Let’s unpick that.

Chloe Laws www.stylist.co.uk

Suella Braverman is on the shortlist of eight MPs currently in the race to become prime minister following the announcement of Boris Johnson’s resignation. If you’re unfamiliar with Braverman, she was appointed as attorney general on 13 February 2020, having been elected as the Conservative MP for Fareham in May 2015. She has consistently voted against laws that promote equality and human rights, including voting against allowing gay marriage in Northern Ireland. 

In a rather grim but perhaps unsurprising move, the MPs’ leadership bids have been focusing on scapegoating minority groups and pitting sections of society against each other rather than, oh, I don’t know, focusing on the cost of living crisis, fixing the economy, supporting the NHS, tackling the climate crisis and a myriad of other things that make it increasingly difficult to live in the UK. 

Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt and Suella Braverman have already signalled their intention to oppose trans equality, weaponising trans rights in an attempt to win lazy political points from those hellbent on attacking some of the most vulnerable people in society. For instance, Sunak has promised a “manifesto for women’s rights” that opposes trans women’s inclusion in sport and the use of gender-inclusive language; meanwhile Mordaunt commented in the past week: “And I am legally a woman. Some people born male and who have been through the gender recognition process are also legally female. That does not mean they are biological women, like me.”

And recently, speaking on ITV News, Braverman has targeted other vulnerable people: “I think we spend too much on welfare. There are too many people in this country who are of working age, who are of good health, and who are choosing to rely on benefits, on taxpayers’ money, on your money, my money, to get by. I don’t think there’s enough rigour. Universal Credit’s been a brilliant thing in stamping out the culture of dependency but there’s further we can go, there’s more we can do.”

Let’s pick this statement – and its hypocrisy apart.     

Braverman has accused people of “choosing to rely on benefits”. She is entitled to a £99,732 cabinet salary on top of her £81,932 pay as Conservative MP for Fareham, Hants. So, her combined salary is likely around £181,600 a year. What is that compared to the average UK salary in 2021/2022? According to the ONS, the average UK salary was £38,131 for a full-time role and £13,549 for a part-time role.

Yet, she claimed £159,000 in expenses last year. Universal Credit for a single person is £4,018.92 for an entire year while she claimed £4,815.59 in expenses for her second home. Given the energy crisis we’re all facing right now and the surging price of bills, it’s worth noting she charged a £3,945 energy bill as expenses. The taxpayer pays for all this. Remember the part of her statement about people ‘choosing to rely on benefits’? 

What about her suggestion that the UK spends “too much’ on welfare”? The government dedicates roughly one-fifth of its GDP to social spending – placing us 17th among OECD countries – around the middle of the pack and hardly what most would see as over-the-top. 

The way Braverman is framing welfare alludes to the well-trodden trope that those claiming benefits are lazy or don’t need them. As poverty continues to rise, this language is dangerous and puts the blame on individuals, rather than a government that has allowed austerity to thrive over the last 11 years. It’s also a misunderstanding of what welfare is – something you’d hope an MP would have a better grasp on. Social spending, aka welfare, covers all social protection, not just working-age benefits – eg pensions and other benefits that are often seen as more ‘socially acceptable’.

Braverman isn’t unique in this regard. As prime minister, Boris Johnson claimed a salary of £75,440 on top of £84,144 for his role as an MP. According to the Financial Times in 2021, he has regularly been heard to say: “I just can’t afford to do this job.” Meanwhile, Sunak is believed to be the richest man in the House of Commons, The Sunday Times Rich List values Sunak and his wife Akshata Murthy’s fortune at £730 million. In Sunak’s campaign to become PM, he’s using ’let’s rebuild the economy’ as a rallying call even though he has been the chancellor for the past three years. 

Almost a third of children in Britain live in poverty. This is something MPs like Braverman and the rest of the Conservative government should be focusing on and working to change. Given the state of the UK right now, we should be increasing welfare to support those in society who need it most, and not attacking people who have to rely on benefits. Personally, I’d rather the tax I pay goes towards those in need, not an MP’s second home. 

Stylist has approached Suella Braverman for comment.

As the Daily Mail highlights that the NHS needs FORTY THOUSAND more hospital beds in England alone to return to pre-pandemic standards of hospital care

• Health Foundation estimates it will cost the taxpayer up to £30billion to scale up
• People’s illnesses are to get more complex by 2030 as the population gets older
• England has fewer beds per person than Lithuania, Poland and Hungary

Royal Cornwall Hospital has once again declared a ‘critical incident’ following delays in discharging patients due to bed blocking. A spokesperson for Cornwall’s largest hospital told CornwallLive about the escalation today (Tuesday, July 12) after reports that ambulances were queueing up outside with emergency patients waiting to be seen.

Edward Church www.cornwalllive.com

The hospital, at Treliske, Truro, has escalated its alert level this high several times in the last few years. Most notoriously, it did so at the outset of the Covid pandemic and in October last year when its emergency department became swamped with patients.

Royal Cornwall Hospital Trust (RCHT) chief executive Steve Williamson said: “As a result of the acute pressure on our hospitals we are stepping up our escalation level to an internal critical incident. The number of people ready to leave our acute and community hospitals but waiting for care home places or care at home has risen by well over 20 percent since April.

“Without these delays, ambulances would not be held, and we would have enough hospital beds to admit people needing emergency and planned care. Although our Covid positive inpatient numbers have doubled in the last week, these patients are mostly in hospital for other reasons and effective infection prevention and control measures mean they are not impacting hugely on the availability of beds.

“Declaring an internal critical incident galvanises system partners to take additional and immediate steps to create capacity to aid the movement of patients through our hospitals and consequently releasing ambulances and their crews. Our population can help too by making sure they make the right choice if they need urgent care, either by contacting their own GP, even if here on holiday, seeing a pharmacist or calling 111 for advice on the most appropriate place for their needs.

“If families have a relative in hospital who they could help to get home sooner by supporting them in their home whilst they get back on their feet, it will release beds for others who need our care. We urge them to talk to the ward team about how we can work together to make that happen.”

The alert means the hospital admits it is overwhelmed. Last weekend, a hospital spokesperson made a public plea for people stay away unless they could not avoid it.

Problems are so bad that it’s being reported that paramedics are spending their whole 12-hour shifts in ambulances in queues at A&E.

As local councils in England continue to feel the sting of over a decade of budget-slashing austerity policies, Brent council has launched an initiative to give residents the power to decide how they spend £2.25m of funding for local projects.

Aina J Khan www.theguardian.com 

The participatory budgeting process was first pioneered in Porto Alegre in Brazil. It has been trialled in Tower Hamlets, but is a first for Brent council which trialled a much smaller version of the initiative in January, with a funding pot of £500,000.

At Brent civic centre on Tuesday evening, the grand hall was abuzz as almost 200 residents streamed in to attend a Dragons’ Den-style event, where each group or individual had three minutes to make a pitch for up to £50,000 of funding.

The initiative, called You Decide, will allocate a £400,000 budget for five localities across the borough, which includes Harlesden, Kilburn, Kingsbury and Kenton, Wembley and Willesden.

“Giving people the opportunity to decide where the money is actually spent on things they want to see in their communities, it’s really empowering,” said Muhammed Butt, the council’s leader.

The funding is split into two pots: one targeted towards social and physical improvements; and a second which aims to support health and wellbeing in the area.

In a series of public consultations, local residents are given the deciding power to vote for projects that will be awarded funding through a voting system that ranks the projects on a scale of one to five, a process overseen by an independent company.

More than 200 grant applications were submitted for the scheme. Tuesday’s selection round resulted in only 12 being awarded funding.

Among them was a consultant dietician, Salma Mehar, 42, who plans to improve health inequalities in the borough with a nutrition education project that aims to provide free nutritional resources for children with biodegradable plates, and eco-toothbrushes made from bamboo and corn starch, both engraved with educational messages around nutrition and oral hygiene.

“Children from lower socio-economic communities generally tend to have poorer health outcomes,” Mehar, a mother-of-two, said. With almost two-thirds of Brent’s population from Bame groups, much of her work has centred around these communities. “They’re the ones who need more education,” she added.

Brent is London’s most diverse borough, but 33% of its population are living in poverty, a rate significantly higher compared to the overall rate of poverty in London. The north-west London borough also has some of the highest childhood obesity rates in London.

During the first wave of coronavirus in June 2020, Brent had the highest age-standardised coronavirus death rate in England and Wales. Excess deaths in the borough were three times the national average.

“Now people have become all of a sudden really interested in health inequalities in certain communities, but I’ve been seeing this for the last 20 years,” said Mehar, who has been promoting health and wellbeing in Bame communities in north-west London for two decades.

“There’s an issue of paying for healthier food, healthier meals, healthier resources. Our aim is to promote and produce resources that are going to be free of charge for these children and their families, but supported by a local council and the government.”

James Jordan, 32, and Jermaine Bishop, 37, were also successful in securing funding for Set Them Up, a foundation that will teach financial literacy on topics including mortgage, rentals and pensions, to students aged 15 to 18.

“We made some silly mistakes when we were younger, when we came out of school, so we’re really trying to highlight safe usage around money and credit,” said Jordan.

Since April 2010, Brent council has been forced to curb its budget by £196m , as government funding it received has been cut by 78%. The borough has metamorphosed over the years as regeneration efforts have transformed its urban spaces.

The funding from the initial scheme in January was taken from the carbon offset fund, which is formed by a charge paid by housing developers who have not met the London mayor’s carbon emissions target on their development. That fund was used for carbon reduction projects in Brent.

The money from Tuesday’s participatory budget event is from the neighbourhood community infrastructure levy, a charge that local councils apply to housing and residential developers, which is reallocated back into local communities.

Whether this new participatory budgeting project will have any tangible impact remains to be seen. But at least for now, the power to change the area is temporarily in the hands of its residents, not just its council.

“It’s democracy in the heart of the community,” Butt said.

Seems to be scratching his bum! – Owl

To put this number in perspective there were 70,000 civilian deaths and 384,000 soldiers killed in combat during the six year course of WWII.

“We got the big calls right” or did we? – Owl

Tom Whipple www.thetimes.co.uk

Over 200,000 people in Britain have now had Covid recorded on their death certificate, according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics.

The milestone comes more than a year after the country reached 150,000 Covid-related deaths towards the end of last winter.

With hospital admissions continuing to rise amid a wave fuelled by a subvariant of Omicron, public health officials expect the toll to increase over the next few weeks.

Simon Clarke, from the University of Reading, said that the latest wave, in which infections are close to record levels, showed the importance of staying on top of the vaccination programme.

“At the moment we have transitioned to a situation where population-wide immunity, delivered largely by vaccination, means that Covid-19’s worst effects are likely to be a mass sickness which keeps people off work, and while this could disrupt public services, it doesn’t fill intensive care units with people struggling to breathe,” he said.

“But we are seeing the virus change and try to squeeze through the gaps in that immunity, so the vaccine producers need to ensure that future boosters take into account those changes to the virus and the government needs to ensure that boosting is comprehensive enough.”

At present the government plans to offer a booster to over-65s in the autumn, as well as those in younger age groups at increased risk. The JCVI, the committee advising the government on vaccinations, does not yet know whether that booster will, for the first time, be tweaked to match the variants. Both Pfizer and Moderna have vaccines in development that are specifically targeted to Omicron.

Sajid Javid, as health secretary, recently indicated that he was looking at extending this booster programme to include those aged over 50. Clarke said that doing so could be money well spent, adding: “A half-baked booster rollout done on the cheap risks not covering enough people and could end up costing the economy more in the long run.”

The 200,000 figure, announced today by the ONS, represents deaths up to June 25. The delay is because the statisticians have to wait for the official death certificates, where doctors mention Covid only if they deem it contributed to someone’s death.

These numbers are separate from the more rapid but less accurate “28-day” measure, in which those dying within 28 days of a positive test are all recorded as Covid deaths — in England this figure is 157,000 and in Wales 7,500. This measure is no longer used in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The latest wave has not translated so far into steeply rising deaths. ONS data shows that total mortality is only slightly higher than expected at this time of the year, although because of the lag from infection to hospitalisation, more deaths are expected.

While scientists do not expect to see peaks anywhere near those encountered pre-vaccination, when there were more than 1,000 Covid deaths a day during the worst periods, some groups remain at risk.

A survey by Blood Cancer UK has found that a quarter of those with the cancer are still only leaving home for essential trips. Treatment for the condition can wipe out the immune system, and more than four fifths of those surveyed by the charity said they were still anxious about Covid.

An estimated half a million Britons are immuno-compromised, meaning they typically have a less strong response to the vaccines.

The organisation called for those who have not gained vaccine protection to be offered Evusheld, an antibody prophylactic.

“The number of people with blood cancer who have died of Covid is shockingly high,” said Gemma Peters, the chief executive of Blood Cancer UK.

“We also know that the effort to avoid coming into contact with the virus has had a huge mental health impact. While it is completely understandable that the country is now getting back to normal life after a horrible two years, this return to normality needs to be accompanied by much more support for those who are still vulnerable to Covid.”

 

It isn’t often that the people of East Devon make a real difference to national politics. 

Martin Shaw, Chair, East Devon Alliance www.midweekherald.co.uk

But I think we can safely say that when voters in Honiton, Seaton and Axminster helped return our first non-Conservative MP last month, we played a major role in forcing Boris Johnson’s grudging commitment to leave Downing Street later this summer.

While everyone knew that Johnson was badly discredited – for his Seaton photo opportunity he lurked at the yacht club end of the beach to avoid bumping into residents – it was only after 22,500 of us voted in the Liberal Democrat, Richard Foord, that enough Tory MPs got the message that sticking with Johnson could cost them their seats.

So our great Devon victory was a vital first step towards getting the country out of its mess.

But the problem is much bigger than Johnson. Most other Conservatives (including virtually all the new contenders to lead the party) excused his behaviour even after we called time on it. And that behaviour itself was just the tip of the iceberg.

When the East Devon Alliance was formed nine years ago to tackle corruption in our district council – after a Conservative councillor was exposed offering planning permission for £25,000 – people did not often use the word ‘corruption’ to describe British politics. We thought East Devon was an exceptionally bad case, the result of a long period of one-party rule.

But now it is routine to describe the national government in this way. During the pandemic, millions of pounds were handed without proper scrutiny to firms linked to ministers’ cronies and Tory donors – while many of the latter, including the oligarch son of the former KGB agent that Johnson met in a Tuscan villa, were awarded peerages. (I wonder if Johnson’s strong support for Ukraine is partly an attempt to compensate for the Tories’ Russian links?)

This self-interested clique at the centre of the Conservative party has scant concern for the real problems of the country and the difficulties facing ordinary people. Their claim that they have ‘got the big calls right’ doesn’t stand up to examination.

The early response to Covid was a shambles and the policy towards care homes was ruled unlawful after EDA’s Cathy Gardner took them to the high court. Indeed the government washed their hands of the pandemic after the third vaccine was rolled out.

Until last week, Sajid Javid presided over an NHS which has never been in a worse state, with six millions waiting for treatment, the ambulance service in crisis, and staff shortages worse than ever.

Similarly, Rishi Sunak delayed and delayed supporting people with their energy prices, and then the help was too little, especially for the people whose benefits he slashed only last year. He has continued the decade of austerity which has made it impossible for local councils to maintain, let alone really improve, public services – even Devon County Council could be at risk of bankruptcy.

Instead of solid work to improve our economy and society, for 12 wasted years the Conservative Party has given us an endless soap opera of rivalries between wealthy, overentitled men (and a few women). 

They serenade us with pretend policies like ‘levelling up’, which no one really knows the meaning of, and which have brought precious little benefit even to the north, let alone to Devon, which has again been taken for granted.

Half of these years have been taken up with the fantasy of Brexit, which has had virtually no practical benefits but has wrecked much of our trade, damaged the fishing industry it was meant to help and divided Europe just when it faces the threat of Putin.

As the soap opera resumes, Tories are telling each other that the next prime minister has to be a Brexiteer. In my view, the next prime minister, like our new MP, should be a non-Conservative.