Still Waiting...

Two days on: still no report, and now we're told that the Met wants Gray to effectively soft-censor her report so as to 'not prejudice their investigations...', meanwhile saying they don't want the report delayed. Any redaction, however temporary, is likely to take the wind out of the enquiry's sails, giving Doris more breathing and kicking-the-can-down-the-road space, and hoping to find some suitably long grass for it to end up getting lost in.

The nature of these 'independent' reports is such that the longer the delay in publication, the less effective they are: I would propose that an inverse-square-law-of-cooling-news operates in these situations: bury a report long enough and the general public will eventually get bored of waiting and move on. As I said before, Doris will wait until the feel good factor associated with Covid unlocking kicks in and waffle his way forward from there.

Her Majesty's Opposition are effectively hamstrung by Doris's constant PMQ stonewalling, and while the Tory back benches continue to largely sit on the fence, the litanies from either side of the House will continue to bounce back and forth to no good end. One possible way out of this deadlock is the internal wrangling over the National Insurance hike: if sufficient Tory numbers get sufficiently hacked off at the Non-Gov™'s stance on this, maybe, just maybe, some of them might get off the fence and join the rest of us in arguing the contrary.

I think even some of the true-blue-through must feel that living in one of the richest ("fastest-growing G7 economy", remember) countries in the world, having one of the richest serving chancellors in the world, but where approaching five percent of its population are reliant on food-banks, to be beyond mere irony. We're in a very sad place at the moment...