Behind closed doors

Doesn’t this crude mock-up of the Downing Street door look sinister? I have already expressed my disgust at the words of Rachel Reeves here:

The royal societies: RSPCA and RSPB – Animal Wild

“I have no words to express my contempt for dangerous tax liar Rachel Reeves who has said that we need to learn from Trump’s positivity and revive the “animal spirits” whatever the hell she means by that. Many businesses are struggling terribly following her national insurance hikes, either shedding jobs or freezing recruitment or both. She is even in favour of a third runway at Heathrow, Growth, growth, growth. Has she forgotten about net-zero altogether? If that seems an exaggeration, in the quickfire section of an interview with her spread over two pages, she answers “Bats or great crested newts?” with “Neither because I want growth.”

The Wildlife Trusts, generally and relatively a fairly conservative group, has come out punching. By “growth” RR, whose sanity I increasingly question, of course means satisfying corporate greed and profit above all else, and appeasing the extremely powerful building lobby. There have been plenty of scandals about newbuild housing estates, with poor quality properties built to last just until their guarantees expire. Joe Keegan, public affairs spokesman for the Trusts, has spoken about widespread misinformation on the subject: “Nature does not block growth … The assertion that protecting nature undermines economic growth is simply incorrect; nature is the bedrock upon which the economy is built. ” We need to mitigate flood risk and drought, we need to filter the air we breathe, and nature will do that for us if we let it. The choice between nature and growth is a false one, he says, and the fact that more than one million homes have been granted planning permission since 2015 but have yet to be built suggests that the problem lies elsewhere. Personally I do not buy into the housing shortage myth in the first place. Keegan continues, “A balanced approach will ensure we meet our housing needs without compromising the ecosystems that protect and sustain us.” Not much point building houses for humans if we have a planet, an environment, which is bereft of biodiversity and uninhabitable. What would help enormously would be taking environmental assessments into account as a starting point. Think HS2 (on top of everything else about this pointless, disastrous and corruption-riddled project, a number of large sinkholes have appeared in Buckinghamshire which, say the company and the Environment Agency have not caused any water pollution. That may well be true, but I don’t trust either of them). The Trusts also object very strongly to the proposed Heathrow expansion, an idea that keeps rearing its ugly head.

Speaking of the rearing of ugly heads, war criminal Tony Blair (Bliar) has also popped up yet again. He is surely universally despised. Will he ever just shut up and go away? Once again he is arguing for a surveillance state. Why, in 2025, should his views have the slightest relevance to anyone or anything?

There is also, on the front pages, the matter of tackling the huge costs of sickness benefits. I was told the other day that 70% of our council tax in Berkshire goes towards social care. I am a woolly liberal and a believer in a society which helps the least able, those who cannot help themselves. But I do see an issue here. I am thinking very locally and I am not saying they are typical, but there are two people on long-term benefits and other forms of support at considerable expense to the taxpayer. But the truth is they could help themselves very easily: they’re both off their heads on alcohol and drugs 24/7. For that reason they will either not be prescribed the medication they arguably need, or they simply will not be effective. They are perfectly capable of finding a job, they just don’t want to. If they are given work (I speak from personal experience here), chances are they will be so intoxicated as to do it incompetently at best, if they undertake it at all. They don’t need to work, they think, other people will pay for their daily needs, so why should they or would they? This may sound like a rather right-wing diatribe, which is not where I am coming from, but the system as it stands can be most unfair to those of us who do work for a living.

Behind closed doors. Protect the Wild reveals that the badger cull has been discussed by the government and farming lobbyists in three secret, off-the-record meetings. Political parties always promise more transparency in their manifestos, but here again Labour disappoints, to put it mildly. Freedom of Information requests remain unanswered: we cannot see minutes nor even the names of the participants. DEFRA states that this is because the meetings were not formally minuted which seems to me a disgrace in itself. Why on earth not? And if that is the case, let’s see the informal minutes. Is the government not supposed to be representing us and accountable to us? It seems they don’t think so. Other FOI requests regarding meetings between ministers and water companies have similarly crumbled to dust. “DEFRA confirmed that nine meetings had taken place but said ‘we do not hold any minutes of the meetings you have asked about.’”

Protect the Wild has also just drawn attention again to the forgotten victims of fox hunting (sab groups continue to expose the trail hunt lies, especially with the use of drones). You would think the hunts would be keeping their heads down at least but foxes, hares and deer are still being illegally hunted and killed on a regular basis and there is plenty of video evidence to support that claim. The hunts have always treated their hounds abysmally. The latest figures show that there have already been over 500 recorded incidents of abuse or neglect (or both) in this hunting season alone. 537 to be precise, across 75 hunts. As ever with these numbers these are just the ones we know about. Who else could have their dogs running out of control on public highways, busy roads, railway lines, with impunity? It is perfectly possible to rehome hounds deemed too old, unfit for purpose or injured, but the hunts, as is now well-known, just shoot them instead. As one rehomer says, finding them a happy home would seem the least they could do for the dogs after their years of enforced, miserable and unnatural servitude.

Another story which caught my eye this morning is that of a ‘padel club racket’. Neighbours in Hampshire have complained about “gunshot” noises from padel courts and the players may in time be subject to a noise abatement order. What about actual gunshots? Whether or not you find the sounds of birds being shot out of the sky for hours on end as occurs here in West Berkshire deeply upsetting, which I do, or not, who does not find them disturbing? Should we not have a right to enjoy the sounds of birdsong and silence without having to endure the constant noise of warfare on wildlife?

When I can bear to, thinking about Trump (whom Rachel Reeves wants us to be more like), Musk, et al., the Statue of Liberty and the poem which it bears came into my head. ‘The New Colossus’ was written by Emma Lazarus in 1883. She had been involved in assisting Jewish refugees escaping the pogroms in Eastern Europe. Here is the text in full:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

This needs no comment from me, but Paul Auster wrote, “”Bartholdi’s gigantic effigy was originally intended as a monument to the principles of international republicanism, but ‘The New Colossus’ reinvented the statue’s purpose, turning Liberty into a welcoming mother, a symbol of hope to the outcasts and downtrodden of the world.” Wikipedia also gives us John T. Cunningham: “The Statue of Liberty was not conceived and sculpted as a symbol of immigration, but it quickly became so as immigrant ships passed under the torch and the shining face, heading toward Ellis Island. However, it was [Lazarus’s poem] that permanently stamped on Miss Liberty the role of unofficial greeter of incoming immigrants.”

In 2019 Trump’s top immigration official stated that the poem meant something quite different. The welcome was intended only for those able to “stand on their own two feet” and not become “a public charge”. In another interview he said that the lines were only written for European immigrants. He may as well have gone the whole hog and said it was just for white people.