From my Twitter account, as usual best read from the bottom up:
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Fucking hell Richard.
This is fucking excellent.
This is controlled outrage at its finest.
I’d love these questions to be put to Boris and his ruffians in a Court of Humans Rights with you as the prosecuting barrister.
Sorry for the effusive swearing.
I was annoyed when having breakfast this morning
Haha, PSR, I was trying to formulate a comment that didn’t include swear words – so very glad you have brought some of the needed emphasis for me!
An excellent set of Tweets Richard, and says it all, plainly and clearly – that we (collectively) put up with this behaviour from government,,, I’m grinding my teeth trying to think of a suitable description – and that they think it’s ‘normal’ behaviour to enact these policies,,, I despair.
Our MP put a post on Facebook ‘trying’ to justify why he had voted against the bill. I suspect it was a scripted reply provided to him by Dominic Barnard Castle Eye Test and his cronies. The last bit of a post was basically encouraging people not to be afraid to challenge others for having children they cannot afford – shifting the blame from a Govt, quite prepared to spend hundreds of millions renovating Buckingham Palace but not a relatively small sum to ensure children do not go hungry, to the parents (or those responsible for the children).
He was, to quote an Americanism, ‘torn a new one’!
Craig
So parents were meant to know Covid was happening when they had children?
You literally could not make this callousness up
No, you couldn’t. It was bad enough to vote against it. He then doubled down with the explanation trying to justify it.
He voted to make some children hungry.
Craig
Well done for exposing the Nasty Party at their nastiest. How else can we describe the Nasty Party at their nastiest? What other term can we use apart from scum to describe these utterly inhumane and economically illiterate MPs (with only 5 honourable exceptions) .
My son has persuaded me that wearing a string vest and shouting at the TV is NOT a good look… nor that it does any good.
I have dropped the string vest but was shouting at the TV last night…… I am glad to read that I am not alone. Thank you.
I am also getting particularly annoyed at hearing “we asked the government for a minister to come on the programme but they declined to offer anyone”…….. which is then followed by an interview of some random apologist. When will our TV media “empty chair” our government? We must do something to get our leaders to answer questions.
I really do wish they would empty chair …. and not apologise by putting on some unheard of backbencher
Perhaps the Really Nasty Party is heading for some comeuppance according to this latest Guardian article on Brexit. If Biden wins he may prefer to do a trade deal with the EU and just ignore the UK if only on the grounds Johnson was an early supporter of Trump and needs to be left stewing. Clearly such a move on Biden’s part would strengthen the hand of the EU, Britannia Unchained would suddenly find itself marooned and left on the sidelines. This would very neatly take the wind out of the Brexiteers’ sails!
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/24/johnson-will-wait-for-us-election-result-before-no-deal-brexit-decision
Those keystrokes for ‘school meals’ would only provide the supermarket voucher. The buying of ingredients and preparing the food, as in actually providing the meal, isn’t included. Further resources would need to be summonsed.
Everything in the state, nothing without the state.
You say that we would not need the BoE to be making money, because we would be making it ourselves. Eh? !! That shorthand is well too short!
At full employment we would have created all the money we need to do everything that is possible is my essential argument
There will be consequences. My MP, Mark Jenkinson, ex UKIP until he was called upon to be a brick in the red wall, was so inspired by Ben Bradley that he made his own contribution to the debate; he said that here in the Workington area – one of the most economically and socially deprived area in the country – food vouchers were being swapped for drugs. This was his reason for voting against extending free school meal provision.
Yesterday his Facebook page was inundated by comments by furious constituents. Today on Facebook there are rumours of a no confidence petition to call for a bye election. There are very many of us hoping this is true and if it’s just a rumour we can make it fact.
I hope it happens
I’d add the deeply divisive nature of this gang, like Trump, taking every potential division in society and deliberately making it worse. The latest being the fight with Andy Burnham and Manchester, and now Sadiq and London. There is no part of the country that they have not managed to alienate. If that means that people in those two towns realise that they have more in common, that has to be a good thing. A reminder that London has poverty as bad as anywhere – it’s Westminster and the City that are the problem.
Few signs yet though of divisions within the Tory party, as they threw out all those who had any sense of decency or wider sense of responsibility for others than themselves. Yes, they did exist. Not today’s pseudo Christians objecting to kids being fed. At least in the USA there is the Lincoln project mounting a determined attack on Trump and all that he represents. The Tory party deserves to implode – unfortunately they may take the country down with them.
Tory splits? Well, maybe not in the government team itself, but this article by Matthew Parris in the Times yesterday pulls few punches:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/smirking-ministers-dont-care-what-we-think-sklkklfjm
On a more optimistic note, good piece from Marianna Mazzucato with a vision of how things could be
https://time.com/collection/great-reset/5900739/fix-economy-by-2023/
Hmmmmm…..
No mention of funding or macro as such at all
That bit was disappoimnting
So what is it about Tories and cruelty? Why the everlasting correlation? Foxes, pheasants, foreigners, refugees, hungry kids’ the young, the elderly, the vulnerable, the poor….Are we in the realms of infinity or does it have a limit?
Rodrigo
Privileged?
Boarding school?
Detachment from rest of society?
Perhaps guilt is at the core of it all?
The slave owners of old must have known the cruelty and human misery they were dishing out to their slaves, but couldn’t stop because their wealth and privileged were dependent on it.
But in their heart of hearts they must have known it is they who were the devil.
How to distract themselves from the truth????
How do you cope with the guilt?
By hating the very people who are making you feel guilty. Telling yourself they are below you. Less than human. Deserving of their plight. God’s will.
Tories know the system.
They know how their wealth and privileged comes about.
How to live with the guilt?????
Having just started reading The Deficit Myth: Stephanie Kelton there is a modern version of this guilt.
Unemployment is a monetarist tool to control inflation.
The Tories follow the doctrine of Monetarism, so they know full well that unemployment is a requirement (in their eyes) in keeping inflation “under control”.
Tory policies have unemployment at its core, yet The Tories are more than happy to point the finger and stigmatize those who are unemployed.
Some of the maneuvres by this Westminster government appear so out of the park, it was making me think that it was contrived distractions, rather than unbridled incompetence. The meals for kids outrage made me realise that it is not unbridled incompetence, it is unbridled ideology, delivered by having an 80 seat majority.
On first hearing of it, Peter Lilly at party conference flashed up from memory, singing “I have a little list and on that little list is, single parents,” —- and on, to the tune from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. This was also a time of unfettered ideological zeal, when the tories are given the opportunity it will fall heavily on the less fortunate and will favour the “wealth creators.”
Now there is a perspective from the wrong end of the telescope, wealth creators. When I think objectively the wealth creators are the ones who pay the interest on their mortgages, loans and collectively the scam that is PFI. So instead of singing from G&S it would have been more beneficial to quote and carry out, Yosser from Boys from the Black Stuff, “Gizza a job.”
Or have I grasped the simplistic covered end of the stick?
No I think you got this right
I guess that kids going hungry is nothing new.
But this time there are many more people who realise that it could very easily be them and their kids
The finger pointing and stigmatising may have worked in the past, but people are feeling very insecure and vulnerable at the moment.
Maybe people are seeing the Tories as the callous, cruel party that they are and have no faith in the government helping people in their hour of need.
Let’s hope that this is something good that comes out of the pandemic.
The government definitely are not looking good right now. Poor “optics” is the journalistic jargon.
Last week was frim for the Tories
School meals.
Brexit.
U-turning on Cocid support, again.
I really cannot see people forgetting this.
And this morning on radio 4, Today, we had Matt Hancock telling us that we were all (the entire country) pulling together. He might have had a quick look around the cabinet to find the problem closer to home – Priti Patel blaming lawyers, Michael Gove in some kind of role play fantasy, usw.
Rishi Sunsk’s local pub (which he is known to frequent) have made their feelings clear
https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/politics/rishi-sunaks-local-pub-defends-barring-him-and-three-other-yorkshire-mps-over-their-vote-against-free-school-meals-3015755
Excellent
And good for the Yorkshire Post for publishing it
Short and to the point (from today’s Herald Letters page):
Rushford 3, Johnson 0