Get the apologies out: Embarrassment for Tories after confidential files are released

Last Updated: December 30, 2015By

Letwin: Apology for refusing assistance to black unemployed youths after 1985 riots is 30 years too late.

Embarrassing facts about Conservative Party bigwigs should be causing red faces in the party of the blue-bloods.

Oliver Letwin and David Willetts have been revealed to have advised the Thatcher government to carry out policies that harmed black unemployed young people in Britain’s inner cities and “pampered” Scots.

Margaret Thatcher is shown to have dragged her heels over the then-Conservative government’s reaction to AIDS in the mid-1980s, in the belief that concerns about “bad taste” should “limit wider distribution of precise explanations of which sexual practices were most likely to lead to HIV infection”.

It seems likely to This Writer that the people of Scotland, at least, may soon be howling for Mr Willetts’ blood after the revelation that he told Margaret Thatcher to starve Scotland of public funding.

David Cameron’s chief policy adviser has apologised after he helped to ward off cabinet pleas for assistance for black unemployed youth following the 1985 inner-city riots with the argument that any help would only end up in the “disco and drug trade”.

Oliver Letwin, then a young adviser in Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street policy unit, played a decisive role along with her inner cities adviser, Hartley Booth, in rejecting demands from three cabinet members that assistance schemes be introduced in the aftermath of the Tottenham and Handsworth riots in 1985. On Tuesday night he said he apologised “unreservedly” for any offence caused by his comments.

Source: Oliver Letwin blocked help for black youth after 1985 riots | Politics | The Guardian

David Willetts (right): It’s all such a laugh for him

A former minister in David Cameron’s coalition government argued “pampered Scots” should face deep cuts in public spending when he advised Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

David Willetts, who served as universities minister until the general election in May, had told the then prime minister that Scotland was the “only juicy target” that had escaped her spending axe.

“Ultimately, the question is a political one. The position of the Conservative party in Scotland is so bad that it might not deteriorate any further. And the envious north of England might even welcome an attack on the pampered Scots over the border,” [Willetts told Thatcher in a secret paper dated 8 January 1986].

Source: ‘Pampered Scots’ should face deep cuts, David Willetts told Thatcher | UK news | The Guardian

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6 Comments

  1. amnesiaclinic December 30, 2015 at 10:53 am - Reply

    A good start to the new year!!
    More to come to bring this lot down.
    Flooding in more ways than one.
    Sewage may be a better term!!
    Thanks for all you do, Mike and a very happy new year to you and Mrs Mike.
    x

  2. Dez December 30, 2015 at 11:24 am - Reply

    Well I guess it is good to know/confirms what most people think actually goes on in Cons minds and after all this time they still do not understand how the other half lives and breathes…..you hoorays can keep woofing your champers with immunity while the real world mops up the mess you have left in the north with your thoughtless flood penny pinching..

  3. Dez December 30, 2015 at 11:34 am - Reply

    Always good to know what really goes on in the Cons minds as it seems not much has changed with regard to their disrespect to the majority general population of this country.

  4. Jean Casale December 30, 2015 at 11:44 am - Reply

    I am sick to death of these constant ‘apologies’ – shamologies. MSM, MPs, and others say whatever they like in their full page propaganda fuelled utterances. When, and if, there is a public furore, they issue an ‘apology’, expecting that to end the matter. Forgetting that the harm caused by their vile irrational oleaginous words have vilified innocent people; many of whom will never see the shamology, which is usually hidden amongst inconsequential back pages, in the smallest print possible.

  5. NMac December 30, 2015 at 11:57 am - Reply

    Isn’t Letwin the clown who disposed of his constituents’ private correspondence to him as their MP in a public park litter bin?

    I believe this thoroughly unpleasant character was also involved in a very strange incident when, in the early hours of one morning, he let two alleged strange men into his London house allegedly to use the toilet. He states that they then stole items from his house, including I believe, credit cards, and dressed in his pyjamas and dressing gown Letwin then chased them down the street. Well, that was the story he gave, which didn’t sound very credible at the time. The truth, I am told, was far more sordid.

    The man is yet another nasty, corrupt and thoroughly dishonest Tory cretin.

  6. roybeiley December 30, 2015 at 4:25 pm - Reply

    Isnt Willetts the “MAN WITH TWO BRAINS”? So he can he twice as Nasty as anyone with only one brain. Reminds me of the song “Letwin has only got one brain, Willetts had two but very small. Osborne is very similar but Cameron has no brain at all”

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