Category Archives: Conservative Party

You’re £11,000 worse-off than in 2008 due to wage stagnation – but the billionaires aren’t!

Cash money: if you haven’t seen even this much in a while, it’s because – thanks to Tory policies – billionaires have vacuumed it all up.

Here’s a painful piece of information I found on the social media:

I did a bit of digging (not very much!) and it turns out that Mr Burgon isn’t wrong:

Workers are £11,000 worse off per year due to 15 years of wage stagnation, according to the Resolution Foundation.

In new figures shared with BBC Panorama, the think tank calculated that, had wages continued to grow at the pace seen before the 2008 financial crash, the average worker would make £11,000 more per year than they do now, taking rising prices into account.

Torsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, told the BBC the wage stagnation of the past 15 years is “almost completely unprecedented”.

Unprecedented it may be, but you can bet it was entirely planned by the Tories who slithered into government in 2010.

“This is definitely not what normal looks like. This is what failure looks like.”

Not as far as those Tories were concerned. For them, it was success. They funnelled the cash away from the majority of UK citizens, away from the Treasury, and into the hands and offshore bank accounts of the tiniest minority of the super-rich.

As for the billionaires… here‘s Statista:

The UK’s top ten richest people are wealthier than the group has ever been, according to The Sunday Times, who recently released their annual Rich List. Their data finds that the cumulative wealth of the top ten billionaires in the UK has grown from £47.77 billion in 2009 to £182 billion in 2022 – an increase of 281 percent.

As this chart shows, following the 2008 crash, the UK’s billionaires have seen a steady, and fairly steep, incline in their wealth. The upward trend continued despite the pandemic, which saw the UK’s economy shrink by 20.4 percent in the second quarter of 2020, as most industries suffered, and 30.5 million people in Europe were expected to be pushed into poverty. This is a stark contrast to the UK’s 250 ultra wealthy, who saw their collective wealth surge to a record high of £653 billion in 2022.

And Jeremy Hunt’s Budget predicted slower growth than we expected after the disastrous Liz Truss was ousted from Downing Street last year.

And the Tories are starting to bounce back in the opinion polls.

Who are the people going back to them? Are they masochists?

Source: Workers £11,000 worse off a year due to stagnant wages – Resolution Foundation


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Is this the new wheeze for friends of the Tories: subsidies for asylum-seeker hotels?

Channel migrants: it seems the Tories have found a way to help their friends make a profit from the presence of these vulnerable people.

It’s not so long since we discovered the Tory government was giving contracts to provide Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to their friends via an illegal ‘VIP lane’ – now it turns out they are paying their buddies to run hotels housing asylum-seekers.

Apparently the BBC has been told the government is using 395 hotels to accommodate more than 51,000 people, at a cost of £6 million per day.

Hotel owners are being approached to hand over their properties to outsourced companies, which run the businesses on behalf of the Home Office.

The BBC’s report names the outsourced companies as Serco, Mears Group and Calder Conferences, all of which are enjoying increased profits as a result.

Here’s a bit of info on Serco:

But what about this snippet from the social media?

Here’s more evidence:

Sadly, that’s only a little to go on.

But it should be enough to support a demand for the facts from the Tories.

Who is running the hotels that are benefiting from this public money? Are they Conservatives or supporters of Conservatives? Who is responsible for selecting them?

Has someone set up another ‘VIP lane’ for applications?


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Michael Gove implicated in Michelle Mone PPE scandal

Michael Gove: this minister (who once got caught making a joke about rape on the radio, by the way) was in charge of handing out procurement contracts for PPE. At the time, This Site pointed out that they seemed to be going to his friends.

What does Michael Gove know about the contract under which Michelle Mone’s company won a PPE contract via the illegal VIP lane?

A leaked email has shown that he was involved…

… but look what happened when he was challenged about it!

Apparently this will be examined by the independent inquiry into Covid-19 this spring, and it has been suggested that Gove was trying hard not to say anything that may be used in evidence.

This could be highly informative!


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Braverman in Rwanda for propaganda junket; praises decor of homes for UK refugees

Suella Braverman arrives in Rwanda: what a pity she isn’t being forced to stay there.

Yes, here we are – and there she was: Suella Braverman has indeed been on a propaganda-fuelled junket to Rwanda, where homes are being built for the couple of hundred “migrants” (also known as asylum-seekers or refugees) into the UK that the African country has agreed to accommodate.

Here’s a video clip of her arrival:

The clip makes the very good point that the Tory government’s attempts to send people over to Rwanda – which has a very poor human rights record – are mired in legal challenges.

Here’s Peter Stefanovic to expand on that:

And he’s right about the headline, which is the source of This Site’s assertion that her trip was for propaganda purposes:

Does anybody really think Braverman wanted the name of the Rwanda homes interior designer?

Neither do I. If she was given it, I expect her to have binned it – which is exactly what she is planning to do to any asylum-seekers and refugees who are unlucky enough to be sent there.


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Reported funding cut could set back social care ‘for years to come’

Care: the head of NHS England once said he wanted change but now it seems clear it will be for the worse.

The Tory government promised to revitalise social care in the UK – but seems set to renege on that vow.

Is this the next big Tory scandal?

Ministers are poised to cut £250m from investment in the social care workforce in England, it has been reported, in a move that providers say could set back care “for years to come”.

With more than 165,000 care worker jobs vacant, and low pay driving staff to quit for better wages in retail and hospitality, care providers and councils have been clamouring for investment in recruitment and retention. Inadequate staffing levels are frequently noted as a cause of neglect and poor care by the Care Quality Commission.

However, according to the Health Service Journal (subscription), the government is poised to water down a promise it made in the December 2021 social care white paper to dedicate £500m to “investment in knowledge, skills, health and wellbeing, and recruitment policies [that] will improve social care as a long-term career choice”. This amount could be cut to £250m.

Source: Government ‘to cut £250m from social care workforce funding’ in England | Care workers | The Guardian

Dominic Raab fails to convince he’s not a bully in TV interview

Dominic Raab: look at those eyes, those hands, the set of his face. Could you believe a man like that could be a bully?

This is odd: Dominic Raab appeared on a TV show where he was asked about the bullying allegations against him – but ducked the questions by saying it was improper to discuss them while an inquiry was going on.

Even when talking more broadly about the issue, he was unconvincing.

Here’s Maximilien Robespierre’s appraisal of it:

The points are good; he never even said bullying is unacceptable.

Perhaps, having been appointed on the basis of loyalty to the leader rather than merit, he simply didn’t think he owed it to anybody working for him to have a respectful relationship with them?


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Tory crumbles under cross examination over Budget

John Glen, Tory Chief Secretary to the Treasury, got badly mauled when he tried to dissemble about the Budget in an interview with Victoria Derbyshire on the BBC’s Newsnight.

He couldn’t explain why it was a “Budget for growth” when medium-term growth forecasts have been downgraded.

And on the effects of Brexit, challenged to admit that it has made the UK poorer, he could not provide an alternative explanation for what has happened since the country left the European Union.

He crumbled under scrutiny.

Watch this car crash interview and understand why Tory leadership has taken the UK nowhere.


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Firm connected to Rishi Sunak’s wife is still open in Russia and STILL getting government contracts

Dodgy dealings? Rishi Sunak’s government has given a large commercial contract to Infosys, a firm part-owned by his wife Akshata Murty, even though it had failed to stop operating in Russia. Why?

Remember Infosys?

This is the technology company in which Rishi Sunak’s wife owns shares worth an alleged £400 million, and which was found to be operating in Russia after the UK had sanctioned firms that operate in, and profit from, connections with that country after it invaded Ukraine.

Infosys claimed in April last year that it was closing its office in Russia – providing a lucky escape for the then-Chancellor, who had refused to take any action about the company’s continued commercial interest in a country that the UK should have been shunning.

Now we learn the following:

So, after Sunak became prime minister the UK government gave a large contract to the company his wife partly-owns, even though it had not left Russia as it had promised.

Should we not have a statement from Sunak on how this has happened and what he proposes to do about it?


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Boris Johnson will give TELEVISED evidence to Partygate probe next week. Buy popcorn!

Boris Johnson: his evidence to the Partygate inquiry might be quite short – after all, his inquisitors really have only to show him this image of himself at a party he said he never attended and ask him if he was there.

This is one to put in your diary:

Boris Johnson will give public evidence about whether he misled MPs over Partygate on [Wednesday] March 22, the Privileges Committee has confirmed.

The former prime minister will be questioned by the cross-party committee from 14:00 GMT in a televised session.

In an initial report published earlier this month it said Mr Johnson may have misled Parliament multiple times.

But Mr Johnson has rejected this and said he believes the process will “vindicate” him.

I’m looking forward to this one, very much!

In fact, I might have a ‘Partygate party’ and invite friends to watch it with me. Wanna come along?


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‘House of Commons Hooligan’ Gullis falsely accuses Gary Lineker. Will he be sued (please)?

Braying beardie: this is still the only image I have of Jonathan Gullis (the maskless one shouting over Boris Johnson’s shoulder).

The ‘House of Commons Hooligan’ has struck again – but this time he may have made a fatal mistake.

This is because Jonathan Gullis has has accused BBC sports presenter Gary Lineker of calling so-called Red Wall voters Nazis and bigots – alongside a slew of other unsupported accusations…

… outside of Parliament.

This means he did not have Parliamentary privilege when he said those words, and this means that Mr Lineker could sue him for libel.

Mr Lineker has seen the offending clip and, from the tweet directly below, it seems he is distinctly unamused:

This Writer can only urge Gary Lineker to initiate court action at once. It won’t go all the way because the offence seems very clear-cut, and the experience of having to apologise and make reparation might even reform the Tory party’s loudest-mouthed thug.

For anyone who doesn’t think the above is bad enough behaviour, let’s have a few reminders:

In January 2022 we all saw him screaming his support for Boris Johnson after the Tory soon-to-be-ex-prime minister made a fat-shaming joke at the expense of then-SNP Parliamentary leader Ian Blackford, in response to an accusation about the alleged birthday party at Downing Street: “I do not know who has been eating more cake.”

Here’s a video clip:

Disgusting, isn’t it?

And it isn’t Mr Gullis’s only such intervention. People have been looking him up.

Here are some of the ugly details:

https://twitter.com/MarinaPurkiss/status/1486469347438743554

After a mercifully-brief period as an education minister in Liz Truss’s less-than-two-month ministry, in December 2022, he made another of his famously misguided attacks – this time at bishops in the House of Lords.

His outburst came after all the Anglican bishops in the Upper House said the Tory government’s Rwanda deportation policy, which was endorsed as “lawful” by the High Court earlier this week, should “shame us as a nation”.

They signed a letter saying, “The shame is our own, because our Christian heritage should inspire us to treat asylum-seekers with compassion, fairness and justice, as we have for centuries.”

In fairness, even the Home Office seems to have accepted that many of those who arrive in the UK by illegal routes still have a claim for asylum; the majority of them are accepted as genuine refugees and are permitted to remain in the UK.

The problem lies in the fact that they have to take illegal routes – making them prey for the Tory government’s deportation policy – because there are no legal routes; the Tories have closed them all off in order to be able to pursue this inhumane mistreatment of people who are already victims.

Gullis’s response may be found here:

So: first he flung some whataboutery into the ether, claiming that the Church should be dealing with abuse claims against its own clergy. How does he know that it isn’t? And isn’t that more a problem for the Catholic clergy?

Then he said: “Too many people are using the pulpit to preach from.” Does he not know that preaching is exactly what the pulpit is for?

This man used to be a teacher but gave up when he was elected into Parliament. He said pupils at the school where he had been working were “probably happy to see me go” – perhaps because they were already better-educated than he was?

He also said the bishops were unelected. Correct – but everybody has an understanding of what constitutes fairness and justice, and nobody needs to be elected to put forward their opinion of what that is.

Furthermore, these are people who sit as experts on law and political matters in the Upper House of Parliament, and their words have weight whether Gullis likes it or not.

And in January this year, Gullis apparently shouted, “Well, they shouldn’t have come here illegally!” in response to a Prime Minister’s Question by labour MP Tulip Siddiq, drawing attention to the fact that, despite the UK being considered a safe haven for vulnerable children, there are 200 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children missing from UK hotels.

That’s Compassionate Conservatism for you: let children go missing – kidnapped? Made into slaves for criminal gangs, for purposes that one flinches from considering? – because they should have stayed at home, possibly to be exploited in similar ways by their own countryfolk?

<strong>One can only agree with Peter Kyle: The Conservatives have found a new low.</strong>

Here’s the video clip:

And here’s Mr Kyle’s tweet:

Are these not great reasons for someone who has the ability to punish Gullis, actually to do so?


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