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Rishi Sunak’s Government separates itself further every month from issues that are crucially affecting the lives of people in the UK. Its disconnect from any reality outside the plots and counterplots of the Tory party is now almost total.
Sunak has a policy towards Rwanda, declaring it a safe destination for asylum seekers against all the evidence and a decision by the Supreme Court. The policy absurdly assumes that an Afghan who has survived a perilous 3,500-mile journey from the Hindu Kush, crossing the Channel in a flimsy boat, will be deterred by the limited risk of deportation to Kigali.
The Government likewise has a policy towards the Houthis, the Zaydi Shia de facto rulers of most of Yemen, joining US air strikes against them. Given that the Houthis are among the most bombarded people on the planet, and the Yemeni population enthusiastically supports the attacks on Red Sea shipping, the US/UK action appears risky and counterproductive.
Yet it is less the futility of Sunak’s fixation on his Rwanda and Yemen policies that is damaging than the degree to which they divert attention away from gargantuan real-world problems that are degrading the crumbling British state. Notable among these is the bankruptcy crisis hitting local councils, which now owe an extraordinary £97.8bn to lenders, or £1,400 per person in the UK.
This is a crisis directly affecting everybody in the UK, as councils cut back even further on their shrunken services. The sums involved vary but can be enormous: in Woking, the debt is no less than £19,000 per person. One in five councils may have to issue a Section 114 bankruptcy notice this year. Care services, already cut to the bone, will be reduced further. Woking’s council proposes to shut everything from public toilets to sports pitches.
As local government implodes, the biggest effect is on the most deprived people who need all the help they can get. To find out more about such places I spoke to Paula Spencer, who runs a community centre in Thanington, a poor district beside the River Stour on the western outskirts of Canterbury.
A few years ago, she told me about a rat infestation problem there. “People came to me and said there were rats in their kitchens, rats in their children’s bedrooms, running over kids’ feet,” she said. “Under bathrooms there was raw sewage seeping everywhere.”
Central government cuts to council budgets meant that Canterbury City Council allowed rubbish to accumulate, attracting rats, and it was no longer operating a vermin control service.
I talked to Spencer again this week and asked about the general situation in Thanington, and particularly about the rats. She spoke of black mould spreading in the houses, adding that the rats were still there, “biting children in the face”. The council tried to help, “but they don’t have the money.” It has been a long time since there was a council pest control officer, and “if you can’t afford to feed your kids, you won’t be able to pay a private pest control company £200 to get rid of the rats”.
Cuts in council budgets since 2010 may sound like a dreary topic, but the practical consequence of such austerity measures is children being bitten in the face by rats and their parents being unable to do anything about it. It was bad before, and the bankruptcy or impoverishment of councils means it can only get worse.
What is the Government planning to do in response to this crisis affecting so much of the British population? There is no doubt about the £97.8bn figure for total council debt, which comes from an analysis by the BBC Shared Data Unit. Surely, if Sunak can rustle up policies and devote a great quantity of time to declaring Rwanda safe and doing down the Houthis, he must have a policy to do something about the crippling debt of councils that play a critical role in everyday British life.
Extraordinarily, unlike Rwanda and Yemen, the Government has no policy to save these foundering institutions. “Both the Government and the Labour Opposition should be prepared to explain how they plan to address crumbling local authority finances,” writes Stuart Hoddinott of the Institute for Government think-tank. “So far, neither have given any indication that they have any credible plan.”
What the Government does have is an excuse for what has gone wrong. This sounds convincing, though it is essentially false and misleading.
To understand how it has successfully avoided blame for the debacle, keep in mind the history of the Post Office IT scandal. In both cases, those with power and authority put the blame squarely on the heads of their victims. The Post Office has now been exposed as lying when it accused sub-postmasters of theft. But when it comes to council bankruptcies, the Government has stuck resolutely to its guns by accusing councils of bringing about their own downfall through disastrous investments in dodgy commercial ventures, financed by borrowed money.
The Government has promoted a headline-grabbing story of out-of-their-depth councillors fecklessly spraying money around. Yet it was, in fact, the Government that a dozen years ago encouraged council leaders “to make creative use of reserves” in investing to make up for the reduction in central government funding.
The result was some spectacular risk-taking that crashed with heavy financial losses. Warrington council’s investments included a supermarket in Greater Manchester, solar farms in York, Hull and Cirencester, and a third share in a bank. Woking spent hundreds of millions of pounds on skyscrapers in its town centre.
But poor investment decisions are not even close to being at the heart of councils’ problem: the rising cost of providing services without adequate funds from central government or the ability to raise sufficient taxes locally. “The Government claim that mismanagement is solely to blame for council ‘bankruptcies’ is not credible,” says Hoddinott.
Yet Michael Gove, the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Secretary, appeared before a parliamentary select committee last month – soon after Nottingham council had gone bankrupt – and blithely denied any government responsibility. Nottingham had no risky investments, but Gove stuck adamantly to the Government line that all the bankrupt councils have “had failures of leadership, management and governance, and some have taken risks that were unmerited”.
The Government has got away with this for the same reasons that the Post Office and Fujitsu were able to pretend that hundreds of sub-postmasters were secret fraudsters. Local councils are likewise demonised as hick provincial spendthrifts that plunged into the commercial property market and lost their collective shirts.
As with the sub-postmasters, the fact that most of this had happened outside London fitted in with stereotypes of life outside the metropolis. The local press in Britain has largely disappeared and only Private Eye, as with the Post Office IT scandal, regularly chronicles the downfall of Britain’s local authorities.
No wonder the Government would prefer us to think about Rwanda and the Houthis.
I always dislike writing about elections whose outcome is entirely predictable. What on earth is the point of me writing and others reading a piece confirming what we all already know? A temptation is to make what one writes more interesting by suggesting that the election is more up for grabs than it really is. Another approach to be avoided is to exaggerate the historic importance of the poll result for the future direction of the country.
Donald Trump’s landslide win in the Iowa primary is a classic example of this kind of election in which everything panned out as expected. Everybody said he would win big and he did. Those who said they thought Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis might get somewhere proved to be wishful thinkers.
What does it all mean for the Presidential election in November? Less than might appear because, for all the media brouhaha and funds expended by candidates, the numbers of voters who actually went to the caucus meetings was strikingly small.
Only 56,000 Iowa Republicans voted for Trump out of 752,000 registered Republicans in the state who could have voted. The overall turnout was just 110,000 or 15 per cent of potential voters, indicating that Republicans may not be that enthusiastic for any of the candidates. Their absence could also be explained by the freezing Iowa weather or the fact the election was a foregone conclusion, but this does not fully explain why there was such a sharp fall in Caucus attenders from 187,000 in 2016.
The low number of votes received by Trump and the even smaller number opting for DeSantis and Haley was not obvious to many because reporters and pundits talk in terms of percentages not the raw figures. After all the campaigning, DeSantis garnered just 21,000 and Haley 19,000 votes. Trump won an overwhelming majority, but where were all those fanatical Maga (Make America Great Again) evangelical Christians we had been reading about? What about the quarter of Republicans who say they never vote for Trump?
In the event, Iowa proved almost nothing we did not know before. Trump’s victory was a little more underwhelming that the media coverage suggested. It is almost certain he will be the Republican candidate and Joe Biden’s ability to shoot himself regularly in the foot politically – witness Gaza and Yemen – still works in his favour. But we already knew all that.
The massacre of Gazans continues, but the western media shows less and less interest in the slaughter. It speaks of the normalisation of evil that the bombing and starvation of 2.2 million people is scarcely reported, as it is no longer “new” news.
The Houthi declaration that their attacks on shipping will cease when there is a ceasefire in Gaza is ignored. The US declares them to be terrorists, though their drone, missile and seaborne attacks have yet to kill anybody. Compare this with Gaza where at least 24,285 Palestinians have been killed and 61,154 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Interesting piece in Newsweek about Joe Biden’s campaign workers quitting in droves because of Gaza.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
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