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Oliver Dowden made multiple false claims at PMQs last week. And now?

Oliver Dowden: if he had done this, he might have suffered less reputational damage than he undoubtedly will after today’s Deputy PMQs fiasco.

As Oliver Dowden commenced on his second Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions in as many Wednesdays, This Writer filed the following opinion:

He has form.

Last week, the website Left Foot Forward devoted an entire article to falsehoods told by Dowden. It stated:

Full Fact, the campaigns team of independent fact checkers, issued two corrections… Firstly, was a claim by Dowden that the NHS waiting lists are ‘coming down’. Whilst some waiting lists, such as patients waiting over 18 months for a treatment, have fallen, the overall number of cases of waiting in England are at a record high.

He repeated this lie today (July 12) – and yes, it is a lie. Last week he could have got away with saying he didn’t know the information was wrong, but now he can’t.

Secondly the fact checkers pulled up on another claim made by Dowden that the government had been ‘cutting taxes’ for national living wage earners by doubling the personal allowance.

Citing a similar claim made by the deputy prime minster last month, where he said minimum wage earners had seen a £1,000 reduction in their tax, the campaign organisation highlighted that on both occasions this was potentially misleading as Dowden failed to make it clear that this was based on a counterfactual estimate.

Whilst minimum wage earners are paying less tax this year than they would have since 2010 if tax thresholds had gone up in line with inflation, that doesn’t mean the amount they pay has actually decreased compared to 2010.

So it’s a load of jargon, and it seems the deputy PM doesn’t understand it. What can we expect? He’s a person of very little brain.

Labour MP Lisa Nandy also took to Twitter to fact check the deputy MP on two points. First was his claim that his government had built more council houses, which she referenced to an article which cites official government data showing how 161,577 social rent homes had been completed since 2010. Compared to 362,912 between 1997 and 2010.

That’s a straightforward falsehood, then.

Next the deputy PM said that, under his government, record numbers of housing had been being built.

Nandy referred to figures this year that showed planning application in England had actually fallen to their lowest level in at least 16 years.

Furthermore, the Home Builders Federation has predicted England’s housebuilding levels will soon fall to their lowest since the second world war.

That’s a straightforward falsehood, then!

To round it off, the Deputy PM was called out during points of order refereeing to a claim he make on the 7th June, when he said the Labour Party’s plan to invest £28 billion in green energy would add £1,000 more to people’s mortgages. Dowden apparently made the claim a day after the Daily Mail reported this figure, but he said it came from treasury analysis.

However, the treasury has admitted that the figure did not come from their analysis and was forced to make the admission that this was not true. The statistics authority was unable to find any official source for the figure after investigation.

So that’s five falsehoods from last week and two (so far) – including one outright lie – from today (July 12, 2023).

How many more will the fact checkers find?

Source: Tory Deputy Leader slammed over multiple false claims during PMQs – Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK’s progressive debate


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Labour’s tuition fee u-turn: ‘circumstances may change but principles shouldn’t’

The excuses man: we can use this image again because all of the excuses in it are short-term issues. Starmer’s justifying his u-turns by saying circumstances change… but policies should not. Otherwise we don’t know what Starmer’s party stands for, what it will do, or even whether it intends to represent us.

Good for Good Morning Britain for hammering StarmerLabour’s latest two-faced u-turn!

To recap: After giving a solemn commitment (a pledge) to abolish tuition fees in 2020, Keir Starmer has u-turned, saying the financial situation has changed and Labour now has to prioritise its plans:

GMB‘s Susanna Reid, interviewing Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, made the point that “circumstances may change, but principles should not” – adding (alongside co-presenter Martin Lewis) that Starmer has dropped many more of the original 10 pledges he used to get himself elected as Labour leader (This Writer is fairly sure he’s dropped them all by now):

So StarmerLabour is also LyingLabour. I used to correct people who accused his party by calling it “Liebour” but he has made them right.

He paid for it in Prime Minister’s Questions on May 3, when the Westminster leader of the SNP (!), Stephen Flynn, put the boot in – much to Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak’s joy:

Contrast that with the politics of Jeremy Corbyn, who was ousted as leader after a concentrated, years-long, campaign against him by members of his own party who support Starmer now:

One more point: Changing circumstances don’t need to affect government policy. The Covid crisis and the war in Ukraine have happened, sure – but they are temporary; short-term. Government policy should be long-term.

Political plans should be made in ways that accommodate unexpected developments; they need to represent a coherent political position for which each party stands.

Changing policy on a whim, as Starmer does, puts the electorate on shifting sands. What does Starmer really want to do? Who does he represent?

I don’t know the answer to either of those questions but I know two things:

He doesn’t want to do anything for me. And he certainly doesn’t represent me.


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Out of touch Tory Dominic Raab can’t get Paul O’Grady’s name right

UK Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab showed he was so out-of-touch he couldn’t even get late comedian Paul O’Grady’s name right – while paying tribute to him during Prime Minister’s Questions.

He compounded the offence by adding an unnecessary attack on ‘woke’ comedy:


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Quick review of PMQs: Sunak has to break out the ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ excuse AGAIN

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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Zara Aleena probation failings not political says Tory boy Bowie – but they are

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 fails to answer why he helped a sanctioned Russian warlord

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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200 asylum-seeking children go missing – Tory MP says they should not have come to UK illegally

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:

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Prime Ministers Questions November 23 2022

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was grilled on Scottish Independence and the forthcoming recession – and as usual provided few answers.

I was live-tweeting during the session, and my comments look like this:

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Prime Minister’s Questions – November 9 2022 [VIDEO]

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 nailed over peerages for lockdown partygoers

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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