The press and media in general love bye-elections. They are easy to cover and provide acres of editorial. The Chesham & Amersham poll has been no exception, with pictures of the gurning but otherwise anonymous Liberal leader "smashing" a pile of kiddie's bricks as he demolished the "Blue Wall" (GEDDIT?). Coming so soon after the Tories' success in overturning a long-standing Labour majority in Hartlepool, the result was a useful corrective to Conservative hubris. In leafy Bucks, the Liberals had a personable candidate, mounted a ferocious campaign and capitalised on long standing grumbles about HS2 (the estimated cost of which has doubled to £90bn in 10 years) and the more recent proposals to change planning legislation in favour of mass building in green spaces.
Were any of these factors really decisive? After all, HS2 has been known about for a while and the Liberals are long-standing supporters. Equally, the tide has been running against Nimbyism for years and the Conservative manifesto made it clear the status quo was unsustainable. Yet the Tories won the seat comfortably in the 2019 General Election.
So which of the two bye-elections will be seen in retrospect to have been of the greatest significance? If the Tories win another Labour seat at the bye-election for Batley & Spen, it will reinforce the case for Hartlepool. Certainly the omens for this look good - the West Yorkshire seat is surrounded by others that went "Blue" in 2019 and Labour has already arguably reaped the benefit of the murder of the former MP Jo Cox, although this has not stopped them trying to milk the situation by having Cox's sister stand as their candidate. In the Bucks vote, the Labour candidate lost the party its deposit and Keir Starmer has been all at sea. Yet in future years, the "shock" result in the Home Counties may be seen as the turning point for Boris Johnson and for the governing classes more generally.
Arguably the catalyst for the Amersham result was neither HS2 nor the prospect of thousands of Barratt boxes going up in the already HS2 desecrated countryside. A strong case could be made for the PM's conference call to announce the postponement of the end of lockdown which was preceded by his scarcely less embarrassing performance at the G7 summit in Cornwall. Indeed that whole pointless bean-fest, with its gazillions of police and other self-important "security" gonzos was a perfect emblem for what is wrong with modern governance: the grotesque and expensive over-protection of "leaders"; the carefully "curated" PR photo shoots (complete with Boris's nth child, whose face we are not allowed to see for "safeguarding" reasons); the massive inconvenience of local residents (many of whom were denied access to their roads and homes); the staggering cost (such as lengthening the local runway so that Biden's ridiculous air armada could land); the conceit that "personal chemistry" can solve complex problems, and the utterly banal "communique" which was the sum total of their intellectual effort. One felt for HM in her widow's weeds who, not for the first time, must have wondered "Who are all these stupid people?".
The attempted justification for yet further delay in the ending of increasingly pointless Covid restrictions was a truly shaming event, complete with misleading charts and a failure to answer truthfully the few questions that were allowed. Naturally the "Two Gentlemen of Corona" will take less flack than the PM, who once again demonstrated that he cannot be trusted. It is simply no longer possible to give Johnson nor his craven and inadequate ministers the benefit of the doubt - the PM plainly prefers to cuff it, and hopes that his dishevelled schtick will cover his (and their) complete lack of capacity. Whether it is Covid, immigration, education, the Northern Ireland protocol (a disastrous and asymmetric deal into which the establishment willingly entered, but now regrets) or public spending that is now out-of-control, the uselessness, intrusiveness and lack of accountability of the apparat and the low calibre of its political masters stands comparison with the regime of the last Tsar of Russia. The only mitigation is the vaccine program, the discovery of which was pure serendipity.
Meanwhile the scarcely believable costs of dealing with the pandemic continue to horrify. The £37bn (and counting) Test and Trace program is a proper scandal to which the BBC could usefully apply its so-called "Reality Checkers" that were deployed so liberally to try to discredit the Brexit process. Naturally, no such examination will be attempted given the level of the Beeb's complicity with the "bio-security" agenda of the government's advisors. Instead we are treated to daily graphs of "infections" but no details as to how effective is the "trace" part of the program, which requires people to self-isolate. The answer is probably "not much" given the speed of infection of the new "Delta" variant among the younger un- vaccinated cohort of the population. More effort has gone into educating us to accept a coy name for a mutation that appears to have developed in India, and which was allowed to take hold as HMG dithered about travel bans from the sub-continent earlier in the year . Yet the papers are full of letters from doubly-vaccinated holiday travellers now being harassed by intrusive, random and expensive testing and quarantine "protocols".
Naturally, there is an assumption that we will simply put up with all this nonsense and the now discretionary provision of public services, for which the practitioners still receive full pay. Yet hardly a day goes by without further evidence of the colossally expensive uselessness of the governing and political class. The latest is an habitually gargantuan cock-up in the Ministry of Defence's procurement department, for which the commissioning service chiefs bear as much responsibility as their civilian contractors. The current horror is the Ajax "light tank", which at 42 tonnes is 80% of the weight of the WWII German monster, the Tiger II. Designed to be a (heavily) armoured personnel carrier, only 14 have been delivered so far at a cost of £3.2bn. They are in all shapes and sizes too, as the brass hats bicker as to what they actually need these piles of metal to do. Only recently has it been discovered that "the poor bloody infantry" who will have to use them tend to throw up if the things go at more than walking speed, such are the vibrations. Nearly 600 have been ordered and are, according to the CGS, a core part of the army's "modernisation". What a mess, but you can be sure that various MOD wallahs will still get their KCMG's.
In fairness, the government has at least resisted the £14bn tab that was estimated by the so-called "Education Catch-up Tsar", Sir Kevan Collins, as the cost for putting right nearly 18 months of disruption in the class-room. A full time apparatchik and former CEO of that exemplar of local authority probity, Tower Hamlets, Sir Kevan left in a huff when his builder's estimate was given the bums-rush. Having faced the fierce resistance of the teaching unions to any form of classroom teaching during the pandemic and the half hearted attempts to deliver distance learning in a "safe" way, the government was surely right in doubting whether such a sum would be properly or effectively spent by an unreformed and obstructive educational establishment. But equally, was not Sir Kevan given some proper and achievable objectives before he was allowed to come up with his hasty calculations?
But lest the Scottish government is inclined to crow, the embargoed OECD report on the "Curriculum for Excellence" (CFE) has just been released, now that the Holyrood elections are safely out of the way. To the baffling conundrum as to why such a significant proportion of Scottish children and young adults still leave school functionally illiterate and innumerate, the OECD cheerily states that the Curriculum offers "an inspiring and widely supported philosophy of education". Any one of these descriptions is open to serious challenge and in passages of masterly periphrasis the OECD goes on to describe the implementation of CFE as a complete dog's breakfast. Most damningly of all, it recommends as "next steps" that the CFE "focus on students and their learning progress". 20 years after the great "National Debate" on education, the product of that "debate" has yet to connect with those it is supposed to serve. Ms Sturgeon and her scarcely less able ministers should hang their heads in shame.
Perhaps the poor state of UK education at all levels from nursery to tertiary is the reason why the top of the public and, increasingly, the private sector is stuffed with so many flawed, privileged and entitled people who keep coming around again and again. From page 5 of the Sunday Times Business section grins Charlotte Hogg, 50 year old scion of the expenses-scamming, company destroying and moat clearing Hogg "dynasty". Very embarrassingly, Charlotte had to resign as a newly appointed deputy governor of the Bank of England in 2017 when she failed to disclose an obvious conflict of interest (her brother was a director of Barclays, which makes millions from the arbitrage of interest rates). She "forgot" to tell the Bank because, apparently, " I thought everybody knew, and I hadn't filled in that particular form". Such little details - life is so unfair isn't it? Even the Governor thought it was not really a resigning issue - after all the proles always lie on their mortgage applications don't they? But no matter, by mucking out the stables (she is an able horsewoman) and with the love of her family and friends, she was able to get through the whole "shattering experience" and is now a better leader. Soon after she was appointed head of VISA (Europe), on an undisclosed salary unlikely to be trifling. The conceit that it is our expectations of our public officials rather than her arrogance which was responsible for her little faux pas is scarcely concealed.
Further down the page is a cheery shot of her with Baroness Dido Harding, both nattily attired in jockey silks for a charity horse race. Both are good pals, both served on the Court of the Bank of England and both are the products of a private education and upbringing where all vestiges of humility and self awareness are ruthlessly squeezed out. Fresh from nearly sinking a PLC (TalkTalk), Dido is busily working her way through the confetti spending of Test and Trace, the abject failure of which is already a matter of record, if only to the Parliamentary select committee. Yet such is her chutzpah and mis-placed self esteem, she has publicly put herself forward to succeed Sir Simon Stevens as head of NHS England, who has himself been rewarded for failure with a place in the House of Lords.
Never mind "woke", when are people going to wake up? Across swathes of the public sector, the lack of capacity and moral probity is absolutely staggering. The Tories have been in power one way or another for over a decade, and as with Saint Nicola and her little Green helpers, has absolutely nothing of any long lasting value to show for it. Boris thinks he can still "level up", but even if the market lets him, the ambition will scarcely get us back to levels of well-being that were in place at the end of the last century. Hartlepool was the last gasp of electors who have been serially legged over by politicians of both stripes but who still (amazingly) think that governments are there for the citizens and can spend their way to social justice. Chesham and Amersham shows that the honey moon is well and truly over and that revolutions in Great Britain inevitably start with the "gentry".
