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.
Trade Unlocked prep
continues
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 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 and LinkedIn 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 amid a firestorm of public condemnation.
However, commentators noted 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.
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 with a bit more precision. Workers’
rights—specifically, according to reports, the EU directive limiting 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 the PM of “behaving like a Borgia”, while ERG chair Mark
Francois, continuing his career-long quest to disavow his own name,
publicly challenged 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 in people needing food banks, continuous
wage stagnation, £100bn/year gone from the economy thanks to the damage
of austerity, NHS waiting lists over 7 million, a third of newly qualified teachers
driven out 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
