I have urgent safety concerns for Rishi Sunak’s government. Could we not shut it down for a bit?
This week the government announced it would be “banning zombie-style knives”. Could they not ban zombie-style governments? You see, zombie knives have already been banned. As far back as 15 August 2016, news outlets including this one were reporting on the ban on zombie knives coming into force that week, with regular surplus banning announcements occurring with strange frequency ever since.
Zombie knife ban announcements simply refuse to die. As I understand it from the movies, the only way to be really sure you have finished off a zombie knife ban announcement is to destroy its brain. In the meantime, maybe the Conservatives could announce plans to ban other unpopular bad things, such as international drug trafficking or murder.
Some sort of eye-catching pseudopolicy is certainly needed to distract from the fact that Rishi Sunak’s administration has just ordered the last-minute closure of dozens of schools (and rising) right before the new term begins. Also, they won’t say which ones. If only the government had featured a “schools week” at some point in its seemingly endless cavalcade of themed weeks this summer. Perhaps it would have focused its laserlike attention on the potential timebomb of crumbling concrete in at least 156 schools so far, which has forced the closures.
Then again, would anything have got them off their arses even somewhat quicker? It turns out the timebomb clock has in fact been ticking on this one since 2018, when the government became aware of the crumbling concrete problem after the roof of a Kent primary school caved in the previous year. Thankfully no children or staff were hurt, as it happened at the weekend. That was only by complete chance – but seems to have left ministers feeling lucky, given the obvious lack of urgency they are now justifying as no biggie.
You may recall that in the run-up to the 2010 election that would usher in 13 years of Conservative rule, one of David Cameron’s strongest attack lines against the then Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, was that he “didn’t fix the roof when the sun was shining”. It now emerges that the Conservatives didn’t fix the roof when they knew it was crumbling.
Even for a party that appears to despise investment in infrastructure, the missed chances tend towards the glaring. The construction industry was kept open during Covid, while schools were, famously, not, which might have presented the leadership of the Department for Education with an ideal opportunity to deal with the known concrete issue – until you remember that the aforementioned leadership was Gavin Williamson.
Forgive me: he is now Sir Gavin Williamson. (Of course, of course.) Maybe Gavin Williamson couldn’t get round to thinking about the condition of the schools estate because he was too busy not getting round to thinking about the looming and predicted exam results crisis in that first year of Covid. And then all over again in the second year of it. Whitehall bods: has your department had a Gavin Williamson in it? If so, there could be structural dangers within a number of its policies.
Of course, it is certainly not just Williamson – the Department for Education has had four secretaries of state in the past year, never mind the past half decade. (Elsewhere, Grant Shapps has this week been made secretary of state for defence, in a year in which he has also been transport secretary, home secretary and business secretary, as well as energy security and net zero secretary.)
And regrettably, it’s certainly not just schools. This morning the current schools minister, Nick Gibb, confirmed that hospitals and courts were also at risk from crumbling concrete. Imagewise, that tends towards the sledgehammer. Schools, courts and hospitals turn out to be at risk of physical collapse as well as metaphorical and systemic collapse.
After Covid, in particular, none of these civic tragedies feels like a surprise, particularly those related to education. This is a country that opened pubs before it fully reopened schools. It took a footballer – twice – to force Boris Johnson’s government into U-turns on free school meals for the poorest children over the school holidays.
For me, the lowest point came after the appointment of the widely respected Kevan Collins as educational recovery tsar, brought in supposedly to deal with the ravages of disrupted schooling on a generation of children. Collins determined it would cost £15bn to fund pandemic catch-up. Rishi Sunak, as chancellor, offered £1.4bn.
So a presentation was prepared, and Sunak and others in Downing Street were shown how the failure to invest £15bn in the future of this blighted cohort of children would end up costing more than £160bn down the line in welfare and criminal justice. Sunak still refused to pay any more than £1.4bn (bear in mind that he spent £840m helping along a second wave of Covid with his “eat out to help out” scheme). Collins resigned in despair.
Another false economy, another bad bit of business, another instance where someone without the necessary political courage judged it would all be someone else’s problem when it came fully home to roost. This is how the country has now long been run, to widely predictable – and indeed widely predicted – effect. And the longer it is mismanaged in this way, the less money there is to fix it. Three terms of absolutely committed incoherence have not left the country in good health. If there were such a condition as long short-termism, the UK could now consider itself an advanced sufferer.