We have to decide how to vote in the GLA elections on Thursday 2nd May. I have made no secret of my Lib Dem leanings, especially in respect of principles which I regard as fundamental to functioning democracy: fairness, community consultation, open debate, respect for a local community and their interests, provision of affordable housing ….
The problem I have is that Gareth Roberts, the candidate I should be voting for in the South West London constituency, has defied all those principles. Teddington and Twickenham are preferred to East Sheen and Mortlake. The best he can do in terms of consultation and debate about the Stag Brewery is to storm disrespectfully out of a meeting shouting ‘Get real’. He oversees a residential planning application which has reduced affordable housing from 30% to 6%.
He oversees the import of a school from East London to the banks of Mortlake, pretending that it will benefit the area. How? It will primarily attract pupils from across London, thereby exacerbating local traffic and other infrastructure problems. Worse still it would impact detrimentally on the other schools in the area, schools which he has failed to consider or consult.
I have had several local councillors, including one canvassing at my door in the last few hours, tell me that the Council was required by law to make the recent planning decisions. None of them has been able to explain why that might be so. I do not believe it. It is simply what they have been told to say to what they regard as the gullible public.
So how to vote? For an autocrat who gives the appearance of regarding himself as en route to the House of Lords or for a party which locally is allowing its guiding principles to be subverted?
Richard White
So the autocrat won.
Richard White is a retired solicitor and former Tribunal Judge
I have been living in the area of East Sheen for over forty years. In the last few years since retirement I have become more interested in what is happening in the local community. Having worked in and with local authorities in a variety of ways it is perhaps a natural development.
Working on the aftermath of the closure of the Bank of England Sports Centre, much used by Richmond residents in the east end of the borough, was an eye-opener on the lack of consideration for the community.
Being a member of the Barnes Home Guard Club (based in Sheen) for thirty years and watching its modernisation in the last couple of years, provided links in the local community.
Joining the committee of the Mortlake with East Sheen Society (MESS) provided another perspective. The increase in its membership over the last year is illustrative of a need and the monthly newsletter from an independent Civic Society is important.
Attendance at the East Sheen Police Liaison Group and taking minutes of their meetings has shown how little interest there appears to be on matters of importance to local community welfare. Unless of course you are a victim. Efforts are ongoing to try to improve methods of communication.
All these activities have demonstrated the difficulty of developing reliable sources of news and the exchange of well-informed opinion.
One of the most useful publications is Sarah Olney’s Weekly Newsletter, but, while informative, it is inevitably politically biased. The refusal to address the Stag Brewery planning applications in spite of the huge local opposition demonstrates this all too clearly. The Richmond Council Community News available by email is a useful factual source of information but it too naturally comes from a source where you would not expect to find anything remotely critical of services.
By comparison the Barnes Bugle appears, on recent examination, to be a useful independent medium for Barnes residents. One might have hoped that Next Door East Sheen would have provided a useful and reliable source of information and thinking. Sometimes it does but all too often it has descended into a bearpit of vituperation.
The Richmond and Twickenham Times ought to be for the whole borough but its primary local focus is on the other side of the river, and its knowledge of East Sheen and Mortlake can perhaps best be summed up by its report of the major incident at the junction of the Upper Richmond Road and Sheen Lane on 24 April as having happened in Putney. [Nowhere reported the closure of the junction between Waitrose and Milton Road which continued from 930am to 6pm to facilitate the necessary forensic investigations. News of the resulting traffic chaos appears to have been left to local Whats App groups.]
The Stag Brewery
The context for this analysis of what might benefit East Sheen and Mortlake is that Richmond Council is becoming worryingly autocratic and authoritarian. Their conduct of the Stag Brewery planning applications is of course the prime example. Ignoring the local expertise aimed at improving the proposals for the benefit of the local community in East Sheen and Mortlake is unforgivable and will cause dissension for years to come. That is especially so if the developers succeed in their appeals at the Planning Inquiry which is now to start on 29 May 2024.
Somewhat belatedly at the Planning Committee meeting on 31 January 2024 the Chair apologised for the failures in consultation. Hollow you might think, when in the next breath the Committee approves the applications on the basis that it has all taken too long and must now be pushed through.
The 1200 pupil secondary school to be imposed on the site will be a white elephant dominating the area. It will cause all kinds of problems for access to the area for pupils and staff, use of Mortlake Station at rush hours, residents and business people getting in and out east and west, medical facilities. These are all questions which the Council has refused to address.
Why you might wonder have such a large school on that site in the face of opposition from other local secondary schools who openly state that they could provide more spaces. Not that the need is likely given the falling primary school rolls. Could the answer to this conundrum be anything to do with the fact that the Council would acquire a nice status symbol in the shape of a shiny new school, paid for by the Department for Education, on the banks of the River Thames.
Where does one find out accurately what is going on with the Stag Brewery development other than the Mortlake Brewery Community Group website? That was originally set up only for ensuring adequate discussion of plans but has now also had to become a fundraising site, to enable the local community to be represented at the Planning Inquiry. Our interests are certainly not being represented by Richmond Council, which has a single-minded and determined approach to the scheme. It is galling to realise that one’s council tax is being used to pay for representation of a scheme which lacks viability, while having to pay again to ensure that arguments are fairly put before the Planning Inspector.
Just as awful we have discovered recently that the developers, so well supported by the Council, uploaded to the Council Planning website, detailed letters of support for the planning applications about which some of the alleged authors knew nothing. What was the motivation for that? Was it perhaps that they could see the growing opposition and wanted to paint an alternative picture of support for their plans, which they assumed no-one would cross-check? The numbers involved and the wrongful assertions that consents were given suggest it was no accident.
Electric Car Charging Points
In the same vein we now find that electric car charging points have been constructed by private contractors acting on behalf of TFL outside shops from 199-207 Upper Richmond Road, severely reducing the available parking for short stays to use those shops. Planning permission is required but seems to have been regarded as a formality. The Council website states that notices were sent to 40 properties in the area on 11 December 2023. Only two people can be found who received them. It is possible that they all got lost in the Christmas post. But it seems improbable.
And now the responsible Council officer says that the notices were only sent as a courtesy in any event. If that is so why does the Council website refer to the notices as if they were part of a consultation process? And the local councillor responds ‘well it is a done deal’. Does it all sound familiar?
Enough for now but it seems to me we do need an independent, apolitical East Sheen and Mortlake outlet, which ensures that information circulates freely among residents and retailers.
Good afternoon One and All. And Welcome. And thanks to Sir Ivan
I prepared a speech and then wondered, as a white, male, elderly, middle class, allegedly privileged, lawyer, interested in cricket, whether I should tear it up and start again in the light of current media reporting.
But I didn’t because I can’t help being any of those things. And given I am one of the 80% of the white UK population I decided that any thoughts I have about advantage should be in relation to that 80%.
Looking around I can see only one brown face and no black faces. Dinshaw Master told me a few moments ago that he was the only brown face at the school in his time. There are a few disabled now, but that is largely from age. That all reflects the school in our era and I see no purpose in apologising for it. Of course we need to ensure we address current problems but were we to consider the population of BHASVIC now I suspect it would be very different.
When I was younger, I guess my ambitions would have included earning money, having a house, a car, and a family. I have achieved those but looking back, it has been the journey that has given me as much pleasure – the highs and lows, of life, work and sport, the people I have met, the places I have visited. I feel I have been fortunate and I doubt whether that journey would have happened without the grounding I received at our school. Talking over lunch to Norman Wright, the only Football Blue (1971) I know from the School he feels similarly. So thank you School for helping with the journey.
My approach to today has been to look for the benefits I feel I accumulated from this School. How did they influence my life as a lawyer and my involvement in sport? And how did law and sport come together? At heart it is about friendships and connections in social life, work and leisure.
Of course I passed the 11+ but I was never an academic at school. I was reasonably good at cricket and I was selected to play for the School Under 14 team in my first year when I was eleven.
Later being cricket captain had consequences. I recall Stan Cave, the Under 14 manager and a delightful elderly northern gentleman, picking me out in class one day to ask what the first rule was. I had no idea what he was talking about. It was a maths lesson. How embarrassing! He had to tell me what was obvious TO HIM: keep your eye on the ball. Perhaps in modern parlance stay focussed on your primary objectives.
School chess also provided a regular but rigorous diversion from academic studies. Matches against other schools were regular features and less physically demanding than football. And who remembers the 430pm train journey to play Steyning Grammar School, until Dr. Beeching destroyed part of our history in 1963?
By virtue of outlasting my peers to a third year in the sixth form, ostensibly to apply for Oxford (there was no chance of that) but in reality to spend more time playing cricket, I became Head Prefect. This was something of a fulfilment of one observation of the Headmaster Harry Brogden, that my abilities were administrative rather than academic.
Nonetheless he encouraged me to apply to study Law at Southampton. I was offered a place by a Professor who must also have had an interest in cricket. I doubt I would have succeeded on academic merit but perhaps the Head’s reference helped out!
My Law Degree was not much to write home about, and my university career was based largely on chess in the winter and cricket in the summer. I captained some very articulate and useful young cricketers – not an easy task but it had benefits in later life.
In 1968 I returned to Brighton where I was offered articles with Sir John Donne, an old friend of my father, both of whom loved cricket. John sponsored me to join the MCC. In a remarkable coincidence of timing I was admitted as a Solicitor on 15 May 1971, the same day as I was admitted to membership of the MCC.
Recently I came across a press cutting in the Brighton Evening Argus of a case in which I represented a fifteen year old boy in Brighton Juvenile Court following an assault at the Annual School Athletics at Withdean. At the time of this case I had been a solicitor for six weeks. My defeated client had put a running spike through his opponent’s foot. My rhetoric described it as ‘just a scuffle’ which the headline writer picked up on. The outcome of a small fine rather than the custodial sentence my client might have expected, no doubt encouraged me to believe in my advocacy. But I was never sure whether the picture of a hot air balloon adjacent to the article was a comment in itself.
One lesson I took from the occasion was that it might not be what you know but who you know. The Chairman of the Juvenile Court Bench on that day was none other than Mr. H Brogden.
You can perhaps see a theme developing here – the interrelationship of school and work and sport.
In 1972 I started to think that a taste of London Life might be fun for a while. An old school friend, Richard Hunt, suggested I apply to the legal department in the local authority where he was working. So in October 1972 I moved to work in the Camden Legal Department. Richard told me recently that the deal was sealed in the men’s toilet. The Chief Solicitor told Richard he might as well appoint someone who was a friend of his. Equal opportunities was not then the force it is now.
Another old school friend, Doug Fraser, later my Best Man, helped my move when he offered me a space in his flat in Turnham Green in West London.
I also made contact with Roger Morgan, one of the best school cricketers who had been here two years ahead of me. He introduced me to Hampstead Cricket Club, a leading London sports club where I started playing in April 1973. There I also later met my wife Diana. We had two sons, both of whom I am pleased to say still play sport in their 30s.
I thought working for a local authority would be less onerous than family and divorce law in Brighton. How wrong I was. Camden employed me mainly to conduct legal proceedings in relation to the protection of children, which had become a major social issue following a child death in Brighton. I worked with some of the leading social workers, paediatricians and psychiatrists of the day. This led to national and international activities in that field, and offers to teach, write and research child law and to conduct child death inquiries.
I found it ironic that I developed my career writing, given that at school my English was the subject of justifiable criticism. The end of education is not the end of learning!
By the mid 1980s I decided there was more scope in running my own child law practice, which in large part through the hard work of my excellent partner, flourished in Croydon for over 20 years. We had a legal aid practice, advising children, parents and many children’s charities and developed an interest in adoption and education law.
In the early 1990s I was approached to become a part-time Chair of the new Special Educational Needs Tribunal. I sat on that Tribunal for 23 years, and in 2007 I got converted – by legislation – to a Judge – a rather more impressive title than a Chair.
I have two main purposes in tracking that personal progress – through family, school, helpful friends, fellow professionals. My experience has been that so often it is not one’s personal achievements that matter but those that you can develop in coordination with other helpful and maybe like-minded people, including old school friends. And the contribution made to the creation of the journey of others, colleagues, students and family, has been an important part of my journey.
In the last few years I have found a way to combine personal and professional interests. Child protection and adoption work forcefully showed me the hardships experienced by many children and their families. The Tribunal work taught me an enormous amount about their special needs, in particular in relation to physical disabilities and neurodiversity such as autism, dyslexia and ADHD, and the family struggles they can create..
But what I have learnt recently is how much sport and other physical activities, and the arts at large, can contribute to the inclusion, health and well-being of disadvantaged young people, in a way which we did not foresee in our school days. A look at the BHASVIC website shows just how far the educational system has changed with attention to equality, diversity and inclusivity.
Sadly consecutive governments, central and local, still fail to promote systems to support these needs and benefits. We have to look more to private organisations. Locally the community is really fortunate to have both Brighton and Hove Albion – where the Blooms have made a great contribution – and Sussex County Cricket Club and the Aldridge Academy – where John Spencer has done likewise – all provide important social benefits through their Community Foundations.
So in conclusion it has been an exciting and fulfilling, and perhaps unfinished, journey for me – from early school days to the present day.
I believe in the power of communities and shared ideals. My family and this school provided me with a foundation for combining that thinking and continuing to strive to work in that direction. Continuing contact with the Crew on Table 4, support for this event and for the regular Old Boys lunches now organised by Alistair Rapley in London provide opportunities for those discussions.
Two final thoughts. Does anyone know how BHASVIC is described on its website? Be a Happy, Active, Successful, Valued and Independent member of the Community. [PS I learnt later invented by Alison Cousens, Head of Safeguarding and Media at BHASVIC]
And secondly an allusion to the school motto Absque Labore Nihil. Noel Coward said ‘work is much more fun than fun’. I guess those two concepts fit my thinking pretty well.
So to you all – many thanks for listening to my journey and thanks again to the School for helping it to happen.
Richard White 1957 -1965
As you set out for Ithaka
Wish for the road to be long,
full of adventure, knowledge and discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon- don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbours seen for the first time;
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her, you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
On 24 February 2022 a warmongering billionaire tyrant, a latter-day would be Tsar of all the Russias, invaded Ukraine, an independent and largely peace-loving neighbour in mainland Europe. Western countries fulminated and imposed sanctions on a few of the tyrant’s gang but otherwise did nothing to protect its friend and neighbour. Baltic, Scandinavian and Central European States must now be fearful of further Russian expansion over the next decades and whether their allies will take any steps to stop it.
We can now see all too well the effect of a disintegrating Europe initiated by a disastrous politically motivated Brexit, both in terms of a unified policy and economically. We accepted an attempted assassination of a British resident by Russian agents and a consequential death of a British citizen. We subsequently continued to permit Russian investment in the UK, no doubt to the benefit of some of the London political and professional classes. We ignored the annexation of the Crimea. It was all a green light for a tyrant.
The consequences of a self-interested, inward-looking, incompetent Government, ill-equipped to combat a period of unrest and uncertainty will be seen for years to come.
Eighteen days on from the start of the invasion and after what appears to be deliberate bombing of a maternity hospital and numerous other massacres, what we should do about Ukraine? To date sanctions and the provision of weaponry to Ukraine have been put in place. Consideration of imposing a no-fly zone and putting forces on the ground have been dismissed in short order. Much of the policy thinking in the West seems to have been developed on the basis of a fear that opposition to Putin runs the risk of starting WW3 and / or the use of nuclear weapons. So allow the massacres and devastation to continue.
In Putin we have a man who is a cowardly bully and either mad or megalomaniac. In my experience of the concept of bullying it is necessary to confront the person. Until that happens they continue to act outside the boundaries of normal behaviour. Having got a taste for blood the lust for it increases. Although it is good to read that the Pope has somewhat belatedly after 17 days called on Putin to ‘stop this massacre’, this man is unlikely to respond positively to pious imploring. Nor will he worry that the Russian people will become impoverished by his actions. He appears to place little value on life.
While it may be improbable that he will immediately seek to reestablish his fantasy of a Russian Empire, once he has conscripted more armed forces, an onward march to Poland, Moldova and Estonia must be probable. He is only 69. His model is Stalin.
The West needs to construct a more coherent plan to bring this man’s evil activities to an end sooner rather than later.
But what do I know? I am 75 and it is my end of life which could be blighted or shortened and not my whole future. As I have thought in other contexts a younger generation has to make its own decisions and probably its own mistakes.
Ukraine Update
The war criminal remains undaunted 32 days on. His forces have surrounded one city, bent on starving 120,000 innocent civilians to death, and flattened other cities with cruise missiles, one a mere 50 miles from a western country. We allow genocide to rage unopposed except by feeble sanctions. Western politicians seem primarily concerned to protect their own immediate interests, with little concern for those dying an unpleasant death on their borders, or for the longer term consequences of unchecked barbarity.
The #StopRussianAggression video shown to the UN Meeting on 5 April 2022 is quite horrific and could prove to be a turning point. Russia pretends that Ukraine has invented the atrocities. Can anyone seriously believe that? How can the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia and Sergei Lavrov Foreign Affairs Minister ever sleep?
If China continues to ignore what has happened it is in danger of becoming a pariah state as well. Day 40.
It is said that most Russians believe Putin’s propaganda. Does that make them accessories to murder?
After two months of unceasing aggression Russia continues its murderous campaign against the innocent and independent state of Ukraine. Putin’s sideback, the mad Lavrov, who calls himself Foreign Secretary, issues threats of World War III and nuclear attack, as a prelude to talks with the UN Secretary General, simply because Ukraine does its best to oppose its country being destroyed and its people murdered, raped and pillaged. Meanwhile the Russian population at large stand by and take no steps to oppose the mindless violence, heedless of the loss of 15,000 of its army, with many times that wounded, or the consequences of war for generations to come. [Updated 26 April 2022]
War exhaustion has set in after four months of ceaseless Russian barbarity. But renewed atrocity in bombing a shopping centre today causing the deaths of countless Ukrainians must surely make NATO rethink its policy of only arming them to defend themselves. Given the support Putin appears to have among his subjects, the war must be taken to them by some means to make them recognise the crimes that are being committed on their behalf. [Updated 27 June 2022]
Reading recently about the Holocaust it made me think that the only people I could compare Putin and his oligarchs to are Hitler and the Nazis. Sadly it seems they have the support of many of the Russian people.
24/10/2022
Regrettably this is what you get if you support a brutal, war-mongering regime which has no boundaries. Anton Krasovsky, the chief of Russian-language broadcasting live for the RT channel formerly called Russia Today, said Ukrainian children who said they were being occupied by Russia should be “thrown in a river with a strong undercurrent. Just drown these children. Drown them. Burn them alive.”
“Russia is being reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of barbarism…Civilisation is being extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of their cities and the corpses of their victims.” Churchill in a speech in 1918. Plus ca change.
Russia retreats
Remembrance Day in the UK is memorable for the Russian retreat from Kherson, the only major city in Ukraine which they captured during their invasion. I cannot help but wonder how the Russian people can continue to be deluded about Putin’s claim that he was saving Ukrainians. It was a relief to see the joy obvious in Kherson today at their family reunions in spite of the privations visited on them by the invading barbarians.
Moving in to 2023 and eleven months on from the invasion Russia continues to send its men to the slaughter. At last the West has decided to assist Ukraine with tanks.
ONE OF THE FEW IN RUSSIA IT SEEMS
She imagines the muffled screams of those trapped under the rubble, the fire and smell of smoke, the grief of the mother who lost her husband and infant child beneath the ruins of the building in Dnipro bombed by Russia. She imagines being unable to breathe.
That is why she is here, at a statue to the Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka, a largely unknown monument tucked away among Moscow’s brutalist apartment blocks that has hosted a furtive anti-war memorial at a time when few in Russia dare protest against the conflict.
“I don’t know what else I can do … I wanted to show that not everyone is indifferent [to the war] and that some people still have a conscience,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. It is the second time she has returned to place flowers at a makeshift memorial to victims of the strike on 14 January that killed 46 people and wounded more than 80. She passes it when she comes to visit her mother, who lives nearby.
This is the closest Russia comes to an anti-war demonstration these days. While Vladimir Putin’s announcement of the invasion of Ukraine brought thousands on to the streets last February, the government has methodically stamped out public dissent, arresting thousands and pressuring many more to flee the country.
Now, more than 10 days after the missile strike in Ukraine, a trickle of Muscovites still come to pay respects to those who died. An elderly man silently bows to the statue and crosses himself as he passes. Returning from class this week, Ilya, a student, bent over to read the memorials left at the statue.
29 January 2023
I heard Michael Marmot speak at a zoom seminar of the Dartington Social Research Unit in the summer of 2021. If you google his name you will find a number of references to his work on health inequalities. What he told us at the seminar was that the government had commissioned a report from him in 2011. They then ignored it and introduced an austerity policy instead. He did a further report in 2020 which highlighted things like the consequences of this policy on death ages and rates and reduction in life expectancy – after ten years of unnecessary austerity and pre covid. It is obvious that the quality of life of the elderly and vulnerable must also have suffered.
The amounts wasted and given to a variety of dubious organisations has shown all too clearly how money can be found when the government wants to.
What we also now know is that for a variety of reasons the impoverished groups are less likely to get vaccinations.
And yet the population in sufficient numbers supports a government which continues to dictate these policies.
And MPs who know the Prime Minister has lived down to his reputation over many years of being a born liar also continue to support him. It is all about saving their own skins and finances and nothing about promoting the wellbeing of the country.
I always thought that when an apple was rotten the whole of it should be discarded, not just a few of the smaller pips.
I used to be proud to be able to call myself English, not for John Bullish reasons, but because largely I thought we had standards to be proud of: in legal terms Rule of Law, Separation of Powers, independent judiciary, many caring professional groups, who looked after the more vulnerable in our country and others, and sporting prowess! Scientists and the caring professions remain high in my estimation, but they are vulnerable to political manipulation.
The last high spot I can recognise is 2012 when the Spirit of the Nation was unified and we combined with other countries in a primarily positive way. I was a volunteer driver all round London for three weeks, during which time there were limits on our personal freedoms, especially on the roads. I cannot recall a racist or other social incident during the 2012 Olympics.
Since then of course we have had austerity, on which we now have research evidence to demonstrate that it has had a damaging effect on life expectancy (which must also mean other damaging consequences). And in 2016 we had the disastrous Brexit campaign of lies and deceit, which led to a developing understanding that government was increasingly able to tell lie after lie and flout the constitutional norms, without consequences to their political standing.
If you can lie about £350m on the side of a bus, what can’t you do. If you can create a Cabinet in your own image and appoint only second rate ministers who will do your bidding and sack the rational thinkers from government and party, what can’t you do.
If you can break the law by refusing, on a mere statement in the House of Commons, to implement a political commitment, enshrined in a statute, to provide foreign aid of .7% of GDP, what can’t you do.
And where I lose my pride to an even greater degree is that we have a Lord Chancellor, a man previously thought to have some decency) who can state in public that it does not matter what the Prime Minister does or says because he has public support, we have a majority of MPs who are willing to comply with that debasement of standards, and we have enough people in the country who support him for him to continue his lying, deceit, self-interest, cronyism. One woman is reported as saying during the Hartlepool election that she liked him because he was like her. So she admits to lying and cheating her way through life. It seems there are many like her.
The next hope for bringing the country together at least to some degree has been the EU Football in 2021. But it is now becoming increasingly clear that the government set out to destroy that hope, largely it seems because it feared the political impact of a country at one. We have white men rioting at Wembley without serious media comment. The police are looking for five people. Imagine if that had been blacks in Tottenham. We have government led racist abuse of some of our leading players. If the Trump cap fits wear it.
I feel little to be proud of in England or being English right now. And the threats to democracy only increase that feeling.
And now in mid August 2021 we see more evidence of this Government’s incompetence and hypocrisy, as the Taliban resume power in Afghanistan. All that loss of life has been wasted as this xenophobic, self interested cabal leaves a vacuum with potentially disastrous humanitarian consequences and almost certainly a return to a state in which there is little respect for women and ‘unbelievers’. ‘We did not expect it to happen so quickly’ says the Government, as thousands are stranded and at the mercy of religious fanatics.
Given the lack of an adequate government at present I have the following suggestions for a reshuffle.
Prime Minister Gareth Southgate
Chancellor of the Exchequer Raheem Sterling
Lord Chancellor Harry Kane
Home Secretary Tyrone Mings
Foreign Secretary Jadon Sancho
Health Minister Kyle Walker
Defence Ministers (joint) Harry Maguire / John Stones
Northern Ireland Declan Rice
Cabinet Office Marcus Rashford
Education Jason Pickford
Trade Kieran Trippier
Work and Pensions Calvin Phillips
Environment Mason Mount
Housing Jordan Henderson
Ag and Fish Luke Shaw
Children Bukayo Saka
Without Portfolio Jack Grealish
They are all qualified for these posts in various ways and I venture to suggest maybe better than the present incumbents.
It is a bit light on women but then so is the present Cabinet.
RW
14/07/2021
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