I start with a quick thank you to my many million readers (is this right? – ed) who have been waiting patiently for my annual – well, my first – New Year message. I’m sure you are thinking that I have spent an enormous amount of time preparing this blog but that would not really be true. The reality is that following my usual perusal of the day’s news, I’ve plonked myself at my desk and started to write. As you start to read, you may wish to know that I had no more idea what I was going to write than you have about what you’re going to read.
Happy New Year, everyone. I hope you had a great Christmas. Well, that’s how the short-trousered billionaire snake oil salesman Rishi Sunak started his address. Then, as per usual, he started telling lies about the great achievements of his government, of which there are almost none. Maybe I could have left almost out. Presumably, there wasn’t enough time for Sunak to acknowledge the way people feel about the country today, which is that everything is broken and nothing works.
No matter how people try to dress things up – and Sunak certainly tried to do that – people’s real life experiences stand in stark contrast to his make believe world. He boasts about record funding for an NHS he doesn’t use. Indeed, Sunak uses a private GP service so has not had the experience of trying and failing to see a GP in an overstretched health centre. He doesn’t suffer in terrible pain, as many do, with over eight million people on NHS waiting lists. He lies about an economy he says is growing – it isn’t – and he brags about cutting taxes, having imposed the highest tax burden since World War Two. Words are all he has left. Actions are so yesterday. I worry about the state of this country today, not just because of how many people are falling through society’s cracks, but of how little we seem to care, or do, anything about it.
Labour leader Keir Starmer is far from sealing the deal with a tired and worn out electorate and anyone who suggests the next election is already a done deal is an idiot. But at least in his excellent New Year message he acknowledged a simple truth: “I know that politics isn’t held in particularly high regard in Britain.” This is, of course, a massive understatement and Keir knows that because he told me when I met him at a Labour Party event in Bristol last year. Many people say that “politicians are all the same” and “only in it for themselves” and Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss did nothing to suggest they are wrong after the disgraceful New Year’s honours list, in which Tory donors and Vote Leave leaders were rewarded, along with numerous other dodgy mates, not for great service but for being their cronies. People want, millions need, change, but they need to get more engaged, to get more involved, to get angry, to rise up.
For 14 years, we have sat by and allowed things to happen. There was a kind of inevitability about it, too, because politicians simply got themselves elected and did whatever they wanted for the next five years. Instead of politicians being there to serve on our behalf, to act on our wishes, they told us what to do. They were, and Sunak’s government is, an elected dictatorship, except for Sunak himself who wasn’t voted PM by anyone, not even the Conservative party. We might have been angry about NHS waiting lists, the cost of living crisis, extortionate energy bills, collapsing schools, crime not being investigated and all the other things that illustrate today’s broken Britain, but we have just meekly accepted it all.
The Tory party wants us all to think all politicians are the same because if we do, they hope we will re-elect them next year. It’s the job of opposition parties to show that they aren’t all the same and to give us something to believe in. But first, we need to rise up.
Whatever the tin pot elective dictators like Sunak say, this is our country. It does not have to be broken. The NHS needn’t have more than eight million people on its waiting lists – there were barely any when Labour was voted out of office in 2010 – and having millions of people in poverty is as a result of political choices. They are, largely, political choices made by us, those of us who have lost faith in politicians, feel they are all in it for themselves and anyway they’re all the same.
The main thing we can do in 2024 is vote Sunak and his cronies out of office. But we can do so much more before he calls an election. Write to your MP when you are mad about something or you want something done. Sign petitions, no matter how cynical you feel about their value. Attend meetings by political parties. Attend your MP’s surgery and, without being abusive or threatening, don’t hold back. When politicians arrive at your doorstep tell them what you want to happen. When the Tories show their faces – both of them – down our road I follow them from door to door, holding them to account. I do not accept that Sunak is better than me and anyway he is there to serve me, not the other way round. There is no such thing as government money: it’s our money. None of this requires a great deal of thought. We are not obliged in any way to buy Sunak’s snake oil.
It’s true that it feels like we have no say in how our country is run and that democracy means nothing more than a single vote every five years, but there is far more we can do than simply vote these people out. They’ve got it too easy at the moment. We need to make their lives much harder.
In conclusion, my message to my people – my loyal reader, then – is this very simple truth. This land is your land and this land is my land. In 2024, we are going to take it back. You have broken this country and we want someone to fix it and that someone, Sunak, after 14 miserable years of Tory government can’t be you. And we do that by voting for the candidate most likely to unseat the Conservative. Things can get better, we can change the world, but only if we want them to. We do, don’t we?
