Government corruption is now normal. Yesterday we learned that the VIP channel for Covid procurement took up so much of officials' time last year that those actually capable of delivering PPE, ventilators and other essential supplies that might work could not get a look in.
There can be no doubt people died as a result. How many could not be said. But whilst NHS staff were reduced to wearing bin liners as PPE the profiteering cronies were being favoured, and that must have had a cost.
But is this the big news story of the day? No, that was reserved for the suspicion that Dominic Cummings leaked the tests from Dyson to Boris Johnson on getting tax favours so that he could advance himself still further in the VIP queue for favours.
This annoys me. As I have tweeted this morning:
So, the big story of the day is that Boris Johnson annoyed Dominic Cummings by sacking him, and now he's getting his own back. Why not talk about the deaths resulting from corruption in the VIP procurement process instead? This is just cover.... https://t.co/PjRHcNs7NN
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) April 23, 2021
This is cover. But it's worse than. That. It actually shows that this government is even able to corrupt the news media's coverage of its own corruption. And that's deeply worrying.
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Agnotology Dear, Boy, agnotology – it’s all agnotology.
And why didn’t Biden pull up Johnson’s use of the term ‘bunny hugging’?
If I’d had been Biden I would have publicly upbraided the Tosser in Chief and told him to grow up.
Johnson is such an embarrassment – an ass – both on a personal level and the way he runs Government as if it were the sales at Harrods which is nothing but a free for all grab for the rich, with the anointed arguing over who got there first whilst as you say people have been dying through lack of equipment.
Agreed
I suspect what we were watching was Boris, aware he’s expected to put on some sort of a show, struggling to imitate someone who has feelings like empathy, like caring, he doesn’t and never has had, such emotions being entirely alien to him. His sociopathy stood revealed there, I’d say, for all to see.
Yes – the “bunny hugging” line was a moment of unintended and emetic clarity.
He had no language available in his lexicon of ‘jolly’, sub-Wodehouse gaggery to use as cover for the un-chaplike embarrassment of appearing actually to care about the environment – and “bunny hugging” sprang unguarded from his lips.
I strongly suspect that it lurked in his subconscious for reasons completely unconnected with wildlife.
Tree hugging seems to be the new form of right-wing abuse. Any mention of green policies are dismissed as wild Swampy like extremism and dismissed outof hand.
Bill – Swampy may have adopted some fairly extreme measures (esp. wrt to his own personal well-being), but I don’t feel protecting ancient woodlands against the inexorable march of ‘progress’ is extremism.
This Government I feel is corrupt in the way it conducts…well….EVERYTHING really , but there are also other corrupting influence at work too.
Before the Tories got into power in 2010, my pay was slightly above the median wage for this country. Currently it is now some £3K below (I’m a public sector worker BTW).
I still find it hard to take that hundreds of thousands of public sector workers who have done nothing wrong have to suffer a degradation of the their pay like has been happening since 2010 and is justified in that somehow it is the Government that is in debt and not private banking as a result of 2008.
Added to this, New Labour got rid of our final salary pensions in 2003 (making them ‘fairer and in the context of that the Government could not afford them) only to let the private pension ‘industry’ off paying taxes from I think the late 2000’s.
Tell me – if you believe like many of our poxy-ticians (sic) (Left and Right) that taxes pay for stuff like pensions, how can you justify reducing taxes – the income that you allege pays for the public ones – in the first place? Is the aim to argue that we can’t have public pensions at all? And anything else for that matter that might be ‘public’? Frankly it’s bizarre.
You see, I’m not at all surprised at all by Tory sleaze – sleaze is to the Tory party what the letters ‘Blackpool’ are running through a stick of Blackpool rock. You can guarantee that it will always be there (you see, it’s about ‘entitlement’ – the Tories conflate this with something called ‘democracy’).
The revelations will titillate us. We’ll be able to point our fingers and say we told you so. And maybe Johnson will be disposed of as a liar-bility (another sic). But it won’t alter anything policy wise – they’ll find another poxy-tician to take his place and vomit out the same lies and misinformation and punishing us for daring to be here at all.
But lets not forget that real people like me are suffering (many more, more so than me) because of the CORRUPTION of ideas and imagination within politics itself of which there seems to be no end in sight. This Government would not think of restoring pay in order to help the economy out. Nor does it believe in the ‘good jobs’ (well paid?) Biden talks about.
So, by all means enjoy yourselves as it unravels. But it will a brief respite I assure you until the public REALLY understands just how corrupted politics has become by anti-social ideas promoted by Thatcher and unchallenged as far back as Harold Wilson.