On flip-flops and the art of politics

They are great for walking quickly and painlessly across hot, gritty terrain – perfect in fact. So why are the Conservatives using this footwear reference as metaphor for Labour’s alleged political inconsistency? It doesn’t make sense.
 

This supposedly clever barb – you can actually buy Kier Starmer flip-flops from the Conservative Party Shop – is, to say the least, ironic. Flip-flop? I mean, look at the post coalition years since 2015, when the Conservatives have been in office.

It’s been a torrid time, what with Brexit, the Grenfell disaster, the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. We’ve had five prime ministers, seven chancellors (that’s almost one per year), six environment secretaries and 12 (count them) housing ministers – some of them barely having time to take their coat off before they were heading for the door.

The Conservatives sweated the small stuff. They also sweated the big stuff. We started off with fiscally prudent posh boys, Dave and George, in number 10 and number 11 (it’s got a bit confusing who lives were). This was familiar territory – privilege in a polo shirt. But there was something different about them. Not only did they acknowledge that ‘the north’ (of England) existed – they launched and appeared to believe in a ‘northern renaissance’ and even a ‘midlands engine’. Good God.

The Brexit vote happened – an under-whelming endorsement for an idiotic policy that has benefited no-one, apart from hedge fund managers who sought lower taxes and patriotically ‘shorted’ their own currency. Dave left in a huff. Things got really strange then. The new incumbent of number 10 was Home Counties Theresa, with her pointy leopard skin footwear hinting at a personality that she did not possess. Theresa badged herself as a ‘nice Conservative’ while blowing on a dog whistle and making the UK hostile to its Afro Caribbean citizens. There was a touch of Abigail’s party about the ‘dancing queen’. But she wasn’t comfortable in her own skin. How could she be as a ‘nice Conservative’.

It had dawned on the people of these four nations long before her botched election of 2017 and her car crash conference speech that October, when a letter F dropped off the wall behind her out of sheer embarrassment, that it had made a dreadful mistake. Prime minister? She could host a dinner party, but the guests would leave early. Hammond her money guy at number 11 raised cautious pessimism to an art form. He made Gordon Brown look reckless. And then? OMG. Bullingdon Club Bojo – Churchill in clown shoes.

The man’s delusional self-belief and knockabout antics, matched with a willingness to lie at all times made us smile – at first. He stormed the 2019 election like caustic soda unblocking a drain – admittedly against an ineffective opponent. And then. The mould of doubt crept acros the ceiling. We had messed up again! Shouldn’t there be an HR policy for appointing prime ministers, some people wonderered – psychometric testing, a lie detector? Lend this man your car and he would lose the keys. You wouldn’t let him anywhere near the sherrry bottle.

Disjointed narrative

The national narrative has never been more disjointed. It’s not just the flip-flopping of the personalities of our anointed leaders – from almost normal seeming and competent (Dave and Theresa), to recklessly flamboyant (Boris), to mad (that women who gate-crashed the number 10 party with poppers and bondage gear) then back to dull – head boy Rishi, with his shiny prefect’s badge and his carefully polished shoes.

It's also a policy thing. Johnson laid waste to the economic theories of Hayek, Thatcher’s free-market god, and a hero to Dave and Theresa. He was a fiscally incontinent turbo-charged Keynesian who threw money around like a drunken sailor. He knew that there was life in the north of England, like Cameron and Osborne did, but he actually went there (avoiding Liverpool of course) and flashed the cash.

The David Blaine of politics, he hypnotized and bribed people north of Watford into voting for him! That’s simply not Conservative. One can go shooting in the north or even represent a constituency there (Baldwin had Bewdley, MacMillan had Stockton-on-Tees) – but, for a true Conservative, the job of the north is to embody a plucky form of failure, not to be an electoral base or an economic powerhouse.

In some ways, Conservative policies are reverting to type after the hallucinatory madness of Johnson and Truss (that was her name – did that really happen?). The brief revival of the north that Dave and George laid the groundwork for and Boris nurtured is being killed off by neglect and indifference. Rishi, the man who tried to buy groceries with a Blockbuster card, is not really that bothered about the north and he doesn’t get net zero.

Flip-flopping? Aside from macroeconomic policy yawing around like a crippled oil tanker and Boris’s flirtation with fascism, there haven’t really been coherent policies as one would recognise them in the past eight years. One of the main reasons for this, in my submission, is the mercurial figure of Michael Gove. He is a politician with a brain and a work ethic, who leaves unfulfilled projects and a trail of disaster behind him, rather like John Prescott did, but for different reasons.

As environment secretary, between 2017 and 2019, he shepherded a surprisingly not terrible Environment Act into life, which set a credible template for a post EU Britain, respectful of the environment and net zero. And he laid the basis for a waste and resources strategy designed to increase recycling rates and make the UK economy more circular. Since he left the job, no-one has been in charge. The waste and resources strategy is a shambles – it’s not happening – and the government is backing away from its net zero commitments as fast as it can, even though half of Europe is spontaneously combusting.

At the moment Thérèse Coffey, is nominally running things as Defra secretary, but she convinces no-one in her defence of privatised water companies, which are clearly more interested in shareholders receiving dividends than stopping sewage flowing into rivers and the sea. And she has done nothing to demonstrate that the UK’s commitment to achieve net zero by 2030 carries any conviction.

Gove was also the main architect of levelling up – the name of a well-intentioned policy aspiration, inherited from Cameron, Osborne and Johnson, a department and a piece of legislation. When he left that portfolio, in July 2022, the levelling up policy was dumped in a skip, like your mum and dad’s CD collection. Confusingly, he is now back in the role – a job that he is quite good at. But he won’t be around for long. The name ‘levelling up’ is becoming embarrassing. It won’t survive the next departmental re-organisation.

Consistent inconsistency

Which brings us to other areas of policy discontinuity. Cameron and Osborne built quite a lot of houses – although they didn’t like social housing – why would they? They were too posh to understand it. They began to re-organise planning in a sensible and logical way and set up some solid and credible skills and employment strategies across the economy, including an industrial one – Rishi doesn’t like industrial strategies so he dumped that idea. Whoops. Shame. May and Hammond carried on the housing baton from their predecessors and they were kinder to councils.

Two years ago, planning returned to year zero, when Robert Jenrick decided to scrap the local authority-run system that we have had since the 1940s and start again. But his grand plan was unceremoniously scrapped last year, when it transpired that this would have led to building more houses in the Tory-dominated green belt and risk an electoral meltdown. Not many people noticed, apart from a few technical specialists and policy nerds (like me). But that was the mother of flip-flops.

In December, as the 12th housing minister since 2010 was taking his coat off, the ‘top-down housing targets’ that had been rigorously imposed for councils under Cameron, May and even Johnson – in a rare example of policy continuity – were got rid of. Completely. First there were housing targets, then there weren’t and now, with Gove dipping his finger back in the saucepan, there might be targets again, in a modified form. To say, the least it's confusing. Isn't it somewhat disingenuous to say that there is crisis and that we need to build more houses and then to dismantle the policy infrastructure needed to create them?

The Conservatives, true to type, have demonstrated that they don’t want to build anything anywhere that would threaten their votes. So, development in cities, not the countryside, is Gove's new mantra. The new houses, or, rather, boxy flats with miniature balconies, will be squashed into overcrowded urban spaces, where poor people live, alongside city workers who are willing to trade living space for gym membership. It's a crap idea, straight from the blue heartlands.

Politics has had more twists and turns than a Netflix series in the past eight years. We’ve been gifted with Theresa’s May’s ‘kind’ Conservatism, Boris Johnson goose-stepping through Whitehall, Liz Truss’s mad interregnum and now, Rishi Sunak, a dull bean counter. Sunak is the UK’s chief finance officer, not its CEO. He will implement a policy if you instruct him too. But he won't team-build or make a rousing speech, or lose any sleep over it. All he really cares about is trying to balance the books. That's his job.

For the Conservatives, flip flopping is interpreted as pragmatism, for the  Labour party, its portrayed as weakness. And, since 2015, we’ve had more flip flops than a beachwear shop, which is probably why the Conservative party, punch drunk from thirteen bruising rounds, is still clinging to power.

Footwear should be appropriate to the time and place in which it is worn. When you are in opposition, you obviously need to be quick on your feet and not to tie yourself up with pledges which a ruthless right-wing press will taunt you with as unfulillable, if you get too close to office.

If I were Keir Starmer, I would certainly wear flip-flops. I know where he could buy some from – the Conservative Party Shop. But they are rather expensive. They cost £16.99. He would be far better going to a pound shop – a sector of the economy that has flourished under the Conservatives. Maybe not for long. Now even Wetherspoons is in trouble.

 

Women pioneers in environmental health

The first female recruits into environmental health were ladies from the genteel classes who ventured bravely into the slums and sweatshops of Victorian England. Some campaigned for votes for women. One, Charlotte Marsh, a celebrated suffragette, worked as a chauffeur for the prime minister, David Lloyd George.

In 1893, the vestry of Kensington – later to become the Royal Borough of Kensington – recruited two female sanitary inspectors. They were joining a workforce of public officials who had been employed, since the Public Health Act of 1848, to fight a daily battle against unsafe food, filthy, rat-infested streets, lethal backstreet workshops and slum housing.

It was a pragmatic appointment, necessitated by a particular set of conditions. The Factory and Workshops Act of 1891 had recently extended responsibility for inspecting workplaces from the national Factory Inspectorate, which only had 50 inspectors to cover the entire country, to local government. Many of those employed in factories and workshops, often in brutal conditions, were women.

Kensington’s enlightened medical officer of health, Thomas Orme Dudfield, had received complaints about poor working condition in local dressmakers’ establishments. He took the bold step of proposing females to fill paid positions in his vestry because, he confided, he did not have the resources to help a “numerous and somewhat helpless class” of young women. In addition, “some of the duties involved were of too special and delicate a nature to be properly discharged by male inspectors”.

Victorian values were at their height in the 1890s. No form of official discourse was available to discuss sexual or reproductive rights – apart from the ludicrous misnomer of the “fallen woman”. And yet prostitution was everywhere. A similar myopia applied to poverty. Many people believed that poverty was contributed to by genetically transmitted traits of mental weakness, such as ‘imbecility’ or ‘moral degeneracy’. They decried the illiberal breeding of the poor. Of course, it would help if the poor didn’t drink so much. Francis Galton’s theory of eugenics, based on the concept of encouraging reproduction only for ‘higher’ races and classes, was reaching its apogee.

Even otherwise enlightened individuals attributed poverty to a failure of character, rather than a failure of society. John Simon, Britain’s first chief medical officer, wrote, in his his book of 1897, English Sanitary Institutions, of the able-bodied who ‘flagrantly’ claimed Poor Law relief: “Their idleness is so wilful an offence against the community as to deserve treatment of a penal nature”.

Crossing the social divide

In public health, as in the law and medicine, the first women to breach the barriers of male professional entitlement, were socially well-connected, living in circumstances that meant that they did not have to marry to be financially secure. In the late Victorian period, Organisations like the Charity Organisation Society and the National Health Society developed as vehicles for such women, who wished to help the poor. They were often the daughters of doctors, soldiers and clergymen.

The rent collectors who worked for social campaigner, Octavia Hill, from the 1870s, keeping careful track of the domestic lives and habits of tenants, came from this section of society. Such women served a distinct moral purpose for the state. It was felt that they could inculcate sober and thrifty values into the feminine sphere of the Victorian household.

It must have been extraordinary for a female of their class to cross the social divide and enter what founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth described in a best-selling book in 1890 as ‘darkest England’ – a drink sodden sub-stratum, akin, in Booth’s eyes, to the most ‘uncivilised’ parts of the British Empire.

The women appointed to work under Dudfield, to inspect workshops in Kensington, both came from we would call privileged backgrounds. Their names were Lucy Deane and Rose Squire. Both were extraordinary individuals who overcame titanic obstacles of prejudice and social convention to serve long careers. They both rose to senior positions in public health and the civil service, blazing at trial for other women to follow.

Suffragist and peace campaigner

Born in 1865 in Madras, India, Lucy Deane was daughter to a colonel who was killed in 1881 in the First Boer War and the niece of a viscount. After the death of her mother, when she was 21, Deane set up house with her sister Hyacinth, in Kensington. She needed a job. Deane obtained a nursing diploma from the National Health Society, a Victorian philanthropic charity, and worked at the Chelsea Infirmary.

In 1894, after serving as a sanitary inspector in Kensington, she passed stringent civil service exams, gaining her position against stiff opposition, and became one of the first females to be employed by the Factory Inspectorate. With her colleague, May Tennant, she was responsible for inspecting sweats shops in Soho. In 1898, her work observations led her to being one of the first people to postulate that dust particles, particularly asbestos, caused lung disease.

In 1901, Deane served as secretary to a six-woman commission headed by Liberal supporter and suffragist, Dame Millicent Fawcett, to investigate reports of dreadful conditions in British-run camps in South Africa, during the Second Boer War. The commission's findings were damning. Deane insisted that highly critical sections of the report were included in the final version. By the time the war ended in 1902, a quarter of the inmates had died.

In 1904, she moved to Westerham in Kent. A keen supporter of votes for women, Deane organised a Westerham branch of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, attending marches and rallies in London.

She was not the only female professional in public health to campaign for votes for women. Charlotte Marsh, known as Charlie Marsh, from Newcastle, who had trained as a sanitary inspector, joined the radical Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1908. Unlike suffragist, Deane, who followed peaceful methods, Marsh, as a suffragette, believed that carrying out acts of violence was legitimate, to gain the right to vote. She was arrested following a demonstration in Parliament Square later that year and again in 1909, when she became one of the first suffragettes to go on hunger strike and to endure force feeding.

Marsh was a standard bearer at the funeral of Emily Davison, the sufragette who was fatally crushed beneath the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913. She trained as a motor mechanic and worked as a chauffeur to the founder of the WSPU, Emmeline Pankhurst. During the First World War, she served in the same role for prime minister,  David Lloyd George, who was sympathetic to the female suffrage cause.

The WSPU suspended its campaign during the First World War. Marsh became a member of the Women’s Land Army – a volunteer force recruited to take over agricultural work from men. Lucy Deane, too, took this route. During the war, she served on the executive committee of the Women's Land Army and on an arbitration tribunal for the wages of women munition workers.

in 1915, Deane was invited to attend the Women's Peace Congress in The Hague, but the government prevented most British delegates from attending by suspending ferry services between England and Holland. Deane was one the first women magistrates, in Kent. As founder of the Westerham branch of the Women's Institute, she produced and acted in Shakespeare plays. She also helped to set up a home in Chelsea for unmarried mothers and their babies.

Fearless investigator

Rose Squire, her co-appointee in Kensington in 1893, was the daughter of a well-known Harley Street doctor, William Squire. She was educated by a governess and presented at court to Queen Victoria. One of her father's patients was Lord Cardigan, from whom she heard stories about the Charge of the Light Brigade. Like Deane, Squire moved on from her Kensington foundations to achieve great things. In 1904, she was appointed, because of her tact, persistence and investigative skills, to research "the relation of industrial and sanitary conditions to pauperism", for the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws.

She and her colleague, Arthur Steel-Maitland, who was later to become a Conservative MP and a baron, were supported by two secretaries. They travelled to Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham, Bristol, St Helens, the five pottery towns and Cornwall. They visited factories, docks and mines and took evidence from thousands of paupers. Women were discouraged from entering male places of work and, in many cases, forbidden.

That did not stop her. In her vivid memoir, Thirty Years in the Public Services (which is worthy of a Netflix series) she describes plunging down a terrifying, 3,000-foot shaft in a coffin-shaped capsule and walking down tunnels with a candle stuck in a ball of clay attached to her hat: "When our party emerged once more into the light of day we were scarcely recognisable and, to me at least, until I had bathed and donned dry garments, life seemed not worth living!"

In 1904, there was no compensation for industrial diseases, no national health insurance, no old age pensions, widow's pensions or employment exchanges. They would all evolve over the next two decades. Services catering for tuberculosis (the most common cause of destitution) and for infant and maternal welfare were in their infancy. Drink, she admitted was often resorted to, inevitably, when other forms of hope and relief were absent.

Her work made her angry. She wrote "Honest, hard-working, steady men were reduced to destitution by the conditions under which they were employed. I cannot recall without hot indignation and shame the cold fact of excessive hours, miserably inadequate wages, exposure to wet, to heat, to dust, to poisonous materials in the heavy iron and steel trades, in chemical works, in white lead, paint and pottery works, to say nothing of the inhuman system (or lack of a system) of casual labour at the docks." In 1918 Squire was appointed director of the women's welfare department of the Ministry of Munitions. 

This was an important job that suited her sympathies and capabilities. During the war, with male bread winners absent, two million women, including teenagers and grandmothers, worked in factories and half a million worked on the land. An estimated million more worked as munitions workers as 'munitionettes', to produce shell and cartridge cases. The work was highly dangerous and unhealthy. Contact with dangerous chemicals frequenlty made women il lfrom 'toxic jaundice', turning their skin yellow – hence their other nickname: 'canaries'.

Some of the plants were huge. Munitions Filling Factory No7 in Hayes, for example, employed 10,000 women and 2,000 men in buildings spread over 14 acres. It had a military guard of 190 men and a factory fire brigade of 60 female firefighters. There was a constant risk of serious, potentially fatal accidents, not least from explosions. Women were searched at the beginning of their shifts for cigarettes and metal implements. But these measures weren't fool-proof.

There were huge explosions at munitions plants in Faversham, Chilwell and Silvertown during the war, killing many people. The explosion at the Brunner Mond & Co TNT works in Silvertown, on 19 January 1917, was the largest industrial accident in British history. It toook the lives of 73 people, and injured more than 400, destroying several streets, two oil tanks and a gas holder. The explosion broke half a million windows and was heard as far away as Cambridge

Squire retired in 1926, as the first woman to hold a senior administrative position in the Home Office.

Women make inroads

A few persistent and single-minded women followed in the wake of Deane and Squire. By the beginning of the twentieth century, organisations like the Women’s Local Government Society, the Women’s Industrial Society, the National Union of Women Workers and the Fabian Society were pressing for female admission into workplaces dominated by men, often opposed by trade unions. By this time, there were a handful of female sanitary inspectors in London, working in Kensington, St. Pancras, Islington, Hackney, Suthwark and Battersea. There were also female inspectors in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield and St Helens.

But many male sanitary inspectors did not welcome this incursion into their worplaces. They opposed female membership of their professional body, the Sanitary Inspectors’ Association, which was an all-male organisation, until 1901. They frequently argued that some parts of their job, such as lifting manhole covers to peer intro drains, or going into abattoirs, were too physically demanding or gruesome for women. At a meeting of the Sanitary Inspectors’ Association at the Carpenters’ Hall in London in 1989 Miss Tattershall and Miss Coppock of the Manchester Corporation were refused membership. The meeting was outraged when candidate ‘A. Elliott’ was found to be named ‘Annie’. Her name was duly struck off the list.

Women were obliged to take matters into their own hands. In 1896, a short-lived Women's Sanitary Inspectors' Association come into being, with seven members, based in London. By 1908, it had 100 members.

Legislative changes, such as mandatory health visiting following the Notification of Birth Act of 1907 and school medical inspections under the Children's Act of 1908, were changing the nature of the sanitary inspector’s role. Female inspectors had become relatively numerous by 1913 – there were 23 in Liverpool and 17 in Sheffield. In all authorities, their duties were focused on mothers, infectious disease and workplaces employing women, including laundries. This was an era, long before vaccines, in which epidemics of measles, German measles, mumps and whooping cough frequently took the lives babies and children. Tuberculosis, which took more lives than any other infectious disease, occupied its own category as a killer, for vigilance and inspection.

Rate collectors and lamp lighters

The war was temporarily to disrupt the Edwardian social order. After conscription began, in March 1916, women were increasingly visible as bus conductresses, porters and postal workers. Soon, the press began to report amazed sightings of women refuse collectors, road sweepers, rate collectors and lamp lighters. Their presence, often in clothing that was distinctly masculine, must have been a boon to those suffragettes who believed in equality in employment.

By 1915, a tenth of the Sanitary Inspectors’ Associations predominantly male 1,600 members had joined up. Fearing that “women would take men’s jobs”, the Sanitary Journal warned, condescendingly, that a “frantic rush of well-meaning wealthy ladies”, without proper training, could “wreak havoc” on public health. When women did take up what had been men’s positions, it was often on inferior terms and conditions. In many cases, they were appointed to dual posts, as sanitary inspectors and health visitors. 

An article written in The Sanitary Journal in November 1913 by a Miss Gorniot (her first name is not recorded), adopts the term, the ‘sanitary lady’. She is not a house fumigator or a drain cleaner, like the men in her department. Her work is to exert psychological influence upon the poor in the moral sphere, upholding the values of the respectable home. Her language would have been recognised by Octavia Hill, in the 1870s. A key  function of Hill’s exclusively female rent collectors on their weekly visits was to make sure that houses were neat and tidy, boots polished and children well-presented.

Miss Gorniot writes in the journal of the ‘sanitary lady’: “Her work is to help and elevate the poorer classes out of squalor and misery, teaching them to be better citizens and inspiring them with a sense of duty-towards their children, in this way endeavouring to keep down infant mortality ... Her work is difficult and ever uphill and she will have to bring to it ready sympathy and keen enthusiasm coupled with firmness and perseverance.”

Emphasising the gulf between the Edwardian social classes, she goes on: “There is a vein of warm heartedness underlying the oftimes hardened exterior of the people who live in the slums and the ‘sanitary lady’ must strike this vein before she can hope for success. Once she has found her way to the heart of the poor, her work become daily less and less arduous.”

The return of soldiers to civilian life, in 1918, led to the employment status quo being largely re-established. Women moved back, en masse, into the 'female' occupations of nursing, school nursing, health visiting and midwifery, which were less well-paid than equivalent male roles. They gained limited access to the Parliamentary vote in that year but would have to campaign for many more decades (a journey that is not finished) for equality in society and the workplace.

In 1915, reflecting its evolving membership, the WSIA had restyled itself as the Women's Sanitary Inspectors' and Health Visitors' Association. In the 1920s, health visitors gained national standards and training courses, and in 1997, their professional body was retitled the Community Practitioners and Health Visitors Association (CPHVA). To this day, the CPHVA, which is a trade union, part of Unite, retains mauve and green, which were chosen by the suffragette movement, as its colours.

Thanks to Jennifer R. Haynes, for her PhD, dissertation, Sanitary ladies and friendly visitors: women public health officers in London 1890-1930 and to Ava Greenwell’ for her chapter in the Stuff of Life, CIEH, 2012, The Women Inspectors.

This blog was written for public protection software company, RHE Global