [of online disinformation]” the Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden told MPs on Monday, adding that citizens should make themselves aware of the “need to treat images [online] with much more scepticism”.
Yet within minutes of Dowden warning about rogue states spreading disinformation , the Conservative Party had released its own attack advert falsely claiming that London had become a “crime capital of the world”.
The video, which later had to be deleted and re-edited after social media users pointed out it had been illustrated with footage from a terror scare in New York, is still available online despite containing a series of other falsehoods.
It's opening sequencecontinues to suggest that London has now become so dangerous that citizens have been forced to either stay at home or “go underground”. This is obviously untrue.
In fact the latest crime stats actually show that London is among the safest cities in the world, with violent crimes lower than they are in England as a whole.
And while the video claimed that Khan had “seized power” in the city, he had in fact won two mayoral elections by a healthy margin and is currently forecast to win a third by an even larger distance.
The Conservative party’s misinformation video was also linked to a new website detailing claims of what “Life under Labour” would look like.
One of the pictures used to demonstrate this supposed dereliction being experienced under the opposition, was of derelict housing in a Peterborough - a city which until recently was Conservative-led and is now independent, without any Labour control.
A source close to Sadiq Khan told Byline Times that the party’s latest attack on him, led by their candidate Susan Hall, was “true to form for the Tory campaign. It’s a deeply misleading attack, intentionally talking down London from a candidate who appears to have no love for the city she aspires to lead.”
The video is not a one off, however. In recent days Hall has repeatedly tied crime rates in the city to Khan's closure of a number of police stations to Londoners, while refusing to acknowledge that the closure programme actually began under the last Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson.
Not everyone in the party appears willing to go along with such misinformation, however.
The party’s former Minister for London, whose bid to become their candidate for City Hall was reportedly blocked by Rishi Sunak, shared his discomfort with the party's latest attack ad.
A post shared on X by Scully, attacked the “deeply negative video” about London and warned that the party should not be “disrespectful to Londoners”.
Yet showing such disrespect to this city of eight million people appears to be a big part of the Conservative party's political strategy.
'A Dog Whistle in a City With No Dogs'
Despite briefings from both side that the race between Khan and Hall is close, recent polls suggest that the Labour incumbent is more than 20 points ahead of his rival. As a result, the Conservatives appear to be putting very little effort into their ground campaign.
At her campaign launch last weekend, in what appeared to be a car park in Uxbridge, Hall was not joined by Rishi Sunak, or any other senior Cabinet minister. And whereas Khan’s own launch last week was accompanied by Keir Starmer and attended by multiple media outlets, the Conservative party appears to have deliberately excluded any journalists from attending Hall’s launch.
A spokesman for Hall did not respond to a request for comment on why journalists had been excluded.
However, while the Conservatives appear to have abandoned any real hope of fairly defeating Khan, they do appear determined to continue using the city as a tool for their campaign in the rest of the country.
By portraying London and other Labour-led cities such as Birmingham, as crime-ridden hellscapes, no matter what the facts actually show, the party is attempting to send out a dog-whistle message to its potential supporters in other parts of the country.
This strategy, which includes the Prime Minister regularly mocking Keir Starmer’s own London background, is a clear attempt to do down the UK’s capital city in an attempt to win votes elsewhere.
This strategy has sometimes backfired, most recently when the party’s then Deputy Chairman Lee Anderson falsely accused London’s Muslim mayor of being in league with Islamic extremists. However, it is not a new one.
When Khan first stood to win back City Hall for Labour in 2016, the Conservatives subjected him to a sustained campaign attempting to tie him to Islamic extremism. At the time one senior London Conservative described it to me as being a "Dog whistle campaign in a city with no dogs".
Yet while such dog whistle misinformation may have had little effect on Londoners themselves, Rishi Sunak and his party still appear to believe that it will have an impact elsewhere.
Just like Brexit campaign, which relied on spreading false claims about millions of Turks heading the UK, the Conservative party's latest campaign is designed to play on the worst prejudices of swing voters, while abandoning any interest in accuracy or the truth.
So while we have heard much from the Government in recent weeks about the threats of deep fakes and online 'extremism', the reality is that when it comes to inciting division and spreading misinformation, there are few parties who have proven more adept at it than the Conservative party.
‘Mental Health is the Elephant in the Room When It Comes to Prioritising Economic Growth’
Despite mental health being arguably the most significant health crisis facing the UK, Jeremy Hunt didn't mention it once during his Spring Budget.
One in four people in the UK are affected by mental health, with mental illness costing the country an estimated £118 billion annually – equivalent to 5% of GDP.
According to NHS data, the number of people in contact with mental health services has increased by almost 500,000 since 2020.
For these reasons, mental health charities did not welcome the Budget.
Mind was particularly critical of the decision not to commit more funding to the roll-out of 'Right Care, Right Person’, an initiative that aims to ensure that the right agency deals with health-related calls, rather than police forces being the default first responders.
"It is simply impossible to take a million hours of support out of the system without replacing it with investment," the charity said. "Failing to properly fund NHS mental health crisis services while instructing police forces to step back from mental health calls is an unsafe and frankly irresponsible decision."
Given that the NHS is facing extreme challenges in almost every aspect of its running, it does not have the capacity to handle the increasing number of people in the UK reaching crisis point with their mental health.
The Budget promised to deliver an NHS productivity plan, by making its technology more efficient and reducing healthcare time on admin. While this may ease time pressure for healthcare workers, it is not focused enough to address the broader, more systemic issue of underfunding and under-resourcing.
A recent British Medical Association report highlights an additional problem: mental health professionals are becoming so disillusioned that they are unable to work themselves. In September 2023, one in seven medical posts in NHS mental health trusts were vacant.
According to a report shared with The Independent on March 25, emergency departments are so overwhelmed, A&E staff are unable to look after the most vulnerable mental health patients or treat them with compassion. According to medical records, more than 40% of patients who needed emergency care due to self-harm or suicide attempts received no compassionate care, the newspaper reported.
It appears as if the Conservatives view our mental health crisis as a primarily financial burden, reprimanding the growing population of people out of work, many for mental ill-health.
The Autumn 2023 Budget, for example, announced the Government’s plan for short-term changes to how the Department for Work and Pensions classifies who is fit to work. It proposed stricter sanctions for people previously deemed unable to work, potentially pushing those who are too mentally unwell back into work to avoid losing access to support.
The driving force for these changes seems to be primarily one of labour, productivity, and money rather than addressing the underlying socio-economic factors such as, but not exclusively, racism, homelessness, poverty, and sexism.
People under 25 seem to bear the brunt of these pressures.
A week before Hunt's Budget, Young Minds delivered an open letter to the Chancellor, signed by 15,000 campaigners, urging the Government to invest in early intervention hubs for young people struggling with mental health.
Meanwhile, a new report published by the Children’s Commissioner showed that more than a quarter of a million children and young people are awaiting mental health support, and referrals for under-18s are up by 53%.
According to the Mental Health Foundation, 50% of mental health conditions emerge by the age of 15 and 75% by 24, so early intervention could help prevent severe mental health issues which may impact work and life quality into adulthood.
Responding the the Budget, Laura Bunt, chief executive at YoungMinds said, “Ultimately, until we focus on the systemic drivers of poor mental health, we will be fighting a broken system. We need a plan that works across Government, one that prioritises early intervention and prevention; we need this Government to wake up and take steps to stop this crisis from getting worse.”
The Government has also repeatedly fallen short on promises to deliver on mental health reform.
A previous commitment to a 10-year mental health plan to "level-up mental health across the country and put mental and physical health on an equal footing" was scrapped and absorbed into a ‘Major Conditions Strategy’. That aimed to tackle wider ill-health and removed the focus on mental health.
Recently announced National Insurance cuts will also do little to help those with low incomes, providing almost no support for those on the lowest threshold. Financial insecurity is a crucial indicator of poor mental health. Children from the poorest 20% of households in England are almost four times more likely to have serious mental health difficulties by age 11 than those from the wealthiest 20%.
Fazilet Hadi, head of policy at Disability Rights UK, told Byline Times that the Budget “totally ignored the deepening poverty and lack of support being experienced by millions of disabled people, including those experiencing mental distress".
"There are to be no further cost of living payments and the Household Support Fund, which enables councils to give discretionary payments, is only extended by six months,” she added.
The burgeoning mental health crisis is evident, with a high cost to the long-term productivity and growth the Conservative Party desires. Unless the Government prioritises mental health service funding and effective measures supporting the young and most vulnerable are in place, the crisis will only get worse.
‘Why We Will Apply to Take Ofcom to Court Unless It Explains Its Approach to GB News’
Readers of Byline Times are likely to have been among the many who have complained to Ofcom about GB News and its partisan political stance.
Byline Times itself has repeatedly scrutinised the broadcast regulator’s unwillingness to enforce the impartiality requirements of its Broadcasting Code, other than administering a few slaps on the wrist for breaches so glaring and egregious that they could not be ignored or excused.
It has also attempted to establish the reasons for Ofcom’s forbearance.
We may be about to find out a bit more about what’s going on at Ofcom’s Riverside House HQ as I have teamed up with the Good Law Project to take the first step in a legal process, putting the regulator on notice that we intend to apply for a judicial review of its approach to GB News if Ofcom does not make it clear that it has not changed its policy in the case of smaller or non-public service broadcasters.
In particular, holding them to different standards from those governing the public service broadcasters as far as impartiality is concerned – something which the Code does not appear to permit.
What finally prompted this action were remarks by Ofcom's CEO Dame Melanie Dawes in an interview with Sky News on 13 March. In it, she stated that its requirement for due impartiality was not "an absolute test of equal balance" but has to be achieved "in a way that’s appropriate for the audience expectation, in a way that’s appropriate for the subject matter. We expect a range of views to be brought to bear, rather than just one single view or small cluster of views". This, she explained, "can be done… in lots and lots of different ways".
But, crucially, she then added: "The standard for someone like the BBC, which reaches still, 70% of the TV viewing audience for news is a different one from that of a channel that has an audience of maybe 4% or 5% of a of the viewing public. We expect different things and I think that's appropriate."
She then went on to make a distinction between different kinds of broadcasters.
On the one hand, there are the public service broadcasters and Sky News, with their "pretty scrupulous approach to impartially", their "high standards… underpinned by the Broadcasting Code", and the "high levels of trust" that people have in them.
On the other, there are now channels "that can present the news from a particular perspective. It’s not about the overall output of a channel, as long as for each programme there is a sufficient range of views brought to bear. And I think that that allows a level of diversity and plurality in provision to be brought to the viewing public".
It is our case that Dame Melanie is proposing that channels with relatively low audience figures (although it should be pointed out that GB News still reaches millions of citizens) are held to a different standard of impartiality from that applying to the public service broadcasters.
We also argue that, judging by Dame Melanie’s interview, ‘different’ here means less ‘scrupulous’ than the ‘high standards’ underpinned by the Code.
In our letter to Ofcom, we refer to this as the “lower standards for small or non-public service broadcasters approach”.
We are contending that this amounts to a revision of the due impartiality requirements of the Code, that this revision has been undertaken by Ofcom without any form of consultation, and that this runs counter to the 2003 Communications Act.
Among other things, this Act created Ofcom and required it to establish a standards code. Section 319(1) states: "It shall be the duty of Ofcom to set, and from time to time to review and revise, such standards for the content of programmes to be included in television and radio services as appear to them best calculated to secure the standards objectives."
No public consultation on the specific subject of impartiality has taken place since 2007, when Ofcom published the discussion document 'New News, Future News’, which did indeed suggest relaxing the impartiality rules for smaller channels. However, the suggestions were badly received (except, all too predictably, by newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, who at that time was itching to turn Sky News into Fox News UK) and the idea was quietly dropped.
But, as Stewart Purvis, former Ofcom content and standards partner, and Chris Banatvala, Ofcom’s founder director of standards, have pointed out: "It is not for Ofcom but Parliament to decide whether impartiality rules should be weakened, changed or abandoned. If, after public and parliamentary debate, there’s a view that perhaps impartiality should only apply to public service broadcasters, then so be it. But, at the moment, the rules are being changed by the back door."
We are also asking for clarification of the meaning (if any) of Dame Melanie’s statement that due impartiality "is not about the overall output of a channel".
As Ofcom is always at great pains to point out, the Code requires that news programmes in whatever form are presented with 'due’ impartiality – and both the Communications Act and the Code stress that "special impartiality requirements" apply to news and other programmes dealing with "matters of political or industrial controversy and matters relating to current public policy". These are, of course, GB News’ stock-in-trade.
But, although the word ‘due’ is made to do a great deal of heavy lifting in the Code and in its accompanying guidance notes – indeed, threatening to qualify the very notion of impartiality out of existence – nowhere is it suggested that due impartiality turns on the audience share that a particular channel enjoys.
When fining RT £200,000 in July 2019 for breaches of its impartiality rules, Ofcom explicitly stated that, although RT had a relatively small audience of, on average, 2,300 viewers, amounting to a share of total viewing in the UK of 0.03%, "in this context, the extent of a channel’s audience cannot sensibly dictate the gravity of the breach, not least because the due impartiality regime could easily be circumvented and undermined if smaller broadcasters were allowed an effective exemption from generally applied standards".
When RT appealed against the fine, the Court of Appeal stated that "the number of viewers affected by the partial broadcasting is not the point, because Parliament has determined that such broadcasting shall be duly impartial". It also pointed out that the harm caused by partial broadcasting "is not limited to the harm caused to viewers but extends to the harm indirectly caused to members of society generally by the provision of broadcast news and current affairs that lacks due impartiality".
When fining talkSPORT in February 2020 for impartiality breaches in three episodes of a programme presented by George Galloway, Ofcom announced that although it "recognised that the audience for the programmes in question was small when compared to some other radio services", it considered that the three repeated breaches of certain of the impartiality rules in its Code "had the potential to adversely affect those listeners who chose to listen to the relevant programmes and who were therefore presented with coverage of important policy and political matters which denied them an appropriately wide range of viewpoints".
Our case rests largely on the question of whether GB News, as a smaller broadcaster, is being held to different standards from those governing public service broadcasters as far as impartiality is concerned. However, there are also other aspects of Ofcom’s approach which are troubling and are in need of investigation.
Firstly, there is the matter of freedom of expression.
In her oral evidence to the House of Commons’ Culture, Media and Sport Committee last March, Dame Melanie stated that "the phrase 'freedom of expression’ is a very important part of this debate – one that perhaps should be a little bit more prominent".
In the wake of the furore following then Conservative Deputy Chairman Lee Anderson interviewing then Home Secretary Suella Braverman in September 2023 on GB News, in answer to a question about whether the Code was fit for purpose, she was quoted in the Guardian as stating that: "The rules are flexible, they require us to prioritise freedom of expression, which is missing a bit in this conversation, and we feel we’ve got plenty of flexibility."
The only problem here, however, is that the rules do not require Ofcom to ‘prioritise’ freedom of expression – they merely require it to take into consideration Articles 9 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights when making their judgments. In point of fact, however, they should be compliant with these articles.
In any case, the idea of freedom of expression championed by Dame Melanie, and also by Ofcom Chair Lord Michael Grade, seems to echo that of Elon Musk and his fellow ‘free speech fundamentalists’ – namely that rules governing any speech on any platform should be at the very least relaxed, regardless of its provenance and the damage it might inflict on others, or on public and democratic life in general.
Second, there is the idea that what Ofcom really wants is that viewers should be able to access views other than those that they encounter on the public service broadcasting channels. So, for example, in her appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Dame Melanie said that "we are always thinking about freedom of expression here and do not want to see just a single, monocultural – a mono-representation of views on British TV. When you compare what you get in the UK with what you see in America, which is unregulated, it is very, very different".
Similarly, in her Sky News interview, she remarked that "it’s very important that we uphold freedom of expression. And that’s the freedom of the broadcaster to broadcast and to express, if you like, their creativity in their journalistic skill in multiple different ways. But it’s also the freedom of the viewer to receive a range of different formats and opinions".
Subtextual it may be, but lurking behind these pronouncements there seems to be the highly questionable assumption that the public service broadcasters are beaming at their viewers a particular view of the world. And, in the current 'culture war’ climate, one strongly suspects that the ‘view’ that Ofcom has in its sights is that of the dread ‘metropolitan liberal elite’.
It’s almost as if the real problems are seen as lying with the allegedly out-of-touch public service broadcasters, and particularly the BBC (which Ofcom now regulates), while GB News has brought a welcome blast of fresh air to a stale and staid broadcasting environment.
Dame Melanie’s evocation of the variety of representations which are broadcast in the US is a worrying reminder that Fox News was launched there on the back of the canard that it was going to be ‘fair and balanced’ by providing an alternative to the ‘liberal bias’ of the existing news networks. But the truth of the matter is that the latter appear to display such a bias only when viewed from a vertiginously conservative perspective, whereas Fox and the various other populist channels are about as unfair and unbalanced politically and ideologically as it is possible to imagine.
Nonetheless, the Foxification of news and current affairs on British television could well be the result of Ofcom’s apparent rewriting of the impartiality regulations in its Broadcasting Code. Unless, that is, this process can be halted and then thrown into reverse.
Julian Petley is a Honorary Professor of Social and Political Sciences at Brunel University London
Revealed: Met Police ‘Exit Data’ Shows Just How Bad it is to Work there for Some Staff
Black and ethnic minority Metropolitan Police employees are four times more likely to quit due to bullying and harassment than their white colleagues, according to internal data obtained by Byline Times.
The figures, from March 2023, also show employees of colour are five times more likely to resign due to discrimination compared to white colleagues, and that females were three times more likely to resign due to bullying, harassment and discrimination than men.
One-fifth of all female leavers cited bullying and harassment as the reason for quitting, compared to 9% of men.
The findings come after Byline Times reported last month that Amina Ahmed, a senior female Asian Met employee, quit her job citing an “environment [of] discrimination, bullying and harassment”, one week after the National Black Police Association (NBPA) called for a boycott of the Met by people from ethnic minority backgrounds.
NBPA president, Andy George, said that the data on resignations "comes as no shock to our members" as their “lived experiences of working in the Met is one of hostility from colleagues and a lack of support from managers".
George believes that Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley "has tried to engage in a PR exercise" to highlight reforms being made, but "this data shows that things are not as they appear".
“The Met has also taken no action to reduce the disproportionality in the misconduct system despite Baroness Casey highlighting that black officers were 81% more likely to be disciplined," he added.
“The Met must take a step back, confront the reality of racism in the force, and bring about meaningful and impactful changes rather than engaging in a PR campaign which dismisses the experiences of black, Asian and minority ethnic officers and staff”.
Miss Ahmed told Byline Times that black, ethnic minority and female Met employees were leaving “in their droves” due to the “toxic” environment.
The Met responded by saying it was undertaking “extensive work” to “address valid concerns about disproportionality and to provide officers and staff from all backgrounds with the confidence that they will be supported to succeed and progress in their careers”.
The Met’s so-called ‘exit data’, generated during interviews with those leaving in the year ending March 2023 – the same month that Baroness Casey’s report found the force was "systematically misogynist and racist" – revealed that 13% of all leavers had reported having “experienced or witnessed bullying or harassment” in the previous 12 months. The figure rose to 27% across their career in the Met.
It suggests disproportionately high levels of staff who are leaving the Met come from black or ethnic minority backgrounds (26% compared to the 19% of the workforce who are from those communities), or are female (42% compared to the 37% of workforce who are women).
Forty per cent of black and ethnic minority leavers said they had experienced or witnessed bullying or harassment in the past 12 months, rising to 46% across their time on the force. That compares to 11% of white staff.
Almost half (49%) of female leavers said they had experienced or witnessed bullying or harassment during their employment, compared to 19% of men, with 32% having experienced it in the past year, compared to 11% of men.
The Met’s publicly available HR workforce data, published in November 2023, shows that there are no chief superintendents or commanders who are female and from an ethnic minority background. Only 7% of all chief superintendents and commanders are from ethnic minority backgrounds, despite these individuals making up 46% of London’s population.
Despite an uplift in the overall number of police officers, sergeants and inspectors between December 2022 to November 2023, the percentage drawn from ethnic minority backgrounds has remained stagnant, with the biggest uplift in sergeants being those who are white.
The percentage of detective inspectors from ethnic minority backgrounds fell by 7% (from 67 to 62) between December 2022 and November 2023. Only 6% of superintendents are from ethnic minority backgrounds, numbering six compared to 104 who are white.