Everything But Brexit II: The Terrible Stuff the Government Has Done Recently

Keeping up with politics is exhausting, not to mention depressing. The Brexit negotiations have dominated the news agenda for close to 18 months, a seemingly endless stream of articles and news bulletins about a bunch of people sat around a table struggling to agree on anything.

So who could be blamed for opting out of the whole politics thing? If that’s been your strategy, we regret to inform you that the country is a complete shit-show. Earlier this year we rounded up all the terrible things the government had done since the EU referendum. Obviously, the bad news didn’t end there. Here’s what the government’s been up to in the past few months.

• Mistakenly wrote to 100 EU nationals and ordered them to leave the country or face deportation – an incident described by Theresa May as an "unfortunate error".
• Been accused of acting as a "lobbying arm of the fossil fuel industry". This was after trade minister Greg Hands met with the Brazilian government to discuss concerns raised by BP and Shell over taxation and environmental regulations in the South American country.
• Plunged thousands of people into rent arrears and sent use of food banks spiralling due to delays making universal credit payments. Universal credit was intended to simplify the benefits system. Apparently the government failed to see any potential problems with the fact that people would have to wait six weeks to receive their first payment – a situation made worse by the fact that one in four recipients had to wait even longer due to delays checking claims. Chancellor Philip Hammond magnanimously used his autumn budget to reduce the waiting time to five weeks and announced funding to help those adversely affected – but the changes won’t take effect until next year. Merry Christmas!
• Proved so incompetent that its own social mobility team resigned en masse. Alan Milburn, who has headed up the team since 2012, said he had "little hope" that Theresa May was capable of bringing about changes to ensure a fairer society.
• Oversaw a reduction of 1,193 in the number of full-time GPs working for the NHS in the space of a year, despite pledging to recruit an extra 5,000 family doctors by 2020.

• Failed to sack Boris Johnson after he risked condemning a British woman to spend up to five more years in an Iranian prison by incorrectly claiming she had visited the country as a journalist. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian national, was arrested and jailed while on a family holiday in 2016. She is accused of planning to overthrow the Iranian regime – charges she has always denied.
• Left parents unable to claim childcare due to a fault with the HMRC website. The government was later called out by the national advertising watchdog over "misleading" claims about the extent to which parents were being offered free childcare in the first place.
• Promised reforms to protect up to 1.1 million workers employed in the gig economy, by forcing companies like Uber and Deliveroo to offer things like the minimum wage and sick pay, then delayed these reforms after it emerged that right wingers within the Conservative party might rise up in opposition to such radical measures.
• Threatened to deport a woman who has lived in the UK for nearly 50 years. Paulette Wilson arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1968, has the right to remain in this country, has paid national insurance contributions for 34 years and has never been back to her home country. Nevertheless, in October she was detained, taken to the infamous Yarl’s Wood detention centre, and was on the verge of being deported when her MP and a local charity intervened.
• In November it was reported that a woman who tried to report her rape to the police was arrested and interrogated about her immigration status, in what was seen as a shocking consequence of the government's "hostile environment" migration policy.
• Saw international development secretary Priti Patel resign after going on holiday to Israel and failing to disclose a meeting with the country’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and at least 11 other meetings with Israeli politicians and government officials.
• Refused to pay for fire safety measures after the Grenfell Tower tragedy. FOI requests by the BBC revealed that only one in 50 council or housing association-owned tower blocks have a full sprinkler system. Councils say their requests for funding to pay for sprinkler systems have been denied.
• Failed to sack Boris Johnson after he suggested UK investors could turn the Libyan city of Sirte into the "next Dubai" if they could just "clear the dead bodies away".
• Considered tackling the NHS crisis by banning walk-in patients from going to A&E.

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• Fought a legal battle to avoid helping refugee children. Charity Help Refugees went to court in an attempt to force the government to help unaccompanied asylum seeking children stranded in Europe.
• Set new records for violence in prisons – as assaults on staff and fights between prisoners hit all-time highs. Meanwhile, Ministry of Justice figures revealed Britain’s highest security jails have lost one in four prison officers since 2010. And plans to close down ageing jails were abandoned after prisoner numbers spiralled.
• Slashed redundancy payments for public sector workers – a decision that was later deemed unlawful by the High Court.
• Refused to accept more than 100 recommendations made by the UN Human Rights Council in areas including the detention of children and international laws on abortion.
• Failed to sack Boris Johnson after he offended the nation of Myanmar by reciting a colonial poem by Rudyard Kipling while on a visit to the country.
• Unfairly charged fees for access to employment tribunals. The Supreme Court ruled the fees of up to £1,200 were unlawful and ordered the government to repay up to £32 million to claimants. One week after the ruling, the government was found to have wrongfully blocked people from appealing decisions to deny them benefits.
• Called a general election, lost a parliamentary majority, was forced into a deal with the ultra-right wing DUP and has gone on to govern in a permanent state of crisis.

@mark_wilding