Latest from New Statesman
New Statesman
26 minutes ago
- General
- New Statesman
Samuel Pepy's diaries of a somebody
The creation of a national icon in this country is a many-faceted business. Sometimes it happens rapidly, in the midst of crisis – Nelson, Churchill. Sometimes it is a matter of steady, incremental reputation, a figure whose stature has grown unstoppably and is acknowledged even outside national boundaries – Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens. And sometimes it happens almost arbitrarily, when a person is recognised as embodying something that is imagined to be quintessentially British or (more usually) English. Some historical figure captures the imagination; their actual achievement may be small or great, but they somehow encourage the feeling that only here would a character like this emerge – Dr Johnson, perhaps, or Florence Nightingale; the historical equivalent of a national treasure. It is hard to deny Samuel Pepys's role as a minor national icon of this sort. A professional civil servant, holding a highly responsible position in the Admiralty under Charles II and his successor James II, he was also an enthusiastic amateur musician and a passionate collector of books, whose wonderfully eclectic library remains a jewel in the crown of his old Cambridge college, Magdalene. He might have been surprised to be remembered less for his labours as a dedicated and highly effective naval administrator than for the diary he kept between 1660 and 1669; but it is undoubtedly the latter that has established his role as 'treasurable'. What most readers know or think they know about his diary is its charm – quaint period phrases ('Up betimes', 'And so to bed', and all the rest), sparkling vignettes of 'real life' in the 17th century, what it felt like to witness the events of the textbooks as they happened – not least the Great Fire of London. Of course, there is also the rather problematic brand of charm conveyed for a certain kind of male reader in Pepys's knowing salaciousness, the rueful chuckles of a not very successful sensualist and henpecked husband. Kate Loveman's excellent book does not set out to rob Pepys of his charm – but she gives us a range of tools for interrogating it (and our responses to it), so that we can offset the effects of a long history of selective and rather superficial reading. As she shows, some of the most familiar phrases owe their frequency in the diary to the fact that they are very easy to write in the distinctive form of shorthand he employs. But mention of this is a reminder that until 1825 virtually no one had read the diary. Pepys was remembered gratefully at Magdalene; his reputation in the Navy had survived. But what made the difference, and set Pepys on the road to being an icon, was a confluence of factors in the early-19th century: a new interest in first-hand historical testimony, a desire on the part of both the college and the Pepys family to do better justice to his memory in this new climate of antiquarian enthusiasm, and the crucial decision by the Grenville family (the then master of Magdalene was a close relative) to pay for a full transcription of the diary by an expert who identified Pepys's 'code' as based on a pattern in a manual that Pepys had thoughtfully included in his library. The history of subsequent editions in the 19th century is complicated, though Loveman lays it out with great clarity. Initially the Grenville and Neville families retained close control of the publication process, with Richard Neville, Lord Braybrooke, overseeing the first published selection of material. It found a receptive audience, and demand grew for further extracts – especially as rumours began to circulate that what had been omitted in the published version included some material that might not sit too well with the editor's portrait of Pepys as a model of dutiful virtue. Eventually, Henry Wheatley in the 1890s produced nine volumes of selections, which would serve as the received text for many decades; it was an edition that provided far more space to display Pepys as a comic character, including much of the rather Pooterish material about minor domestic troubles and assorted purchases – but not the sexually explicit passages. Loveman stresses that the text from which all 19th-century editors worked was the transcript made by John Smith for the first edition; no one revisited the encoded text until the next major round of interest in the later 20th century. Robert Latham, of Magdalene, and William Matthews, an expert in shorthand, produced the definitive modern edition between 1970 and 1983, working from the originals, correcting earlier errors or amendments and restoring omissions. They decided, with the college's approval (supported, in a letter of rather acerbic common sense, by CS Lewis) that the censorship of Pepys's 'explicit' passages was indefensible; and so at last readers were able to make their own judgements on the author's morality. Loveman persuasively shows that the Pepys of popular imagination between 1825 and 1970 was, to a significant extent, a creation of his editors, who in turn depended not on the primary text but on a transcription that they at times felt free to tinker with in the cause of clarity or decency (as in Pepys's account of his almighty hangover the morning after Charles II's coronation). This is the Pepys of popular imagination, extracted in assorted books, summarised in schoolbooks, dramatised on stage (JB Fagan's And So to Bed of 1926 is still occasionally revived as a musical) and, later, television screens. And Loveman has a brilliant chapter on the popularity of Pepys, and of pastiche Pepysian diaries in the press, during the Second World War. The picture of the Ordinary Englishman – going about his business in times of upheaval and crisis, often absurd but essentially decent, brave and amusingly stoical – rang a good many bells. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The publication of the full text did not by any means overturn this picture, but it lit a slow fuse. It is harder now to see Pepys's sexual adventures as a bit of high-spirited naughtiness. He was clearly a pest and at worst a predator. Loveman reminds us that the female servants who had to put up with his groping were what we should unequivocally call children, just on the edge of puberty. Some of his accounts of escapades with adult women amount to admissions of rape, and his willingness to grant professional favours in return for the sexual compliance of other men's spouses is a nasty strand in several bits of the text. Loveman does not demonise Pepys, but she asks us to notice what icon construction can encourage us not to see, and to remember not only a bright, lively, sometimes slightly absurd social companion, but a series of young women, bewildered, frightened, resentful, for whom their employer's 'kindness' – Pepys's own term for his unwanted attentions – was not a matter for jocularity. Predictably, Pepys's involvement with enslaved persons also comes into focus here. The number of public figures and national institutions not in some way complicit in enslavement in the late-17th century is vanishingly small. And while Pepys was not a major profiteer from the trade, the evidence makes it plain that in the 1670s he had at least one enslaved young man in his service. Loveman discusses with care and insight what Pepys has to say about such persons, noting how the 'ownership' of an enslaved person had become a very clear marker of social status. The presence in a household even of a non-enslaved black person made an unmissable statement, and Pepys was obviously very happy to make use on occasion of other people's black servants, enslaved or otherwise, to reinforce his social capital. Nothing suggests that he had any qualms at all about the trade and its effects. Loveman is not inviting us to judge and cancel, but rather to follow through consistently what she sees as explaining the popularity of the diary's earliest editions. People were beginning to do history differently in the 1820s; they were more interested than hitherto in what it had felt like to be alive in another age. And Pepys himself, in leaving his diary alongside his other literary bequests, seems, so Loveman suggests, to have anticipated this. He records things, he tells us, as evidence of what people were talking about, enjoying, or fearing. The abiding significance of what he writes turns out to be just that. Reading the diary with the challenges of Loveman's closing chapter in mind is to be forced to imagine a world and a sensibility in which a moderately generous and easy-going man could instinctively have seen the slave trade first in terms of its contribution to luxury and assured social leverage – a world in which sexual consent could be assumed or ignored by a partner of higher status. Pepys, in other words, succeeds brilliantly in doing just what he says he is doing, offering a sense of 'what it's like', the irony being that the success is in proportion to the unselfconsciousness of what is written. And we also learn what his editors were unselfconsciously assuming about what was needed in a reassuring national icon – and what they either failed to see as flaws, or did see and persuaded themselves to pretend they hadn't. The problem with the past is not that it is a foreign country. It is that it is both strange and all too recognisable. A book like Pepys's diary is significant not because it provides a consoling idyll about salt-of-the-earth Ordinary Englishmen getting on with things in much the same way as the ordinary English Reader of today; nor because it uncovers a vicious pre-modern barbarism about women and racial others that we have learned to reject. It is because it reminds us that we look at the past – of a culture or an individual – and really recognise and warm to some things, and then encounter an absolute moral brick wall with others. Pepys's geniality and gossipy vigour, the evident liking and indulgence of his contemporaries, do not remove the shadows. Shadows are what happens in a three-dimensional world – not everything is clear and continuous. Theologically speaking, icons are meant not to be three-dimensional (they have to open up to a depth that is not human). Non-theological icons are a problem because of what they encourage us not to see in terms of shadows, literal and metaphorical. If we shrink the three-dimensionality of the past for the sake of an iconic smoothness, we may shrink the present too. We are still not out of the shadows. That is why we both recognise – even like – Pepys and also worry about his blind spots. We too may still be in the process of moral maturing. If one were to read an unselfconscious diary of 2025 a century from now, it would be every bit as uncomfortable (if we are still reading by that point). Kate Loveman has written a book that knows exactly what it is about. It is written with complete clarity, it is organised intelligibly, and it keeps us turning the pages with its skilful and thorough storytelling, while leaving us with some searching unfinished business. At Magdalene College, we still drink to the Immortal Memory of Samuel Pepys once a year. I don't think Loveman would want this to stop, but she would want us to remember a rather less two-dimensional figure than we have sometimes become used to. The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary Kate Loveman Cambridge University Press, 254pp, £22 Related
New Statesman
27 minutes ago
- Business
- New Statesman
No 10 is scrambling for a Silicon Valley payday
Photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters It all turned on a decimal point.A shipping container of Aston Martins had been waiting off the American coast for the British government to strike a deal with the White House. The vehicle manufacturer was desperate for Keir Starmer to get Donald Trump to lower his 25 per cent tariff on British cars. In May, Trump finally agreed to drop the base tariff to 7.5 per cent. The only problem was that when the ship docked, a US customs official wrote down 75 per cent by mistake, leaving out the decimal point. The error was soon corrected, and British exporters have since smoothed over the chaos of getting their goods into the world's richest market. But other embassies up and down Massachusetts Avenue are anxiously waiting for a phone call from the White House. Trump put out a new deadline of 1 August for several countries to capitulate to fresh deals before those big tariffs from the package he announced on 2 April – 'Liberation Day' – hit. The cycle of threats and negotiations feels ceaseless. These pauses mean Trump is mocked by Wall Street with a teasing slogan coined by a Financial Times columnist: 'Trump Always Chickens Out', or Taco. Trump's penchant for cutting taxes on the rich and bombing the Middle East has led many commentators to muse he is 'Just Another Republican' (call them Jars, for short). But don't confuse Trump hitting pause with ditching protectionism. Few Jars would raise tariffs with the alacrity that Trump has. While Ronald Reagan deployed import quotas in some sectors, that Republican president believed the 'freer the flow of world trade, the stronger the tides of human progress and peace among nations'. Compare that to the fact that since Trump took office in January, the average tariff rate has soared from 2.5 per cent to 16.6 per cent. Those fixated on the constant delays and reversals forget that the general thrust of the policy is that tariffs are going up. Protectionism, like mass deportation, is one area in which this administration is ruthlessly consistent. All of which means the UK's deal from June grows more attractive by the day. It sparkles when compared to Vietnam's 20 per cent base rate, or the 30 per cent Trump has said he wants the European Union to pay. The Business Secretary and President of the Board of Trade, Jonathan Reynolds, is hoping to visit Washington soon for further negotiations, or at least to court American business. Photo ops to one side, Reynolds would likely be overshadowed by Ambassador Peter Mandelson and Starmer's éminence grise with business, Varun Chandra, the mysterious former Hakluyt chief who is frequently in town. All the politicking is leaving the Americans fed up of taking calls from British negotiators who are under pressure from No 10 to finalise awkward areas such as steel. Avoiding a cliff-edge for trade with other countries now takes precedence. Hadn't the Brits already got a deal, anyway? Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The problem is that there is still much to thrash out. I understand the Trump administration is pushing for the NHS to charge UK providers more – for pharmaceuticals, for instance – in order to make American firms more competitive. Then there is the crowning deal on technology: the one part of these negotiations that isn't just mitigation but could actually advance Labour's governing agenda. Starmer and Rachel Reeves see an open invitation to Silicon Valley's tech companies as the ladder out of the country's terminal decline. Britain's saviour, in their mind, will arrive in robotic form. And if the options are either Chinese and American, then Labour will look west. Nonetheless, the deal is proving tricky to reach. I hear the hold-up is end-to-end encryption. The Washington Post reported in February that the UK government was trying to force Apple to open up users' encrypted data, including that of non-British citizens. But JD Vance, the US vice-president, who is negotiating with Mandelson, has resisted, backing the tech companies, ever keen to protect his old Valley buddies. Vance's position denudes the argument that these firms are apolitical, as if there is no cost to letting foreign companies become gatekeepers for the digital systems on which the UK operates. Vance clearly views these companies as American – does Labour? Remember it was Vance who refused to sign the communiqué at the Paris AI summit in February to protest against over-regulation. The UK dutifully followed suit. The government's claim that this had nothing to do with the American position should elicit a small chuckle. Look also to the tech-optimist, Innovation Secretary, Peter Kyle welcoming Google into the civil service last week. Much as the software company Palantir did during the pandemic, Google said it would provide its services to the UK for free, which meant the deal did not go out for tender. A marriage between Whitehall and Silicon Valley has become the mission by which this government wants to define itself. But a comprehensive tech deal with Washington remains elusive. The specific content is confused and ambiguous. The pressure on the ambassador, who always has one eye on the growing fissures back in Westminster, is mounting. On technology, the Brits are still circling off the coast, waiting for an agreement to be struck. [See more: Trump is serious about getting tough on Putin] Related
New Statesman
27 minutes ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
Are Unite and Labour heading for divorce?
Photo byIn Place of Strife was the name that Barbara Castle gave to her attempt to broker peace between Labour and the trade unions. Keir Starmer's approach to industrial relations lacks such a poetic title, but the aim has been much the same. Under the Conservatives, 2022's 'summer of discontent' saw the number of days lost to strike action reach its highest level since 1989. Where there was discord, Starmer promised to bring harmony. After Labour entered office, pay disputes were settled, to echo Aneurin Bevan, by stuffing workers' mouths with gold: a 22 per cent rise for resident doctors (formerly junior doctors), a 15 per cent rise for train drivers, and an above-inflation rise of 5.5 per cent for teachers and nurses. The most radical workers' rights bill since the 1970s was introduced. While Tony Blair was accused by the former TUC head John Monks of treating the trade unions like 'embarrassing elderly relatives', Starmer embraced them as partners. Yet a year on, discontent is returning. To the indignation of Wes Streeting, resident doctors have voted for five days of strike action this month despite a cumulative pay rise of 28.9 per cent (doctors reply that their real-terms pay is still lower than in 2004-05 – even if the government's preferred inflation measure is used). When Streeting addressed the Labour Party on 14 July, he warned that the action would be a 'gift to Nigel Farage' and his 'attacks on the very existence of a publicly funded, free at the point of need, universal health service'. But this conflict is mild compared with the fusillades between Unite and Labour. It was the union's ceremonial purging of Angela Rayner that absorbed most of the attention (the former Unison shop steward, in fact, cancelled her membership several months earlier). Yet far more significant was the decision by Unite to 're-examine' its affiliation to Labour. Jack Jones, the former general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, once said of the relationship between Labour and the unions: 'Murder, yes; divorce, never.' But Unite's general secretary, Sharon Graham, is raising the spectre of divorce. Unite insiders speak of a long train of grievances: Rayner's 'shambolic' handling of the Birmingham bin strike, the winter fuel cuts (which saw the union launch a judicial review), the disability benefit cuts, the 'watering down' of the Employment Rights Bill and Ed Miliband's climate policy (Graham warned that oil and gas workers could become the 'miners of net zero'). Cabinet ministers have reacted with incredulity to Unite. This government, they argue, has delivered for union members: raising defence spending, rescuing British Steel and protecting automotive workers from the full force of Donald Trump's tariffs (one source describes the Labour-union link as 'the best deal in western Europe'). Rayner's allies contend that far from being diluted, the Employment Rights Bill has been strengthened: amendments introducing a penalty for abuse of 'fire-and-rehire' practices and barring businesses from using non-disclosure agreements to silence victims of harassment and discrimination have been tabled. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 'Angela is a working-class woman facing down powerful interests in pushing through the Employment Rights Bill and now Sharon is doing their job for them with these vicious and pointless outbursts,' says a Labour MP with close links to the unions. At the Durham Miners' Gala – the labour movement's most hallowed gathering – Graham led a chant of 'Shame on you' over Rayner. Her speech dispelled assumptions that Unite's threat to disaffiliate from Labour is a bluff. 'If we leave, we will forge a new vehicle for our class,' declared Graham. To some ears that sounded like an endorsement of a new left party. Jeremy Corbyn, who has vowed to establish such a force, was among those on the same platform as Graham. For Labour, MPs say, losing Unite's annual £1.4m affiliation fee would be an 'annoyance'. Indeed, it would be rather more: an internal party document speaks of a 'difficult financial position' with Labour needing 'at least £4m to adequately resource the 2026 elections', the contests that some cabinet ministers say could determine Starmer's fate. But in the words of a Starmer ally, it would be 'game-changing' for Unite to throw its financial and industrial muscle behind a new left party. The absence of union backing helped thwart past upstarts such as Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party and George Galloway's Respect. Yet Unite insists that its animosity towards Starmer should not be mistaken for adoration of Corbyn. 'Sharon is not interested in personality cults,' one source says of a new left party. What of Zarah Sultana, Corbyn's putative co-leader? Unite is still less impressed by her. She was not among the 100 candidates financially supported by the union at the last election, charged with being insufficiently supportive of the 2022 Coventry bin workers' strike. Those who know Graham say that she is unconcerned with the power games that so absorbed her predecessor, Len McCluskey, rarely happier than when posing with a chessboard and calling himself 'the kingmaker'. Her animating passion is industrial struggle – she once managed to close down a toll bridge in Toronto over a dispute in London – and so it will remain. Polls show support for a new left party, but Labour is unmoved. 'We've got enough challenges in the marketplace without worrying about something that is yet to form,' said one strategist. For Starmer, a divided left will remain a beatable one. [See more: Even centrists want to vote for Reform] Related
New Statesman
27 minutes ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
A stable future for Gaza is a distant prospect
Photo by Omar AL-Qattaa/ AFP On 7 July Israel's defence minister presented the outline of a plan. Israel Katz explained to local journalists that he had instructed the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to prepare what he called a 'humanitarian city', into which about 600,000 Gazans would be moved 'voluntarily'. This 'humanitarian city' would be built on top of the destroyed city of Rafah, in south Gaza, and eventually be home to the entire civilian population of the Strip. Those entering the area would be screened in order to weed out Hamas militants, said Katz, and would not be able to leave once admitted. With talks ongoing in Doha, a ceasefire in Gaza might be imminent – even a permanent one. This would end a 21-month war, the longest in Israel's history, that has killed at least 58,000 Palestinians according to Gaza's health ministry – a number many experts believe to be a gross undercount. But while the end of the war may be in sight, the proposal from Israel's ministry of defence suggests that a stable, safe future for Gaza is still a distant prospect. The plan has been met with considerable backlash. Even before the war, Gaza was one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Israel's former prime minister Ehud Olmert has said that the proposal – which would concentrate the population of Gaza into a purpose-built camp in an area the fraction of the size of the enclave – describes a 'concentration camp'. Some of Israel's most respected international law scholars, meanwhile, issued an open letter saying that 'any directive to prepare or advance the establishment of a 'humanitarian city' in Gaza constitutes a manifestly illegal order' and that, if implemented, 'the plan would constitute a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and under certain conditions, could amount to the crime of genocide'. Conditions within the 'city' would not be managed by the IDF, Katz said, though the military would 'provide security from a distance'. This raised the spectre that the proposed camp would be run in much the same way as Gaza's new aid delivery sites: with deadly force. In May, when Israel's full blockade on the Strip was partially lifted, a US-backed organisation called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was set up with help from the Israeli authorities, began distributing aid to Gazans at just four locations, replacing the 400 aid points previously overseen, in part, by the UN. The scarcity of the sites not only requires Palestinians to travel long distances to receive food and other aid, but also forces them to stand in fenced-in, chaotic queues with thousands of other desperate people. The IDF patrols these distribution sites and, according to Gaza's health ministry, more than 600 people have been killed by Israeli forces while trying to get aid since May. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation says no shootings have taken place in the vicinity of its operations, but an investigation published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 27 June revealed IDF officers and soldiers say they have been ordered to fire at 'unarmed crowds' around these sites. 'It's a killing field,' one soldier said. Both Benjamin Netanyahu and Katz called the report 'blood libel'. Some media outlets have floated the possibility that Katz's proposal is not so much a concrete plan as it is a negotiating tactic, intended to pressure Hamas to bend to Israel's ceasefire demands. Yet Haaretz reported on 14 July that Netanyahu and other government ministers were angered by the IDF's suggestion that the 'humanitarian city' would take up to a year to build and could cost billions. In a cabinet meeting on 13 July, the prime minister reportedly demanded a more efficient plan. Even if the proposal is a tactic to force Hamas to negotiate, it doesn't seem to be working: at the time of writing, Israel and Hamas are still struggling to reach an agreement. Husam Badran, a senior member of Hamas, has said the camp plans were a 'deliberately obstructive demand' that were impeding ceasefire negotiations. 'This would be an isolated city that resembles a ghetto,' he told the New York Times. 'This is utterly unacceptable, and no Palestinian would agree to this.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The broad contours of a ceasefire have already been established in a US proposal: a two-month truce, in which talks to forge a permanent ceasefire would continue. Half of the remaining 50 hostages still in Gaza, including some of the 20 who are thought to still be alive, would be released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Yet sticking points beyond the proposed camp in Rafah remain: Israel demands that the much-diminished Hamas agrees to fully disarm and its political leadership is exiled; Hamas wants guarantees that the ceasefire will be made permanent and that Israel will not resume the war after a brief pause. For all the reported resistance from Hamas in negotiations, critics of Netanyahu have suggested that it is he who is stalling in an effort to placate the far-right ministers within his fragile coalition who oppose any ceasefire at all. There is speculation that the Israeli prime minister wants to drag out talks until 27 July, when Israel's parliament, the Knesset, breaks for summer, and it would become more difficult for ministers to collapse the government. Though Netanyahu travelled to Washington earlier this month, where he was pressured by Donald Trump to agree to a deal, an official told the BBC that the trip itself was to buy time. In the absence of agreeing to a peace-deal and swiftly bringing an end to the war, Netanyahu instead nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. [See also: Gaza diary: Amid the rubble] Related
New Statesman
13 hours ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
The Tories are responsible for the Afghan resettlement fiasco
It is difficult to fully get one's head around revelations of the super-injunction preventing the public – and MPs – from discovering that a data-breach in early 2022 put tens of thousand of Afghan lives at risk from the Taliban. Both the scale of the debacle – a spreadsheet full of highly sensitive data accidentally sent by an unnamed 'defence official' to the wrong recipients – and the scale of the cover-up, in the form of an unprecedented two-year super-injunction and a secret resettlement scheme with a price-tag in the billions, are jaw-dropping. After the court order was lifted at noon, Defence Secretary John Healey made a statement to the commons – and you could see the shock on the faces of MPs across the House. The unanswered questions kept coming. Which individual was responsible? Were they still in their post? Was £7bn really earmarked for the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR) to safely resettle those affected by the leak? And could the government confirm that any Afghan who had assisted the British armed forces and was therefore in danger had been or could be rescued and repatriated to the UK? It is the job of a minister to fend off these sorts of challenging questions – and on issues of life and death where there has been a government failure of this magnitude, such scrutiny is vital. But watching Healey in the spotlight, it was hard not to feel a touch of sympathy for him – and for the Labour government thrown once more into a tailspin just a week before the summer recess. This is not a crisis of Labour's making. The data leak occurred in February 2022, when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister. It has been reported that the government only learned of the breach in August 2023, when Rishi Sunak was at the helm. The super-injunction was requested when Grant Shapps was Defence Secretary; the resettlement scheme covertly planned out during the Foreign Secretary tenures of James Cleverly and David Cameron. And yet it is Keir Starmer and John Healey holding this long-unexploded grenade at the crucial moment when it has blown up. The Labour government is not devoid of culpability. Despite Healey's insistence in the chamber today that 'No government wishes to withhold information from the British public, from parliamentarians or the press in this manner,' under his watch the MoD continued to do just that, by requesting that the super-injunction remain in place. It was only abandoned after an independent review into the dangers involved concluded not just that the risks had diminished but that the insistence on secrecy could in fact have made them worse. The government also chose to push ahead with the resettlement scheme drawn up by the Tories, with Rachel Reeves signing it off in October. Different choices were presumably available (although they would have come with their own risks and consequences). Yet amid all the justifiable horror and outrage, it should not be forgotten that this was a scandal that occurred during a Conservative government, that has now landed on Labour's desk to clean up. Healey told the House today that, as shadow defence secretary, he was informed of the resettlement scheme and issued with the super-injunction in December 2023, but that 'other members of the present cabinet were only informed of the evidence of the data breach, the operation of the ARR and the existence of super-injunction on taking office after the general election', at which time the scheme was fully established. As he spoke, Luke Pollard, the parliamentary under-secretary of state for the armed forces who was sitting beside him, started nodding vigorously, his eyes wide in memory of that a meeting that must have seemed utterly beyond belief to a new minister. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This is the latest in a long line of time-bombs inherited from the Tories – hidden traps the new government has stumbled into that began years ago only came into the spotlight after the election. In addition to the state of the public finances (over which the parties are still squabbling), we can add: the over-crowded prisons that threatened to overflow weeks after the election, the crisis in Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) funding, the fall-out from the decades-long grooming gangs. Then there are all the compensation schemes for historic injustices, from the Post Office to infected blood – consequences of governments long-gone, the can for which was kicked into the future by a line of ministers hoping it would be someone else's problem by the time the public demanded actions. Every time the government hopes to have won itself some breathing room, a new landmine goes off. Today, Healey offered in sombre tones his 'sincere apology' to all those whose information was compromised. The shadow defence secretary James Cartlidge, a defence minister when the super-injunction was first requested and the resettlement scheme planned, added his own apology to those affected. The Conservatives will not be opposing the government's decision to conclude the ARR. But the fall-out from this catastrophic failure – the costs of the scheme and of the lawsuit already in the works, to say nothing of the revelations that may emerge if it transpires deaths occurred due to the breach – will be Labour's to manage. And the blame if it is mismanaged in any way will be laid firmly at Labour's door. [Further reading: A glimpse of the Taliban at work] Related
