BEST FOR BRITAIN'S 



WEEKEND WIRE



Dear John,



A new King has officially been crowned. The Metropolitan Police are demanding nothing short of absolute loyalty, while their bosses in Government are too busy getting at each other’s throats to tell royal critics to love it or leave it. At least for this week <[link removed]>. 



Trade Unlocked prep continues <[link removed]>



This week, our team stumped for Trade Unlocked across the business community in London and beyond as more industry leaders and trade experts joined our call for representatives of businesses large and small to create a trade policy blueprint for the next decade.



On Tuesday, we launched <[link removed]> Trade Unlocked to London business leaders at an event hosted by the Central London Alliance. We also hosted a webinar for leaders of FTSE250 companies on Thursday morning to brief them on the opportunities to influence trade policy and join hundreds of businesses of all sizes. With general election manifestos being written up, we’re building on the palpable enthusiasm from businesses to take their strategy for achieving growth directly to the Government.



We also continued our rollout of Trade Unlocked speakers and panels. This week, we announced that the host of our plenary stage will be award-winning writer, broadcaster, and comedian Ayesha Hazarika. Make sure you’re following Trade Unlocked on Twitter <[link removed]> and LinkedIn <[link removed]> and keep an eye on the #TU23 hashtag so you don’t miss any updates!



You didn’t have to open Traitors’ Gate that quickly…



Last weekend’s Coronation was a day of wonderfully mediaeval fun for fans of the monarchy, but for our money, they could have skipped the “throw all the naysayers into the dungeon” part.



On Saturday, in the leadup to the King’s Coronation, over 60 people were arrested in Central London on suspicion of joining protests, including several members of the anti-monarchist group Republic. The Met gave a number of justifications for the arrests, including a head-scratching charge that rape alarms being handed out by a women’s safety group could startle the procession’s horses.



The Met later apologised <[link removed]> amid a firestorm of public condemnation. However, commentators noted <[link removed]> that the Orwellian arrests could just be the beginning of a crackdown on civil rights under the newly-assented Public Order Bill, which gives police a wide-ranging and vague mandate to arrest anyone suspected of starting “disruptive” protests.



Best for Britain CEO Naomi Smith said the arrests were a worrying demonstration of how the Bill will be weaponised to “attack the basic freedoms of British people''. You can learn more about the Government’s dangerous crackdown on our civil rights and about Best for Britain’s advocacy to protect our right to protest here <[link removed]>.







Brexit bonfire doused, but the embers still burn



In an unforgivable betrayal to hardline Brexiters, the Government no longer plans to set afire more than 4,000 standards and protections laws and cause chaos throughout the economy, risk dangerously unsound buildings  and unsafe foods, and gut workers’ rights just to stick it to the EU after a broad spectrum of businesses rather loudly warned them that that was not, in fact, a good idea. 



Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. Instead of taking the chainsaw that is the Retained EU Law Bill to the UK economy, they’ve elected to operate <[link removed]> with a bit more precision. Workers’ rights—specifically, according to reports, the EU directive limiting <[link removed]> companies to require 48 hours per week for workers—will be on the chopping block alongside roughly 600 other EU-derived laws deemed burdensome by Kemi Badenoch’s Department for Business and Trade. 



Still, senior Brexiters are apoplectic, and they have made their displeasure known to anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot. Jacob Rees-Mogg, always eager to return political discourse to the sixteenth century, accused <[link removed]> the PM of “behaving like a Borgia”, while ERG chair Mark Francois, continuing his career-long quest to disavow his own name, publicly challenged <[link removed]> the Business and Trade Secretary at a UQ session



Adding to Badenoch’s mare of a week was none other than Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, who stingingly rebuked <[link removed]> her on Thursday for the Government’s haphazard shifting of their legislation. 



Despite the watering-down of the legislation, it still poses huge dangers to the standards and protections that keep our products, workplaces, and buildings safe. Best for Britain CEO Naomi Smith warned <[link removed]> last week that striking off these laws would still “automatically remove workers' rights, food standards and environmental protections.



Ukrainian counteroffensive reaches preliminary stages



In the same week that the UK became the first allied country to send long-range missiles <[link removed]> to Ukraine, reports from the front have indicated that the long-expected Ukrainian counteroffensive against Putin’s forces has begun to gain preliminary ground.



Despite denials from the Russian regime, the Ukrainian Deputy Defence minister said the country’s troops had recaptured <[link removed]> key territory in the eastern city of Bakhmut, while the head of the Putin-supporting paramilitary Wagner group has accused the regular Russian army of deserting their positions in the city.







President Volodymyr Zelenskyy downplayed the gains, saying the bulk of the counteroffensive had yet to be launched. Also managing expectations was one Ukrainian analyst, who told the BBC that the counteroffensive would face a difficult task dislodging the occupying forces this year.



Move over, Stevenage Woman



Political strategists stacking a bunch of poll readouts into the shape of a person and building themselves a swing-voting friend is a time-honoured tradition in British politics. 



In the 90s we had Mondeo Man, and more recently Holby City Woman and Workington Man delivered the Tories to victory. This election has already seen the birth of Stevenage Woman, whom Labour will be courting heavily, but they’ll now need to expand their target list, because the Spectator’s Lara Prendergast this week debuted <[link removed]> a new model: Millennial Millie.



Identifying Millennial Millie as a Home Counties-reared millennial squeezed by the acute housing shortage and a decade of wage stagnation under Tory rule, the story paints a grim picture for Tories who could in the past count on Millie and her cohort to reliably start voting Conservative as they edge upward in age. For their part, Labour will need to offer concrete vote-getting policies to entice Millie, such as the recently rolled-out childcare provisions from the Budget.



Whether Millennial Millie comes to define the next election or not, Prendergast also offers a stark view of the scale at which under-45 voters have jumped the Conservative ship–their support among the young has dropped from close to 40% in 1987 to just 11-13% today.



Ousting the Tories tactically



If you enjoyed watching the Tories lose over 1000 seats last week so much that you want to see it again, the Times this week featured an informative look <[link removed]-[LIST_EMAIL_ID]> into the tactical voting patterns that led to their local election rout–along with the clues they can give us for the next general election.



According to the report, discontent with Tory rule around the country has voters organically turning to tactical voting to dislodge the Conservatives in their wards, even where local parties are not coordinating the effort. The authors estimate that this trend could see up to a third of non-Tory voters in the upcoming general election vote tactically to bring in a new Government, which could leave the Tories with fewer than 200 seats.



For comedic purposes, the story also carries a quote from the ousted Tory leader of Bracknell Forest Council, which saw them reduced from 37 seats to 10. He decried the “undemocratic” collaboration between Labour and the Lib Dems in his borough and bemoaned that voters had been “cheated” out of a fair election. Wait until somebody tells him about the party that made the law that barred nurses <[link removed]> from the polls and refused to accept their NHS ID.



Unlucky 13







This Friday marked the thirteenth anniversary of the Tories seizing control of Government, and the numerology feels as apt as ever.



Let’s take an itemised view of just some of the carnage: a hundredfold increase <[link removed]> in people needing food banks, continuous wage stagnation, £100bn/year <[link removed]> gone from the economy thanks to the damage of austerity, NHS waiting lists over 7 million <[link removed]>, a third of newly qualified teachers driven out <[link removed]> of education, and, to top it off, a rock-hard Brexit that unleashed its own exponential drags on our economy and society.



Have a wonderful weekend safe in the knowledge that it is likely to be better than that of the disgraced former-deputy PM.



Best wishes,



Tommy Gillespie

Press Officer, Best for Britain







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Best For Britain - United Kingdom

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