…March 2024

March started with George Galloway’s return to Parliament, having won the Rochdale by-election. This prompted Rishi Sunak, who inexplicably is still prime minister, to give an impromptu speech about the dangers of extremism, though Galloway was elected as an MP while Sunak has yet to face the electorate as prime minister. And in any case, Galloway’s turn at comic relief will only last a few months till the next election.

The government chose to follow this up by manufacturing a row over how to define extremism. This appeared to be an exercise to justify not engaging with certain groups, or even being able to take action against those groups, but has been accused of catching mainstream organisations that are merely practising their right to disagree with the government.

The cause has not been helped by many friends of the Conservative Party making disagreeable statements. For now, it is extremism to suggest that arbitrarily killing over 30,000 Palestinians is a bit off, but the Tory party donor Paul Hester’s remarks over wanting to shoot the MP Diane Abbott after referring to her being both black and female, are merely racism and not extremism, or at least, not extreme enough for the Tories to give him back his £10 million. 

The former deputy Tory chairman Lee Anderson defected to the Reform Party, underlining the pincer that the government is now caught in, with the Liberal Democrats appealing to more moderate Conservative voters, and the Reform Party to the more right wing. Or to put it another way, the Conservatives are now in the awkward position of being too hateful for many voters but not hateful enough for others. 

Perhaps to capitalise on this, the Tories have indicated their intention to run another toxic election campaign, since they clearly can’t campaign on their record in government. Thus we have seen a video nasty detailing panic on the streets of London, strangely with an American voice-over. Even stranger, some of the scenes showed New York, suggesting that the people currently running the British government may not have realised that London is in the UK. 

March also saw the Spring budget, billed as the last major financial statement  before the next election, with its promise of a further cut to national insurance rates. This largely backfired against the government as analysts pointed out that fiscal drag – where more people pay higher taxes as wages rise – would mean an effective tax rise for many people while public services were badly cut back. The only real achievement of the budget was to cripple Labour’s plan for recovery, which had involved raising tax from the ultra rich non-doms to pay for improvements in public services, before the chancellor used the same ploy to fund his NI cut.

The latest figures suggest that inflation fell to 3.4 percent in the UK for February, though core inflation, which strips out volatile elements such as food and oil prices, is around 4.5 percent. However these figures are constantly reassessed, with the Office of National Statistics announcing that the UK was in recession for the second half of last year after all. Meanwhile prices continue to rise for everything from milk to Easter Eggs. Even the cost of honours has gone up, with businessman Mohamed Mansour donating £5 million to the Tory party before being knighted. 

The inflation issue won’t have been helped by a tragedy in Baltimore, in which a container ship, the MV Dali, took out the Francis Scott Key bridge. Ports around the world will now have to reassess the risk to infrastructure that predates the giant container ships, further adding to the logistics problems facing the shipping industry, and by implication, supply lines in general.

The month ended with the annual boat race between Oxford and Cambridge, which has highlighted an ongoing ecological disaster over the amount of raw sewage that British water companies pump into rivers and beaches. Alongside this, Thames Water has continued delivering its masterclass in reasons why national utilities shouldn’t be privatised. The argument for privatisation is that companies can raise money through shareholders to invest in the business. However, through a combination of reckless payouts on bonuses and dividends and general incompetence, Thames Water finds itself mired in debt and facing fines for dumping sewage.

So far, the government has declined the company’s request to raise its bills by 40 percent and the shareholders have refused to pump any more money into the company, leading to somewhat of a standoff. The government’s response, mindful that Labour might simply renationalise the company after the next election, has mostly been limited to changing the legislation around utilities to make that harder. 

Finally, spare a thought for the world’s dictators who are forced to vent their own failings on journalists. Iranian journalist Pouria Zeraati, 36, who works for Iran International, a television broadcaster that has covered the protests in Iran, was stabbed outside his home in London. The station was forced to upgrade its security recently following threats from the Iranian regime. Meanwhile, Russia continues to detain the Wall St Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich as well as Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist with dual Russian and American citizenship, based in the Czech Republic, who was arrested whilst visiting her sick mother in Russia.