Rishi Sunak: cost-of-living support schemes will end with March.
This is another ‘public service announcement’ (as one reader described them) for those of you who need to know.
Some ‘cost of living’ support schemes announced by the Tory government last May are set to close at the end of March. They are:
The Warm Home Discount is a one-off discount of £150 off electricity bills. It was automatically awarded to people in England and Wales on a low income with high energy costs, or who received the Guarantee Credit element of pension credit. In Scotland, the payment was made to the same groups – but those on a low income had to meet their energy supplier’s criteria for the scheme. It began in October 2022 and the scheme ends at the end of March, 2023.
The Cold Weather Payment is essentially a £25 benefit. It’s made for every seven consecutive days when the average temperature in your area is recorded or forecast to be 0°C or below. It ends on March 31 – but is expected to return next winter.
The Energy Bills Support Scheme (EBSS) gave around 29 million households £400 off their energy bills – that’s every home with a domestic electricity connection. From October 2022, a discount of £66 was applied to monthly energy bills, rising to £67 a month from December through to March 2023 – when the scheme ends.
The deadline to make a claim for this year’s (winter 2022-23) Winter Fuel Payment is March 31. It’s paid to people born before 26 September 1956, and the scheme will return in winter 2023. Most people on certain benefits (such as the state pension) will have already received the payment, which is up to £600.
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Uncannily accurate: The Conservative government’s genuine policy towards PIP claimants may as well have been as it appears in this cartoon from 2017. But what will replace the assessment system it satirises?
I should be pleased.
This Site has campaigned against the Work Capability Assessment for sickness and disability benefits, practically since I started publishing it at the end of 2011.
In my opinion, it has been misused, as a tool to force people who are too ill to work onto job-seeking benefits that carry sanctions if a claimant fails to carry out particular tasks – tasks which the long-term sick and disabled are often clearly incapable of doing.
In many cases, the results have been fatal. I know this because it took me two years to force the Department for Work and Pensions to release figures showing that 2,400 people died within a limited period (two weeks) after being found fit for work, between dates in 2011 and 2014.
That’s right – these people had been found fit to go to work by this hopelessly flawed tick-box assessment system, and then they had proven themselves to be nothing of the sort.
And the Tory government carried on as though nothing was wrong.
I also have personal experience of the system’s flaws. After my partner – Mrs Mike; remember her? – was wrongly put in the work-related activity group for Employment and Support Allowance, she appealed in the hope of being relocated to the support group.
Instead, whoever received her letter slapped a “Do Not Contact” tag on her file for no discernible reason and allowed her claim to end after 12 months, while she waited – in considerable confusion and distress – for a response that was never going to come.
Fortunately, I was around to kick up a stink and get the situation sorted out. But that just highlights the fact that many thousands of people don’t have that kind of help at hand.
And now, we’re told, the Work Capability Assessment is to be scrapped.
But we’re not being told what will replace it.
This Independent article has comments from a couple of organisations that have a stake in what happens:
Trades Union Congress general secretary Paul Novak [said:] “Scrapping the work capability assessment will be welcome if it means an end to assessments that cause anxiety instead of helping people achieve their aspirations,” he added, while urging greater investment in public services to get people off NHS waiting lists and reduce barriers to training.
James Taylor of the disability equality charity Scope said axing the assessment was “the minimum change needed to even begin improving a welfare system that regularly fails disabled people”, and stressed the need for “a more person-centred system” offering “specialist, tailored and flexible” support.
“Those that want to work should be supported. But for some, that’s not an option and disabled people shouldn’t be forced into unsuitable work,” he said. “There is a lot of work to do for the government to restore trust in our benefits system.”
Notice that they both mentioned ways of getting more people back into work; this is Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s aim with the changes to the benefit system.
And that’s why I fear for the future of sickness and disability benefits in the UK.
I think the odious Hunt is planning another push to put sick people into jobs they can’t do. If I’m right, his plan will fail on many levels.
In Liz we DON’T Truss (it’s a play on her campaign slogan, which is itself a play on words): she’ll end your right to free speech, and to campaign for fair pay and decent working conditions.
Tory leadership contender Liz Truss vowed to clamp down on free speech and protest after being interrupted by critics of her police on climate change.
Her speech at a hustings in the Winter Gardens at Eastbourne was halted when six activists from Green New Deal Rising loudly criticised her:
In response, Truss said: “Can I just say a few words on the militant people who try and disrupt our country, and who try and disrupt our democratic process, and who try and disrupt our essential services?
“I would legislate immediately to make sure that we are standing up to militant trade unions who stop ordinary commuters getting into work, and I would legislate to protect our essential services.
“And I will make sure that militant activists such as Extinction Rebellion are not able to disrupt ordinary people who work hard and do the right thing and go into work.”
If you think that sounds good, think again.
Truss was saying she would remove your right to free speech and rescind your right to demand acceptable pay and benefits at work.
You may be happy that other people will be stopped from disrupting your day, but will you be as happy when you have a serious issue of your own and get arrested for trying to raise it?
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Did he say it? That hardly matters now – Boris Johnson’s own behaviour shows he agrees with the sentiment.
With Covid-19 still causing as many deaths as a major commercial plane crash every day, Boris Johnson has decided to tell us the crisis is over, we should get back to normal – and is dropping all regulations that keep people in England safe.
The legal requirement to self-isolate if you have Covid-19 will be dropped within days as part of Johnson’s “Living with Covid” plan.
It’s misnamed. “Dying with Covid” would be more appropriate – or “Living with Covid deaths“. Johnson, we know, is happy to live with Covid deaths; he’s understood to have said, “Let the bodies pile up in their thousands” last year, and this new policy tends to confirm it.
Medical opinion is that Johnson’s plan is utterly insane.
Dr Chand Nagpaul, chair of the British Medical Association, told the BBC: “You have at the moment more people dying, more people in the hospital, than you had before Plan B [restrictions] was introduced.
“It does appear as if the government is trying to pretend that Covid doesn’t exist in the day-to-day lives of so many people.”
He’s not alone in this opinion:
the best advice I can give anyone today is to ignore Johnson and his Covid Plans, WHO think he has lost his marbles.. they believe people should still wear mask and protect the spreading of the virus.. He wants to continue to Pile them High,
Also set to end is community testing, with free PCR tests for people with symptoms likely to stop, and Lateral Flow Tests set to follow – because Johnson doesn’t think it is worth spending £2 billion a month on them, just to keep UK citizens alive.
Also likely to feel this way are the UK’s billionaire business leaders, who want to get back to making money hand-over-fist and absolutely do not care if it happens amid a new slew of Covid deaths.
Are people really ok with knowing that if they go out to dinner, the chef and restaurant staff could have Covid, if they go to the cinema the person sat next to them coughing has Covid but doesn’t need to isolate, the person spending an hour cutting their hair has Covid?
So this week #COVID19 is safe to pass round your workplace and the deaths that will occur are an irrelevant side affect of the virus that many will find they can’t live with.
Ian Hodson is right. With the compulsion to self-isolate scrapped, firms will refuse to accept Covid-19 as a reason to be off work, and people who should be avoiding all human contact will instead be spreading the infection to all of their work colleagues.
This danger should also be linked with the danger to vulnerable people – that Johnson himself acknowledges is still clear and present. But his actions belie his claims that communities in the UK should remain cautious – as people who know what they’re talking about are making clear:
Boris Johnson has said this morning that Covid is still dangerous for vulnerable people. Despite this he is lifting all restrictions in England. There are millions of people vulnerable to Covid in England. Implicitly he is saying he does not care about them.
Schools have always been the engine room of Covid-19 in the UK, because Johnson was desperate to keep them open in order to get parents back into the workplace making money for Tory donor firms.
His government has never lifted a finger to reduce the spread of Covid-19 through schools.
And now teachers are reacting to his new plan with shock:
Horrified and as a teacher I'm now to be expected to teach kids with symptoms and have no right to get them checked and sent home to protect the rest of the class. Believe me there are parents who send their kids in with obvious symptoms a lot and we test and send them home.
So no isolation. My wife has covid. She works in a primary school. The gov think she should go in & seed an infection among 200 children. Think about that. Multiply that tens of thousands of times in the community..what a catastrophe for the NHS. ERG is a death cult. We're doomed
The callous insensitivity is highlighted when one contrasts the decision to spend £12 million on a book about the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee for primary school children, while refusing to spend even an equivalent amount on ventilation systems that could have prevented the spread of Covid:
How the hell is the govt able to spend £12 million on a commemorative book about the Queen for primary school children BUT not able to spend £££ on ventilation in schools to prevent the transmission of a virus which can potentially cause life long health problems/disability.
Even the BBC admits the figures are worse than that: “Some 34,377 Covid cases were recorded on Saturday, with another 128 deaths within 28 days of a positive test. It brings the total number of deaths by this measure to 160,507.” The report said five per cent – one in 20 – of English people had Covid-19 in the week ending February 12. That’s not a pandemic that is on its last legs!
But what are the biggest news stories?
Storm Eunice killed 4 people yesterday.
Covid killed 158.
Each is a tragedy.
But you won’t hear about the ones dead from Covid. They don’t matter apparently.
And most people will swallow the anaesthetic offered by the Tory-supporting TV news channels gratefully – as the Covid they’ve contracted at work rages through their systems unrecognised and unchecked and they prepare to catch public transport to their job the next day, so they can infect even more unsuspecting victims of Boris Johnson’s genocidal ignorance.
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Nadine Dorries: she likes to take credit. Shame she doesn’t deserve it.
How do you like the nerve of the Culture Secretary?
Nadine Dorries (the people of Mid Bedfordshire must be so proud of her) has tried to take credit for the hard work of LIVE, the Association of British Orchestras and others who have been working hard to cut the red tape that her government has wrapped around musicians from the UK who want to perform in EU countries.
Bloody cheek – This is because of the hard work of trade body LIVE, Association of British Orchestras and others in the industry engaging with Spanish counterparts and NOT an ineffective British Government which created the problem in the first place. https://t.co/fspQDNvU4m
What motivates people like her to lie so brazenly?
Will she try to convince us that God told her to do it?
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Action not words: and Boris Johnson’s government has done absolutely nothing.
This Writer is relieved. If he had gone on any longer, who knows how badly his body could have been damaged?
Richard Ratcliffe has ended his hunger strike to highlight the plight of his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, after 21 days.
Nazanin has been imprisoned under false charges in Iran since 2016.
Boris Johnson famously mistook the accusation against her for what she did, providing the Iranian authorities with justification, not only for having jailed her, but for jailing her for an indefinite period to come.
then Johnson turned Nazanin’s freedom into a bargaining chip in an argument between the UK and Iran over around £450 million owed to the Middle East country since the Shah was overthrown in the late 1970s.
That gave the Iranians reason enough to find another charge on which to keep her imprisoned for another year.
Mr Ratcliffe, after having entrusted his wife’s well-being into the hands of the worst clown ever to hold high office, may have started his hunger strike in the belief that nothing will change unless there is a genuine threat to health and life.
But he has discovered that the Conservatives don’t even care about that. Current Foreign Secretary Liz Truss will have passed him on the street (he was camped outside the Foreign Office) to attend Parliamentary votes. She never even asked how he was.
He said he had started to get pains in his feet overnight and after discussion with his doctor he ended the hunger strike.
According to the BBC, he said he “didn’t want to go out in an ambulance”.
“I want to walk out with my head held high,” he said.
He was likely to have caused permanent damage to his body from the 15th day of the hunger strike onwards.
So the end of this hunger strike is a good thing. It wasn’t changing any Tory minds because they simply didn’t care whether Mr Ratcliffe lived or died. Their only interest in his wife is as a bargaining chip in negotiations over money.
This is not a defeat for Richard Ratcliffe. It is disgrace for Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and the pathetic excuse for a government that they front.
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The UK is well on-target to have more than 50,000 new Covid-19 infections per day by July 19 – when Boris Johnson insists on unlocking all lockdown restrictions and abdicating any responsibility for the consequences.
Today – July 15 – the UK recorded 48,553 new cases and 63 deaths (within 28 days of a positive test) – those are the highest levels since January 15 and March 26 respectively.
More than 1,200 scientists have signed a letter accusing the Tory government of “recklessly exposing millions to the acute and long-term impacts of mass infection”.
Branding the government’s plans “dangerous and premature”, it described Johnson’s strategy as “herd immunity by mass infection” and said that opening the country should be delayed until “everyone, including adolescents, have been offered vaccination and uptake is high”.
“A strategy that chooses mass infection in children and young people now as a way to protect the vulnerable in winter, instead of taking the time to vaccinate our young is unethical and unscientific,” the letter added.
It also said the pandemic plan risked “burdening a generation with long Covid, the long-term consequences of which are unknown”.
Lancet editor-in-chief Richard Horton has accused government Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty of “wilfully misrepresenting scientific opinion across the country”.
He said: “I found it extraordinary that the Chief Medical Officer suggested and emphasised that there was widespread agreement across the scientific community whereas in fact there is profound disagreement in the scientific community.
“He did not mention the letter… that we published, and I’m afraid I have to conclude that the Chief Medical Officer is wilfully misrepresenting scientific opinion across the country, and that is extraordinary to observe.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan has announced that the city’s transport network will continue to make wearing face masks mandatory after July 19 – and cartoonists have gleefully seized on the obvious opportunity for satire:
A SAGE expert has warned that young people in particular will suffer “acute Covid injury” – damage to their lungs and kidneys that will seriously harm their future health – due to the felaxation of social distancing restrictions:
Economist Richard Murphy raises another concern – that the decision to relax face mask rules was down to Tory vanity. He points to an article in the Financial Times, to which this tweet refers:
“The message is loud and clear,” Murphy states. “The right-wing of the Tory party want to end Covid restrictions without caring for the consequences. The government knows that this is madness, but will not rely on Labour votes to retain masks. And so, to save Boris Johnson masks must go, even if (as will happen) thousand will die as a result.
“This is democide in action.”
Read it yourself via this tweet:
Thousands are going to die to keep Boris Johnson in Number 10 https://t.co/6fDBw0As0w When even Tory commentators in the FT are saying the government policy is madness, worry
It seems thousands of people are to die because Boris Johnson is scared of his backbenchers – and too proud to rely on support from Keir Starmer – that he has enjoyed throughout the Covid-19 crisis.
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‘Covid Boris’: this satirical image was made when Johnson caught the virus in April 2020. He didn’t get Long Covid – and you can bet that he
According to the BBC’s Panorama, 33,000 children are suffering with Long Covid. Didn’t the government tell us children didn’t get Covid-19?
Wow. 33,000 children sentenced to lose an undetermined length of their life because the government they didn’t even elect is incompetent – or, worse, intended to harm them.
And some of you, reading this, will argue that it doesn’t even exist. It is this kind of ignorance that gives Boris Johnson the space to inflict the damage.
In fact, it does exist. It does harm people continually over a period of months and years. There is no established treatment for it because it is a new disease and the causes of the symptoms it produces are not known.
And thanks to more than 10 years of Tory defunding – because they want to privatise the NHS – the health service does not have the capacity to research Long Covid, let alone treat it.
According to Lucy Adams, in the programme, many thousands of people are likely to be off work for years, with a huge knock-on impact on the UK’s society, economy and culture.
Why does Boris Johnson want that?
Why has he decided to remove social distancing restrictions just as infections of a new, more virulent strain of Covid-19 are increasing exponentially?
He says he wants the country to get back to normal but the decision to end restrictions now is – according to the scientists from SAGE – definitely going to put more people in hospital, give more people Long Covid, and send more people to their graves.
And Johnson knows this.
He is deliberately crippling the UK for years to come.
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Jabber Johnson: Boris Johnson has invested everything in the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccinations – but a quarter of new infections are in people who have had both injections.
The weekend turned out to be a disaster for the Tories, after all their crowing about getting Covid infections and deaths down.
On Bank Holiday Monday the government recorded no Covid-19 deaths for the first time in more than a year – but the euphoria over that was short-lived.
It was a statistical blip caused by the fact that the people who record deaths had been on holiday.
Since then, with the arrival of the Indian delta variant in the UK due to Boris Johnson’s ridiculous insistence on keeping our borders open to anybody with the virus, infection rates have skyrocketed – on Saturday, 70 per cent more people were recorded to have contracted it than the previous Saturday.
The disease is being transmitted most commonly through secondary schools after Johnson said pupils there should take off their masks.
And now we discover that one in 25 people who have been infected with the new strain are supposed to be fully inoculated against it, having had both the required vaccination injections:
Former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, says one in 25 new #COVID19 cases are people who have been vaccinated twice, which is the equivalent of 400 new cases a day.
So now the Tories are having to backtrack on their plan to finish lifting lockdown restrictions on June 21:
Matt Hancock says 21 June is a “not before” date for ending England’s remaining restrictions.
They are going to extend the agony for all of us – and, incidentally, harm the economy that has been their “sacred cow” throughout the crisis, because they keep making the same damned stupid mistakes.
And they’re stupid enough to think that we haven’t noticed.
Are they right, though?
I fear they may be.
After all, they’re only in power because people were stupid enough to believe the Tories’ claims that Jeremy Corbyn would be worse. And now we know he couldn’t possibly have been.
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Manifesto commitment: the Conservatives made their plan to end democracy clear in their 2019 election manifesto. Every Conservative voter demanded an end to democracy and a slide into dictatorship.
Boris Johnson is getting back to business after the Covid crisis – and his business is stripping you of the liberties and freedoms your ancestors fought hard to win over the last several hundred years.
Be in no doubt: you will have lost most of your rights by the end of this Parliamentary term, and you can thank your Tory-voting neighbour for making it happen.
Included in the Queen’s Speech were announcements that all three main planks of the attack on democracy – listed on Page 48 of the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto, so everybody who voted Tory absolutely supported them – are still going forward. They are:
Removing your right to protest so they can use the police and armed forces to put down any dissent.
"This law would threaten the public’s right to protest and undermine Britain’s reputation on the world stage. It is deeply illiberal and undemocratic and we will continue to campaign to stop it." @pimlicathttps://t.co/JeNRvYmxvp
Imposing dictatorship by ensuring that the courts cannot stop the Tories from breaking the law.
Government plans to *restore the balance of power between executive, legislature & the courts* are ominous threat to the ability of Parliament to hold ministers to account & the independence of our judiciary#QueensSpeech
The only one of these that has been given prominence by the mainstream media is the last – the planned repeal of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. This has been reported as meaning that Johnson would be able to call elections before his Parliament has served its full five-year term.
But it could also mean that he will allow himself to delay elections indefinitely.
The FTP Act repealed the previous electoral law that allowed prime ministers to call elections at any time during their five-year term, but demanded that they must call an election to be held after five years, no matter what.
So repealing the FTP Act means that unscrupulous prime ministers like Johnson would be able to call elections whenever they liked – or simply neglect to call them at all and remain in power indefinitely.
This is what will happen unless he specifically writes new limitations on Parliamentary terms into his new law. And why would a corrupt liar like Johnson do that when he has a majority of 80 seats in the Commons and can currently do whatever he likes without fear of punishment?
Worse still, the new legislative programme includes more attacks on democracy, the most important being the planned limitation of the right to vote to those who can afford to show the proper photographic identification.
This, Johnson claims, is to stop electoral fraud. You may assume that this is a rampant problem across the UK, but in fact it is practically nonexistent. His plan will strip the vote from around two million people:
There were 6 cases of voter fraud at the last election.
To solve this, the govt will introduce a law making that will prevent approx 2 million from voting.
This is #VoterSuppression, and Labour, Tory or anything in between, if you believe in democracy, you should oppose it.
The plan will strip votes from people who are poor and young – in other words, people who will not vote for the Conservatives at the next election. It is corrupt Tory gerrymandering to prevent the voice of the people from being heard at elections.
There were just SIX cases of voter fraud at last election. Yet these plans could disenfranchise voters who don’t have photo ID – overwhelmingly the young and the poor. Hard to escape the feeling this is an assault on democracy. https://t.co/VeOSFlSVsP
Typically of the current Tory government, its MPs tried to justify the planned law by lying to us about it. Gillian Keegan, whoever she is, claimed you need photo ID to pick up a parcel from the Post Office – and was put straight in no uncertain terms by fact-checking site Full Fact:
Gillian Keegan MP has said you need photo ID to collect a parcel from the Post Office in defence of plans to require photo ID to vote.
Many of us think valuable Parliamentary time would be better spent preventing the kind of corruption that allowed Tory cronies to gain multi-million pound contracts to provide vital supplies in the fight against Covid-19, that they were totally unable to fulfil. What happened to all that money?
— Parliament View #GetVaccinated (@parliamentview) May 11, 2021
It's a shame the Tories weren't checking IDs when Hancock gave two PPE deals worth more than £90 million to a faceless Chinese firm listed at a hotel room in Beijing.
Finally, shall we consider the misplaced priorities of these entitled Tories who have spent more than a decade manslaughtering benefit claimants without feeling any need to reform the system?
They brought in ID cards after 6 cases of voter fraud but did nothing when their policies killed 120000 disabled people.
'Six are too many' said Hancock about #VoterID but 120000 isn't apparently.#QueensSpeech
— Gay, Autistic, Disabled And Proud. ♿🏳️🌈 (@criptheirvote) May 11, 2021
Come to that, why isn’t the government introducing plans to end tax evasion? I mention this because the deaths of disabled benefit claimants are linked to the Tory clampdown on claims – the so-called “magic cures” that claimed hundreds of thousands of people were not disabled at all, despite volumes of medical evidence showing they were. These people were unceremoniously stripped of their benefits and many of them subsequently died. The figure of 120,000, quoted above, is a very low estimate.
The Tories spend huge amounts of money every year on their campaign to strip disabled people of their ability to survive. It is a campaign of persecution that has been more successful in eliminating the disabled than the infamous Nazi “Aktion T4” in 1930s and 1940s Germany. In comparison, they spend hardly anything on tracking the rich Tories – let’s not deny it – who have evaded their tax responsibilities in order to squirrel away trillions of pounds in tax havens abroad.
Absent from the new legislative programme are any plans to support the rights of workers with promised reforms to zero-hours contracts and the gig economy, and an end to the practice of “fire and rehire” – terminating workers’ contracts and then demanding they take new contracts with lower pay and fewer privileges:
— Prof Kailash Chand OBE FRCGP (@KailashChandOBE) May 11, 2021
“Fire and rehire” is a key element of Howard Beckett’s campaign to lead the UK’s largest union, Unite. He was in London to campaign about it while the Queen was delivering her speech:
Fire and rehire is ripping through UK workplaces – around one in ten workers face this despicable practise from unscrupulous bosses using the pandemic to destroy hard-won Ts and Cs. @BeckettUnite is in Parliament today to call an end to #FireAndRehirepic.twitter.com/wchTkUxaG4
He has also made the very obvious point that the currrent Labour leadership has no interest in looking after the interests of British workers – because Keir Starmer actually refused to oppose “fire and rehire”.
The current Labour Leader was asked to sign this and said no. It is a slap in the face to workers facing fire & rehire. He should add his name now and say sorry. He won’t. pic.twitter.com/RShGwZkI52
— NHSActivistRN 🏴 #NHSPAY15 #FBNHS (@NHSActivistRN) May 11, 2021
The oppression goes on and on:
No10 confirms it wants to remove the right of refugees to challenge immigration decisions in the High Court, in order to “increase the efficiency of the courts” and “provide clarity in the legal system”.
Long-awaited plans for reform of social care – promised by the Tories years ago – went undiscussed. There is no plan for such reforms in the current Parliamentary term.
Admittedly, Andy Burnham is right to say all parties are responsible for allowing social care to fall into the disrepair we have today; New Labour failed to do anything about it too.
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham tells @cathynewman “all parties are culpable” on social care and he doesn’t “consider it radical to apply NHS principles to social care”.https://t.co/2ak1bO0VNH
He spent the whole of 2020 lying about the severity of Covid-19 and justifying his decisions to award government contracts worth billions of pounds to Tory cronies who couldn’t fulfil them. What are his words worth?
Oh, and before anyone suggests that plans to address the climate crisis show at least some hope for the Tories, they don’t:
Queen’s Speech climate measures ‘missed opportunity to show world leadership’ https://t.co/ZqJxaSpsDt
For a more detailed attack on the new legislative programme, take a look at Unite’s response (under current leader Len McCluskey). I’m sure other critiques are also available.
“This Queen's speech reveals the nasty, repressive side of this government” – @LenMcCluskey
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