On the 2018 cabinet reshuffle

The latest reshuffle of Theresa May's Cabinet, whilst not drastic, has been rather interesting, to say the least.

Being an entirely Conservative Cabinet, I was not expecting much change, except for the worse. The resignations of James Brokenshire and Sir Patrick McLoughlin from the Cabinet have attracted the most attention but they are not the most significant changes by far. The fact that Justine Greening has been replaced by Damian Hinds (MP for East Hampshire since 2010) as Education Secretary makes no noticeable difference.

The most significant and worst change is the re-appointment of Esther McVey to Work & Pensions Secretary; David Gauke meanwhile becomes Justice Secretary and is the first solicitor to hold this role (mostly held by barristers historically). The last time Esther was Work & Pension Secretary (when she was MP for Wirral West, rather than the Tatton constituency she currently represents), she became infamous for her total disregard for the lives and needs of disabled people when she implemented harsh benefits cuts (especially to ESA, vital for those unable to work due to disability and/or illness), and has been a primary instigator and defender of the worst of the Conservatives' welfare reform policies, including food banks popping up nationally and harsh and unjustifiable benefit sanctions often on flimsy excuses, even when faced with evidence of the moral and practical failures of such policies.

The more notorious ministers, such as Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove, meanwhile stay where they are, although coincidentally the resignation of controversial paleoconservative Toby Young from the new universities regulator at the same time this reshuffle happened is welcome news nevertheless.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The English local elections of 2023-Conservatives pay the penalty for failing to put a stop to sleaze and sewage in our rivers

The English local elections of 2023 (Northern Ireland's elections will finish next week and a separate blog post will be devoted to these) not only resulted in more than 1000 Conservative losses just as Rallings & Thrasher and Sir John Curtice predicted, they also resulted in sweeping Green and Liberal Democrat gains across the nation-sending a hard message to the Conservatives about the need to protect our environment and Labour for barely acting like an opposition at all. The Conservatives in total made a net loss of 1,061 seats, with the vast majority being in the shire districts where they once dominated-even councils such as Bracknell Forest and Surrey Heath, which they held in 1995 and 2019, fell, to Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively in those two cases. Who they lost to varied widely by the nature of the authority-their losses to Labour came mainly in (ex) industrial "Red Wall" areas where they had made against-the-trend gains in 2019 or fared better
Read more

My analysis of the Swedish general election of 2022

The Swedish general election of 2022 generated some surprising results, despite also averting pollsters' predictions significantly. The last three years in particular proved to be a rough ride for the Social Democrat led governments of Stefan Lofven and Magdalena Andersson respectively. Although Sweden's laxer approach to the COVID-19 pandemic (compared to most countries in Europe, which imposed lockdowns during much of 2020 and 2021, an approach that arguably caused more problems than it solved) proved effective, Mr Lofven's desire to lift the austerity tax (which only affected a wealthy minority, similar in nature to the wealth tax initiative of former French President Francois Hollande) and to join NATO proved contentious, with two of the Social Democrats' former coalition partners (the Swedish Greens and Swedish Left Party, who had both pulled out of confidence and supply) unsurprisingly voting against Swedish accession to NATO membership (all other parties in the R
Read more

On the 2020 Serbian election: Why a boycott will only worsen things there

First of all, I apologise for the recent hiatus; however elections are still postponed or on hold in many countries, including the UK. Serbia, however, was able to proceed with its 2020 general election amidst this crisis. Its overall result proved reminiscent of Hungarian elections under Viktor Orban's tenure (2010-present), since the leading national-conservative coalition, the SNS (Progressive Party of Serbia) coalition led by Serbian President Aleksander Vucic (Ana Brnabic is the Serbian Prime Minister, and the first woman and openly homosexual person to hold that position), polled 61.6% of the vote, giving them as many as 191 seats out of 250 and a majority of as high as 132, almost unheard of in any country with proportional representation. Press freedom has endured significant curbs since President Vucic first came into power as Serbian PM in 2012 (he became President of Serbia in 2017), as have civil liberties of Serbs in general. Nepotism and corruption in the Serbian
Read more