Farrukh Dhondy | UK Labour, after 80 days, gets flak for schools’ VAT, Starmer freebies

A metaphor -- little to more?

The sky speaking of the currents of trouble

Which comes in threes, exceeding the double?

Or is it saying that blessings multiply

A lottery win -- just luck -- no reason why?

Or if affection mends your fragmented heart

--The horse restored to the front of the cart?

From The Peeping-Tom Adventures of Don Qui-holo

Tr. from Bengali by Bachchoo

Come mid-October the UK media will be full of assessments of the Labour government’s performance and promises after 100 days of being in power. I am, gentle reader -- partly because Labour has just had its annual conference at which its leaders have boasted about their achievements and made their promises of things to come, going to beat them to it and write my assessment after eighty days. My second-cousin-thrice-removed (each time by the immigration authorities!), Emoji Feromonereplacementwalla, always says that “stale bread is unwelcome bread”!

Whining from right-wingers about Labour’s manifesto began a month before the election. One of these, soon to be law, is to charge public schools (which are not “public” at all but fee-paying private schools -- but that’s Britain!) Value Added Tax (VAT) of about 20 per cent.

Take this comment by Lisa Kerr, former head of Gordonstoun, where King Charles III went as a pupil: “Labour’s VAT raid on private schools poses an existential threat”. The school charges each pupil £53,000 a year. The average wage of British workers is around £35,000 and that’s before income-tax is deducted! Existential threat?

Whose existence or existentiality? (I’ve read Albert Camus, etc, but never quite understood what the word now means).

Also, in the Telegraph (“Torygraph”), a paediatrician who earns £90,000 a year from the National Health Service, moans that “I will have to quit being an NHS doctor and work in LIDL (a comparatively-low-price supermarket) under Labour’s private school tax raid.” Does this make any sense?

The least popular policy already announced by Labour is restricting the number of old-age-pensioners who will get a winter fuel allowance, a benefit introduced by Gordon Brown in 1997.

When I reached the happy age of 65 and then some, I have been sent sums of over a £100 each year to help pay heating bills. So have millions of people over the age of, at first 60, and later starting at 65.

Did we need it? Would we have frozen to death or had to wear three sweaters through winter? Er... no! I treated the allowance as though I’d won a local lottery without buying a ticket.

Now Labour says it will restrict the payment to those who really need it and check eligibility for the allowance through the layers of the existing benefit system. Undoubtedly, there will be some, through bureaucratic or other causal errors, who will suffer the winter cold without the allowance. Nevertheless, Labour’s argument is that this cut will provide £1.9 billion towards filling the £21 billion hole in the nation’s finances which the Tory government left had them.

Apart from several Labour-supporting unions and a substantial number of their own Labour MPs criticising the cut, there were of course the hypocritically “compassionate” Tory MPs and commentators vociferously opposed to Labour’s move. This despite the fact that over 14 years of Tory rule these same MPs and commentators presided over, or demonstrated no concern against, the catastrophic rise in homeless numbers and the proliferation of charitable food banks all over the country helping those who couldn’t afford, through inflation and rising prices. their daily bread.

I am sure, as any reader of Dickens will be, that very many citizens of the nineteenth century were subject to bitter cold and to starvation. At times in the last fourteen years of Tory government it could easily appear to advanced cynics (ahem… yours truly?) that “Conservative” values meant preserving or regenerating “British” (read “Dickensian”?) conditions.

Now, in these roughly 80 days of the Labour Party in government, a friend of the party, Lord Waheed Alli, gave Sir Keir Starmer a pair of spectacles and several gentlemanly suits which the PM proudly and publicly wore. Lord Alli also donated some sombre, fashionable dresses to Lady Starmer, who made no secret of the present.

Boris Johnson, who writes a column for the right-wing Daily Mail -- being paid £1 million a year for his views -- wrote a piece in which he alluded, slyly, to these gifts to Sir Keir and Lady Starmer, calling their acceptance of these sleaze and corruption. Heaven help us, and Boris’ self-consciousness!

This was not the pot, but an astronomical “black hole” calling the kettle black!

Oh Boris, I know of no remedy for quicksand memory but may I remind you of the £800,000 you and your memsahib, when you were PM, took from a friendly donor to buy soft furnishings and bad-taste golden wallpaper for your residential quarters at 10 Downing Street? And this while on a donated holiday? And the drunken parties at 10 Downing Street when you’d imposed a lockdown on the nation during the Covid-19 pandemic?

Yes, Sir Keir has realised that taking freebies, such as specs and suits and several box tickets for premier football games, is corrupt and has wisely decided to stop accepting such. Except maybe for the football freebies which his staff say have to be in the box and not the stands.

Fair enough, I suppose they don’t want his ear shot off!