So Sir Keir Starmer has made an announcement. It’s an announcement that has been greeted with derision rather than expressions of disgust or anger which has been the reception that many of his statements have garnered from the public.
That announcement is that local authorities are to receive extra money from central government for repairing potholes in roads. All well and good you might suppose, after all many of Britain’s roads are awful and like something out of some third world shithole.
But almost as soon as Starmer made his announcement I recalled another similar governmental announcement from decades ago made by a relatively new Prime Minister heading up a government that was increasingly unpopular. Starmer’s new potholes policy reminded me greatly of John Major’s ‘Cones Hotline’ policy created in 1992. This, for the benefit of younger readers who didn’t live through Major’s 1990 – 1997 administration, was a high profile policy designed to grab public attention and make it seem as if the Major administration was doing something popular and positive. The premise behind the Cones Hotline policy was that drivers could report to a central office problems caused by roadworks which were often designated by road cones.
The Cones Hotline was poorly staffed but cost thousands of pounds per year to run, had relatively few calls to it and eventually became an object of press and public mockery. It was eventually folded into the Department of Transport general highways information services before being ignominiously forgotten. I predict a similar deflated ending powered in large part by mockery to be the result of Starmer’s potholes policy.
The Cones Hotline was but an hor d'oeuvres for the main course of scandal that would afflict the John Major government. This was the collapse of John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign which saw the government promote ‘traditional values’ to the public. This policy also fell apart when the press and public found out about the many government ministers and Tory MP’s who were having ‘interesting’ and convoluted private lives that were miles away from what many Britons would define as ‘traditional’ ones. Untold numbers of Tory MP’s were revealed as having relationships with women who were not their wives, allegations of associations with shady business people, ostensibly straight MP’s going on gay sex jaunts, the wife of a Tory peer committing suicide allegedly over her husband’s infidelities and culminating in the death due to an erotic auto-asphyxiation of a Tory MP. Although the Back to Basics campaign was not specifically aimed at sexual morality it got taken as such by the press and was used as an excuse for the press to dig in to the colourful private lives of Tory MP’s.
We can only hope and pray that Starmer’s Pothole Policy ends up being as mocked as the Cones Hotline was. It must also be hoped that it also is the starter for the sort of scandal revelation that dogged the Major administration throughout its existence until it was put out of its misery in 1997.