'Britain needs a spring clean - but is anyone up to the job'
On the one hand, a columnist for a Left wing rag such as this should be delighted at the prospect of the Tory party eating itself in what must be its last few months.
If Mark Francois and Suella Braverman are going to indulge their cannibalistic tendencies, ably assisted by that damp old perv Damian Green and a few Church of England squires from the shires, then let's all enjoy the spectacle. Pass the port, and pump up the jam.
But as the Rwanda bill renews its anti-cyclonic journey through Parliament, and Rishi Sunak finds himself short of both bribes and f***s to give, I am far from thrilled about it all.
Because what the Tories are using to eat off, and everyone else is treating as a dance floor, is the festering corpse of what used to be our country. Once they've been cleaned out, is anyone going to fix it?
He'll be sunning himself in California, having destroyed the high street and impoverished millions (HM Treasury)Under the rule of the 6 Tory, or Tory-led, governments of the past 14 years, they have made it almost impossible to be compensated if you are wrongly jailed in a miscarriage of justice; protected statues and criminalised protest; made it harder to vote; announced a Northern Powerhouse and then systematically dismantled anything that might have made it northern or powerful; damaged almost every democratic institution, broken the laws willy-nilly, and fundamentally changed the relationship of Northern Ireland with the rest of the United Kingdom without a single voter's say-so.
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And that's just off the top of my head. When the history books sum up Dishface, May But Can't, Blundering Boris, Untrustworthy Truss and 'Sue Me' Sunak, there'll be whole libraries devoted to the things that were damaged while they were fighting with Europe, fighting the markets, and fighting each other, and we should all be sad that their list of undeniably good and worthy achievements will consist of one single, solitary medal. And they didn't even get that done on time.
On top of the ruins of everything many of us hold dear they have dumped a stinking ordure of racism, division, and pandemic-era selfishness that could be summed up as the sort of attitude that sees people stockpile bog roll, then sell it at a mark-up. The idea that desperate, freezing, wet, non-swimmers who arrive here traumatised from war should be treated harshly, that anyone urging the use of fewer fossil fuels is a terrorist, that those seeking redress are only in it for the money, is pervasive and vicious and flipping everywhere.
And all of that has to be fixed by a government with no money, and an overdue compensation bill the Tories are flat refusing to pay for Windrush, Grenfell, the Post Office, and contaminated blood scandals, which stretch into the billions. Add that to the nuked blood lawsuit which will be arriving at the Ministry of Defence in a few weeks, and you have a fresh new regime bankrupted before it has begun.
On the plus side, he does look a bit more well-scrubbed than Boris Johnson ever managed (Getty Images)How does Labour rebuild that? Can anyone? Could Jesus himself do it, if he was here and someone explained TikTok and trans rights to him first?
It won't matter in the election. According to a poll today paid for by a group of Tory donors, Labour is on course for a 120-seat majority in a 1997-style landslide. They could have saved their money, because the polls have been saying that for two or three years, and the dog outside the pub has known it for even longer.
People are ready for change, just because it's been 14 years never mind the fact Liz Truss invented a new circle of hell. All Keir Starmer has to do to get into Downing Street is talk about some hopey-changey-vaguely-optimistic blah blah, just like Barack Obama did, and he'll be swept in by a nation desperate to believe and who reckon he'll have to do.
But if, once there, that's all he's got, he'll be leading a nation even deeper into despair.
The whole place needs a good buff (AFP via Getty Images)You can't fix what's been knackered beyond repair, especially if there's no money in the pot. All you can do is start afresh, invent a new solution: replace, rather than restore. And that means what Franklin D Roosevelt called 'The New Deal', when he came to power as US president following the Great Depression, and brought in banking reform and protections for the unemployed, young people, and the elderly.
Britain needs its own New Deal - a new broom, sweeping the failures of the past away. A legal duty of candour on public officials to prevent cover-ups, a Public Advocate to stand up for the little guy who gets chewed up in the mincer of the state, hard-and-fast rules about budgets for schools and hospitals, a National Care Service to bring down NHS costs and bed-blocking, an asylum seeker visa scheme, renewable energy jobs and subsidies, legislative bans on VIP lanes for govt contracts, and for the love of Mike, a sense that we are still what we were, and can be what we dream of.
Every pandemic in history has been followed by sweeping social change. The Black Death led to the Peasants' Revolt, higher wages and the end of serfdom, Spanish flu was followed by widespread democratic reforms, and HIV led to scientific discoveries, gay rights, and same-sex marriage.
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What must come out of Covid is what we had in Covid: community, respect for public servants, and the widespread belief that you don't make anything better by cutting everything off. Covid showed that instinct lies dormant within us, and we'd be much happier if there was more of it around.
Britain will never be - and doesn't want to be - a socialist utopia. But it really does want to be nicer than this. The whole place needs a clean, and whether he's up to the job or not, it looks like Keir Starmer is the only guy with something even resembling a broom.
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