— Victoria Derbyshire (@vicderbyshire) March 1, 2021
Four those who can’t read images well, the question is: “Do you agree or disagree that you would be happy to have a physical relationship with a disabled person?”
The implication is that people with disabilities are sub-human and should not enjoy the same relationships as the rest of us – and that shows despicable prejudice by the Tory government.
As I say, my own partner has a disability so I know this subject very well.
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I bet certain commentators will be doing their best to muddy this issue so let’s make it clear:
There are moves to increase Corporation Tax, forcing companies to pay more when they could be investing that money in (for example) employment of people who desperately need a regular paycheque. This is a bad idea.
There are also moves to levy a windfall tax on firms and individuals who have profited from the Covid-19 pandemic – such as Amazon and all those Tory cronies who won huge Covid-related contracts. This is a good idea and is supported by 70 per cent of the population, according to a Survation poll.
Keir Starmer and his Zombie Labour party oppose any increase in taxation for businesses.
Support or oppose a windfall tax on the pandemic profits of large companies such as Amazon?
There will be voters who are shocked that anybody claiming to be a Labour Party representative should plead against taxing corporations, and while there are good reasons for leaving Corporation Tax low at the moment, although it is likely that firms will need further incentives to keep them on the straight and narrow, there is no reason at all to back away from a windfall tax.
This decision is spitting in the faces of the voters – at a time when Starmer desperately needs to get them on-side.
Labour is falling increasingly further behind, at a time when – we were told – the party should be at least 20 points ahead of anybody else, having dumped Jeremy Corbyn.
Is it time his supporters’ club admitted that this wasn’t true and Starmer is a non-starter?
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Justice: before anyone comments, I know that UK courts don’t use the gavel. This is for illustrative purposes – although it sesems people believe the courts now exist to give ordinary people a hammering.
Voters in a Vox Political poll have overwhelmingly condemned a Supreme Court decision to deny Shamima Begum entry to the UK to defend her citizenship, quoting national security concerns.
At the time of writing, 64 per cent of voters (583 votes) said the Supreme Court has not treated Ms Begum fairly. Just 36 per cent (329 votes) supported the decision.
The issue has provoked huge debate on the social media, with more than 440 comments on This Site’s Facebook page alone.
Many commenters on Facebook have suggested that, as she was 15 when she left the UK to join the so-called IS caliphate, Ms Begum was not old enough to be considered responsible (although others have pointed out that environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg was the same age when she started campaigning publicly, and nobody says the same about her).
Many commenters have suggested that Ms Begum was “groomed” by adult male supporters of IS – manipulated into travelling to the Middle East to become a child bride and bear children for a terrorist – and that this should be discussed in court, in order to root out any terrorist supporters who remain here in the UK.
Others have stated that the authorities let her down by allowing her to leave the UK unaccompanied by an adult.
It had been argued that Ms Begum’s right to a fair hearing, in her bid to have her revoked UK citizenship restored, would be harmed if she was forced to conduct her case from the north Syria camp where she is currently living.
But the Supreme Court said this right does not overrule the government’s obligation to national security. Its judges accepted that she is a threat to national security and that she should not be allowed back into the UK.
The result of the Vox Political vote – which is admittedly unscientific – suggests a groundswell of distrust in the courts by the people of the UK.
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If you have a disability, did you know about this? It has been running since January 15.
Has there been a whisper about it in the national, or even local media?
If so, This Writer hasn’t seen it.
I was alerted to it by a contact, to whom I think we should all be grateful.
Let’s try to get the following shared with as many people as possible – obviously anybody with a disability needs to see it and take part.
Because it seems people with disabilities are the last ones the Tories want to hear from.
The Disability Unit at the Cabinet Office is developing a National Strategy for Disabled People. Publication is planned for Spring 2021.
To help the government with understanding the barriers that disabled people face and what it may need to focus upon to improve the lives of disabled people, we need to hear about your views and know more about your experiences.
This survey will ask about your life experiences either as a disabled person, a carer or parent or as someone who has an interest in disability issues.
Many people have had big changes in their lives as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and there will be an opportunity at the end of the survey to state if your life has changed notably due to COVID-19, and in what ways. However, please answer other questions thinking about yourself, your own experiences and your current situation.
The survey will be open until 23 April 2021. Responses received before 13 February 2021 will inform the development of the National Strategy, while those received after this date used to inform its delivery.
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No answers: Starmer’s Labour is level in the polls because of Tory incompetence, not because of anything he has done. His own decisions could force his ejection from the party leadership within a few short months.
Apparently The Guardian reckons Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has gained 26 points in the opinion polls to draw level with the Conservatives on 40 each. This is nonsense. In fact, I think it’s a flat-out lie.
My reasoning is obvious: Labour has not fallen to 14 points on the opinion polls this year. When Starmer took over as leader, I am reliably informed the party stood on 32 points.
So, if The Guardian was right, Labour should now be 18 points ahead. And that’s still not the 20 points ahead that Labour right-wing cuckoos said Jeremy Corbyn should have been, when he was Labour leader!
Who wrote that nonsense for the Graun and how do they justify their paycheques?
And consider this: while Labour as a party is said to be level with the Tories in this outlier poll by Opinium…
… Starmer himself has fallen behind Johnson. It is a matter of days since Starmer’s adherents were claiming his critics should shut up because a poll had put Starmer above Johnson as preferred PM while Labour was several points behind the Tories.
They want to have it both ways, and it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Hilarious overreaction from centrists to *one* poll showing Lab and Cons level.
Some perspective:
When Lab and Cons were level in 2019, centrists said Lab should be 20pts ahead.
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush (@WarmongerHodges) August 30, 2020
Labour’s current – only average – showing is due to the incompetence and greed of Boris Johnson and his Tory cronies, who are clearly to be seen cashing in on the Covid-19 crisis when they should be doing everything they can to help the citizens of the UK.
And it’s not going to last – because Starmer’s decisions are catching up with him.
So we see in Labour Heartlands that genuine left-winger and film director Ken Loach wants to know Starmer’s involvement in the Julian Assange case:
As DPP, Sir Keir Starmer tempered his supposed love of liberty by fast-tracking the extradition of Julian Assange (a process now making its way through the courts). He flouted legal precedents by advising Swedish lawyers not to question Assange in Britain: a decision that prolonged the latter’s legal purgatory, denied closure to his accusers in Sweden, and sealed his fate before a US show trial. Leaked emails from August 2012 show that, when the Swedish legal team expressed hesitancy about keeping Assange’s case open, Sir Keir’s office replied: ‘Don’t you dare get cold feet’.
Documents released under Freedom of Information requests to Italian magazine La Repubblica confirm the very close relationship between the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and Sweden in the Julian Assange case. The files contain hundreds of mostly redacted emails sent over a five-year period. But according to one authoritative source, the number of CPS documents relating to the case may be much greater than has so far been disclosed.
In May 2017, the Swedish authorities announced they had ceased all remaining investigations into alleged sexual assault by WikiLeaks founder Assange. But the Metropolitan Police arrest warrant for skipping bail would remain in force. Subsequently, Assange’s legal team sought a ruling that the Met warrant should be rescinded, but the court ruled otherwise.
This case is one of the great political cases of the century, as John McDonnell recently said. It’s a defining case for the left, and Sir Keir Starmer has taken the most conservative position imaginable.
This is what Labour Party members can expect from a Starmer leadership: unquestioning loyalty to the establishment on both sides of the Atlantic.
I really hope that Assange is released from Prison and holds #StarmerOut to accont, he is no socialist, he has always been just a puppet working for others who pull his strings he is an insult to the UK.. no asset to anything, as someone said nothing more #StarmerTaylorsDummyhttps://t.co/Flg2jfPVf7
— Will Never Vote Labour Again **All Lives Matter** (@Isobel_waby) August 30, 2020
And then we have the matter of the Labour Payout – the £600,000 that Starmer handed over to a group of right-wing factionalists who are no longer working for Labour but who made extravagant claims about anti-Semitism and Jeremy Corbyn, while apparently doing all they could to sabotage the party’s chances at election (according to a now-infamous leaked Labour report).
One part of those allegations involved the diversion of 2017 election funds away from target seats to safe seats in a move that was hidden from Corbyn. Former elections director Patrick Heneghan was said to be responsible for this and he has now published his attempts at self-justification in response to the inquiry into that leaked report.
His response has been picked apart in a 14-tweet thread by Steve Howell, who also worked on Labour’s General Election Campaign Committee (GECC). I make no apology for including those tweets here, so we all have access to them:
2/14 I was a member of the official campaign committee (GECC).
As elections director, Heneghan was accountable to us.
But it says a lot that his blog (quoted as I go along) refers to the GECC as 'Corbyn's team' and talks about us 'asking' for things and him 'agreeing' to them. pic.twitter.com/qyVFWf0n1E
4/14 Heneghan has now confirmed that he and Gen Sec Iain McNicol secretly set up a rogue operation at Ergon House to continue to support these 14 safe seats (which had already had fulsome funding for five weeks).
6/14 In attempting to take credit for holding seats like Barrow and Dudley North, Heneghan rather stupidly draws attention to the hole in his argument: The GECC can hardly be accused of political bias when it wasn't querying and continued to support Ian Austin and John Woodcock!
8/14 Heneghan was still arguing for a defensive strategy even as Matt Singh was writing in the FT (May 16) of a Corbyn surge.
It's a measure of his judgement that the Ergon House operation was apparently set up three days after that to support strongholds with huge majorities. pic.twitter.com/lWjxgcThNv
10/14 Would the money diverted into this rogue operation have made a difference? In a piece for @LabourOutlook I explain how the £135k we know about could have been used on a GOTV mailer to 15,000 voters in 35 more marginals. This is my conclusion. Link to full piece at the end. pic.twitter.com/CmTFQt745t
12/14 Heneghan throws in an old story about my conference call with the candidates. My first general election experience was in 1966 (I was 12), and I've never known one where a Labour leader was universally loved. I may be wrong but IMO canvassers should look for common ground. pic.twitter.com/NBzEeEzcir
(Oh yeah, let’s have the rest of that previous thread as well:)
3/5 It's absurd to use 2019 results to justify ultra vires spending on the 13 seats taken off the list in 2017 (having had 5 weeks' funding).
In 2017, the polls had narrowed. We needed the money to WIN seats. None of the 13 was at risk, and that was no one but JC's call to make. pic.twitter.com/EfC3Bh1D9q
It is clear that Heneghan did siphon off Labour campaign money that could have been used to win the seats needed to form a government in 2017 – without the knowledge of the party leader – and it is entirely possible that this action prevented Labour from winning that year’s election.
So why did Starmer give a huge amount of money to the people who threatened to take Labour to court over it? It seems clear they did not have a case.
Put these matters together – along with any others that you care to mention – and one thing seems clear:
Keir Starmer’s position as Labour leader is on borrowed time. He may not last long after the Forde report is published.
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Keir the clueless: he genuinely doesn’t know what he is doing wrong.
It has all gone horribly wrong for the Labour centrists and their figurehead Keir Starmer.
His plan to fool left-wing, traditional Labour supporters into electing him as leader and then push them out of the party succeeded a treat.
The problem is, the rest of his strategy – to ditch the left-wing policies he used to woo those voters as no longer needed, replace them with centrist (read right-wing/sub-Tory) policies and win support from Lib Dem/Tory voters – has failed utterly.
In what should be his honeymoon period, Starmer’s new New Labour has slumped in the latest Survation poll (Survation is currently the most reliable opinion pollster) to a level almost as low as that which his followers are believed to have engineered for Jeremy Corbyn in last year’s general election.
But that outcome was based on lies and this is due to Starmer’s actual behaviour.
It will fall lower, but the ridicule from critics on the left is already bad enough:
Crude though it may be, Cornish Damo has a point, I think.
Neither Starmer nor his “centrist” supporters will accept it for a while – but there’s plenty of time until the next general election.
Once he’s had a few local defeats, I reckon the rank-and-file members will be clamouring for a return to Corbyn-style policies…
And the removal of “centrism” from Labour altogether. We’ve heard the “broad church” arguments; the right-wingers need to remember that, as a rule, people don’t start fights with fellow members of the same church.
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Spend, spend, spend: but Boris Johnson is ensuring that your money only pays his friend’s firms to provide polling that supports his activities, it seems.
It is good that someone is asking why Boris Johnson is spending £2 million this year on opinion polling – even if it is only Parliament’s toothless public accounts committee.
Critics have claimed the Tory – and his government – has been trying to understand public opinion in order to follow it, in order to gain our approval by doing so.
But isn’t it more likely that he is trying to use these polls to tell us what to think, rather than for us to tell him what to do?
A Cabinet Office spokesperson said almost as much in an attempt to justify the spend: “During this unprecedented pandemic it has been vital that people follow public health messages to save lives… This work has helped us to deliver communications campaigns to support the UK’s response.”
It’s about what the Tories communicate to us, you see – not what we tell them.
Oh, and it’s also about funnelling even more public money into the hands of the Tories’ friends, such as the research company linked to Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings that received a plum contract that was never offered on open tender (as would normally have been the case).
The excuse – that Downing Street used legally-sound emergency regulations that permit urgent Covid-related services to be quickly commissioned – was paper-thin at the start.
It disintegrated altogether when it was revealed that some of the work for which the euphemistically-titled People First received the £750,000 contract related to Brexit, not the virus.
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Keir Starmer: if Tories and Liberal Democrats like him, he’ll be electoral poison for Labour.
How humiliating for new New Labour leader Keir Starmer.
A survey by Tory-run pollsters YouGov has given him an approval rating of +23 – higher than that of Boris Johnson – partly courtesy of people who vote Conservative or Liberal Democrat and have a vested interest in duff Labour leadership.
It is no reason for anybody associated with Labour to feel proud – and certainly doesn’t bode well for the party’s election chances.
New Labour leader Keir Starmer has been given a boost thanks to YouGov polling today that shows he has a net approval rating of +23, which is higher than that of Boris Johnson.
Asked whether they thought Keir Starmer was doing well or badly as leader of the Labour Party, overall 40% said “very well” or “fairly well” and 17% said “very badly” or “fairly badly”.
More Conservative voters said he was doing well than badly, at 34% and 25% respectively. Lib Dem voters were very positive about Starmer, with a higher percentage saying well (63%) compared to Labour voters (54%).
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How interesting that this came out the day before Boris Johnson traipsed back to work.
Yes, the latest poll says the public has lost faith in the way the Tory government has handled the coronavirus response in the UK.
The Opinium poll for The Observer showed:
57 per cent of people believe the government has handled the key issue of coronavirus testing poorly; only 15 per cent thought it had been handled well.
71 per cent think the level of testing was not enough – while only seven per cent thought it was adequate.
63 per cent say they government did not act fast enough to stop the spread of coronavirus; only 30 per cent thought it acted in good time.
In comparison with other countries, only the United States was believed to have made a much worse response to the pandemic. The UK was seen to be roughly on a par with Italy, Spain and France.
Notably, China was perceived as making a better response than the UK, with Australia better than China and South Korea better than Australia. Germany was considered the furthest ahead of the UK – but New Zealand wasn’t included in the results This Writer has seen.
The Observer‘s report says nothing about the UK’s record on PPE.
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