Well, that was another week done. We made it through *another* one without gouging our eyes out and stuffing them in our ear holes so as to block out the awfulness from all senses. Some favour a “just put your phone down and lock yourself away” approach. I like to really commit. Because rolling your eyes at the headlines before tossing your phone onto the sofa in disgust suggests a passing familiarity with current affairs, doesn't it? Only when you’ve turned your entire head into a veritable windowless room, will your great peers of political thought conclude “yep, he gets it”. There’s no shortage of people who’ve compared Politics to Sport. From Soccer to American Football, you get the same parallels drawn again and again. From JFK, to Obama to James O’Brien and back. It’s two teams. It’s avid support. It’s “own goals” and “the speaker showed the PM a red card”. But with weeks like this, for most of us, it feels less like the Beautiful Game and more an endurance round in a Japanese game show where the producers want to see how much Portsmouth Harbour sewage they can waterboard you with. (Bonus points for Cabinet Ministers who storm the set & steal a chair to refuel) Last week saw a foray into the newest chapter of the culture war: Work From Home. Not three weeks have past since the last time they wheeled it out, when (Amateur Dramatics portrayal of a Victorian Paedophile) Jacob Rees-Mogg dismounted from his penny farthing to leave post-it notes on civil service desks to voice his disapproval. Of course, the issues with WFH have been debunked again and again. “People are lazy”, “we need to grow the economy!”, “everyone’s just at home in their pyjamas”. The reality, statistically, factually, objectively is that it’s more productive. It’s better for your mental health. It’s better for the environment. You see your kids more. People, on average, achieve a day’s more work per week. The benefits are innumerable. And none of that is anecdotal. It’s been studied and concluded by everyone from Stanford to LSE. From business leaders to academics. Perhaps that’s the problem? Experts have told the Tories that WFH works. The Tories don’t like that, or indeed experts more broadly because their stats and studies invariably tell them their ideas are shit. But because we live in a country where undisciplined schoolboys run the show, such objective (if inconvenient) advice is ignored and the pre-set position merely amplified. They are the political equivalent of an English tourist in Magaluf, who, when told some frustrating news, responds to it by shouting the same thing louder and louder. "What you are saying is not what I like hearing so stop creating those unpleasant noises out of your face-hole and listen to how vitriolically I need my fantasy to be reality" They are the annoying husband who doesn’t get the answer he wants, so waits a few hours and asks the same question again. Rees-Mogg isn’t alone, of course. He has friends. Sort of (do any of them? Ever?). Nick Ferrari used his breakfast show to rail against workers staying at home in their pyjamas. The Telegraph publicly soiled itself with “Homeworking is a middle-class Remainer cult”. And now, this week, even the PM jumped in, with a Mail front page splash: “PM: Working from Home Doesnt Work”. Except it does. So, are we expected to just sit back and take this nonsense? *gleefully takes seat on endurance gameshow set* “Yeah, sewage, please. Keep it coming. I. Am. Parched.” Perhaps it's little wonder that WFH is becoming the new battleground for the Culture War. It's perfect. You have a city-based, metropolitan, largely liberal group of people pointing at facts. And then you have cynical careerists and every tap-dancing tosser from GB News and TalkTV telling traditional 'workers' that we're just looking down on them, trying to get one-up on them, etc etc. As ever, Dan Hodges (Mail on Sunday) was my favourite. To Hodges, there was a layer of disgusting classism to all this. "Plumbers. Roofers. Dinner Ladies... They don't get that choice." he bemoaned. "At least acknowledge it..." Well, quite. But it's hard to justify forcing ten million people back into the office, at huge expense, often paying four hundred quid-a-month, unnecessarily, to no one's benefit, not seeing their children all week, in a Cost Of Living crisis - all to make some unspecified person, somewhere, not feel bad. Frankly, it's a cuddly, fluffy sensibility I was not expecting from the Mail. And what of other professions and working environments that attract other benefits? In Summer, I'd quite like to work outside more. As a programmer, I don't get that choice. As an MP, you could expect a Grace & Favour flat, a country pile and a Westminster office. But that can't be right. Bin-men don't get that. Alright, hands up: Which lucky son of a bitch had Equality-of-Outcome on their Daily Mail bingo-card? Separate (yet similar) to that, Govt revisited the Northern Ireland protocol, last week. Another matter I thought we’d dealt with, listened to the concerns and responded to accordingly. It’s funny, when you remember it was these same people who negotiated, signed and sold us the Oven Ready Brexit deal - it's quite something when they come back *two weeks later* to tell us we obviously didn’t understand before. And then... like clockwork, like an overwritten plot in a 90s cliche political thriller, they also briefed last week that they would be binning 90,000 civil service jobs. Okay, wow. In terms of characterising of the modern Conservative Party, you couldn’t have asked for a clearer week of examples. Honestly, the writers room on this thriller would’ve been shut down as amateurs. “C'mon, Larry, I like the idea of a Govt who won’t listen to a few home-truths, but you’re really hitting them over the head with it here...”. So, Spoiler Alert: This is a Govt that doesn’t like listening to reality. From warnings about VIP fast lanes to WFH to drug legalisation to Rwanda to Brexit. It likes hearing the truth as much as it likes telling it. At a time we desperately need the Executive to be briefed correctly, with facts, by experts, objectively - we instead have leaders intent on savaging the departments that perform that function - because they don't like being told no. While other countries grapple with the cost of living crisis using energy price caps or lower/stagnated tax solutions we have a Cabinet who spend their time trying to fit triangular-shaped objects through square holes - and defensively target anyone who points out their lunacy. A Govt who now operate almost exclusively between "publicly shitting the bed" and "shooting the messenger".
