Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

I think that's from Starmer, not in the King's speech which as you say has a little bit of spin but very very little.

[Sheilbh]

Didn't see it but again Sunak's speech apparently quite well received and suitable for King's Speech debate (I've said it before but I think, once he's Sir/Lord Rishi Sunak, he's very comfortably on the path of John Major, Gordon Brown, Theresa May as a well-liked/respected ex-PM).

Picked up by Starmer who responded first with "I want to thank the right honourable gentleman. In every exchange that we've had since the election and in his words today, he has gone well beyond the usual standards of generosity."

I can't help but feel that it is in some way impacted by this being the first transfer of power after January 6, even if only subconsciously. Both sides making this effort - as I say possibly sub-consciously - thinking of the US and Trump and even the assassination attempt.

[Sheilbh]

First report from the covid inquiry:

State's 'fatal strategic flaws' during Covid are laid bare
The Covid-19 inquiry has called for a series of reforms after concluding that civil service groupthink and bureaucracy contributed to mass death and suffering
Eleanor Hayward, Health Editor | Tom Whipple, Science Editor
Thursday July 18 2024, 5.00pm, The Times

Vaccinators wait to give people their jabs. The public inquiry heard there was a "dangerously mistaken" belief in government in 2019 that the UK was one of the best-prepared countries in the world for a pandemic
THE TIMES

The state "failed its citizens" during the pandemic when groupthink and bureaucracy contributed to mass death and suffering, the Covid-19 inquiry has concluded.

Several "fatal strategic flaws" in the government and civil service were laid bare by the first official report into the UK's handling of the pandemic.

Baroness Hallett, chairwoman of the public inquiry, said that radical reforms of Whitehall must be implemented to guard against groupthink and mitigate disasters.

These include regularly bringing in "red teams" of outside experts to "scrutinise and challenge" the work of civil servants preparing for national emergencies.

A new cross-governmental body must also be put in charge of preparing for national threats such as pandemics to "streamline the current bureaucracy", Hallett said.

The report, published on Thursday, examined the preparations in the years before the 2020 Covid pandemic and is the first of nine reports by the inquiry. It found that inadequate leadership meant the nation "was ill-prepared for dealing with a catastrophic emergency, let alone the coronavirus pandemic that actually struck".

Ministers often failed to challenge the advice they were given, the report said, while decision-making was bogged down in "needless bureaucracy" and "labyrinthine" systems.

Hallet said: "I have no hesitation in concluding that the processes, planning and policy of the civil contingency structures across the UK failed the citizens of all four nations. There were serious errors on the part of the state and serious flaws in our civil emergency systems. This cannot be allowed to happen again."

She made ten key recommendations and said they must be implemented to ensure that the deaths of more than 235,000 people in Britain during the pandemic were not "in vain".

"There must be radical reform. Never again can a disease be allowed to lead to so many deaths and so much suffering," Hallett said, adding that the inquiry team would "liaise closely with relevant government departments".

The prime minister responded by saying that the government would "carefully consider the recommendations". Sir Keir Starmer said: "Today's report confirms what many have always believed — that the UK was under-prepared for Covid-19, and that process, planning and policy across all four nations failed UK citizens.

"The safety and security of the country should always be the first priority, and this government is committed to learning the lessons from the inquiry and putting better measures in place to protect and prepare us from the impact of any future pandemic."

The Covid inquiry was established in June 2022 and is expected to keep hearing evidence until summer 2026. The first report, into resilience and preparedness, is among nine modules being examined. The second report, focusing on political decision-making in Boris Johnson's government, will be published next year.

The 217-page document was based on evidence from 213 witnesses. It detailed how the government's sole pandemic strategy, from 2011, focused on flu rather than a more lethal coronvairus.

This meant it had to be abandoned as soon as Covid-19 struck. The government had also failed to consider the possibility of a lockdown, meaning that no analysis had been done of the economic and social harms of shutting down society. They also had no test-and-trace strategy.

Hallett said that the economic and social harms of lockdowns were "immense" and she highlighted the fact that millions of people had missed out on NHS treatment for other conditions.

"Had the UK been better prepared for and more resilient to the pandemic, some of that financial and human cost may have been avoided," the report said.

Hallett said there was a "dangerously mistaken" widespread belief in government in 2019 that the UK was one of the best-prepared countries in the world for a pandemic. In reality, poor planning, combined with austerity cuts and high rates of obesity and heart disease, had left it particularly vulnerable.

Ministers "were not presented with a broad enough range of scientific opinion and policy options, and failed to challenge sufficiently the advice they did receive from officials and advisers" in the years before the pandemic, the inquiry found.

It highlighted the fact that a number of key witnesses "explicitly attributed at least some blame for the UK's lack of pandemic preparedness on groupthink", including Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, the former prime minister, and the former chancellors George Osborne and Jeremy Hunt, who also served as health secretary.

The report said: "The essential antidote to 'groupthink' is external scrutiny, oversight and challenge to the prevailing institutions involved with pandemic preparedness."

Hallett said that external groups of experts — or "red teams" — should be brought in to "challenge orthodoxy" in the government and civil service. She also called for pandemic response simulation exercises to be conducted every three years, with findings published in full.

Hallet said that "it is not a question of 'if' another pandemic will strike, but 'when'" and that she expected the government to act quickly on all her recommendations.

The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK said that "failure to prepare is indefensible" and called for the creation of a dedicated minister to oversee preparedness for a future crisis. "We ask for the government to produce a plan to address health inequalities, and in its first 100 days conduct a cross-departmental audit into pandemic preparedness," a spokeswoman said.

The inquiry's ten recommendations

1. The government should establish a "whole system" committee responsible for overseeing preparations for emergencies.
Advertisement
2. The Cabinet Office, not the Department of Health, should be put in charge of preparing for pandemics.
3. The government must adopt a new approach to risk assessment that examines a wider range of options for dealing with emergencies.
4. A strategy for emergencies that includes modelling of the potential health, social and economic impacts of measures, including lockdown, must be developed.
5. New systems must be established to collect health data during pandemics.
6. The response to pandemics must be tested every three years in national exercises simulating the outbreak of a new virus.
7. Detailed findings and reports must be published within three months of each civil emergency.
8. Ministers must update parliament every three years about how they are prepared for emergencies, including analysis of the economic and social costs of actions such as lockdowns to mitigate risks.
9. External "red teams" of experts from outside Whitehall and government should be brought in to challenge and guard against "the known problem of groupthink".
10. A single independent statutory body responsible for whole system of preparedness and response should be created.

[Admiral Yi]

Scrutinizing and challenging is groupthink?

[Sheilbh]

Scrutinizing and challenging is groupthink?

Wut?

[Admiral Yi]

My bad.  I misread.

[The Brain]

My bad.  I misread.

No. You "challenged".

[Josquius]

Riots in Leeds overnight.
Farage is quick to comment on twitter that this is people from the sub continent importing their issues to the UK- the local MP tells him he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
And it seems...yep. Its white people. Seems to have born out of a kid being taken into care.

[Sheilbh]

It looks a bit complicated because it wasn't just Leeds.

Yeah from what I've read the police were called in to support social services and it then escalated. It sounds like an unsupervised baby fell out of a window, so social services were called in. They decided they needed to take the siblings into care temporarily and the family resisted so the police were called - it then escalated. From what I saw the family and a lot of the community in that area are Romanian which was the start (and I couldn't help but wonder if there's maybe a particular Romanian angle there - I don't think care is good anywhere in the world, but growing up I remember charities and stuff about how bad Romanian orphanages specifically were).

But as ever with riots it then spirals into people who just want to have a bit of fun, fight the police, burn some stuff etc which I think was more multi-cultural (literally I saw Black, Asian, White kids in the videos I've seen). And worth shouting out the local Green Councillor Mothin Ali who was actually on the streets stopping rioters from adding things to the fires (literally taking bins and pallets out of their hands), from the looks of it with the help of some other elders (https://x.com/PodcastClipsMD/status/1814067899679510913).

Separately there were clashes with the police in Whitechapel last night. This seems to have escalated from clashes between rival groups of protesters because of what's going on in Bangladesh at the minute. I lived in Whitechapel 10-15 years ago for 5 years and around that time there was a big split in the British Bangladeshi community in the area between supporters and opponents of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh (where she's been the model of illiberal democracy/sliding into authoritarianism). There were rival TV channels, radios, papers, Whitechapel based YouTubers etc - it split the local Labour Party and was part of Lutfur Rahman's rise.

There's been anti-government protests in Bangladesh recently and yesterday a protester was killed by Bangladeshi security forces. This seems to have triggered the rival camps in Whitechapel to get on the streets, then there were clashes and the police trying to intervene and keep the groups separate. I have some sympathy with the Met on this as from what I've seen the police arriving clearly had no idea WTF was going on or how high tempers were running.

[Tamas]

I have a (racist) urge to assume they were Romanian gypsies. Resisting law enforcement / social services and extended family piling in to help is a very standard gypsy thing to do, in Hungary at least. I mean, there are certainly valid reasons why they'd be mistrustful of law enforcement, so I get that bit, but still.

[Sheilbh]

Always enjoy Patrick Maguire's columns - he's up there with Stephen Bush for me as one of the few commentators who actually seems to have any knowledge/understanding of (or contacts in) Labour. But this struck me as interesting - not least because an awful lot of policy decision in politics is fundamentally about relationships and personnel, so this side of things matters:

To decode Starmerism, look to his new hires
Appointment of longstanding confidant Chris Ward to a role at the PM's right hand challenges Blairite mythmaking
Patrick Maguire
Thursday July 18 2024, 9.00pm, The Times

I'd like to tell you about the prime minister's parliamentary private secretary. Over the past fortnight you will have noticed that Sir Keir Starmer has made dozens of appointments to his government: big jobs with big salaries, ministerial cars, seats around the cabinet table and offices on Whitehall. A parliamentary private secretary (PPS), by contrast, is unpaid. They are the bottom-feeders of the ministerial foodchain, bag-carriers and cheerleaders to the cabinet, and it is only this week that Downing Street got round to recruiting them.

The prime minister has appointed two, as has become customary. The first is Liz Twist, who served as a whip in opposition. The second is Chris Ward, the new MP for Brighton Kemptown. They are the family liaison officers of the parliamentary Labour Party: Starmer's eyes and ears among his 410 MPs. If you tune in to prime minister's questions next Wednesday, you will see them sitting behind him. And that is about as familiar as they will become to anyone who does not work in Westminster. For this often gruelling and thankless work they will receive no additional payment.

Why am I telling you this? First, my apologies to Twist: this isn't really about her. The reason the prime minister's choice of PPS is worth noting is because one of them is Ward. His is a name that anyone who wishes to understand Starmer should know. In 2015, Ward was the first person hired to work for Starmer the politician. He knew his boss wanted to lead the Labour Party long before anyone else and was the first person to make plans to that end. In the first year of Starmer's leadership he was deputy chief of staff, writing the leader's speeches and preparing him for PMQs. He has been around long enough to have met Rodney Starmer, the toolmaker of legend. And there is now no job in politics Keir has done without him. Backbencher, shadow immigration minister, shadow Brexit secretary, leader of the opposition, prime minister: no matter his title, Starmer has wanted Ward at his side.

Put like that, it is hardly a shock that Ward has been recalled to the prime minister's inner circle only two weeks after his election to the Commons. But by the standards of recent history it is certainly unusual. The last prime minister to install a newly elected MP as their PPS was Clement Attlee in 1945. More useful analogies are probably to be found in the days of Lord Salisbury, who made his nephew Evelyn Cecil his PPS immediately after he won a by-election in 1898, or William Gladstone, who did the same for his sons Herbert and Willy a few decades earlier. With the exception of Starmer's wife, Victoria, there is nobody working in and around Downing Street who knows the prime minister's mind more intimately than Ward.

So, what's the big deal? It makes perfect sense for a prime minister to have a trusted ally as their PPS. Gordon Brown had the hard-nosed Ian Austin, once his adviser at the Treasury, a man who would have run through walls to defend him. Often, however, prime ministers choose somebody who has something they don't; a distinction of politics, class, or gender. Think of touchy-feely David Cameron and the utterly unreconstructed Desmond Swayne. The other week a Labour MP old enough to remember such things described to me the failsafe measure of a bad week for Tony Blair: he would appear, incongruously, in the Strangers Bar, clutching a half pint of frothy ale as a no-nonsense PPS such as Bruce Grocott or David Hanson acted as his sheepdog.

Starmer can rely on Liz Twist for some of that, but what about Chris Ward? He too knows Labour MPs, having worked among them for a long time in parliament. But really his appointment is about two things: security and continuity. Those two things are particularly important.

Consider the now official history of Starmer's leadership, which goes something like this. He was elected in 2020, naively promising party unity with Corbyn-lite policies. It didn't work and he was walloped at the Hartlepool by-election the following year. At that point he cleared out his office, long-serving aides such as Ward left, and Blairites returned. They junked what remained of the unity project, including the leftish Ten Pledges to Labour members that Ward helped to write, and started to run the show. Only then did Starmer manage to win an election.

In this telling of Labour history there is not really a Starmer project. Often he is described as if he is the non-executive chairman of somebody else's company. Ward himself told Starmer's biographer, Tom Baldwin, earlier this year: "The danger, of course, is that he ultimately ends up trapped by one faction or becomes isolated when the going gets tough. That's always been my biggest fear." If Starmer has wanted for anything since 2021, it is true friends in politics. One of the few, Carolyn Harris, was forced to quit as his PPS just after Hartlepool, amid accusations she had spread rumours about the private lives of shadow cabinet ministers. It is telling that he has now chosen another close confidant to do the job in government.

Ward's appointment is a reminder that for Starmer, politics did not begin in May 2021. He is the prime minister and this is his government. Look at other new recruits: Richard Hermer, the KC who acted as his junior on countless cases, is attorney-general. Sarah Sackman, another barrister friend, became solicitor-general days after her election. Georgia Gould, the former leader of his local council in Camden, was immediately made a minister at the Cabinet Office. Baroness Chapman, whose kitchen was the early HQ for his leadership bid, has a job at the Foreign Office. Stuart Ingham, Starmer's third ever staffer, became head of policy in No 10 despite speculation the job would go to a Whitehall veteran.

These are the true Starmerites. You can call this "jobs for Keir's mates", as one envious Labour MP does, but one could say that of any prime minister. Really these appointments draw the straight line between the politics of 2015, 2020 and 2024 that has since been obscured by Blairite mythmaking. They tell us that in government, Keir may yet feel liberated to govern as the Keir of old: from the soft left, unafraid of economic populism, unburdened by faction. You see that in a King's Speech full of new legislation on workers' rights, nationalised railways and energy, and fiddly reforms to the help the police and judicial system better serve victims of crime. And most of all, you see it in the parliamentary private secretary to the prime minister.

Edit: Oh and also strong reporting in The I that senior Tories and senior Reform figures both expect Braverman to defect now. Apparently of the 5 of the 7 MPs who backed her 2019 leadership pitch are backing other candidates. She's not launched a campaign but it seems very unlikely she'll even have enough support among MPs to get on the ballot.

Additionally those 5 have mainly gone to Robert Jenrick who is pitching to the right. But both Jenrick and Braverman reportedly misjudged the mood by almost immediately jumping into campaign mode - neither have officially launched their campaigns but the day after the election Braverman had her diagnosis in the Telegraph and Jenrick was on the Sunday shows the weekend after. It seems that the Tories are actually planning a longer leadership campaign (the debate is apparently now whether they should have a leader in place at party conference this autumn, or use that as an audition for the final two as in 2005).

[Tamas]

I am sorry but that seems like an extremely long article to explain that Starmer appointed his most trusted advisor as his... main advisor.

[Sheilbh]

Fair.

I think the interesting points are that he cleared house in 2020 after Hartlepool. He ran on a fairly left-wing platform, lost Hartlepool very badly (and by some accounts had a crisis of confidence/considered resigning). Instead he got rid of lots of people around him (though not all - see McSweeney, his key advisor) and reached out to the Blairite/New Labour wing.

Over the last four years he's then ditched every promise he made in the leadership election, possibly indulged in or enabled some light factionalism for the Labour right. On that front I'd add that it's very striking that the only members of his shadow cabinet he didn't appoint to the cabinet are Anneliese Dodds and Emily Thornberry. That means the only people in the cabinet who were willing to work in Corbyn's shadow cabinet are him and Rayner (and both have to be in the cabinet). As I say: ruthless, unprincipled and effective; or very, very naive about the people.

That's why it's interesting he's reaching back to before that shift. And I'd go further. If the ruthless, unprincipled and effective analysis is right - it may be that, having done their job of winning power, the Blairite/New Labour wing maybe need to watch their backs.

Although I have to say the most clarifying moment with Starmer for me was that GB News interview after the Sky News debate. I think it was intended as a bit of a jokey Westminster insider line about why he was so short with people in the audience laughing or groaning about him doing the "my dad was a toolmaker" line (last question at about 5.15 here, as I say I think it's striking how different the answer is from what the interviewer was clearly expecting: https://www.gbnews.com/politics/keir-starmer-dad-job-toolmaker-disrespect) . But Starmer responded really passionately and strongly that he remembers the silence in conversations after his dad said he worked in a factory and that he'd be "turning in his grave" if he heard people laughing about that. He also keeps banging on about "respect" and I think that moment is Starmer's politics (it also resonated with me as my dad also hated "what do you do?" questions because he said they were always about people trying to place you in class terms - though his response "none of your fucking business" didn't always make friends and influence people ).

And relatedly, his is the most state educated cabinet ever - and there's interesting stuff by Tom McTague and in the New Statesman basically arguing that this is the most class-conscious government in decades which I think is true and could be quite interesting.

[Sheilbh]

By the by, just saw the (wild) clip of Emily Maitlis interviewing Kari Lake. Lake casually mentions that the UK as a country is "destroyed" - again I find it so weird how much this has become a common article of faith among right-wing elites in the US. It's really odd.

[garbon]

It doesn't feel that odd. Especially not when you have Conservative and adjacent politicians coming over from the UK for speaking engagements.