Sunday, 30th June, 2024
Warm but a little bit overcast this morning. Wish it would rain but it won’t. We’re not forecast for any until next Sunday. Up late this morning – well 7.15 am – because we weren’t in bed until 1.00 am. I have absolutely no idea why but we watched the last 30 mins of the Glastonbury performance of Coldplay last night. I know absolutely nothing about them, have never listened to them or watched them before. Actually, I was attracted to the pictures of a lit up Glastonbury sky with thousands of wristbands and pyrotechnics. It looked fantastic on a big TV as if we were actually there.
Of course we weren’t. I have never been to a Festival in my life. I hate huge, noisy, sweaty crowds like that. I prefer to watch in comfort as I did last night. When it was over, I had to watch the Newspaper review before going to bed.
If you have been following politics in general and this election campaign in particular as I have, you will be very familiar with the Ming Vase Strategy. Can you imagine the cost of dropping one and seeing it smashed into tiny pieces at your feet. That’s what happened to Neil Kinnock and that’s what happened to Jeremy Corbyn who didn’t take care but went for broke … literally.
This election was always likely to be a Labour victory after 14 yeas of these lunatic Tories and their selfish, greedy politics. However, there have been so few Labour governments in the past 100 years that they have to tread softly and carefully. They have had to avoid dropping the Ming Vase of Victory.
Since I was born in 1951, when the Attlee government (1945–1951), which brought in the National Health Service, narrowly lost to the Conservatives, it wasn’t until Harold Wilson’s win (1964–1970) that I first experienced a Labour government which gave me the chance to properly educate myself through the Open University. After 4 years in Opposition, Wilson and Labour (1974 – 1979) were returned to Office as Callaghan succeeded. Five years of a Tory government were followed by Blair/Brown Labour government (1997 – 2010). Labour hasn’t been in power since.
Labour has been in power for just 24 of the past 73 years. We are about to elect it for the next 15 years. In that time, it will transform Britain and re-join the EU. It will bring in a green economy and nationalise essential services. It will improve public services and reduce cronyism and government corruption. It will broaden the franchise to provide 16 yr olds with the vote and may even bring in Proportional Representation to ensure the Tories never get back into power.
I suspect Keir Starmer will be succeeded by Wes Streeting and by 2039, when I am 88, Dear Reader, the mantra will be Time for a Change.
Monday, 1st July, 2024
Welcome to the new month. Farewell to June 2024. It wasn’t the best anyway. So many things missing! At least this will be a good week. We will vote these dire Tories out and install your caring, sharing Co-op party into government. Then, on Saturday under a new government, England will suddenly rediscover their footballing ability and thrash Switzerland.
If you do nothing else today, do this. Look at your energy supplier’s tariffs and compare them with others you could get. You should do that regularly anyway but, today, Energy prices went down by about 7% nationally because of the price cap readjustment. They will almost certainly go back up towards the end of the year. Fix now and you will save.
I’ve been with British Gas Dual Fuel for the past 8 years (You’re getting excited now, aren’t you Dear Reader?) because they are a class act. Now, they are about the cheapest around and I’ve fixed until September 2025 …. when I’ll be 74!
It’s getting really scary now. Yesterday, I was talking about the Ming Vase Strategy of the Election Campaign. Labour have a huge lead and have been tiptoeing across the weeks, carrying the Ming Vase of public opinion. To all our relief, they haven’t dropped it. They still hold their 20% lead that they started out with. They won’t drop it now but will I? Will we?
Old age is proving very much like the Ming Vase which has to be carried carefully. Our bodies and minds are delicate and increasingly droppable as we age. I am constantly monitoring, checking, trying again. I’ve never had so many things go wrong with me as I have in the past 5 years. Feels like we are fighting off the signs of age in a constant battle.
I do stamina work which raises my heart rate but I need to do more resistance work to increase my muscle mass – rowing and weight lifting. I don’t use our rower enough and I haven’t used the dumb bells for ages. I am going to force myself to follow a programme.
Even more important than that for me is to work on my balance. It’s never been good in my youth but it is definitely weaker now. Can you stand on one leg for one full minute with your eyes closed, Dear Reader? I fall over after about 20 seconds. While it doesn’t matter too much at the moment, it will become increasingly dangerous as I age and my bones become more brittle. You see so many old people who fall, break a hip and never recover mobility. It is certainly life shortening.
Tuesday, 2nd July, 2024
Lovely, sunny morning although not particularly warm for July. Didn’t sleep well last night. To bed at 11.30 pm and awake at 4.00 am. Head full of thoughts.
The next few days are going to be politics, politics, politics. All around Europe and America the populist Right are in the ascendancy. Complex problems are answered with simplistic solutions that they claim will be easy to implement and solve the population’s problems at a stroke. We have seen it in Italy, Holland, Belgium, and we are seeing it in France and USA currently. We saw it in UK with the Farage/Johnson axis. Hopefully, Thursday will mark the start of the fight back of grown up policies and rational solutions to complex societal problems.
People like me have long wondered how people could have been taken in by them but the Manchester Evening News sent me two interesting articles yesterday which goes a long way to explaining the choices. I’ve known for a long time from the analysis but this type of visceral report crystalises the forgotten, ignored, impoverished, second class hurt that the Northern Red Wall seats feel and who thought a Messiah led by Brexit would lead them out of the desert and into the promised land of milk & honey. These mirages of water in an arid land was always just that – a mirage but it has taken all this time for them to realise that they had been taken in by a false prospectus.
Ironically, The Telegraph ran a story on Sunday about East Preston – our neighbouring village – which has the highest density of rich pensioners in Britain. Over 51% of people in our area have above average income and are claiming the State Pension. They are also much healthier than average pensioners in the country. Of course, the right wing Telegraph‘s intention was to argue we don’t need the State Pension which should be considered a benefit and not an entitlement. Good luck with that.
Although we all paid into National Insurance and were told it would fund our safety-net, State Pension and Healthcare free at the point of delivery, the contributions were never hypothecated or ring fenced and were all subsumed into general taxation. That’s why State provision has to be constantly argued for and protected.
Had a wobble when I woke up in the early hours. In so many past elections, Labour have failed to fulfil polling predictions or have dipped in the final few days. I would be desolate if the exit poll at 10.00 pm on Thursday evening shows something like that. Can you imagine 5 more years of the Tories and their appalling management of the country? I think I would just have to buy a property in Europe and leave. We go to Athens soon and I’ve just booked a return trip to Thessaloniki. We’ll see what else we can do in addition.
Wednesday, 3rd July, 2024
Warm but overcast this morning. No rain again. The builders are still working in the house so I will be working in the garden out of the way.
I was talking to an ‘Arty’ girl from the North of England yesterday. I was saying that we had builders in and they are doing work outside the house as well as in the Lounge, Kitchen, Cloakroom and an Ensuite Bathroom. In other words, they are everywhere I go and it winds me up and disrupts my routines. Her immediate reply was that she lived a fairly chaotic life and would struggle to cope with routine.
I reflected on that later and thought, actually, I do allow routines into my life quite extensively. If they are disrupted, I try hard to accept change on principle but I don’t find it as easy as I used to do. My wife says I have borderline obsessive-compulsive disorder. I have written about it before but it is definitely getting more pronounced and it is manifested in my desire to maintain patterns of behaviour and patterns of physical arrangement in my world.
Out in the garden, I like to control nature, to get rid of weeds however well they flower, to trim grass edges, to plant things in straight lines in a parks & gardens style as my wife describes it. She would mix planting of flowers and vegetables in a fashion I couldn’t possibly live with. Guess who wins. Yes, of course I do.
As I’ve written before, my wife and I are like Jack Sprat and his wife. I am obsessed with tidiness and she is obsessed with cleanliness …. and she really is obsessed with it. I’m surprised that we have any floors left she cleans them so often. My (mild) OCD leads to me straightening everything she has just put down, lining up edges and putting things back in their place.
I noticed while I was doing academic work which involved writing papers based on the reading of dozens of books. My Office would start off as utter chaos with notes, pages of books marked for quotes, scattered all over the desk and spilling out on the floor. Gradually, as I wrote and re-wrote the paper, the books and papers would come in towards me. By the time the final draft was complete and the paper printed, the floor would be clear, the books would be back on the shelf (in alphabetical order), the papers would be filed and order would be restored. Order out of chaos. Creation out of anarchy.
Thursday, 4th July, 2024
Well, this is it. The end of the Tories. I’m going to work as a Polling Centre Identity Checker. I can spot a Labour Voter from 100 paces. Few others will be let in. Actually, the most important theme across the country involves the tactic under the banner
because Tactical Voting will be the order of the day right across the country. We would even condone you voting for the racist Faragist party if it helps to defeat the Tory. The most optimistic sign this morning is that it is warm and sunny. The conditions are right to vote the Tories out.
Of course, there are polling centres and then there are POLLING CENTRES. Most of us get drab Community Centres or Primary Schools but one of my friends in North Yorkshire gets a neo-Gothic Cathederal/Priory. Still, it’s the result that counts and I will probably be on an all-nighter as the results roll in.
We will all be looking for those Portillo moments when top cabinet ministers realise they have lost their seats and their jobs. There is little more satisfying than that. The moment when arrogant Tory, Michael Portillo realised he had been beaten by Labour candidate, Stephen Twigg in 1997 was a joy to behold. Let’s have many more of those!
What was very heartening was to find a Labour rep outside the poll asking to have our poll card numbers to crosscheck those that said they would vote Labour were doing so and then, when we got home Labour canvassers on the street going from door to door chivvying people up to get out and vote. Only Labour took the trouble to do that.
Friday, 5th July, 2024
A new day has dawned, has it not? The words of Tony Blair in 1997 are as apposite this morning as they were then. Labour were in power for 14 years then and this time we’re looking for 15.
The hype of the election campaign made me excited and nervous. It was hard to believe it could be realised. The Exit Polls at 10.00 pm last night suggested it wouldn’t be quite as good as we had dared to dream. The thought that the rabid right wing racist party could take 13 seats was a shock.
With 5 seats to declare many of which are so close they are recounts, Labour has already exceeded the Exit prediction, Lib Dems are going gangbusters after a fantastic campaign, Greens are up to 4 seats and reform are back to just 4 seats.
Wales has gone totally Red. Scotland has only 9 SNP MPs – down from 41. Sinn Féin, the political arm of the IRA, have won the majority on Northern Ireland. The move is a step nearer to a united Ireland which should have happened long ago. George Galloway duped Rochdale once but even they saw through him quite quickly and voted him out. All is well with the world.
Went down to the beach to let off steam and scream relief. It was raining, thank goodness. I have been wishing for two things and now I’ve got them both.
Saturday, 6th July, 2024
The sun is out, the sky is blue, the breeze is tugging at the trees blowing away the detritus left by the stale, old Tories and making room for the new brooms of serious politicians. The Labour government under Prime Minister Starmer will meet for the first cabinet today. This is the first day of the rest of all our lives.
Health and Housing will be early subjects to get going on. Reducing waiting lists and building more affordable housing/council housing will feature loudly. I will be more interested in the people in the cabinet. I love people and their lives, their back stories.
- Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer, MP for Leeds West is a Maths specialist – Oxford and LSE – she played chess and won a national championship. Worked at the Bank of England. Her sister is also an MP and Labour campaign manager.
- David Lammy, Foreign Secretary, MP for Tottenham, Lawyer, Havard educated where he met and became friend of Obama. Lammy has spent the past few years cultivating good relationships with European politicians particularly in France and Germany. Augers well for my hopes of re-entry.
- Yvette Cooper, Home Secretary, MP for Pontefract, Castleford, educated Oxford and Harvard, daughter of a trades union leader. Shadowed the Home Office for over a decade.
- Wes Streeting, Health Secretary, MP for Ilford, grandfather was an armed robber who spent time in prison, and his grandmother became embroiled in his crimes and ended up in Holloway jail, where she met Christine Keeler. According to Streeting, they stayed in touch, and became friends. From that background, Streeting fought his way to a Cambridge education.
- Angela Rayner, Deputy Prime Minister & Minister for Levelling Up, MP for Ashton-under-Lyne, born to a Mother who could not read or write, pregnant at 16, trades unionist.
One of the really pleasing elections for me is that of Paul Waugh in Rochdale. I have ‘known’ him for years. He was borne very near to Spotland, Rochdale football ground. He is a local lad who I have known as the political editor of the Huffington Post, Politics Home, London Evening Standard and The Independent.
Paul Waugh defeated the political chancer, George Galloway, who was only there for a few weeks and couldn’t even be bothered attending the count announcement on election night. Waugh will be a typical Labour MP fighting for his home land.