Dowden round-up

Second jobs, woke nonsense, stolen artworks, strikes – what your MP’s been up to since the new year Follow the money. Oliver Dowden features in a big exposé of payments to MPs, from which we learn that our legislators have taken £17.1 million from second jobs in this parliament and that almost 90% of it… Continue reading Dowden round-up

Second jobs, woke nonsense, stolen artworks, strikes – what your MP’s been up to since the new year

A meeting room like the one in which Oliver Dowden hasn’t been holding his strikes taskforce meetings

Follow the money. Oliver Dowden features in a big exposé of payments to MPs, from which we learn that our legislators have taken £17.1 million from second jobs in this parliament and that almost 90% of it went to Tories. Dowden’s piffling twenty-five grand* barely gets him into the top 35% of all MPs, though. Must try harder.

All woke all the time. Our increasingly desperate government has settled on woke culture as the only workable distraction from chaos almost everywhere – escalating strikes, thousands of alleged sexual assaults by police officers, the collapsing NHS etc. The UK government will, inexplicably, act to stop the Scots from making it easier to get a gender recognition certificate. Oliver Dowden has been asked to appoint an ‘Anti-Woke Czar’ to clamp down on political correctness in universities. Expect much more of this in coming weeks. It’s all they’ve got.

Strikes taskforce apparently on strike. In December Dowden was appointed head of the government’s anti-strikes taskforce. We can’t be 100% certain but it looks like there have been no meetings, no announcements, no action of any kind, in fact, from the taskforce since then. Nothing.

Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality

Clinging to the loot. Oliver Dowden has for a long time opposed the return of stolen artworks – the Benin bronzes, the Acropolis friezes and so on – appearing on the telly, making the argument part of his anti-woke platform, writing stern letters to the museums and so on. Since then things have moved on: governments and institutions, including a number of British museums, have been returning artefacts all over the place and there’s been progress even in the gnarliest of disagreements. The new Culture Secretary, Michelle Donelan, has returned to the matter, though, and is insisting that artworks must not be returned – she’s wound the story back decades, in fact, and is using the kind of language that hasn’t been heard for some time on this topic – ‘cans of worms’, ‘slippery slopes’ etc. This one is going to run and run.

* Some of Dowden’s money came from Caxton Associates, the Mayfair hedge fund notorious for shorting the pound and for bankrolling Liz Truss’s short-lived assault on common sense in 2022. Some came from the slightly less notorious South Hertfordshire Business Club – a club with no web site, no staff, no premises, no accounts and, apparently, no members. According to the Electoral Commission, though, the club has given £82,741.09 to Hertsmere Tories since 2017. Details in this spreadsheet. More about Dowden’s second jobs.