29m ago
09.35 GMT
Andrew
Sparrow
@AndrewSparrow
Tue 3 Jan
2023 09.48 GMT
Transport secretary admits proposed legislation
won’t offer solution to current rail strikes
Good
morning, and happy new year. You’ll be glad to hear that I haven’t recorded a
new year’s messsage for you all, but if you’re missing out you can try Rishi
Sunak’s first one (which was even more banal than these things usually are, and
included the claim that he became PM three months ago, when it is more like two
months), his second one (which was an improvement, and may have been recorded
as a repair job), Keir Starmer’s (which was more prime ministerial, and had
enough union jack presence to match a Liz Truss video), or Boris Johnson’s,
which in some ways was the most interesting of the lot.
As usual,
the former PM was peddling boosterism and, as well as saying he expected the
economy to recover and Vladimir Putin to lose in Ukraine, he said 2023 would be
the year when the UK would “finally start to take advantage of all our new
freedoms, lengthening our lead as the best place on earth to invest, to start a
business, raise a family, or just hang out in the pub”.
He may have
been right on his final point, because pubs are British institutions, and so
you would expect them to be particularly good here. But when he spoke about
“new freedoms”, Johnson did not even mention Brexit (perhaps conscious that it
is increasingly seen as a mistake) and, as he ran through his “best place on
earth” spiel, he seemed to be finding it hard to conceal his awareness of how
hollow this sounded.
Britain may
be a good for visits to the pub. But if you were looking for somewhere that
might be the best place on earth to call an ambulance, catch a train, schedule
a GP appointment, secure an above-inflation pay rise, heat your home at a
reasonable cost, get seen by a doctor at A&E, ensure families don’t need to
visit food banks, export to the EU, afford to buy your first home, get the
police to catch a burglar, recruit staff to work in hospitality, find decent
adult social care, obtain affordable childcare, secure a rape conviction or
even book a driving test – then obviously you would avoid Britain at all costs.
As my
colleague Gwyn Topham reports in his overnight story, this week’s episode of
Britain isn’t working is dominated by the rail strikes.
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