Rishi Sunak has announced that he won’t be investigating whether Suella Braverman broke the Ministerial Code by trying to get civil servants to arrange a private speed awareness course after she was caught speeding.
She didn’t want to mix with the hoi polloi, it seems.
Here’s how the BBC reported the story, a discussion of it from Politics Live, and how Labour leader Keir Starmer referred to it during Prime Minister’s Questions.
ALL of these segments feature commentators getting festive at Braverman’s expense and are therefore well worth watching!
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Sunak: he wants to shut down some degree courses – and it seems this is already happening.
Less than a day after I suggested that Rishi Sunak wants to shut down some degree courses because he wants to stifle critical thinking, we see evidence that some courses are already being closed:
Universities at Wolverhampton and Roehampton are ‘suspending’ performing arts courses for 2022/3.
They claim it’s through lack of demand by students.
Critics blame the government’s devaluing of arts programmes and the move to push students toward science, technology and engineering courses.
I even detect criticism in the voice of The Stage editor, Alistair Smith, that parents are responsible for believing Tory spin that performing arts courses, and by association jobs in the sector, are worthless.
Blame the government Alistair, not parents and especially not parents of working-class kids.
The truth is if your name is Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddlestone, Eddie Redmayne, Helena Bonham-Carter, or the odious Laurence Fox you will always be able to follow your dream because you have money and well-off parents behind you.
Working-class kids, however talented, don’t have the luxury of privilege.
But the working class has produced some top-class actors; Pete Postlewaite, Julie Walters, Maxine Peake, and Daniel Mays to randomly name just a few.
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Rishi Sunak: is he trying to eliminate critical thinking so we won’t have the intellectual ability to understand when he and his fellow Tories are talking nonsense?
The BBC’s Any Questions and Any Answers discussed Rishi Sunak’s plan to stop people taking degree courses that don’t increase their “earning potential” – and may have revealed an ulterior motive behind it.
Sunak has said he would assess courses through drop-out rates, numbers in graduate jobs and salary thresholds – and current figures show that students with a degree in languages, linguistics, and classics have the least employable degrees.
But one caller to Any Answers made a hugely important point about the degrees Sunak wants to eradicate: they encourage critical thinking.
Vocational courses – that lead to careers in engineering, science and the like – are all about how to achieve particular results. To a large extent, students are spoon-fed the methodologies and don’t have to employ their critical faculties (although I will be happy to be proved wrong).
So here’s the question: why would a politician like Rishi Sunak want to stop members of the UK electorate from thinking critically?
Is it because they would then be able to examine the word salad he and his fellow Tories churn out every day and correctly identify it as nonsense gibberish?
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Betrayed again: it seems early inquiries into the Hillsborough tragedy were organised in order to deflect criticism of the police while having no legal weight at all.
It seems to me that somebody has been dancing around the law in a very clever way.
Three people accused of perverting the course of justice, with regard to the Hillsborough disaster that killed 96, have been acquitted.
The reason? The statements they prepared – which have been called into question – were provided to a public inquiry chaired by Lord Taylor in 1990 – but it was not a statutory inquiry, therefore not “a court of law”, so there was no “course of public justice” which could be perverted.
In that case, what was the point of having such an inquiry?
Nothing it found can be considered safe.
We have no information on whether the statements by retired Ch Supt Donald Denton, retired Det Ch Insp Alan Foster and former solicitor Peter Metcalf were slanted to minimise blame on South Yorkshire Police.
Without knowing that, we cannot know whether the conclusion of the inquiry – the inquiry, mark you – was accurate or not.
The question therefore arises: why was this not a statutory inquiry? Was a political decision made to run it as it was, in order to avoid possible legal repercussions in the future – like the accusation of perverting justice now?
Some might be hoping that this judgement will close the book on Hillsborough – but it has only given us more reason to demand justice for the 96.
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Ill-starred education secretary Gavin Williamson has suffered another setback by making a long-overdue and practically-empty speech about the effect of Covid-19 on universities – on the day Boris Johnson announced new courses for people who need new skills.
Williamson put himself forward as a prime candidate for such a course.
Here’s how one commentater described Johnson’s announcement earlier today:
Good news for the entire cabinet but especially Gavin Williamson as Boris Johnson announces new free courses for people with no skills. pic.twitter.com/xjmiyngflH
Here’s some of what he said – and some of what people are saying about it:
“We believe universities are very well prepared to handle any outbreaks that arise" – Education Sec Gavin Williamson.
How about not relying on belief. And actually provide clear, standardised guidelines and tangible resources to help students and staff. pic.twitter.com/hY0saE9ieL
Well done, Tory Sycophant Jerome Mayhew MP, for reading out the question he was given, to allow Gavin Williamson to repeat the lines Dominic Cummings taught him last night. 🙄
Do they REALLY think we're all as thick as the cabinet?🤦♂️
Today in Parliament I asked Education Secretary Gavin Williamson whether the government has put university staff and students at risk in order to dodge demands for fee and rent refunds.
My God. Is Gavin Williamson the best we can do out of a population of over 66million?
— Heather Rufus Countess of Midlandshire (@gmai_sutton) September 29, 2020
Of course he isn’t. He isn’t even supposed to be.
And we’re supposed to see that he isn’t.
Boris Johnson has surrounded himself with dimwits; it’s an old strategy.
He knows he’s nigh-on useless himself, so he’s making sure none of the candidates to replace him even match up to his low standard.
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Arbet macht frei: There was a big fuss over an image like this recently, so I’ll tell you what: I’ll stop using it when Job Centres stop persecuting the benefit claimants they process.
Parliament may be all about Brexit and an early election right now but out in the country the business of the Conservative government is the business of depriving ordinary people of their cash and their dignity.
This Site has been following the stories of genuine people at Ashton under Lyne Job Centre, as posted by Charlotte Hughes in her Poor Side of Life blog for years.
This week she brings us the following cautionary tale.
Bear it in mind when Boris Johnson is whining on the telly about how he’s the one having a hard time.
Jill is disabled but the DWP are treating her terribly. I’ve noticed her having to attend appointments at the Jobcentre every week. If that alone isn’t stressful enough she been forced to attend a DWP course elsewhere.
Jilll is really struggling with this. She feels that she’s being targeted both by the DWP and the course providers and she can’t cope.
Visibly distressed she told her adviser that she couldn’t cope with the demands made to her both both on the course and the DWP, she asked if she could stop attending the course.
Her advisor then told her that she would have to attend the course regardless and she started to cry. Her tears were ignored by the DWP but not by us.
I get both angry and upset when I see the DWP treat vulnerable people like this. It shouldn’t be happening but it is and to thousands of people every day up and down the country. Luckily I and my comrades were there to support and advise her.
Can you imagine how hard it is to cope with the constant stress and discrimination relentlessly metered onto you from the DWP? It makes people I’ll, many take their own life because they can’t cope.
In an ideal world this wouldn’t happen. We would all be treated with respect and dignity. I know that this is a dream and it most likely never happen but it doesn’t do any harm to want to achieve this.
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In an effort to respond to Tory whip Chris Heaton-Harris’s call for universities to provide details of courses and lectures that refer to Brexit, Professor Peter Coles of Cardiff University has provided a breakdown of his syllabus.
The document lists the main points of his course, with references to Brexit highlighted in red. There’s only one issue:
Peter Coles is an astrophysicist.
Ah, but, you see, his course is on the physics of the early universe – the EU.
Here’s his syllabus:
For those who can’t read images, the document is entitled: “PXT223 Physics of the Early Universe (EU) and Brexit”
Highlights include: “Basics of the Big Bang: Summary of basic cosmological theory as it relates to Brexit.
“Thermal History in the Big Bang: The cosmic microwave background. Radiation decoupling and recombination. The cosmic neutrino background. Cosmological Nucleosynthesis. Baryogenesis. Relic particles. Dark matter. Implications for Brexit.
“Cosmic Inflation: Cosmological models with scalar fields. Phase transitions in the early Universe. The horizon and flatness problems. Inflation. The ‘Graceful Brexit Problem’.
“The Cosmic Microwave Background: Physical origin of temperature and polarization fluctuations. CMB experiments, the establishment of the standard cosmological model by the metropolitan elite.
“Cosmic Structure: … The cosmic web, the large-scale structure of the Universe and Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.
“Unanswered Questions: Limitations of the Standard Model and why the fuck are we doing Brexit?”
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In an open tweet to Chris Heaton-Harris, fellow Tory MP Paul Scully claimed: “This is what a lecturer was handing out to my daughter who spends £9k pa for him to be teaching engineering, not politics.” Believable? Or a set-up?
Does anybody remember a story in July this year, claiming that teachers were indoctrinating students to support ‘Remain’ in the EU referendum?
That story has been revived by the Daily Heil, after Tory whip Chris Heaton-Harris wrote to universities, demanding details of their courses on the EU, with particular reference to Brexit.
This Writer understands that Mr Heaton-Harris might be in some difficulty after Jo Johnson suggested he wanted the information for a book he was writing. There was no mention of this in the letter, which was written on House of Commons paper. The suggestion is that, by pretending to be writing in his capacity as an MP, rather than as a private citizen researching a book, Mr Heaton-Harris was trying to gain a pecuniary advantage by deception (his book would earn money for him personally, you see. Writing in his capacity as an MP means the information would be used, at least nominally, in the interests of the national political debate). In layperson’s terms, that’s fraud.
But the Daily Mail has seized on the letter – and the reaction against it (one university lecturer told Mr Heaton-Harris that he can have access to the materials he requested by joining the course and paying £9,000, just like everybody else) – to claim that universities are a hotbed of Leftie ‘Remain’ support.
Fascinating how this ‘innocent’ letter from Heaton-Harris has overnight turned into a not so innocent Daily Mail headline. Dirty politics. pic.twitter.com/tMmEFdkSgi
The extent of anti-Brexit bias at some of Britain’s best known universities was laid bare last night amid a furious row.
A Tory MP was castigated this week and accused of ‘McCarthyism’ for asking universities what they are teaching about the UK’s departure from the EU.
But yesterday the Daily Mail uncovered a string of examples of senior figures at universities explicitly speaking out in favour of Remain.
Before the vote, a raft of senior academics spoke publicly to urge their students to back staying in the EU.
Of course, it’s nonsense. As the Tory-run DWP would say, it is anecdotal evidence. If considered as a survey, there is no balance in the respondents. It is simply the opinions of Daily Mail readers – and of the right-wing rag’s reporters and editors.
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The Tory whip and staunch Brexiteer took it upon himself to write a threatening letter to universities, demanding that they provide him with details of courses teaching European affairs and the names of the lecturers teaching them.
The best response is the one sent to Mr Heaton-Harris by Dr Ben Whitham, Lecturer in International Relations at Leicester’s De Montfort University. In fact, considering what the Tories have done to students, it’s perfect:
For those who can’t read images, it says: “Of course you can access my recorded lectures @chhcalling. Just enrol and pay the £9,000 per year your party deems fair, like everyone else.”
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