• Riots

What’s extraordinary is that he’s taking an axe to the very system that has twice (three times by his reckoning) seen him elected to the highest office. The joint session of Congress formally to count the electoral college votes is in some ways a piece of political theatre and one that normally passes off without incident. It is, however, very important according to the way things are organised.

Trying to prevent it happening is akin to bursting into Buckingham Palace and preventing the monarch from signing an Act of Parliament.  Stop this and you’ve jammed a spanner into the machinery. Whether the machinery needs an overhaul is another question. This isn’t the way to do it.

OK, never mind the administrative principles: look at the figures. Wikipedia says that at least 2,000 people stormed the Capitol during the attack. Five people died within 36 hours of the event and four police officers had committed suicide within seven months. 174 people were injured. The damage was estimated to have cost $2.6m.

These are serious stats. By any standards, those responsible should do some time. Many might argue that the person most responsible for this got off scot free so perhaps thought everyone else should do as well.

Many police officers, judges and politicians have criticised the decision. So too did one of those pardoned, Pamela Hemphill, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 60 days in prison. She told the BBC that there should be no pardons for the riot on 6 January 2021. “Accepting a pardon would only insult the Capitol police officers, rule of law and, of course, our nation,” she said. “I pleaded guilty because I was guilty, and accepting a pardon also would serve to contribute to their gaslighting and false narrative.”

• Executives

The PotUS wasn’t done yet, not by a long chalk. This article in The Guardian quotes Trump as saying that he’d be a dictator only on day one and thereafter not a dictator: which is good to know. The executive orders that he signed on this dictator day included revoking EV targets, declaring an energy emergency, declaring a southern border emergency, pausing the TikTok ban, asserting that there are only two genders and renaming the Gulf of Mexico.

He has also told Putin that he needs to end the “ridiculous” war in Ukraine, a choice of adjective with which many would agree. He has threatened taxes, tariffs and sanctions on Russia if an agreement isn’t made to end the conflict. The Ukraine government seems pleased with this stance: Putin’s reaction, in this as in all things, is less clear.

As seriously in a different way, he pulled the USA out of both the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organisation, for which the US currently provides over 20% of its funds. We have been here before, with Trump suspending payments after the start of the pandemic in 2020.

His reasoning for his latest move is very clear: “World Health ripped us off, everybody rips off the United States. It’s not going to happen any more.” He added that the organisation had mishandled the Covid-19 pandemic and other international health crises.

• Pandemics

Over 1.2m people in the USA died from Covid, more than any other country. Its deaths per capita put it at fourteenth in the table, slightly worse than the UK, in eighteenth place. The wide disparity between these figures country-by-country (and some, such as China’s, are rather hard to believe) can hardly be laid at the door of the WHO. I don’t think many national governments handled this very well, certainly not the USA’s (or the UK’s).

The main stages of reaction, normally in this order and pretty much everywhere, were shock, disbelief, denial, panic and acceptance. These are much like I recall my reactions to being in a car crash many years ago. For a car crash is what is was: despite knowing that driving at high speed on a crowded road with bald tyres and defective brakes wasn’t a good idea, that was what humanity did. A number of warning lights, like the Cygnus exercise in the UK and others elsewhere, seem to have been ignored.

Making changes to reduce the threat of a problem – a pandemic, climate change or anything else – generally have a likelihood of success in inverse proportion to how many changes or curtailments these demand we make to our lifestyles. We are, for instance, intensely social creatures who have developed a taste for international travel. These two facts alone are what makes Covid so delighted.

We’re also very resourceful at curing problems (though climate change seems to be eluding us) but less good at preventing them in the first place. Diseases like Covid can, despite what Trump and a few others maintain, be partly preventable with vaccines. However this is merely a mitigation. Moreover, for people to claim that deaths or adverse reaction from Covid jabs (of which there undoubtably some, though no one seems to agree how many) is like saying that heart surgery should be banned because not everyone survives it.

What we should be doing is funding our health systems correctly. There seems little doubt that in the UK the years of austerity led to a partial collapse of these. All this is rather like letting your flood defences go unmaintained and then hoping it won’t rain, despite increasing evidence that it will.

This brings us back to the US’s support, or now lack of it, for the WHO. I suspect the reason Trump dislikes and distrusts it is because, like NATO and the UN, it gets considerable funding from the USA but isn’t run by it. That’s kind of the point of international organisations. If the world weren’t intimately connected at every level, there’d be no need for them. As it is, there are. Imagining that the USA can forge its own destiny in all things and either be in full control of something or want nothing to do with it, seems insane. None the less, that seems to be exactly what he wants to do.

And we’re only at day two…

• Hacking

This week, Prince Harry won what he claimed was a “monumental victory” against News Group Newspapers over historical claims of illegal access of personal data, and not just his. Murdoch’s empire will be required to pay “substantial damages” and it leaves the battlefield with its already sullied reputation further besmirched.

According to Private Eye 1641, the Sussexes have had another dividend from this: Meghan’s “drippy new lifestyle show” has, it reports on p9, been given “unusually generous treatment” in the Murdoch press, doubtless with this day in court in mind.

The trouble is – and this rather undermines claims of a “monumental victory” – is that there was no day in court. The matter was settled at the eleventh hour. As a result the version of events that we shall get is not one that emerged through contested proceedings but rather as a result of an out-of-court agreement between the parties which the court is forced to go along with. Given that there were other victims involved, not all of whom had Harry’s depth of pockets, one’s left wondering what more we might profitably have learned.

The overwhelming impression is one of a suppressed sneeze, aborted at the last moment in the interests of a speedy and certain result but leaving everyone wondering what all the gasping and heavy breathing might have portended.

Exactly the same thing, also involving Murdoch and a high-profile victim, happened in the late 1980s when The Sun launched a vicious and unprovoked campaign against Elton John. This was recorded in a superb article, The Sun and the Star, by John Sweeney (I can’t find it as text but you can click here to listen to what seems from memory to an unabridged reading of it).

The Sun knew from the outset the stories were batshit but continued to publish them. Elton John’s private life was hardly monastically pure at that time and he was advised by many friends to turn the other cheek. He decided, with considerable courage, to take the paper on. “They can say I’m a fat, old sod.,” he said at the time. “They can say I’m an untalented bastard. They can call me a poof. But they mustn’t tell lies about me.”

He had much to thank his lawyers for. Despite being one of the last stories he sued over, they managed to get the most preposterous one – an easily disprovable fantasy that he’d had his dogs’ vocal cords removed – brought to court first. This collapsed, so casting grave doubts over the veracity of all the others.

The Murdoch empire rapidly went into reverse and a £1m settlement and grovelling apology were issued just as the next case was about to start. The judge was unimpressed, complaining that the courts were not designed to be “the supine adjuncts of the PR machines of newspaper groups and pop stars”, but could do nothing to stop it. A line was drawn and we shall never know the truth of the other claims.

In this case, the truth was probably zero so perhaps there’s little lost. In Harry’s case, however, the issues are rather more subtle, affected other people, amounted to possibly criminal activity and took place over a longer period of time. There is therefore a genuine public-interest issue in knowing what happened. The good thing about contested proceedings is that they would, at no cost to you or me, have produced some version of what a public inquiry might have produced.

Of course, we all know the tabloid press made or makes up stories and hacked or hacks people’s secrets. Still, there’s nothing like a court case (or, if we’re prepared to pay for it, a public inquiry) to bring all the issues into the public domain. If Harry’s claim had been as strong as Murdoch’s lawyers obviously recognised, I’d have liked to have seen it play out to the full: and not just for reasons of sensational schadenfreude. However, it was his action and he can handle matters as he decided. Nevertheless…

• And finally…

• Trump and Musk are, as is well known, thin-skinned egomaniacs whose love-in is for that reason likely to be measured in weeks or months. Also worth adding to this list is our erstwhile supremo Liz Truss who, as The Week reports, has issued a cease-and-desist notice on Kier Starmer regarding his claims that she crashed the UK economy.

As the article goes on to consider, on some grounds Starmer’s claim might be incorrect, though hardly more so than that of so much other political knockabout. To resort to the lawyers in such a case is amazingly sad. If I were her, I’d be living in Paraguary at the moment under an assumed name, hoping that all the people whose mortgage rates went through the roof never caught up with me and being very careful lest my texts were being hacked by the tabloids.

Across the area

• Devolution

“Just about every council in the country is in a state of heightened anxiety, feverish speculation or excited opportunism at the possible implications of the government’s proposed reorganisations.,” I wrote in this column last week.”This will also in some areas include mayoral authorities being set up, the idea seemingly being that these elected supremos will be able to make swift and certain decisions on matters which, the government hopes, will be more to its liking than those made under the existing structures.”

All authorities which are not currently mayoral, including our own West Berkshire, are looking at the options presented to them by the Secretary of State in December under which “remaining two-tier areas and neighbouring small unitaries are to set out plans for a joint programme of devolution and local government reorganisation.” West Berkshire is a small unitary: mind you, as we pointed out last week, by the government’s new definition of ideal size (500,000 people), almost every unitary is.

It seems that the ultimate plan is to have a two-tier system across the whole country: strategic authorities with mayors representing at least 1.5 million people; and, below that, unitaries of at least 500,000. Given the hotch-potch we currently have, this may take some time to sort out. I’d imagine that dealing with the cumbersome county/district system in places such as Oxfordshire will be higher up the list than merging existing one-tier authorities. There’s certainly much to be said for trying to create a bit more logic to the arrangements.

This might also be an opportunity to make administrative divisions consistent with those of other authorities such as health, police and fire services. As regards the old, traditional counties, there seems no particularly compelling logic in keeping these all together. West Berkshire, for instance, has in many ways more in common with the Vale and South Oxfordshire than it does with Reading and Slough.

Most authorities are currently eyeing up potential partners, weighing the advantages of flirting with x against those of making a proposition to y. It’s all a bit like a debutantes’ or freshers’ ball, with everyone equally fearful of moving in too soon and of being left on the shelf: and with the added complication that none of the participants has any money.

A lot of people will be worried about their jobs. These changes will be expected to produce economies of scale, although shedding part of the HR bill isn’t on its own likely to make councils solvent. But taking a cynical view, there’s no better time to cut jobs than when you’re going through a re-organisation.

One of the things that seems uncertain is what powers the strategic and the unitary authorities would have. One person I spoke to recently said that they’d heard from three different people that planning would be: decided by the mayoral authority; decided by the unitaries; or split between the two. I’m not sure which is the most likely.

There seem to be three separate issues that need to be addressed: deal with the current county/district structure, where it exists; combine unitaries where these need to be got up to the 500,000 population, as most do; and then decide about the strategic authorities. They really should be tackled in that order, not conflated into one exercise.

The matter of local government organisation might seem arcane and irrelevant. However, local councils are our most immediate point of democratic engagement and provide a wide range of services. For years they’ve been under-funded and many of them could go bankrupt overnight if the government put the SEND costs back onto the municipal balance sheets rather than in the accounting limbo where they currently exist. Any change is thus important to us.

• The fire precept

Royal Berkshire Fire Authority (RBFA) is consulting Berkshire residents and staff on Council Tax funding for the next financial year. Due to significant budgetary pressure outlined in this letter, to maintain the current level of service RBFA is proposing a £5 increase for 2025/26, based on a Band D precept, to £86.31. Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service’s annual budget for 2024/25 is £46 million. About two thirds of the funding comes from council tax, the rest from government grants and business rates. 

You can take part in the consultation by completing this short online survey by noon on 31 January 2025.

• Dog bins

Contrary to what you might have read elsewhere, no final decision has yet been taken by West Berkshire Council as to whether it’s going to cut the number of dog bins, or any of the other services which the recent consultations considered. These have all now closed and the results are being studied.

The budget, including any of these proposals, will be being discussed and agreed at the Full Council meeting on 27 February, the agenda for which will appear here in due course.