Thursday, November 16, 2023

Are we getting a minister of funny walks?

So Rishi Sunak, the PM, has appointed a TV presenter and newspaper columnist as minister for common sense, or minister without portfolio. I wonder if the fact that both descriptions are used of the same post is a sign of how little common sense we can expect to see from her in her new job?


But who is going to get Esther McVeigh's job at GB News when she and David Cameron are appointed to the House of Lords? Oh wait. Apparently, as well as being a political presenter on TV she's also a Conservative MP!  How is that even legal?

Monday, June 06, 2022

The Jubilee

The Queen has been on the job for 70 years. That's an unimaginably long time in one job for most of us. Unimpeded by the sort of reorganisations and reshuffles that affect many of us, she has devoted herself to her role. She has been a constant during 8 decades of change in the UK and the world. And even as she has changed and adapted, she has done so with grace, dedication, and an integrity that contrasts with many of our elected and other leaders.

The Jubilee, and celebration of the Queen's 70 year reign, remind us of just how far Her Majesty's Government has drifted from the values on which our society has been built.

Some will say that now is not the time to speak of such matters - but this Jubilee makes the contrast so start it cannot and should not be ignored. Others might say it's unpatriotic to tell uncomfortable truths about our country - especially on such an occasion. But I believe the real stain on our national life -  what is really dragging our public life through the mud - the actual negative - is not people who love their country but constructively criticise its faults, or those who lament the rising tide of evil, or call us to be our better selves. The fault lies with those who have let us all down, who have betrayed their office, and who by their venality, entitlement, incompetence, mean-spiritedness, and lack of integrity have made the country and its government an object of ridicule, and who (like rotten apples in a barrel) threaten to spread their rot through the whole of society.

The fish rots from the head, and our current head of government, the Prime Minister, has shown himself to be a morality-free zone. At every step of the partygate fiasco he has tried to lie or brazen his way out of it, or sacrifice more junior minions. In this affair, as always, he has organised a parade of ministers and ambitious but unprincipled backbenchers to lie for him - sometimes contradicting their lies the very next day. He lied about an oven-ready Brexit deal, lied as he signed it while promising to drop it later (we still don't know which promise, if any, he intends to keep). He told parliament at the time that the deal was in full compliance with the Good Friday Agreement, but now he expects us to believe that it's undermining it. He lied about how many new hospitals he was building, about how many doctors and nurses he would recruit. He lied about Brexit enabling the vaccine rollout (which began to build the country's immunity while we were bound by EU rules). He even lied to the Queen about why he was proroguing parliament. He was sacked from two previous jobs for lying, for goodness sake. And people have started to notice.

But it's not just the PM, and his own sense of entitlement to rule. It's not just one rule for them, and another rule for the rest of us.  It's not even the way he keeps changing the rules when he or his friends are accused of breaking them.

During the pandemic, his government oversaw a massively corrupt operation to channel taxpayers' money into the pockets of party donors and friends of government minsters and MPs, in exchange for pretending to deliver pretend PPE. Then they decided not to investigate the many frauds.

His Chancellor cut Universal Credit, then had the audacity to claim - when the cost of living started to bite - that he could only increase it once a year without updating his computers. He raised National Insurance on earned income, but left unearned income (like the capital gains his family lives off) and wealth (like his family has in eye-watering amounts) untouched. No conflict of interest there! He was eventually dragged, kicking and screaming, into a U-Turn on taxing the profiteering oil companies - he clearly felt it wasn't important enough to do without being forced into it.

Even while the Queen takes part in a video where a famous migrant has tea at the palace, and she shares a marmalade sandwhich with Paddington Bear, the secretary of state, Priti Patel, is about to breach our international moral and legal obligations to help genuine refugees, by sending them on a one-way trip to Rwanda (if they are found to be genuine refugees, they get to stay - in Rwanda). The civil service told her it's unworkable, illegal, and terrible value for money - but she insisted. To cap it all, she claims that there are no alternatives. After a few moments' thought, I came up with a few (and she has a whole Ministry, unless she's bullied them all into silence):

  • Recruit enough people to process asylum claims in a reasonable time - so we don't need to support them on welfare while they wait for months or years to hear if they can stay.
  • Don't waste the £30,000 or whatever it costs per refugee on routinely locking so many of them up in privatised prisons. Stop using prisons (whatever they pretend to call them) as a first resort in so many cases. At that cost, each of the detained refugees could have their own case handler, working full time - even with the recent Tory increase in National Insurance. The backlog would be cleared in no time.
  • Allow refugees to work or volunteer, instead of expecting them to live in substandard hovels on £30 a week.
  • If she's worried about refugees entering the country illegally, provide legal routes for them to claim asylum in the UK.
  • Stop pretending we're swamped by refugees, when the UK is one of the least generous countries by number of refugees per capita.
  • Stop pretending that most refugees are bogus.
  • Get a grip on the system that denies asylum to so many genuine claimants - only for them to be allowed to stay on appeal. Why not get it right first time? Get the assessors to, you know, look at the evidence that has been submitted.

And if you don't like something the government is doing, they have restricted your right to protest. A protest can be banned if it's too "annoying" or too "loud". Better hope you like everything else they have planned for us.

And don't depend on the courts to protect your rights, since they plan to cut back on that. They don't like the prospect of accountability - for them, at least.

The media won't be clamouring to tell us what they are doing wrong. Channel 4 tried that, and now Nadine Dorries, our hapless Culture Secretary, is about to sell them off to a multi-millionaire media baron or mulitnational. Clearly the new owner will understand the struggles that ordinary people are facing, and hold the rich and powerful to account.

And as for voting them out, they thought of that. They are gerrymandering the constituencies, based on the size of the electoral roll, rather than the normal practice of using the Census. This has the cunning benefit (if you're unprincipled and right wing) of under-counting poor people. And in case that doesn't work, they plan to remove the independence of the Electoral Comission.

So the problem is not just the PM - it's the ministers and back benchers who fave facilitated his dishonesty, corruption, and attacks on the weak for so long.

Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Out of the Protocol, Into... what?


 Ulster Unionist Party MLA Steve Aiken said: 

"Anyone who has a grasp of the provisions of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement will note that the principle of consent is fundamental and that at the very least the protocol does not have the consent of the Unionist and pro-Union population". (BBC News)

But how is consent necessary for the Northern Ireland Protocol, but not for Brexit itself, or even for the decision that the UK should leave the Single Market? 

Surely if consent is a requirement for the arrangements to avoid a hard border, it should be necessary for the decision that a border was required in the first place - the decision that the UK would not only leave the EU, but also leave the Single Market?  

Since the majority in NI voted not to leave the EU, how can anyone claim there is consent in Northern Ireland to additionally leave the Single Market (which during the referendum campaign we were told was a separate issue)? And if there is no consent for extra borders, how can the UUP argue that consent is somehow required for how those borders work?

And even if "consent" were remotely relevant - how do the Northern Ireland Protocol's opponents think NI/GB and NI/Ireland trade should work? It seems to me that if you're going to argue for change, you should at the very least explain what changes you think would better protect both free trade with Northern Ireland, and the EU's Single Market? To be fair, the UUP have some proposals for improving how trade works (and they had seemed more interested in making it work, than in abolishing the protocol). But the DUP and TUV don't appear to have any solution beyond a nice hard border between Northern Irelend and the South, and exporting GB's petrol shortages to NI.

I can understand (if not excuse) a failure to think Brexit through. But if Brexit has taught us nothing, it surely shows that we should think rather carefully before trying to swap the NI Protcol for some vague promises that things could be better - some day, somehow. 

I get that Unionist politicians want out of the NI Protocol frying pan. But where exactly do they think we'll end up if we follow them?

Thursday, April 02, 2020

Testing frontline NHS staff for Coronavirus

Yesterday Health Secretary Matt Hancock said that Hospitals should use spare laboratory space to test self-isolating NHS staff in England for coronavirus.

But if there was spare capacity, why weren't they being tested already?

And if there isn't spare capacity, is he just pretending to do something?

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

BREXIT Myths: Can't we just get Brexit done?

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: No. When we leave, we're straight into a decade or so of the real Brexit  negotiations. What we've negotiated so far is just the Irish Border, the divorce bill, and citizens' rights. Everything else (the hard bits) will be negotiated after we leave. We will be trying to replace all our current trade deals with the rest of the world - all the countries and trading blocs - at the same time. It is likely to take at least 5 years.

Tuesday, October 01, 2019

BREXIT myths: Do we need the threat of "no deal" to strengthen our negotiating position?

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: Right now we're only negotiating the arrangements for the actual trade talks. The real negotiations come after we leave. At that point, we are committed to reaching trade deals, and we'll have no way to walk away. The no deal "threat" won't help with that - we'll have to take what we can get.  If "walking away" now means leaving with no transition deal, then we'll need new agreements even more urgently than if we did have a transition deal. The only real way to "walk away" from the talks is to change our minds, and cancel Brexit...

Saturday, September 07, 2019

BREXIT Myths: Can't we just leave and get it over?

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: No, we can't. It's wrong on both counts. We can't "just leave", and even if we do, Brexit won't be over...

Thursday, August 02, 2018

No-deal Brexit by Accident?

Jeremy Hunt says we are heading for a no-deal Brexit by accident. He could be right...

If you can believe that...

Monday, May 22, 2017

Are you a Marxist?

Sometimes the question you are answering is not what you think. Especially in politics!

Wednesday, March 01, 2017

If we don't vote for a better future, who will do it for us? If not now, when? If not this way, how?

Ballot box
So here we vote again. Some people are cynical, saying "all politicians are the same - what's the point of voting?" I've heard people complain about their MLAs and then say, resignedly, "what can you do?"

There is only one thing to do, if you're not happy with the way your MLAs have been behaving (or your Ministers, or First Ministers, for that matter)...

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Labour - what are they for?

Labour, it seems, needs a new leader. The current one, apparently, is "not electable". But what difference will a new one make? What is the problem with the policies of the current leader that has driven rebellions and resignations in the parliamentary party since the day he was elected? Surely nobody can seriously suggest the day-one wave of resignations and subsequent chorus of complaints were about his leadership style...

Monday, July 11, 2016

On anger and what to do with it

When the Referendum result gradually became clear, I was very disappointed. Not by the result so much as by what it said about us as a country. But as I thought about how it had come about, I felt anger. This is what I wrote on FriendFace shortly afterwards...

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Our Disenfranchised Young - Let them be heard

The EU Referendum was an outrage. The young - who have most to lose - were denied a voice. And to be quite blunt, the old - who voted to leave in such numbers - will have to live with the consequences for the shortest time. This is wrong!


There must be another referendum, in which our 16 and 17 year old citizens who were denied a voice - denied a vote - can have their say!


Young lives matter - Let them speak!

Friday, June 24, 2016

DUPed again!

I am saddened by last night's referendum result. The vote to leave will cause economic damage, it is true. But more seriously, it threatens the stability of the UK and Europe. And the working people who seem to have voted overwhelmingly for exit are likely to pay the price - how will they not, under a government which has already made them pay the price for the Bankers’ Recession?

Britain (or possibly just England and Wales) can survive outside the EU. The skies will not fall, as the official remain campaign promised, but we will be the worse for it. If the decision had been taken after careful reflection, and an honest campaign, I would not have minded so much. But to be dragged out of an organisation that was founded to help ensure peace in Europe and to prevent a hyper capitalist race to the bottom in working conditions, by a campaign that was so thoroughly dishonest, racist, and misleading, is hard to stomach.

Remain’s project fear was defeated by Vote Leave’s fear and hatred. The country has taken a selfish and inward looking turn. Facts have become optional in our political discourse. Now we will wake up and begin to realise what we have, collectively, done.

The farmers have voted for an end to agricultural subsidies, like turkeys for Christmas. Vote Leave has given comfort to every racist in the country and to far right fascists throughout Europe. And at the end of it we may well concede "uncontrolled migration" from the EU as the price of access to the EU's single market.

And we may now see the end of the UK. That will be the final irony for the dreamers of Empire who begrudged the pooling of sovereignty that kept the peace, encouraged laggards to protect the environment, and ended predatory corporate practises like roaming charges. Little Englanders indeed.

So, Boris, when will the NHS be getting its extra £350 million?