I was going to do my own piece on Prime Minister’s Questions but Phil Moorhouse of A Different Bias got there first and did it better than I would have.
See/hear for yourself:
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UK prime minister Rishi Sunak was under pressure over the murder of Zara Aleena in Ilford – so one of his mouthpieces rushed in to claim there was no political element to the case.
Ms Aleena was murdered by Jordan McSweeney, who had been wrongly assessed as a “medium risk” offender, when in fact the violent, woman-hating racist should have been classed “high risk” and recalled to prison after missing probation appointments.
A Ministry of Justice review has found that probation officers were under mounting pressure at the time of McSweeney’s assessment, with staffing shortages and an increasingly-heavy workload.
These are both symptoms of government funding cuts – and, indeed, during PMQs, Keir Starmer raised a “botched, then reversed” attempt to privatise the service, and a decade of underinvestment.
And Ms Aleena’s family’s spokeswoman, her aunt Faraz Naz, made it perfectly clear that “Government bears responsibility too, it is not just the probation service. They have blood on their hands.”
But Tory MP Andrew Bowie, discussing the case on the BBC’s Politics Live, falsely claimed this had not been said – after trying to say that the failings of the Probation Service were not political:
Of course they were.
They were the result of political decisions to starve the service of staff and resources.
A Conservative MP was responsible. But once again, it seems, we are not likely to see anybody take responsibility.
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Rishi Sunak at PMQs: This is a stock pic – he’s not usually this animated.
Rishi Sunak is coming under pressure to explain why he apparently helped Russian oligarch and warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin dodge sanctions against him in order to sue a UK journalist for libel (the case later collapsed but left the journalist owing £70,000 in legal fees).
Prigozhin is the founder of Wagner, a private army that is currently understood to be committing atrocities in Ukraine.
Challenged on it in Prime Minister’s Questions, Sunak had the nerve to say he was proud of the UK’s sanction system – a system over which he appears to have run roughshod.
And he copped out of answering the question by saying there’s a government organisation that deals with such matters.
This Writer was watching the exchange via the BBC’s Politics Live programme, and was hoping the panel would discuss this matter afterwards, as my tweets showed.
No such luck. I wonder why?
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A new low: Jonathan Gullis (the unmasked bearded man in the background) [this is a stock image].
At Prime Minister’s Questions, Labour MP Tulip Siddiq drew 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.
Rishi Sunak’s comment that the government needs to end the use of hotels for unaccompanied children, “and that’s what government plans will do,” was sinister enough – he meant the plan to stop asylum-seekers from getting into the UK would ensure that fewer will be here in need of housing.
But from the backbenches, Tory MP Jonathan Gullis apparently shouted, “Well, they shouldn’t have come here illegally!”
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?
One can only agree with Peter Kyle: The Conservatives have found a new low.
Here’s the video clip:
And here’s Mr Kyle’s tweet:
Tulip Sadiq asks the prime minister about the welfare of 200 unaccompanied migrant children who’ve gone missing.
Tory MP Jonathan Gullis heckles ‘well they shouldn’t have come here illegally’.
Just when you think you’ve heard it all, the Tory Party find a new low #PMQs
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This is a bit of fun filler from YouTube. I don’t think even Phil Moorhouse of A Different Bias takes the threat of Boris Johnson returning to Downing Street seriously:
The takeouts from this are that:
Rishi Sunak is prime minister because he is boring – and the Tories want people to be bored by politics right now because the news is dire and they want to hide it from us.
The UK is going into (who are we kidding? We’re already in it!) a major recession and the Tories are the cause.
The Tories are likely to lose a huge number of council seats in the local elections in May.
Boris Johnson is just too damned noisy; if he’s brought back, he’ll draw attention to all the horrible things that are happening, and that’s the last thing the Tories want.
The headline for political writers like Yr Obdt Srvt is that we must draw as much attention as possible to all the political news that the Tories and their clients in the mainstream media want to bury.
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#RishiSunak claims that the UK has had high growth over the last few years. Is he really right? There is high employment too, he says. #PoliticsLive#PMQs
#KeirStarmer points out that the UK is at the bottom of the OECD league table. He asks why the UK is set to be the first country into recession and the last out. #PoliticsLive#PMQs
#RishiSunak is banging on about high growth again. He's been defeated over that straight away so he's on a hiding to nothing. The UK is going into recession and he's responsible. People's lives are in the balance and he's playing schoolboy politics. #PoliticsLive#PMQs
#KeirStarmer compares the tax increase of £1,400 for a typical household with a super-wealthy non-dom whose income stays overseas. How much will they pay? #RishiSunak has a non-dom wife who fell foul of this fact, of course. #PMQs#PoliticsLive
#RishiSunak reckons taxing non-doms would cost the UK money. #PoliticsLive#PMQs He also attacks the last Labour government for failing to tax non-doms.
#KeirStarmer points out that if the current Tory government was as successful as the last Labour government, there would be billions of pounds more to spend on public services like the NHS. #PoliticsLive#PMQs
#KeirStarmer points out that #RishiSunak pays Shell 90p for every £1 it spends drilling. Why is he subsidising fuel giants that are making massive profits? #PoliticsLive#PMQs
#KeirStarmer says he cares for working people but won't stand up to the unions, says #RishiSunak. What nonsense. The unions ARE working people. Caring for working people is supporting the unions. #PoliticsLive#PMQs
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Gavin Williamson: he resigned rather than allow bullying accusations against him to be investigated in full view of the public. Now Dominic Raab has also been accused. But how many other government ministers are also presiding over a ‘toxic work culture’?
Civil servants have made complaints about bullying by “several ministers” – not just Dominic Raab and Gavin Williamson – but the current system is not adequate to mount a proper investigation, it has been claimed.
Dave Penman, head of the FDA union that represents civil servants, said he had received multiple complaints about several ministers in Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government – but the “toxic work culture” can’t be adequately addressed by current procedures.
As he explains to Sky‘s Kay Burley, he has written to Sunak, calling for reforms to allow proper investigation of complaints against ministers:
As you can tell from the clip, Mr Penman was not interested in bandying around gossip about particular individuals, saying – rightly – that any complaints should be substantiated before they are publicised.
But the allegation is there: bullying is apparently prevalent in not just one or two but several government departments.
After failures by previous prime ministers – notably Boris Johnson, who defended Priti Patel in the face of the evidence – there isn’t even an independent investigator in place.
Sunak will need to be seen to act quickly on this matter.
But will he? Or is this yet another episode in which he’ll prove himself to be weak?
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Questions over the resignation of Gavin Williamson and the future of other Cabinet members he appointed dogged Rishi Sunak in his third Prime Minister’s Questions.
The new PM was struggling from the outset and this performance will only further undermine any belief that he has what it takes to lead the UK through the cost of living crisis and the coming recession.
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Rishi Sunak’s third Prime Minister’s Questions started badly for the struggling new prime minister, when he was asked to deny peerages to any Tory who received a fine for partying during Covid-19 lockdown.
This Writer doesn’t like the questioner – Neil Coyle is a far-right Labour MP who was once suspended from the party for alleged racism against a British-Chinese journalist, and who has been accused of anti-Semitism.
None of what he did today (November 9, 2022) should excuse him of those transgressions if he committed them.
But the point he raised was good and deserves to be amplified at a time when there are concerns that former prime minister Boris Johnson is trying to use the honours system to give perks to political friends who don’t deserve them.
Shaun Bailey, the former London mayoral candidate who faced a backlash for attending a mid-lockdown Christmas party (and who also happens to belong to an ethnic minority – I mention this with reference to the allegations against Coyle but would merely observe that it was probably unwise for him to raise this question, considering his history), was also said to be on the former prime minister’s list.
And his line that Tories who jeered at him could “all go to Australia and eat kangaroo testicles for all I care”, in recognition of Matt Hancock’s imminent appearance on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, is a good one.
Sunak proved once again that he is a weak prime minister; he didn’t answer the question and instead fell back on a list of what he says the Tory government did – a list that many may find objectionable:
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Gavin Williamson has resigned as Minister Without Portfolio in the Tory government, saying he did not want to become a distraction from its work.
He also said he wanted to clear his name from the bullying claims that have dogged him for the last few days.
As ITV’s news anchor Tom Bradby said, reporting the resignation, there might still be time for him to appear on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here along with former Conservative colleague Matt Hancock. Indeed, stranger things have happened this autumn.
Williamson’s last Cabinet role ended when he was sacked as Education Secretary in September last year.
At the time, I wrote the following:
England’s education system is (momentarily) stronger with the announcement that Gavin Williamson has been sacked from his post as the minister in charge, as part of a Cabinet reshuffle by Boris Johnson.
His two-year tenure stands as testament to the fact that having no Education Secretary is better than having him in the role.
Incompetent Williamson’s failures are fast becoming the stuff of legend, with the headline disasters well-known to all of us:
In 2020, when A-level students could not take their exams because of Covid-19, he used a algorithm to allocate marks – that was rigged to make it seem that privately-educated pupils were more intelligent than the riff-raff from the state system that he ran.
He later tried to force disadvantaged, black and minority ethnic children in England to take exams when other kids didn’t have to, claiming that they respond better to examination conditions. It seemed clear racism – an attempt to put these children down with duff results.
He made it clear that the government expected all schools to open as normal in January this year – then closed them after just one day because prime minister Boris Johnson ordered a new lockdown and he was unaware of it.
He decided to foist Latin as a subject onto state school pupils, rather than anything useful. At the time I wrote: “Having killed the economy with Brexit and enormous numbers of the population with Covid-19, the Tories now want us all to learn a dead language.”
He also wanted a clampdown on indiscipline in schools after the return from Covid-19 lockdown – but provided no evidence whatsoever to support his wild claim that our children had gone feral.
Before Boris Johnson gave him the bullet, it was suggested that Williamson would blame school pupils and parents if Covid-19 infections spike after the start of the school term.
Prior to that, he was Defence Secretary under Theresa May – but was sacked from that job too.
In May 2019, I wrote:
Theresa May has sacked Gavin Williamson as Defence Secretary, saying she has “lost confidence in his ability to serve in the role of defence secretary and as a member of her cabinet”.
It appears he is to take responsibility for an embarrassing leak from the National Security Council, stating that Huawei is to take a contract to help provide the UK’s 5G network, despite concerns over spyware funnelling information to the Chinese government.
But was he really to blame?
Mr Williamson himself is on the record as swearing on his children’s life that he had nothing to do with the leak.
But it seems an inquiry run by Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill has found that he was responsible for the leak, which has angered the United States government, which has banned Huawei from government networks and pressurised the UK to do the same.
Alternatively, some have suggested that the US is simply protecting its interests, saying Huawei provides better service than American firms.
According to The Independent, Mr Williamson is said to believe his firing was “politically motivated”.
It has also been alleged that Williamson was knighted on the wishes of Boris Johnson because he knew of connections between Johnson and Russia that the former prime minister wanted to keep quiet.
So there are certainly a lot of claims about Williamson. Did he ever clear up those previous allegations? Not as far as This Writer is aware.
Will he clear his reputation of this new stain on it?
Well, what do you think?
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