Sir Keir slays NHS England, the King of Quangos
Another week and another escape into the lives of real people by the Prime Minister. Westminster's zoo keepers are really due a performance review. This time Oinky had not gone to market but to Hull, there to accuse the public sector of being 'over-cautious', 'weak' and 'intrusive'. Physician, heal thyself!
Today the PM was introduced by a woman with an unplaceable transatlantic accent who spoke almost entirely in managerial platitudes and acronyms. People were there, she said, 'to power the self-care movement within our company'. Quite how being dragged out of your coffee break to watch a man who'd been poured into a blue shirt to talk about civil service reform is meant to boost 'self-care' is anybody's guess. It was more like they'd been dragged in to witness an act of self-abuse.
Sir Keir thanked the LinkedIn-personified woman and did his standard shirt sleeves-up, random hand-gestures opening. 'This must be an incredibly exciting place to work!' he said. Well it was, until about two minutes ago.
After a long preamble about waiting lists and Ukraine, he finally got to the meat of the policy. His aim for the British state was something called 'maximum power'. He made this sound like a particularly advanced form of dishwasher tablet technology. You could see the people in the row behind him thinking: 'Cor, him off the Cillit Bang adverts has aged a bit!'
Clearly, unlike so many of these set-piece moments, it appeared that Sir Keir might actually be about to unveil something of genuine import. You could tell an announcement was imminent because the PM suddenly began inserting all sorts of caveats. 'Of course,' he said, 'I'm not questioning the dedication or the effort of individual civil servants.' (Thus spake a man who had never been on hold to the DVLA.) We can take comfort in the fact that when a politician says they're not doing something you can be pretty certain that that is precisely what they are doing.
Finally we got to the big moment. NHS England was to be scrapped, the King of all Quangos slain in one fell swoop. Goodness knows I find the Prime Minister's tone and manner deeply irritating. A sort of auricular scabies. And I think most of his policies – from his malevolent hatred of farmers to the Great Chagos Robbery – are borderline suicidal for the nation. However, if we can finally ignite the bonfire of the quangos, about which the Tories talked and talked but never acted for 14 years, then he will have done Britain a serious favour.
Perhaps while we're on a roll, the PM may even find time to take his Muskian chainsaw to the £9.5 billion energy quango run by Ed Miliband, the Office for Value for Money, and others among the 27 arm's-length bodies set up by... one Keir Rodney Starmer since last July. Still – there is more joy in heaven over a sinner that repenteth. Whether there'll be joy in Whitehall is another matter entirely.
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The Herald Scotland
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- The Herald Scotland
Are you ‘upset'? The dangers of flags in Scottish schools
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What it means a decade on, in 2025, is that putting up a Union flag, or a saltire for that matter, in a school, or anywhere, is not a neutral act. Maybe there was a time, before the Scottish referendum, when flags went up without much comment; I also used to think, with some satisfaction, that a lot of Scots find naked patriotism and flags a wee bit embarrassing. But the referendum changed things, flags led to more flags (flagflation) and now there's anger because the flag you see isn't the 'right' one. Hence someone looking at a picture of an event at Arthurlie Primary and getting upset. There-there. The position the school takes now is that it was not their intention to imply the Union flag is sectarian but beyond that, it's unclear what their policy is. The council statement says the school should be 'focused on a diverse British society' and 'foster an ethos of respect for diverse perspectives and national identity'. 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You know the type. And why is it always me who ends up sitting next to them at parties? Anyway, expressed in a different way that didn't appear to single out the Union flag, perhaps the headteacher could have explained that there are dangers in all flags in schools. There will be some who argue that the Union flag is different and that it's the national flag of the UK and therefore represents everyone, but I'm afraid – given everything we've been through in the last ten years – that would be naïve at best or evasive at worst. Best, perhaps, for schools to just try to be neutral and, crucially, consistent: no Union flags, no saltires, no flags at all, not mine, not yours. The risk you run otherwise is that you start to introduce the kind of stuff that comes with flags. You may remember a few years ago Michael Gove suggesting 'British values' should be taught in English classrooms, no doubt draped with union flags. Some Scottish nationalists also talk about 'Scottish values' and maybe one day they'd like to teach them in schools plastered with saltires. But in this country, we're rather sceptical about all of that or used to be – it's something the Americans do, not us. And maybe that's something we should try to keep hold of. And maybe the best place to do it is in a classroom free of flags.
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