Thinking about government, money, equality and such like things.

 Well, Nadhim Zahawi has been given the sack. Some are asking why it didn’t happen sooner. Maybe the Prime Minister was afraid of his cabinet falling apart because members of his party, and even of the cabinet itself, are under investigation of one kind or another. His deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, is also under investigation over bullying allegations, after all. And hovering in the background is Boris Johnson, still buzzing around visiting Ukraine, going to international meetings, all the while facing a high-stakes Commons privileges committee inquiry into whether he misled parliament over the Partygate scandal. Not to mention the BBC chairman and the large loan guarantee thing! 

I seem to remember that there was a time when you had to have a certain amount of money and own a certain amount of land before you could vote. Maybe we should have a law saying the people who are ABOVE a certain level of wealth should not be allowed to be in government. But, of course, those rich people would just bring pressure to bear on those in government, as happens via the media and via other means at the moment. 

An Italian friend of mine told me years ago that Britain should be regarded as the home, indeed the birthplace, of modern democracy. After all we had the Magna Carta to look back on. I’ve not seen him for a while and I wonder what he thinks about the state of things now.

Kenan Malik was writing in the Guardian about equality and how we seem to be losing sight of the fact that class difference is much more important than ethnic or gender difference. “The fact that some people of colour are rich and powerful,” American academic Walter Benn Michaels observes, should not be “regarded as a victory for all the people of colour who aren’t”. The same applies to women, of course. 

Malik starts off by quoting Margaret Thatcher who said in 1978, “There is no primary poverty left in this country. There may be poverty because people don’t know how to budget, don’t know how to spend their earnings” but such poverty is the product not of social policy but of “personality defect”. 

She more or less reiterated that belief in a speech in 1996. Would she be able to say it still in 2023, when it has been revealed that Zahawi “carelessly” failed to pay more in tax than most nurses earn in a lifetime. A time when people are working but can’t afford to both eat and turn on the heating.

Mr Malik points out that “One might wonder whether the Daily Mail understood that the reason the top 10% pay half of all income tax is because they own half of the wealth. One might wonder, too, whether an MP from a party whose former leader needed to call on an £800,000 loan because he could not survive on a prime ministerial salary of £164,080 is best placed to lecture nurses earning £30,000 on why they should be grateful for what they get.”

And just to finish off, here’s a link to an article about children arriving hungry at nursery schools.

Some children may get free hours (but not enough) in nursery even before the age when all children qualify for free hours (but again not enough) but the funding from government is insufficient. So prices go up for those paying for nursery places and some mothers are forced to give up work because the cost of childcare makes it untenable. It’s a crazy spiral.

That’s enough for today.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!