I USED to think I understood the phrase “swimming in shark-infested custard”, but now politics in rUK appear to be solidifying in curdling custard and the harder rUK struggles the more the frenzied sharks are circling, lunging at everything and everyone, eyeing up the internal opposition, looking for favourites or threats to their own tenuous positions.

Recent Tory own goals should have seen excoriating headlines and in-depth critique of the immoral, corrupt failures and mistakes of this government and its predecessors back to that cabal of a coalition with the minnows of political, the LibDems. But no, everything will now be swept aside as the focus swings to a sex scandal (“not another one”) emanating from Tory leaders in power, in government and in offices that leak more than a broken colander.

Can we afford to regard One Britain One Nation, and the call that every house should flaunt a photo of the Queen, as early summer-season silliness? Really? Isn’t it much more, namely the realisation that English nationalism is consolidating, and not as an irreverent drop-the-dead-donkey moment, but as the accepted face of taking back control?

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It’s reaffirmation of a jingoistic form of Englishness meant to tug at heartstrings and provoke nostalgia, hoping the peasants forget their years of tugging their forelocks. If the benefits of what you were promised and voted for don’t materialise, let’s blame ABTT: anyone but the Tories.

This government wasn’t content with their recent race report that virtually denied the existence of racism. They’ve now opened up a new front on what is and isn’t “white privilege”: their sleekit way of outlying others in our society, pitting one agin the other, when the bogeyman is poverty, entrenched class structures played out alongside ideology, entitlement and chumocracy. Expectations become even greater when you’re made to believe what’s yours by right is being denied to you by those others. You know, basics like housing.

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All diversion and delusion to detract from the Brexit failures through to now, with wastage and corruption hiding behind the notions of expediency and “unprecedented times”. But that’s the history of the PM: soundbites and grandiose promises that didn’t turn into a green bridge straddling the Thames or a new London airport rising from the mud, and let’s not mention water cannons with less water than the plastic flower on the real clowns’ jackets, sold off at a loss.

We’re meant to regard as manna puny trade deals that will take years to provide tangible benefits, assuming we survive the downturn and decimation of local economies, trades and businesses. What’s another public inquiry post-pandemic worth to the dead, the grieving, the overworked? Who cares about insufficient PPE, jobs lost, shops closed, rents raised, renters turfed out when salaciousness comes to the rescue?

Will the Nolan Report hold sway? Doubt it. Will we know the process of recruitment and appointment of Mrs Coladangelo to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in the first place? Nope. What about the linking of her brother, an executive at a private health company, to the fact said company won a “string of NHS contracts”? To be clouded over.

Will the whistleblower be exposed and sacked? That one could run. Will there be a resignation or two? He’s gone, she too from that lucrative taxpayer-funded post. And the agitated curdling custard stills until the next time.

Selma Rahman
Edinburgh