Tag Archives: MPs

More than 40 Tory MPs demand extra funding for the councils they’ve been starving

Rubbish: will domestic refuse collections be cut back – again – if Rishi Sunak and his government refuse a plea from more than 40 Tory MPs for the restoration of funding to local councils?

Tory MPs who gleefully nodded through cuts totalling three-eighths of local council funding are now demanding extra cash so the same councils can fend off bankruptcy. Is it because this is an election year and they are afraid they’ll lose their Parliamentary seats?

More than 40 of them have joined dozens of others in demanding extra funding to avoid big cuts in council services.

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Here’s the BBC:

The group of 46 MPs, which is made up of 44 Conservatives as well as Labour’s Daniel Zeichner and Liberal Democrat Sarah Dyke, includes former ministers Priti Patel, Robert Jenrick, Greg Clark and Damian Green.

The letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove was co-ordinated by the County Councils Network and the County All-Party Parliamentary Group.

It urged the government to provide extra funding for local authorities ahead of a vote in the Commons next month “to ensure that the councils in our areas can continue to provide the services that our residents depend upon”.

There has been growing concern across the local government sector about council funding, with particular pressure on the cost of providing care for vulnerable adults and children, as well as housing services.

The government said it had announced a £64bn funding package for councils.

In December, the government announced the amount of funding it plans to make available to councils from April, and said it represented an average increase of 6.5% compared to the year before.

It is interesting that the Tory government said it was providing £64 billion in funding, when apparently the amount of cash it made available for councils fell from £41bn to just £26bn between 2010 and 2020.

Perhaps some of the extra cash is so-called ‘Levelling-Up’ money?

If so, Labour’s Luton North MP Sarah Owen has something to say about the way that money has been allocated:

Most of the response to the Tories’ call for cash has been ridicule – and for obvious reasons. They knew they were taking money away from local councils when they voted for austerity cuts to their funding, so they knew that services would be cut.

These responses therefore seem entirely appropriate:

Rishi Sunak is facing the possibility of another rebellion when Parliament is asked to approve a new funding deal for local councils in the near future.

It seems that these Tories have presented their government with a lose-lose situation: either set themselves up to lose the funding vote in Parliament, or set themselves up to lose the election when the amount of funding approved by Parliament turns out not to be enough.

Perhaps this is a good moment to remind you that the people of the UK can have all the public services they want. The only thing missing is the political will to provide it.

The UK is the fifth-richest economy in the world, meaning there is plenty of money available. Most of it is held by a small number of extremely rich millionaires and billionaires, many of whom would not object to paying a little more tax if it frees up money for public services.

But the Tory government – including some of the MPs now demanding more funding – is determined to cut taxes for the richest people, rather than increasing them.

This is a problem that the Tories created for us, with a plan to blame councils in the face of any backlash. Now it is backfiring onto them. Serves them right.


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Matt Hancock’s trials won’t end with I’m A Celebrity

It seems Matt Hancock’s bid to be seen as a real person by going on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here may backfire on him as soon as he gets home.

Residents in his Parliamentary constituency aren’t happy:

And Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards Kathryn Stone reckons she has received dozens of complaints about Hancock’s decision to go to the jungle.

She said she couldn’t investigate because appearing on the show doesn’t breach the Commons Code of Conduct.

But she added: “It raises really important questions about members’ proper activities while they’re supposed to be fulfilling their parliamentary duties and representing their constituents.

“One member of the public contrasted the dignity of veterans on Remembrance Sunday with a former secretary of state… waiting for a buffet of animal genitalia and they wondered what had happened to the dignity of public office.”

So it seems he’ll come back from the rainforest into a storm.

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MPs spent the first day back in Parliament trolling Kwasi Kwarteng

This video is great fun, so let’s all enjoy Kwasi Kwarteng being discomfited by his own idiocies.

Best bit for This Writer? When someone congratulates the Tory government on its overnight transformation of 10 Downing Street – from a nightclub to a casino.

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Are the Tories already trying to get rid of Liz Truss?

New prime minister Liz Truss has apparently squandered her ‘honeymoon’ period by bringing forward a series of unpopular policies – and her MPs have noticed.

And she has made a huge u-turn by caving in to pressure over energy costs.

She can’t be trusted to do what she says and she is ruining the economy.

Are Tory backbenchers willing to put up with this?

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Will Boris Johnson be tackled for ‘misleading’ House of Commons after Covid in care homes ruling?

Here’s something that happened after the end of the last Parliamentary session, but that should be raised in the new one.

More than 20,000 people died in care homes because of decisions made by Boris Johnson’s ministers (notably then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock).

Johnson made a statement in Parliament that ministers were not aware of asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 at the time they were ordering that care home residents in hospital should be sent back. The evidence shows it was false.

Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting claimed this was not true, highlighting a point of order raised by Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow leader of the House of Commons.

Speaking to MPs on Thursday, Ms Debbonaire claimed the government was provided with evidence at the beginning of 2020 that pointed to that asymptomatic transmission of the Covid virus.

“On 28 January 2020, advice from Sage on asymptomatic transmission included that ‘early indications imply some is occurring,’” she said. On 24 February, the Lancet published a paper finding that infected individuals can be infectious before they become symptomatic.

“On 13 March, Patrick Vallance told the Today programme that ‘it’s quite likely that there is some degree of asymptomatic transmission’. Yet it wasn’t until 15 April that the government’s guidance was changed to require patients were tested before being discharged to care homes.”

Ms Debbonaire said Johnson might have “inadvertently” misled the House of Commons, but This Writer disagrees.

Either he was briefed on asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19, or he deliberately chose to miss the briefings at one or several of the COBRA meetings that he skipped (due to laziness?) in early 2020. In any case, the responsibility to know the facts fell on Johnson.

Therefore, if he told the Commons that ministers didn’t know about asymptomatic transmission, he was deliberately choosing to mislead MPs. He should be challenged and he should resign.

Source: Boris Johnson accused of ‘misleading’ House of Commons after Covid in care homes ruling

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Wilfully lying to Parliament: here’s #BorisJohnson

After Ian Blackford was ordered out of Parliament in a shameful display by Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, let’s examine just one example in which Boris Johnson “wilfully misled” Parliament.

Here’s a video clip of him saying there was no party in Downing Street on November 13, 2020:

According to Sue Gray’s interim report on alleged Downing Street parties, the police are investigating one such event that happened in the flat where Johnson lives on that date.

The fact that police are investigating suggests very strongly that a party did take place there, and the fact that they are looking for criminal activity also suggests very strongly that the Covid-19 guidance (to which Johnson was referring in the clip) was not followed at all times.

As far as I’m aware, Johnson was not away from the UK at that time, so one presumes he slept in the flat on the night of November 13, 2020 – unless he fell asleep elsewhere in the building, during the party for the departure of Dominic Cummings.

Whichever, it seems clear that Johnson knew what was going on at the time, and would have known he was not telling the truth about it when he answered the question in Parliament.

That’s knowingly misleading MPs, which is an offence under the Ministerial Code.

Where’s his resignation?

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Truss tests positive for Covid-19. Good news for Ukraine; bad news for other Tories

Liz Truss: half a second after this image was captured, she coughed (no, not really).

Queen of Cheese Liz Truss has contracted Covid-19.

It means she will now be unable to visit Ukraine with Boris Johnson, halving the possibility of a major security leak and ensuring that her counterparts in the Ukrainian government won’t catch the disease – from her.

But her fellow Conservative MPs – including Boris Johnson, who is running away to eastern Europe (partly, I think, to get away from the wave of criticism, not just over Partygate but because he smeared Keir Starmer with a falsehood) may have reason to be disappointed in her.

Here is that reason:

This is what happens when you elect an incompetent prime minister who then surrounds himself with idiots in order to make unseating him unpalatable to the public.

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MPs’ Covid report highlights thousands of avoidable deaths. Families of the dead must demand justice

Doing a runner: many of us may have one or two metaphorical skeletons in our closet; Boris Johnson has fled the UK with the dead of Covid-19 pursuing him.

Now we know why Boris Johnson went on his holibobs so hastily. Tony (below) is being sarcastic:

But Samuel Miller is right:

The Covid Report by MPs is damning. It should lead to prosecutions of leading government ministers – including Johnson – for Corporate Manslaughter (at the very least).

It won’t, but it should.

Sadly, it seems the most we’ll get from the authorities is the long-promised public inquiry.

And when will that be?

On the other hand, we could have an avalanche of civil lawsuits!

Bring ’em on. I hope people group together to make the litigation more easily-affordable. The cases could be huge and the evidence damning.

And Johnson?

He’s staying out of the way until the fuss dies down because he knows if he shows his face around the UK, he’ll face demands for his resignation – from all sides:

You can read the report by the Commons Health and Social Care, and Science and Technology committees, here. And there are reports on the report here, here, here and here, and pretty much everywhere you look right now.

Among the report’s findings are:

Boris Johnson could have saved many thousands of people by taking the UK into lockdown earlier.

The government denies it:

Instead, Johnson caused a national disaster by pursuing a policy of herd immunity and mass infection:

Thousands of care home residents died because government ministers never bothered to think about their welfare in a serious way.

The Covid response was racist: white people had better PPE and other equipment than those from ethnic minorities.

 

The government still doesn’t care. It put up a minister to do the morning media round who had not even bothered to read the Covid-19 report before being asked to comment on it. The results were as you might expect:

Think that’s bad? Another minister blamed the high death toll on obesity rather than allow the government to accept any responsibility:

The excuses are beyond belief. Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt turned up, to say there was good amongst the bad:

They’re saying nobody publicly questioned the failure to lockdown soon enough (that led to 20,000 deaths). We don’t accept that:

They’re saying nobody warned them about the dangers of asymptomatic transmission:

And they all say they followed the scientific advice:

They say any criticisms are only made with the benefit of hindsight:

Oh, and of course they all did their best:

Let’s have another perspective:

The media seem to be trying to help the government evade responsibility:

And then we have someone who says he isn’t forgiving the government, despite having given it a free pass for the last 20 months:

Quick reminders:

Here’s some opposition. Ah, but the UK rejected him in favour of Boris Johnson in the 2019 election – going for the pandemic megadeath option. And then he resigned as Labour leader and the party voted in the absolute melt you saw in the video above…

People are coming to the end of their collective tether:

Oh, and the scandal is still going on:

I notice that Matt Hancock, who was Health Secretary throughout most of the worst mistakes of the Covid crisis, has been appointed UN special envoy to help Covid recovery in Africa. So he’s not likely to be in the UK for the foreseeable future.

Also, in the light of the sex scandal that triggered his ejection from the Cabinet, jokes about Hancock’s new missionary position are likely to proliferate.

So both Johnson and Hancock are away for the duration, and a proper inquiry is about as far away temporally as they are physically.

That brings us back to the possibility of litigation against the government for causing tens of thousands – if not more than 100,000 – preventable deaths.

This could really bring the UK back together – against the government that has failed us all so badly.

So get together, people – in your communities, with the care homes where many of your relatives and friends died, online – wherever you can build the strongest possible case against the inept-but-unaccountable fools who caused those deaths… and take your shot. It could be the most important thing any of us do.

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Three Labour MPs could defect to the Conservatives? Good! LET THEM.

Wishful thinking: we all know Keir Starmer is a closet Tory but it is unlikely that he is among the three Labour MPs allegedly planning to defect to the Conservatives.

Doesn’t it say everything about the Parliamentary Labour Party that Keir Starmer leads, that when its members plan to defect, they decide to go to the Tories?

No self-respecting Labour Party member would ever consider joining the Conservatives. Not if they ever had true Labour values – because Conservative values are poison to traditional Labour beliefs.

The fact that such people are Labour MPs shows just how bad the Tory entryism became under successive leaderships since Tony Blair – and what a shame it is that Jeremy Corbyn was unable to push through compulsory reselection.

These are people who are said to be despairing at Starmer’s failure to close the Conservatives’ lead in the opinion polls – despite the fact that his, and their own, attacks on Labour’s traditional, socialist, membership are directly responsible for this failure.

They are also said to be angry that Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner branded the Tories as “racists” and “scum”. Well, the racism is easily provable…

According to the Mail (sorry),

Party insiders conceded it would be a massive blow to Sir Keir’s already beleaguered leadership.

And it would: it would show that he prefers Conservatives to people with traditional Labour values, and it would suggest that there are far more closet Tories in the PLP.

So This Writer says: let the defections happen – the sooner the better.

With a bit of luck it will persuade other quislings to go back to their true home as well.

And then Labour can select some proper socialists to stand for – and win – their seats at the next general election, because we know voters are tribal.

I only wish one of them turned out to be Keir Starmer himself.

Source: Three Labour MPs could defect to the Conservatives because of Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership  | Daily Mail Online

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Starmer’s Tory-supporting crackdown on his own party makes him a danger to people with disabilities

[Image: @Rachael_Swindon on Twitter.]

Apologists for Keir Starmer who reckon he’s easing the way for Tory legislation to make them “own their mistakes” will have a hard time justifying this.

Starmer and his team are working behind the scenes to stop Labour MPs from criticising the Conservatives.

After significant rebellions against one-line Labour whips on the Overseas Operations Bill and the Covert Human Intelligent Sources Bill (the so-called ‘Spycops’ bill that allows government agents to commit crimes including murder, torture and rape), the whips office has broken party protocol to issue written reprimands to the rebels.

The letters stipulate a reprimand period of six months, to be extended to twelve if the recipient continues to break the whip.

They have been shared with Labour’s parliamentary committee – a group of backbench MPs elected by the parliamentary Labour party (PLP), and currently dominated by the right – which will determine whether to inform the MP’s constituency Labour party (CLP), as well as the party’s national executive committee (NEC).

This information could then be considered when an MP seeks reselection ahead of a general election.

“That’s the fear factor,” one MP told Novara Media. “This could impact your reselection [and] it might be over a one-line whip. It’s intimidation plain and simple.”

A number of those who received letters are seeking legal advice from union representatives, the MP added.

But that’s not all.

It seems someone in Starmer’s office has taken it upon themselves to water down criticism of the Tory government’s failure to protect people with disabilities by reducing the disability employment gap and mitigating the effect of the Covid-19 crisis on them, and in its new COVID-19 guidance for people placed in the “clinically extremely vulnerable” group.

Someone in the office of the shadow minister for people with disabilities, Vicky Foxcroft, sent a draft of her comments to John Pring of Disability News Service which differed significantly from the official version of her comments released by the Labour Party.

The changes include the removal of a reference to the “vital” role played by trade unions in protecting disabled people from discrimination, along with any reference to disability discrimination.

Read the DNS article and see for yourself. It states,

Responding to the new pandemic guidance… her official statement said that disabled people were just “anxious” rather than “extremely worried”. Her call for disabled people who might need to shield again needing to be “properly compensated and not left without enough money to survive” had vanished.

This represents a serious policy change from Labour – back to the indifference to anti-disability discrimination that marred the New Labour years and Ed Miliband’s leadership.

People with disabilities can no longer rely on Labour MPs to stand up for them because it seems the party leadership now supports the Tories’ campaign to punish them, just for existing.

Starmer seems determined to let Boris Johnson’s corrupt Tories do whatever they want – harm whoever they want – while threatening to sabotage the careers of anybody in his own ranks who dares to protest.

The big question is: What is to be done about this?

The union Unite has already cut its funding to the Labour Party by 10 per cent, and the decision to remove a supportive reference to trade unions from an official comment could be interpreted as an attack – or even a retaliation. Should that union – and others – cut support for Labour even more?

And what about constituency Labour parties? The threat to MPs – which includes sanctions that could lead to their deselection (to be replaced by right-wingers parachuted in by head office, no doubt – that was Tony Blair’s practice) – is also an indirect attack on the power of members to choose their representatives.

Will they act? Should they?

What do you think?

[polldaddy poll=10630099]

Source: Keir Starmer Has Launched an Unprecedented Crackdown on Rebel MPs | Novara Media

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