BEST FOR BRITAIN'S 

WEEKEND WIRE

Dear John,

The Government’s got a plan to stop the continued year of discontent–and it’s not likely to satisfy the public sector workers it’s been offered to. Never fear, they’ve deployed a host of diversions, both intentional and through their own incompetence.

Public sector - immigrants = below-inflation pay rise

This week, after months of strikes from public sector workers, the Prime Minister unveiled a new offer to a wide slate of unions, including NHS workers, teachers, police officers, and civil servants dually aimed at heading off further strikes and making the Government look like a reasonable benefactor, even as they accuse all their workers of being lazy.

The trick they’ve omitted? Benefactors are known for paying their staff better than the 5-8% rises the Government is offering, and, with inflation at 8.7%, the offers constitute a real-terms pay cut.

The Government has stated that the pay rises will come from existing budgets, and they announced plans to jack up visa fees and NHS surcharges for immigrants. Surely, this will come with no unintended consequences for the nearly one in five NHS who are not British.

Doctors strike back

Unwilling to grin and simply become poorer, junior doctors began one of the longest sustained strikes in NHS history on Thursday, with 5 days of industrial action set until 18th July.

The Prime Minister is talking tough, claiming that the 6% pay increase is his final offer and that strikes will not move him. The BMA has countered that years of real-terms pay cuts, appalling working conditions and overloaded rotas are “driving doctors away” from the medical profession. An estimated 25,000 doctors and nurses are currently applying to ditch the UK for friendlier shores, with Australia the top destination.

Health Secretary Steve Barclay has called doctors’ demands unreasonable and unaffordable. To his credit, for this round of strikes, he’s kept his opinion that the health service is full of slackers to himself.

Mortgage blues

This past week, millions of households across the UK were smacked in the face by the long tail of Liz Truss. 

As inflation rates continue to soar thanks to her disastrous economic fever dream, two-year fixed mortgage rates have increased by 6.7% to the highest level since the financial crisis in August 2008. 

Forecasts by the Bank of England suggest that the majority of new UK homeowners will be paying up to £220 extra per month over the next 3 years, which could be up to 4 million people taking the fiscal hit. With 650,000 UK households experiencing financial insecurity due to mortgage repayments by the end of this year, perhaps Truss should have pursued her goals safer and saner rather than further and faster.

Selective memory, collective sigh

“I do not recall” may well be the phrase that defines the Boris Johnson era, just beating out “Peppa Pig World” and “Augustus Gloop, Augustus Gloop, the great big greedy nincompoop”, because this week, after failing to turn over his unredacted WhatsApp messages to the Covid inquiry by Monday’s deadline, Johnson claimed he couldn’t possibly do so because he cannot remember the passcode of the government phone he’d been using.

Despite employing the same foolproof strategy to avoid accountability as a teenager whose mother has discovered their locked drawer full of WKD Blue, the disgraced former Prime Minister immediately had cold water thrown on him both by cybersecurity experts, who said accessing the messages could be as simple as removing the SIM card and placing it another phone, and a source close to his Government, who claimed the Cabinet Office should have the passcode on record.

Should Johnson need an additional get-out-of-jail-free card, he could always take a trip to the North Sea…

Well, that’s nice for Japan, I guess

We frequently tar this Government as a nativist, oft-diplomatically-belligerent, declinist set of burnouts who’ve long passed their sell-by date, but this weekend, Kemi Badenoch is determined to change that. The International Trade Secretary is heading to Auckland to mollify one of our biggest allies in the Pacific–by officially signing off on the UK’s CPTPP membership and handing a massive geopolitical win to Japan.

Of course, the UK should be working to achieve mutual benefits with peer nations around the world, but with CPTPP only set to add 0.08% to the UK’s GDP and potentially flooding the UK market with lax-regulated foodstuffs, the Government appears to have forgotten the “mutual” part of the arrangement

A senior civil servant at the heart of the UK’s new trade approach called CPTPP a suitable “plan B” amid the ineffectiveness of the World Trade Organization. If only there were another, closer, barrier-free network of states we could trade with…

Sad chicken is back on the menu

Having left a supranational organisation that is in the process of banning battery chicken farms (the EU), the Government (for balance, presumably) has decided to join one that will flood supermarket shelves with them (CPTPP) – checkmate, remainer wokerati. 

Battery chicken farms confine and trap egg-laying hens to one tiny cage, where they will spend the vast majority of their lives. This breach of animal rights will be prevented under EU legislation, but CPTPP allows it to go ahead with nary a cluck. 

And it’s yet another example of the UK going backward under Brexit–the UK previously had a ban on battery farms in place from 2012. Animal welfare groups are now lobbying to prevent the import of battery eggs.

Deadly heat in the Mediterranean

Southern Europe is sweltering under record temperatures this week, with 45℃ heat the norm across Spain, Italy, and Greece. Some areas in Italy are set to see temperatures as high as 48.8℃.

The heatwave has been aptly dubbed Cerberus after the fearsome beast from Greek mythology. With at least one death from the heatwave already reported in Italy, the dangerous conditions are set to last through next week. 

In addition, thanks to a heightened risk caused by climate change, areas across Europe are on high alert for wildfires, with Croatia already reporting conflagrations.

Scientists have warned that these dangerous heatwaves will only become more frequent as human-induced climate change grows in scale.

This edition of Weekend Wire would not have been possible without Isaac Carty, who came down from Uni of Manchester to join B4B on work experience this week. Thanks Isaac, and bye for now!

Best wishes,

Tommy Gillespie 
Press Officer, Best for Britain