Oliver and Rishi, down by the pool

In a fancy garden near here, the strange drama of the Conservative leadership contest approaches its climax

Last week, Rishi Sunak, currently trailing Liz Truss by 26 points in the contest that will produce a new leader of the Conservative Party (and, because of a mediaeval malfunction in the Parliamentary machinery, a Prime Minister too) was invited to visit the home of a wealthy Hertfordshire Conservative Councillor to speak to local party members.

Like a lot of what we’ve seen from around the country during the Tory leadership contest, the result is a kind of grim social comedy and very close to self-parody. The 100-odd Conservative members apparently present are out of shot. Artfully in shot is a sparkling swimming pool and, above it, a grand suburban villa.

How to discuss a scene like this, at a time when, according to one of the big energy companies, 50% of UK households are about to fall into fuel poverty? Absolutely no idea.

But it’s worth watching the video closely. It has a kind of anthropological value. We’re deep in the heartland of the Home Counties Tory elite here. On Sunak’s side of the pool, milling around, there’s a group of comfortable-looking Tory alpha males, including local grandees who’ve already secured a clutch of gongs and are thus in the home straight for a peerage whoever wins (you’ll have read about some of these guys in Private Eye’s Rotten Boroughs column). There’s at least one of those white straw hats you see at cricket matches.

In this suburban garden we see a snapshot of the context for everything promised by the two candidates in the last couple of months. All the dog whistles about lazy workers, ‘our women‘, tax cuts, grammar schools, deporting refugees and so on are for this powerful audience of ultra-Tory comedy caricatures and not for the wider British electorate. At a more recent hustings, for instance, we learn that frontrunner – and serving Foreign Secretary – Liz Truss is happy to toss Britain’s historic alliance with our nearest continental neighbour into the wood-chipper to win their votes.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t expect some genuinely loopy policies once the winner is in place, of course, but what emerges in the Autumn will certainly bear little resemblance to what we’ve seen during the contest.

Anyway, back in the garden, the candidate is introduced by our own MP Oliver Dowden – also in line for a peerage, of course, for his service to a sequence of PMs – although we suspect he’s got a few more years in the trenches before he’s sent up (and perhaps some time in the wilderness of the back benches too, given his lamentable judgement in backing Sunak over Truss). Dowden says: “Rishi’s got the skills, he’s got the energy, he’s got the vision to fire up our economy and on to a brighter future…”

Sunak opens by connecting his own story to the aspirations of his audience:

And just as our country did something wonderful for my family I want to do the same for everyone, for your children and grandchildren and make sure they have the same fantastic opportunities too.

He has a three-part prescription:

But how are we going to do that? Well, we need to do three things. We need to restore trust, we need to rebuild the economy and we need to reunite our country.

Remember, there’s a week more of this stuff before the polls close and another few days before the results are in and we begin to see how our new Prime Minister responds to the building poly-crisis of energy prices, the highest inflation (and slowest growth) in the G7, a tough season of industrial action and a long recession.

Since this short video was made Sunak and Truss have surely both stood in front of at least half a dozen other sparkling pools. Any sign of the candidates getting together to plan a response to the Winter energy crisis yet? No. Just the Chancellor advising pensioners to turn the thermostat down a bit.

Thanks to the nice people at My Radlett News for the video, which is on their YouTube channel.

Green belt red alert

In the Tory leadership race, Team Rishi has deployed the ultimate THW (Tory Heartland Weapon) – the green belt – and Oliver Dowden is ready

Map of the green belt around London
Map of the London green belt

September 2022 update: turns out the green belt is still growing. The annual government numbers show that, after a break of about eight years, the green belt grew by 1.5% in the year 2021-22 (admittedly, all the growth was in the North of England). And, let’s be clear, if they were allowed, local authorities could build hundreds of thousands of decent, affordable homes in the green belt and it would make hardly any difference.

The green belt Is a 1930s invention – the product of Fabian paternalism and modern local government activism. It was a radical idea that limited speculative building, protected green space and parkland for working people and contributed to the dispersion of decent housing beyond the big cities. London is smaller as a result – the 20th Century sprawl that many thought inevitable was sharply foreclosed. London must one of the few capital cities in the world that looks roughly the same on a contemporary map as it did in the years after the First World War.

Communities on the both sides of the green belt continue to look out across fields and woods long after they might reasonably be expected to have been paved over. The London green belt is enormous – 135 square miles of land, substantially larger than London itself – and it’s got bigger over time. A big extension in the 1950s saw parts of the green belt pushed out to 35 miles from the centre of London.

It’s also, of course, an indefensible nonsense. An initially benign measure, intended to protect city dwellers from rampant development and small towns from being engulfed by the sprawl, has become a kind of Home Counties fortress – an impenetrable defensive shield for rural and suburban communities, almost exclusively in the South East of England (and almost exclusively Tory). It’s an irrational and uniquely selfish device, and almost unique in the world. The idea that valuable land, close to the economic centre of Britain, should be arbitrarily and permanently protected from use is eccentric at best, wicked at worst.

And as an idea it’s fantastically robust. In UK politics it’s essentially untouchable. Over the decades legislation has been reinforced, protections hardened. London’s green belt has grown (and there are now green belts around other English cities). Perfectly sane measures to shrink or amend the green belt have been blocked and politicians who embrace reform always come to regret it. Most won’t touch it with a barge pole.

And, of course, those of us who live by the Green Belt love it – and we’ll expend enormous amounts of energy to defend it – inventing justifications for its permanent protection, most perfectly valid. It’s a ‘green lung‘, it contributes to ‘ecosystem services‘, it’s a corridor for wildlife, it offers various magical protections for the health and happiness of both city dwellers and those on the other side of the moat. We put up signs in our front gardens, attend public meetings and sign petitions. And who can blame us? The green belt has underpinned the value of our homes for decades and contributes to the wellbeing of our families. We can’t think of a good reason to touch it.

An industry of well-funded think tanks, lobby groups, trusts and protest groups has emerged, especially since the 1950s. There’s a Parliamentary All-Party Group on the green belt, of course. A fabulously dense defensive architecture has been retrospectively erected around the idea of the green belt – connecting it with various other big issues – the agriculture lobby, rural landowners, the hospitality and leisure industries, the green lobby – all have joined the defense of the green belt from time to time. For columnists and conservative opinion formers it’s practically sacred.

The builders and developers who want to liberate the green belt don’t help their case much, either. What they put up in the places they are allowed to build is almost always horrible – opportunistic, lowest-common-denominator housing squeezed onto inappropriate plots, speculative commercial developments that blight town centres. Estates dumped in inaccessible locations (or on flood plains). And, inevitably, they take every opportunity to avoid their affordable housing obligations.

It’s hard to argue that rolling farmland, woodlands and parks are not worth defending – the green belt protects some of England’s most precious countryside: Epping Forest, the Surrey Hills, the Chilterns. As you’d expect, the largely suburban and rural electorate in the Conservative Party leadership contest is very much on-side. This explains why the collapsing NHS, booming child poverty and the climate emergency are barely on the policy agenda but the green belt very much is.

Oliver Dowden’s green belt intervention is a long piece in support of Rishi Sunak in the Telegraph. There’s nothing to see here, really. It’s what you’d expect from an MP with a track record of privet hedge bothering but it’s full of Tory membership dog whistles carefully calibrated for his electorate:

Mr Sunak said town halls will be encouraged to regenerate industrial land and he will strengthen policy to encourage the building of much denser housing in inner-city areas.

Oliver Dowden, Daily Telegraph, 27 July 2022

We’re sure the people of these inner-city areas (perhaps the same ones Rishi was cannily able to divert funds away from while Chancellor) will be thrilled to learn that his plan means the land around them will be built on at much higher density. The word ‘brownfield’, which, of course, is a euphemism for ‘not a Tory constituency’ is used ten times.

For my constituents in Hertfordshire and those in neighbouring seats, the fear of losing this belt of fresh air, open space and countryside is raw and real, and as party chairman I saw the Liberal Democrats constantly seek to play on that fear in Conservative held seats around the country.

As ‘raw and real’ as the prospect of falling into poverty or destitution when the energy bills come in this Winter?

Where communities do not want development, it must not be permitted to go ahead. Overzealous planning inspectors must have their wings clipped. It is local people, not bureaucrats, that should take decisions on the preservation of our countryside…

Planning inspectors must be fed up with the rollercoaster of affection and approbation they experience. They’re saints when they deny applications for green belt projects and unredeemable sinners when they permit them.

Mr Dowden has almost certainly picked the wrong side in this fight but he’s honourable enough not to have jumped ship and he has to hope that his track record as a muscular defender of single-sex toilets and colonial streetnames will win him favour in the Truss camp in September. Certainly jumping to the defence of the green belt can’t possibly have done him any harm.

Keeping busy

You have to wonder what a former party Co-Chairman gets up to during a turbulent time like this

Oliver Dowden's social media endorsement of Rishi Sunak. The text reads: "Rishi is the best person to lead our country and unquestionably the best person to beat Labour. That's why I'm backing him to be our next Prime Minister. Ready for Rishi
Dowden’s tweet in support of Rishi was one of the first, on 8 July. It’s exactly the same as all the others because it was provided by the super-organised Sunak campaign team.

He’s ready for Rishi. You already knew this. Oliver Dowden’s social media is saturated with Sunak endorsements. If there’s no Ministerial role for our MP in September it’ll be because the other weirdo won. Sunak may be weird but if you rose during the Cameron era like Dowden, he probably looks like the nearest the Conservative Party has to a normal human being right now – the anti-chaos candidate (but wait until Dowden hears about Sunak’s actual policies – don’t think our privet hedge guy is ready for ‘Charter Cities‘).

He ‘wielded the knife’. Johnson loyalists are making a list of MPs they think were instrumental in the Prime Minister’s fall. Dowden may have missed the Pinchergate action but he’s right at the top of the list anyway. Andrew Pierce, in his breathless Johnson panegyric in the Mail says “News of his resignation came through when the PM was in Rwanda. Boris knew immediately that Dowden had planned it in advance.”

He’s mixed up in a complicated anti-semitism scandal. We don’t pretend to understand this case but if you’re a local democracy nerd you may remember that back in April a QC-led internal Conservative Party inquiry into the abuse of a Jewish Labour Party candidate standing in Hertsmere concluded with reprimands for four Conservative Councillors and a local Agent for ‘enabling anti-semitism’. Jewish News quoted the findings, saying the five accused Conservatives were “party to a personal campaign against the claimant in relation to the 2020 by-election, and which continued for many months.”

A cutting from Private Eye magazine No. 1577, 15 July - 28 July2022
From Private Eye 15-28 July 2022

According to Private Eye’s Rotten Boroughs column (which keeps an eye on local authority malfeasance), the Conservative Party’s disciplinary code was changed after the inquiry’s verdict to permit the reprimanded members to challenge their punishment. The Eye’s assumption is that, as Co-Chairman of the Party at the time, Dowden would likely have been well aware of these changes. Apparently the appeals lodged by the party members are ongoing.

Whither Dowden?

Our MP was way out in front with his resignation from the Johnson government and may have been plotting against the PM for a while

It seems like a long time ago but it’s actually only a month since Oliver Dowden, MP for Hertsmere, resigned as Conservative Party Co-Chairman. And you’d be forgiven for forgetting that it wasn’t actually Pinchergate – the most recent crisis of Boris Johnson’s leadership – that induced his departure; it was the previous one – the catastrophic 23 June double byelection loss in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton.

Dowden’s resignation letter was a shock at the time and seemed out of character for such a loyal soldier: a short and blunt critique of the Prime Minister, out of the blue – “We cannot carry on with business as usual. Somebody must take responsibility…” A few weeks on it seems like a relatively mild intervention and, of course, it was only a preview of a flood of over 60 letters, sent by ministers and advisers and PPSs, in the three days between 5 and 7 July, once Johnson had provided the final push by trying to defend his terrible friend Pincher.

And we’ve all already forgotten the gossip that Dowden had been plotting with his old boss David Cameron (in an ‘elite Mayfair club’ natch) to ‘destabilise’ Boris Johnson after the catastrophic May local elections.

The flurry of letters – the largest number of resignations submitted in a single day in party history – was a hyper-modern, social media affair. Almost all of them were published exclusively on Twitter – and there was some entertainment. Some were unreadable, some weren’t even letters, just hurried tweets or Facebook posts (we do wonder who archives all this official correspondence). Some were written up by local reporters. Some came very very soon after their senders had replaced resigning ministers (Michelle Donelan was Education Minister for 35 hours and has promised to return her Ministerial redundancy money). Liam Fox managed to resign even though he hasn’t been a minister for years and recently appointed Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi hedged his bets by carefully sending a strongly-worded letter addressed to no one that wasn’t actually a resignation (and he’s consequently still in his job).

Meanwhile, Dowden came out for Rishi Sunak on 8 July, right at the beginning of the process, sharing the boilerplate social media endorsement given to him by Rishi’s team.

Oliver Dowden's social media endorsement of Rishi Sunak. The text reads: "Rishi is the best person to lead our country and unquestionably the best person to beat Labour. That's why I'm backing him to be our next Prime Minister. Ready for Rishi
Oliver Dowden’s social media endorsement of Rishi Sunak

Dowden’s support for Sunak is not surprising. The former Chancellor seems to be the closest of the two surviving leadership candidates to the outlook of the pre-Johnson, pre-populist, pre-chaos administration of Theresa May – the panicky interregnum in which Sunak first saw office – and to the seemingly unending nightmare of the Cameron years in which Dowden did. Our MP’s journey – from Cameroonian moderniser to Johnsonite Culture Wars enforcer always seemed an uncomfortable one. Perhaps in supporting Sunak he is rejoining the Tory mainstream.

Minister for junk mail

Careful, your MP wants your email address

Spam

Oliver Dowden, MP for Hertsmere, Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party and unlikely attack dog in the Culture Wars, has a new, slightly demeaning job. He’s been tasked with adding names to the Conservative Party’s email marketing list. He’s doing this by attacking some Labour politicians for supporting the RMT’s strike action. Nothing new about attacking organised labour, of course, but Dowden’s approach is unusual and quite possibly unprecedented – he’s started a petition which will apparently be delivered to the opposition Labour party.

The eccentricity of this approach: a governing party – and one with a 75-seat majority in the House of Commons – petitioning the party that is currently out of power for action in an industrial dispute – will not have escaped you. But the oddball logic will become clear if you actually try to complete the petition. It’s a fake petition. You’ll find that, although you’re offered two options (condemn the strikes, don’t condemn the strikes), whichever way you vote you’ll be required to provide an email address and agree to receive email ‘about the Party’s campaigns and opportunities to get involved’. Boom, you’re on the list.

This kind of data collection mechanic disguised as a campaign has, as you’d expect, been imported from US politics, where Donald Trump and others have been building huge email and telephone databases and surveilling voters via similar devices for years. In this country, political parties are governed by data protection regulations just like other organisations and this petition looks legit but you may want to take your usual precautions against the kind of epic quantities of spam that political parties routinely produce.

Top tip: if you have one, use a special email address when you’re obliged to sign up for junk mail in this way – we have one which deletes all email before we even see it.

And don’t forget that the Conservatives have form when it comes to dodgy online marketing. There was that time they broke Twitter’s rules by pretending to be a ‘fact checking’ organisation and that other time when they were fined £10,000 for breaking data protection law.

Of course, whether it’s a dignified thing for a prominent politician – one who until not long ago was an actual Minister of the Crown (he was replaced by Nadine Dorries) – to be grubbing around for qualified leads for the party’s junk mail department is another matter – one we’ll leave to Mr Dowden’s conscience.

If you’d like to sign it, the ‘Stop the Strikes’ petition is on the Conservative Party web site. The Information Commissioner has detailed guidance for the use of personal data by political parties.

The thankless work of a Party Chairman

An open letter to the Leader of the Opposition, from Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party Oliver Dowden.

Oliver Dowden, our MP, is Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party. It’s an unelected role that’s in the gift of the leader of the party (Boris Johnson), so it’s often used as a place to ‘park’ useful Ministers while they’re out of formal office (this also explains why there’s quite often more than one Chairman – it’s a kind of waiting area for soon-to-be-recycled ministers). While the party is in government the Chairman is also typically given a sinecure role such as Minister without Portfolio, which allows them to attend cabinet meetings.

In his role as Co-Chairman Oliver Dowden is required to do a fair amount of political spade work – defending the party leadership, keeping the latest policy wheezes in the news, rallying the troops at conferences, carrying the message to sympathetic foreigners, that kind of thing.

Today’s grunt work is a strongly-worded open letter to the leader of the opposition, part of a dizzying 36 hours in Westminster politics that seems worth a closer look. Let’s try to put Dowden’s letter into a sequence:

  1. Tuesday evening (19 April). Boris Johnson attends a meeting of Tory MPs, ostensibly to apologise for partygate and rally the troops. He takes the opportunity to criticise the Archbishop of Canterbury and the BBC. As expected, the content of his speech is quickly made public.
  2. Later Tuesday evening. Friendly media outlets are briefed about the speech – that the PM asserted that the Archbishop has been more critical of the Government’s plan to deport refugees to Rwanda than he has been of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, for instance. Also that the PM was unhappy about the criticism of the plan on the BBC.
  3. Wednesday morning. This is where it gets complicated. The press may also have been briefed that the PM was unhappy with the BBC’s coverage of Ukraine. On Wednesday’s Today on BBC Radio 4, Justin Webb picks up this line and grills Paul Scully, the unfortunate junior minister who happens to be on duty that morning, about the Prime Minister’s criticism of BBC journalism – “can you come up with an occasion when Boris Johnson has put his life on the line for the truth as Jeremy Bowen has, as Lyse Doucet has, as Clive Myrie has?” Webb’s line of questioning becomes part of the story, of course. There are complaints and a line is provided by the BBC press office (quoted in this Telegraph article).
  4. Wednesday lunchtime. Webb’s line of questioning obviously hits home, though, and when Keir Starmer accuses Johnson of slandering “decent people in a private room” and says “how can the Prime Minister claim to be a patriot when he deliberately attacks and degrades the institutions of our great country?” at Prime Minister’s Questions, The PM responds furiously – “…he must be out of his tiny mind…”
  5. Wednesday afternoon. So, by now the disagreement comes down to whether the PM criticised the BBC’s coverage of the Rwanda plan or its coverage of the Ukraine war (or both) in his speech to MPs.
  6. Thursday morning. Central Office concludes that this calumny – that the Prime Minister has criticised the BBC for its coverage of the Ukraine war – cannot stand and must be tackled head-on. One aspect of the response is Oliver Dowden’s letter to Keir Starmer, published on his Twitter account. It catalogues Boris Johnson’s various defences of press freedom (not a very long list, in truth) and finishes with a routine reminder that the Labour Party was once led by a Kremlin apologist who routinely wore a slightly communist hat. Ministers tour the breakfast studios to demand an apology from Starmer, newspapers pick up the letter and run it under headlines like Sir Keir Starmer told to retract claims Boris Johnson criticised BBC’s Ukraine coverage (The Telegraph) and Boris Johnson ally suggests he shouldn’t apologise to Commons – but Keir Starmer should (The Mirror).

And this is all in a day’s work for a hard-working Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party.

  • The Conservative Party has a useful page about the duties of the Party Chairman. Oliver Dowden’s letter is on Dowden’s own Twitter, not on the Party’s web site or even on an official Twitter account. Does anyone archive this stuff? Are Government librarians scouring MPs’ social media for material? Will historians be able to access statements like this in the distant future? Or does it actually serve politicians that official statements are now no more permanent than tweets?

Culture wars update

Woke police officer

One of the things we’ve done on this blog – with, let’s face it, limited consistency – is keep an eye on the public statements and Ministerial actions of our MP Oliver Dowden who, these days, is Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister without Portfolio (we started, in fact, under his predecessor, James Clappison, a long-serving MP who had represented Hertsmere since the creation of the constituency in 1992).

Although Mr Dowden is currently without formal Ministerial responsibilities (his role does allow him to attend Cabinet meetings, although without a portfolio to represent he’ll probably just do a crossword or something) you might be forgiven for thinking that he ought to adopt the title Minister for the Culture Wars. He’s all over it. The Google alert that keeps us up to date with Oliver Dowden’s business is essentially all culture wars, all the time these days.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that the Co-Chairman’s message to electors ahead of the 5 May local elections, which you can read on Conservative Home, is heavy on the culture wars and includes two uses of the word ‘woke’ (‘woke warriors’ and ‘woke vanity projects’).

We’re not 100% sure we want to reduce this blog to a chronological account of Mr Dowden’s statements about statues, unisex toilets, woke street names and so on. But it does seem worthwhile to record the fact that a prominent MP, once confidant to a Prime Minister and until recently a full Minister of the Crown, can be so diminished in office as to be obliged to churn out talking points for Facebook (Mr Dowden is so far silent on David Attenborough’s woke dinosaur, though).

So, let’s get it over with. Oliver Dowden’s latest Culture Wars sortie relates to guidance apparently given to police forces to use gender-neutral language when addressing the public (we can’t find this guidance online, although the Mail’s claim is that it was obtained by a FOI request to Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire constabularies). The Minister for Woke’s statement on the matter says that the police should be arresting crims and

…not wasting time trying to condition officers who extend a basic courtesy to the people they serve.

Oliver Dowden MP, quoted in The Mail, 16 April 2022

It’s not clear what Dowden means by ‘condition’ but the quote has surfaced in multiple outlets, from GB News to The Sun, to The Daily Star to Kremlin-funded RT (recently banned from UK TV by Ofcom, as you’ll remember, but obviously still on the mailing list for these press lines). We’re curious as to how this happens. How is a line like this distributed? It’s not contained in an official press release that we’ve been able to find. Is there an email d-list? We’re naive about the ways of Government press offices. Can you enlighten us?

Anyway, our bet is that Mr Dowden’s interest in the Culture Wars will sharply decline immediately the council elections are out of the way in a few weeks (no elections in Hertsmere this year, though, remember, so don’t get excited).

The culture war will be fought in the streets

1900, peak year for Boer War street names. Photo by Gwydion M Williams

The news that Oliver Dowden wants to make it a bit harder for people to change street names got us thinking about how streets get their names and why they’re changed.

Street names are interesting aren’t they? A mix of impenetrable, often very ancient, labels for paths and byways that even precede the Roman names and much more modern, deliberately-applied names that often commemorate battles, statesmen, landowners and local dignitories. Sometimes it’s artists and writers. Round my way there’s a whole estate named after poets, which is lovely.

In British towns you might be forgiven for thinking it’s all about the Second Boer War – a particularly brutal war for land and resources fought in South Africa at the turn of the 20th Century that’s widely commemorated – especially in street names.

This particular war was an early ‘media war’ – covered in often uncompromising detail by star correspondents (including a young Winston Churchill) sent by the major newspapers – most of whom enthusiastically supported the British action against the two Boer republics on the other side. The new technology of the telegraph allowed vivid reports to be returned daily and the papers competed to carry the most gruesome descriptions of the fighting.

The names of battles won and lost, the soldiers who fought them and the places they fought over were all well known – much as we came to know the names of cities and battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan – Fallujah, Basra, Helmand, Kunduz… And because the end of the Victorian period was a time of much housebuilding in Britain’s towns and suburbs it’s no surprise that there are dozens of Ladysmith Streets, Mafeking Roads and Kitchener Terraces all around the UK.

During the First World War the issue was different. Going to war with Germany, a nation with which many – including the Royal family – had close connections, produced new tensions. In the cities, for instance, many were unhappy about British streets that had German names. Some were summarily changed by patriotic Mayors and councils.

In 1916 the London County Council changed the name of Bismarck Road in Blackheath to Edith Cavell Way (Cavell was a nurse, captured and shot by German forces in Belgium in 1915). There’s a street in Stoke Newington called Beatty Road that used to be called Wiesbaden Road. Petitions were raised, questions asked in Parliament. Changing names didn’t become national policy though. In the House of Commons in 1918, faced with a bill to rename all street names of German origin, Leader of the House, Andrew Bonar Law (who, three years later, would become Prime Minister amid a scandal over payment for honours) said: ‘We are engaged, I think, in matters more important’.

Even so, in Leeds:

There are numerous cases in the Metropolitan area of sturdy patriotic British citizens having to live under German direction, so to speak, and the residents of thoroughfares with such pronouncedly Teutonic names as Bismarck, Wiesbaden, Gothenburg, Berlin, Stuttgart, and so on, naturally resent the objectionable denominations.

Streets with German Names, Leeds Mercury, November 11 1915

The Second World War seems to have produced fewer street renamings, perhaps because the German names had been removed 25 years earlier, but in Essex there’s an estate with roads named after Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. The Falklands War is reflected in a scattering of street names as you’d imagine – there’s a Port Stanley Close on a new-build estate in Taunton. The 40th anniversary of the invasion might produce some new ones.

Some Nelson Mandela Streets, Squares (and Houses) arrived in the early 90s – mostly in communities where the campaign against apartheid had been at its most vigorous, where Mandela’s freedom meant most. That Mandela now sits alongside Kitchener on British street signs is appropriate – not least because in marking the final removal of the racist regime inserted under colonialism it brings the story of Britain’s involvement in South Africa full-circle.

The war in Ukraine is obviously going to mean good business for sign makers too. In Vilnius the Russian embassy now stands on Ukrainian Heroes Street. In Tirana it’s on Free Ukraine Street.

We change street names for all sorts of reasons.

And in Britain, street names are a battlefield again. Our MP, Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister without Portfolio Oliver Dowden, who has taken on the role of Kitchener in his Government’s Culture War, is back in the trenches.

In time for the May local elections (in which we will not participate, by the way – no elections in Hertsmere till next year) Dowden thinks there’s electoral mileage in taking on lefty councils. The main target is name changes proposed by Black Lives Matter groups and by those who think it’s incongruous that so many of our streets honour men who prospered from imperialism and slavery. There is a plan:

These proposals will give local residents a democratic check against the lefty municipal militants trying to cancel war heroes like Churchill and Nelson.

Oliver Dowden, quoted in the Daily Telegraph 9 April 2022

Under changes floated by Michael Gove’s Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, local authorities would be required to hold a ‘mini-referendum’ amongst residents when a name change is proposed. This doesn’t seem to be a new proposal, though – and there’s no detail on the Ministry’s web site – so it’s likely that Dowden is re-upping November’s proposal to give neighbourhoods a say in planning changes.

But since Michael Gove himself has recently said that the Government has abandoned plans to bring forward the Planning Bill this provision was contained in, it’s most likely that Oliver Dowden’s referendum idea is electioneering, but it’s certainly fascinating to hear the language of ‘loony lefties’ and ‘municipal militants’ back in the public discourse, over thirty years on. The Mail has gone to the effort of creating an illustration to bring it all up to date:

A photograph of Conservative Minister Michael Gove with images of woke street signs behind him - Equality Road, Inspire Avenue, Destiny Road, Respect Way, Diversity Grove
From the Daily Mail

So, if you’ve decided it would be noble to change the name of your street to Kyiv Crescent, you’ll need to make sure you’ve got the whole neigbourhood with you.

Here’s how Oliver Dowden voted in the free vote on access to home abortions

An important change to the law during lockdown made it possible for women to get abortion pills (early medical abortion) prescribed over the phone (the legislation calls this ‘telemedicine’) and then to have the pills, which are taken in two doses, 48 hours apart, sent to a home address (this is for abortions earlier than 10 weeks).

The government proposed removing this pandemic provision and returning to in-person appointments from 29 August this year. Women’s groups, medical charities and professional bodies, like the Pregnancy Advisory Service and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, lobbied to keep the at-home provision, because women like the convenience and choice it provides but also because it’s been shown to help vulnerable women – who might, for instance, be unable to get to a clinic – to get safe abortions. BPAS Chief executive Clare Murphy said, in a press release:

We’ve long known there are women who really struggle to access clinic services. They are sometimes women in very complex situations, very vulnerable women. Women in coercive relationships, for example, found it difficult to access clinics without their partner knowing. These women either turn to illegal methods or they present to us very late.

Quoted by BBC News.

Earlier this month Conservative peer Baroness Liz Sugg tabled an amendment to the Health and Care Bill, which is currently going through Parliament, seeking to make the at-home service permanent (incidentally Liz Sugg was Head of Operations in David Cameron’s Number 10 PR team while Oliver Dowden was Deputy Chief of Staff – they share an organogram here. Cameron moved Sugg upstairs on his resignation in 2016). Because abortion is considered to be a matter of conscience, Government whips permitted a free vote on Sugg’s amendment in the Commons, which took place yesterday, 30 March 2022. MPs voted in favour of the amendment 212 to 184, so the provision will continue and women won’t have to go to a surgery to get the first dose.

MP for Hertsmere Oliver Dowden is one of the 184 MPs – almost all them Conservatives – who voted against retaining the service.

Graphic showing House of Commons voting in the Health and Care Bill - Permitted Locations for Abortion Treatment on 30 March 2022 - Aye 212, No 184.
Voting details from They Work for You

This vote can’t tell us much about Dowden’s attitude to abortion – he has a mixed record. Anti-abortion lobby group Right To Life maintains a web site that tracks votes for every UK legislator (this approach to holding legislators to account seems to be becoming more popular – it’s an import from US special-interest politics where it is widespread). Oliver Dowden’s page shows six abstentions and a total of three votes for or against on ‘right to life’ issues (votes are labelled green if they’re in agreement with Right to Life policy and red if not).

Dowden’s background as a hard-working member of David Cameron’s broadly socially-liberal administration might suggest support for a woman’s right not to be pregnant but his more recent enthusiastic involvement in the culture wars (statues, hedges, Maoism and so on) suggests otherwise. So it’s inconclusive.

Oliver Dowden’s Parliamentary voting record on issues of interest to anti-abortion group Right to Life.

Right to Life themselves are, as you’d expect, unhappy with the outcome of the vote. A spokesperson said, in a press release:

The group of MPs who have voted for this amendment have voted to remove vital safeguards including an in-person appointment with a medical professional. This will put thousands more women at risk from ‘DIY’ home abortion services, by removing a routine in-person consultation that allows medical practitioners to certify gestation and recognise potential coercion or abuse, ‘at-home’ abortion has presented serious risks to women and girls in abusive situations.

Quoted by the Catholic News Agency.

It’s interesting to note that both sides of the argument depend on appeals to the vulnerability of women in coercive or abusive relationships to defend their positions. Can they both be right?

The BBC has a detailed article about the law and the debate in Parliament. They Work for You has the voting details. More about Early Medical Abortion on the BPAS web site.

Oliver Dowden on partygate

A photograph taken from a window at Number 10 Downing Street in May 2020, showing Prime Minister Boris Johnson, his wife Carrie Johnson (with her newborn baby Wilfred) and two aides thought to be Dominic Cummings and Martin Reynolds. Part of a larger image that shows other staff on the lawn neyond the terrace.
The Prime Minister and Number 10 staff during the first national lockdown

UPDATE 13 April 2022. As expected, the Prime Minister’s fixed penalty notice has arrived (two in the letterbox in fact). Our MP was not the only loyalist to be dropped in it by the news, of course, although Oliver Dowden’s “…he is not going to be subject to a fixed-penalty notice because he is confident that he has not broken the law” from three weeks ago was more fulsome than most. Along with dozens of other Tory MPs, Dowden has now shared the official line:

Fixed penalties are starting to land on the doormats of Conservative Party staff, civil servants and, quite possibly, MPs and ministers. We don’t know how many have been issued but the BBC says it’ll be at least 15 but more likely 20 and there may be a second and subsequent batches. The investigation takes in 12 events, though, so it seems unlikely it’ll stop at 20.

From the Telegraph we get this complicated construction: “Downing Street said Boris Johnson has not been told by the Metropolitan Police that he is being fined over the ‘partygate’ scandal.” The Met won’t be providing a list of those fined (they don’t normally publish the names of people issued with fixed penalties) but we’re willing to bet you a tenner right now that there’ll soon be a list in the public domain. Still no word on the Prime Minister, although his promise to tell us if he is fined presumably still stands.

So, although as Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister without Portfolio his loyalty is obviously guaranteed, it’s possible that Oliver Dowden was going out on a limb a bit last week when he told James O’Brien on LBC:

The prime minister is actually absolutely resolutely clear that he is not going to be subject to a fixed-penalty notice because he is confident that he has not broken the law.

Oliver Dowden, LBC, 21 March 2022

The mood music this week suggests Johnson’s innocence is not quite such a sure thing, though. You’ll find a dozen news and opinion pieces since we learnt that fines were imminent, even in the Tory press, that suggest Johnson’s partygate woes are not over, even that his leadership may still be in peril. The Evening Standard, for instance, owned by the Prime Minister’s friend Evgeny Lebedev, is pretty sure that ‘a day of reckoning’ is coming, although the loyalists questioned are pretty sure that it won’t be till after the Ukraine crisis.

And then there’s the Sue Gray report (bet you’d forgotten about that), the final, unexpurgated, version of which is due after the Met’s investigation is finished.