Some Tory Brexiteers don’t seem to have the brains they were born with.
Answering a question on whether Brexit is responsible for the UK’s “salad shortage”, former Environment Secretary (I’m not making this up!) George Eustice tried to evade the question by saying the UK is not holding up imports because it isn’t checking incoming freight carrying a number of named goods.
Not only was he negating the very reason we were told Brexit should happen – the UK can’t be “taking back control” if it isn’t actually exercising that control – but he was also telling potential smugglers exactly what they need to say they’re carrying, in order not to be searched at this country’s borders.
Maximilien Robespierre makes the point clearly in this video clip:
The Tories seem to be trying to turn the UK into a smuggler’s paradise. I wonder why.
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Boris Johnson’s Britain: “one of the most effluent nations in the world” as Dr Louise Raw put it when she tweeted this image.
How can the Tory government claim to be taking “urgent” action to curb river pollution when its targets are 13 and 28 years away?
Are we all expected to put up with being hip-deep in human waste in the meantime?
According to Environment Secretary George “Useless” Eustice, he’s taking “urgent” action to cut the “most damaging” overflows into rivers and the sea by 75 per cent – by 2035, with all discharges cut by 80 per cent by 2050.
If that’s “urgent” action, I’d hate to think what “Useless” describes as inconsequential!
Eustice said the government was investing £7 billion until 2025 to upgrade sewage infrastructure but admitted water bills will rise by about £12 a year to cover costs beyond that.
Didn’t the Thatcher Tory government of the 1980s, in its push to privatise water, say that bills would be cheaper and private firms would upgrade infrastructure using their profits? Yes, it did.
So why are we paying for it, in money provided by the government and directly through our own bills?
Some background: last autumn, the Tory government gave polluters the green light to dump risky sewage that has not been properly cleaned into rivers and the sea, after it turned out that Brexit had closed the UK’s borders to chemicals that are used to treat effluent.
The Conservatives followed this up by defeating Lords Amendment 45 to the then Environment Bill, which would have placed a legal duty on water companies in England and Wales “to make improvements to their sewerage systems and demonstrate progressive reductions in the harm caused by discharges of untreated sewage.“
One Conservative, This Writer’s MP Fay Jones, said the amendment would have forced taxpayers to stump up £600 billion to “dig up” and modernise the UK’s sewer system, that has remained unchanged since Victorian times (apparently).
She then blocked responses that requested a breakdown of the figures. Considering her party is now saying £7 billion will cover the work, with an increase in bills to fund further costs, I think it’s fair to say that she overinflated the figures somewhat.
Mind you, she’s not the only one who seems to have – inadvertently? – misled the public. On October 25 last year, The Big Issue published a tweet, and an article, reporting that the water companies were saying they did not know how much sewage they were dumping into England’s rivers because the technology did not exist to monitor it.
But new data released on Thursday showed that in 2021, there were more than 372,000 spill events from from storm overflows, which release untreated sewage and rainwater into the environment to ease pressure on the system.
The Environment Agency said it has made water companies fit monitors to their storm overflows in order to capture information on how they are performing. 2021 was the second year the organisation published figures so it seems the firms were being economical with the facts.
And the facts are that we are being forced to live in our own effluent – along with muck imported from the Netherlands, due to EU restrictions on what can be dumped there – while water companies that are mostly owned by foreign governments coin it in.
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A long record of defending the indefensible: Environment Secretary George Eustice has previously stated beliefs that children should starve during the holidays, asylum seekers should drown and people should die of Covid-19 rather than let the economy be harmed.
What stunning arrogance from a man who has been dubbed “George Useless”.
Environment Secretary George Eustice took to our airwaves to try to minimise the damage done by US President Joe Biden’s words on the Northern Ireland border and trade with the UK after Brexit – and made matters much, much worse.
Biden has expressed concern that peace in Northern Ireland could be jeopardised by the “Northern Ireland protocol” between the UK and the European Union, that regulates imports to and exports from the province.
It keeps Northern Ireland aligned with the EU’s single market for goods to ensure free trade across the Irish border, but has led to additional checks on goods being traded across the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which has drawn criticism and protests from unionist politicians in Northern Ireland who have called for it to be scrapped.
Boris Johnson swore to everybody who asked – before Brexit happened – that there would be no border checks between GB and NI… and it now seems clear that he was either lying or did not understand his own deal.
The UK has requested a fundamental renegotiation but the EU has refused – and with good reason. Boris Johnson was desperate to rush his Brexit into being, back in 2019, ensuring that many of his MPs did not understand what they were supporting. Any problem now is his responsibility and he will have to live with it – including any problems it creates with the USA.
Eustice turned up on TV and on the radio to suggest that Biden was “wrong” and had, himself, not properly read the details of the agreement that was negotiated, in a series of interviews that will make Boris Johnson’s current meetings with the US president much more difficult:
… but that makes no sense at all when the UK is also trying to negotiate a two-way trade deal with the United States (over which Biden is, again, doubtful).
Eustice admitted, “It’s just not a priority for the US administration.”
And Boris Johnson has also said, “The Americans do negotiate very hard.”
It seems nothing has changed since former president Barack Obama said the UK would be at the back of the queue for a bilateral deal.
So of course the Johnson government has a Plan B, which is to join a trade bloc – like the one the UK has just spent five years leaving:
Morning Brexit people.
George Eustice says on @BBCr4today the UK is looking to join a Trade block (USA, Canasa & Mexico)
Because we are at the back of the queue for a bilateral deal
Know how you hate them – rules written by others that we have to abide by.
If the UK doesn’t get a trade deal with the US because its deal to leave the EU has created problems in Northern Ireland, then Boris Johnson will try to talk the UK into a trading bloc like the EU.
So what was the point of the last five years of fuss and palaver?
In other news, Julia Hartley-Doodah tackled Eustice on the really important issues:
Boris Johnson has told ‘unjabbed Strictly dancers’ to get the Covid vaccine, with some calling for them to be fired from the show.
Julia puts the question to Environment Secretary George Eustice MP "Should they be axed from the show if they don't get jabbed?"@JuliaHB1pic.twitter.com/PBWru95DeK
Wow. If only some of our political interviewers could be bothered to dissect the Tories as thoroughly on issues like Universal Credit, rising bills and – yes – Brexit!
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George Eustice has a record of defending the indefensible: he also believes children should starve during the holidays, asylum seekers should drown and people should die of Covid-19 rather than let the economy be harmed.
After the Greensill Scandal brought to light a mountain of evidence showing corruption at the highest level of government, Boris Johnson announced a ‘review’ – that won’t have power to change anything.
Environment Secretary George Eustace admitted the review will be utterly pointless:
Mr Eustice told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge: “This review doesn’t need enforcement powers as such, it just needs to get to the bottom of what happened.”
Asked if the government would act on any recommendations from the report, Mr Eustice said there probably wouldn’t be any.
He said: “I don’t think the review’s going to make any policy recommendations.”
Asked what the point of the review was, when it has no powers and won’t make any recommendations, he said: “People are raising questions about what happened in this particular instance around [failed bank represented by David Cameron] Greensill…The purpose of the review is to answer those questions, not prescribe policy.”
In other words, it seems the aim is to make up a plausible fairy story that the Tories think we’ll accept.
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Defending the indefensible: Environment Secretary George Eustice believes children should starve during the holidays, asylum seekers should drown and people should die of Covid-19 rather than let the economy be harmed.
There’s a good reason his nickname is ‘Useless’.
Environment Secretary George Eustace has repeated the insistence of Boris Johnson’s government that it will not provide any funding to feed poverty-stricken children at Christmas.
Interviewed by Kay Burley on Sky News, he said:
#KayBurley – Are you going to help feed children at Christmas through #FSM?
George Eustice – No. #FMS are for term time… that's why we're no longer going to be offering free school meals during the school holidays. pic.twitter.com/pGRwMfYWil
Burley provided robust rebuttals of his claims, and could have also pointed out that there is a five-week wait before Universal Credit claims are honoured (if they are allowed) – and that free school meals were provided outside of term time earlier this year because of the Covid-19 crisis that has forced millions of people to take a huge pay cut and that crisis is still going on.
Useless – sorry, Eustice – covered himself with shame during his trip round the TV stations today (October 28).
After two adults and two children died on a boat trying to get into the UK, he supported Priti Patel’s line that, rather than creating a new system which would allow asylum seekers to apply for refuge in the UK from outside its borders, the UK should block off all legal channels to do so.
This, of course, creates a huge market for illegal traffickers to send would-be migrants on unsafe channel crossings in which they may die. To Dan Walker on BBC Breakfast, Eustice said:
Dear god the tories really are 100% evil
Dan Walker
“Surely the priority is to stop people dying on the crossing”
As you can tell, he doesn’t care if Johnny or Jane Foreigner dies; he just wants to keep them out.
To top it all, when Walker asked why the Johnson government ignored the advice of SAGE to have a lockdown in September in order to avoid having more than 200 deaths a day by mid-November – advice which seems to have been borne out by the fact that 367 deaths were recorded yesterday (October 27) – Useless Eustice said Johnson had chosen to do what he thought was right for the economy, not for the people:
Dan Walker
“SAGE advised a circuit breaker in September to avoid 200+ deaths per day which we’ve surpassed already, do you think you should’ve done it?”
Eustice is a former public relations executive who apparently learned his journalism at Cornwall College in Pool, Cornwall – which happens to be where This Writer did a postgraduate course in journalism.
I don’t think he was there when I was. Otherwise I would now be filled with regret for missing the opportunity to contribute to the national well-being by putting him off politics.
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