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Tory deputy chairmen resign to support rebel amendments to Rwanda Bill

Lee Anderson with his idol, Boris Johnson: it seems he may now try to remove one of Johnson’s successors as prime minister.

Has Rishi Sunak lost control?

It would seem so, after Tory Party deputy chairman Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith resigned in order to support rebel amendments to Sunak’s Rwanda Bill.

And Jane Stevenson, a parliamentary private secretary in the Department for Business and Trade, also confirmed she had offered her resignation after voting for the rebel amendments.

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This Site discussed the amendments and the reasons behind them here.

As far as This Writer can tell, the amendments they supported failed.

This suggests to me that they will want to vote the Bill down today (Wednesday, January 17, 2024) – as urged by former Home Secretary Suella Braverman. She, together with Robert Jenrick, who proposed the rebel amendments, has said she is prepared to vote against the bill if it is not improved.

More could join them and it has been reported that only 30 Tories need to join the Opposition for the Bill to be voted down.

If that happens, it could be treated as a ‘no confidence’ vote in Sunak’s leadership.

And that could mean the end of him. What then?


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More than a quarter of Labour MPs rebel against Starmer over Gaza vote

Keir Starmer: yet ANOTHER own goal.

Keir Starmer is looking for eight new junior ministers and two Parliamentary aides after a major rebellion within the Parliamentary Labour Party against his policy on the Gaza conflict.

Shadow ministers Jess Phillips, Afzal Khan, Yasmin Qureshi, Paula Barker, Sarah Owen, Rachel Hopkins, Naz Shah and Andy Slaughter left their roles after supporting an SNP motion for a ceasefire. Starmer had submitted a motion calling for “humanitarian pauses”.

Dan Carden and Mary Foy left posts as parliamentary aides.

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In all, 56 of the 198 Labour MPs voted for a ceasefire. 160 voted to support Starmer’s “humanitarian pauses”, meaning 18 supported both motions.

According to the BBC,

In a statement after the vote, Sir Keir said he regretted the vote of some of his party.

“I regret that some colleagues felt unable to support the position tonight. But I wanted to be clear about where I stood, and where I will stand”.

He said Israel had suffered “its worst terrorist attack in a single day” at the hands of Hamas on 7 October.

“No government would allow the capability and intent to repeat such an attack to go unchallenged,” he added.

But this is nonsense when compared with what Israel has actually done – which is killing more than 11,000 civilians including 4,500 children. There is no evidence that any of Hamas’s attack capability has been damaged.

The Labour rebels have also had a lot to say, both before and after the vote. See for yourself:

Others have also had their say:

Both motions were overturned – the ceasefire call by a margin of 294 votes against to 125 in favour, with the Conservatives providing the heaviest opposition. There was considerable response to these outcomes, also:

I wonder how many people have been killed in Gaza since the vote – on either side of the conflict. All those deaths should hang on the consciences of the MPs who voted for the killing to continue.


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These are SOME of the pressing issues Rishi Sunak is facing

Rishi Sunak and money: he’s not Chancellor any more but he is the richest man in Parliament. If he really knows how to bring in the readies, then the current crisis should be a cinch for him. Right?

He’s about to be installed as prime minister – but what is Rishi Sunak actually going to do?

Of course the pro pundits have been filling the airwaves with their opinions. Here’s a video:

Oh dear. We’re in recession already. As if those of us on the bottom rung of the economic ladder needed to know that!

But that’s just an economic analysis. There are other issues. Like this:

And there’s a huge trust issue to overcome:

How well do you think he’ll do?

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Ultimatum over NI protocol shows rebel Tories do have power. But how to express it?

A Democratic Unionist Party MP who warned rebel Conservative MPs not to oppose legislation on the NI Protocol as a way “to keep poking Boris Johnson in the eye” has admitted that the Tory rebels now have power to influence policy.

But how will they use it?

The plan to change the Protocol is hugely controversial in Northern Ireland and Liz Truss’s proposal to impose unilateral alterations – in defiance of the European Union – threatens to destabilise not only trade with EU nations but also the Good Friday Agreement that keeps the peace in the Province.

Sammy Wilson’s ultimatum may be premature as he hasn’t even seen the details of the changes Truss is proposing.

But he’s certainly right that Tory rebels should not be seen to oppose Boris Johnson’s policies merely to “keep poking Boris Johnson in the eye”.

This Writer has suggested that a better use of any power they have is to halt the inhumane policy to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda.

Any interference in Northern Ireland would merely muddy the issues without helping anybody at all – least of all the people of the UK.

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Tories don’t want a competent leader – they want a colourful one. Here’s Nadine Dorries

[Image: The Prole Star.]

This should make you quail over your coffee: Nadine Dorries could be the Conservative Party’s choice as its next leader after Boris Johnson is finally shifted out of Number 10 (possibly by using a large amount of Domestos).

Tory rebels trying to push Johnson out with a ‘no confidence’ vote earlier this week were hamstrung by the lack of alternative leadership candidates; Johnson has surrounded himself with fools and nonentities.

The problem was summed up by Hugo Gye of the I, who stated how one MP was scathing about every alternative leader, saying: “Rishi’s a blown flush as we all know. Liz Truss is monotone – you know she’s not planning a leadership challenge because she hasn’t done her hair this week. Tugendhat’s going around saying he should be prime minister but nobody else thinks so!”

The “monotone” issue will be the one that harms the Tories the most. They know Johnson can’t stay – like it or not, the confidence vote means he’s now nothing more than a caretaker PM until another may be found – but they also know they’ll sink if they can’t unite behind another “character”.

They think they need somebody with a big personality who can get the kind of strong reaction from everyone that Johnson won.

And here’s Nadine Dorries.

She certainly has a colourful history. A quick scan through her Wikipedia entry shows a controversy over whether she slept with another MP, a long-running issue over her expenses claims culminating in her vowing to campaign to change the system, and another controversy over the use of the House of Commons ‘Portcullis’ symbol on her blog – making it seem to have Parliamentary endorsement or authority when she herself admitted it was “70% fiction and 30% fact” (although she later withdrew that statement).

The Conservative Party suspended Dorries from the party whip in November 2012 after she announced that she would be appearing on TV’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! as a contestant. It seems she had not informed anybody that she intended to be absent from Parliament.

She regained the whip early the following year, after it was suggested that she would join UKIP otherwise – and shortly afterwards suggested that joint Conservative-UKIP candidates could stand in the next general election (an idea that Tory HQ swiftly dismissed).

In 2019, Boris Johnson appointed her to be a minister for mental health, despite the fact that she had published a disability hate tweet two years previously, describing Twitter trolls as “window lickin'”.

The phrase “window lickers” originated as a term of abuse for people with Down’s syndrome or cerebral palsy and now tends to be used as a term to attack disabled people in general.

In 2020, Dorries made an abortive attempt to discredit Labour leader Keir Starmer by sharing a misleading video created by far-right activists, claiming to show Starmer explaining “why he didn’t prosecute grooming gangs”, when in fact he was explaining why he implemented reforms as the Director of Public Prosecutions.

The account that originally posted the material had previously posted racist content, and commentators like This Writer questioned why Dorries (and other Tory MPs who shared this material) had anything to do with it in the first place.

As culture secretary, Dorries was desperate to appoint foul-mouthed far-right former Mail editor Paul Dacre as chairman of communications regulator Ofcom, even though the interview panel deemed him “not appointable”. Her response was an abortive attempt to change the conditions under which the appointment could be made.

Defending Boris Johnson over the Partygate scandal, Dorries tried to deflect attention by claiming that “we have won the war on Covid in this country”. Then she tried to defend Johnson’s indefensible repetition of the falsehood that Labour leader Keir Starmer refused to prosecute Jimmy Savile for child abuse (he didn’t have anything to do with the decision). A spoof video of the interview presented her as a Catherine Tate character, spouting the line “Am I bothered?” repeatedly.

In another TV interview, BBC news anchor Charlie Stayt was repeatedly confused by Dorries’s apparent inability to answer a single question about Johnson.

She’s colourful – you can’t deny it!

So it should come as no surprise that at least one member of the public has tipped her as Johnson’s replacement.

To the Tories, she must now seem a logical choice. She’s as controversial as Johnson. She’s certainly as crazed as he is. She shows not the slightest inclination to listen to anybody else and every sign that she’ll do whatever she pleases until such time as someone forces her attention toward any rules that constrict her.

She’s another lunatic for the public to get behind.

The only losers will be everybody in the UK who’ll have to live through yet another Conservative-driven disaster.

Will Tory rebels do something useful and stop the deportations to Rwanda?

Callous, immoral and possibly homicidal: Priti Patel announced the plan to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda in April.

There’s less than a week to go before Home Secretary Priti Patel sends the first flight of asylum seekers into exile in Rwanda.

Tory rebels who gave Boris Johnson a bloody nose with their strong response to a confidence vote in his leadership could stop it.

But will they?

There are plenty of reasons for them to do it.

The plan will break the 1951 Refugee Convention that has set the standard for the way that governments should deal with people fleeing persecution in other countries for more than 70 years.

Johnson and Patel have sidestepped the convention by ignoring the complex set of problems surrounding each asylum-seeker and refusing to accept that their arrival is to do with anything more than the criminal acts of people smugglers.

The roughly 100 men selected to be on the first flight have reacted in ways that are painful to learn: one group staged a five-day hunger strike; others have threatened suicide. At least two of those being sent out may not even be adults.

Charities including Freedom from Torture are taking legal action on grounds that the government is violating the refugee convention – and also acting irrationally in treating Rwanda as a “safe third country”.

The Home Office has acknowledged that there are grounds for concern about the way LGBTQ+ people are treated there.

And critics have correctly pointed out that Rwanda’s record on human rights is flawed.

Perhaps that is why Rwanda itself has created, and continues to create, countless refugees of its own, with at least 287,000 Rwandans – possibly as many as a million – having fled the regime of President Paul Kagame.

“Kagame is a stooge: he’s a conman of the West in dubious business including, now, human trafficking,” is how one such Rwandan exile [Etienne Mutabazi] describes the president and his £120m deal with the UK Government.

The Kagame regime is not content with creating exiles, though – and has been implicated in abducting and killing exiles across Africa for years.

Despite these facts, the UK and other Western governments are keen to send their asylum seekers into the care of the Kagame regime – from which many may become refugees for a second time, it seems.

“The West does not care because it’s not happening on its shores,” [Mutabazi] explained. “If you were caring, you wouldn’t negotiate [with Kagame]… [The deal] is immoral, unethical and illegal.”

And it isn’t even deterring refugees from coming to the UK, according to the latest figures.

About 9,000 people have arrived in the UK on small boats so far this year, almost half since the Rwanda policy was launched.

There are better ways of dealing with a refugee problem that, in the UK, is minute compared with that of other nations.

Tory backbench rebels would earn a huge amount of credibility by pushing Johnson into abandoning this lunatic cruelty and adopting sensible policies (some are suggested in the source article).

And they would be showing us that they do have the backbone to restrain the UK’s out-of-control prime ministerial maniac. But can they?

Source: The Guardian view on deportations to Rwanda: cut out the stunts

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After winning Tory vote, Boris Johnson vows to go straight – back to his bad old ways

Spite: instead of accepting responsibility for his failings and promising to do better, Boris Johnson is planning to suppress the rebels who humiliated him in a confidence vote.

He hasn’t learned anything at all from it and he certainly isn’t going to change.

Instead, Boris Johnson has told his Cabinet that they must suppress the row about his leadership after 41 per cent of his MPs said they had no confidence in him after the Partygate scandal.

The appropriate response would have been to accept that he had damaged his own image, to listen to criticisms and to change his behaviour – but Johnson was never going to do that.

He would have taken a single vote over the 50 per cent winning line as a glowing endorsement of his loutishness, and that is why – with only an extra 31 votes beyond that line – he has chosen to act exactly as he did before.

There will be no further reform to stop the rot in Downing Street and standards in Parliament will continue to decay under his diseased hand.

His sole response has been to tell Cabinet ministers to “draw a line” under the leadership row and get on with dealing with what he says people want.

So idiots like Dominic Raab have been going out to the media, saying there is no credible alternative to Boris Johnson’s leadership – which is grimly hilarious.

“There Is No Alternative” was a catchphrase of David Cameron’s government, that inflicted austerity on the UK – an austerity that still afflicts the country, by the way; none of his and George Osborne’s changes have been repealed.

In fact, of course, there were credible alternatives to the “Starve the Beast” economic policy that put the UK on its back during those bad days – and Osborne’s period as Chancellor is rightly derided by many economists.

And the Tory rebels haven’t gone away. After winning a larger proportion of the vote – from a larger Parliamentary contingent – than voted against Theresa May in 2018 (who, as everyone and their dog told us repeatedly yesterday, was out within six months of her own confidence vote), they are now agitating to change the 1922 Committee’s rules so that another confidence vote may happen sooner than in a year’s time.

In Parliament itself, the Liberal Democrats are tabling their own “no confidence” vote that would allow MPs from all parties a chance to vote on Johnson’s future as prime minister – but this is only likely to go forward if Labour gets behind it, and Keir Starmer is sitting on the fence again.

Starmer may see a tactical advantage in leaving Johnson where he is; Labour may win a general election against a prime minister who has been weakened by a confidence vote and by whatever failings he inflicts on the UK in the future (his new version of ‘right to buy’ will be one such disaster).

But of course the public is able to see such manoeuvrings for what they are: cynical politicking that ignores the good of the nation. How could we vote for the person behind it?

Looking further ahead, Johnson will face the humiliation of the expected by-election losses on June 23.

And then he will face investigation by a Parliamentary committee charged with ruling on whether he broke the Ministerial Code. If the finding goes against him, he’ll have to resign anyway.

And after his anti-corruption champion resigned yesterday, saying that this was because Johnson broke the Ministerial Code, it seems that result is already locked in.

Boris Johnson is on borrowed time and the best he can do now is try to salvage what little is left of his good name before slinking back into history’s shadows.

And he’s the only one who doesn’t seem to know it.

Johnson wanted us to think he was another Churchill. But he turned out to be more like Lord Haw-Haw.

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#BorisJohnson’s #PlanB is a shambles. No wonder #Covid19 is skyrocketing

Standoff: the Tory government is at war with its own backbenchers over new measures to minimise the effect of Covid-19, that have been in place and working in Wales for many months.

This Writer has received notification of a Covid-19 booster injection appointment.

It’s on December 29. I had expected December 20, six months after my second vaccination, and then when Boris Johnson announced that seven weeks of injections were going to be crammed into three, I joked that I should have mine on Thursday (December 16).

But it seems I should be grateful to be having one at all – the only reason for it being that I live in Wales.

This is the mess that Keir Starmer told the nation was his “patriotic duty” to support.

You have a serious think about that.

Johnson only managed to get his back-of-a-fag-packet ideas for dealing with Omicron passed in Parliament because Starmer helped him unreservedly.

He could have demanded important guarantees and life-saving additions – like the increase in Statutory Sick Pay that would have made it possible for working people to take time off if struck down by the new variant, but he didn’t.

And he could have demanded proper measures for schools, including ventilation, but he didn’t.

The new measures are pretty much what we in Wales have already.

But here there are administered properly. I’m looking forward with trepidation to the chaos and anger when people realise they’ll be forced to show Covid passes for events at large venues. If they’re upset at putting a piece of cloth over their faces in most indoor public places, then they’re just selfish (face masks primarily protect other people, remember).

I disagree with mandatory vaccination for all NHS frontline staff. What people put into their bodies must be a matter of personal choice and it is unforgivable that politicians are forcing people to choose between what they think is right for themselves and their job helping others.

Significant numbers of Conservative MPs rebelled against all of the new measures – 98 against Covid passes, 63 against mandatory vaccination of NHS staff and 38 against face masks in public places.

If they thought these things were bad ideas on Tuesday, wait until they see how poorly Johnson enforces them!

And, of course, anybody deliberately refusing to follow the new rules has a mandate from the prime minister himself – who flouts Covid regulations whenever he feels like it. I understand he addressed a packed meeting of Tory backbenchers – sans face mask – before yesterday’s votes.

And Covid-19 cases are skyrocketing again with nearly 60,000 new cases discovered on the day Parliament held its debate.

Ultimately, it seems likely that these measures – which are only being imposed now to distract us from the Tory government’s flagrant breaches of its own rules with huge parties last Christmas while people were dying in their hundreds every day – will only increase calls for Johnson to quit politics, never to return.

That day can’t come soon enough.

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#Tories plan revolt against #BorisJohnson over #PlanB – but he’ll be propped up by #STARMER

Good buddies: once again, Keir Starmer is telling Labour to help Boris Johnson out of a mess that the prime minister created. He doesn’t care that his job is to OPPOSE Johnson’s corrupt, lying government.

As the old saying goes, there’s no smoke without fire – and if a prime minister is trying to put up a smokescreen, then it’s our duty to examine what’s on the other side, rather than blithely let him have his way.

What’s surprising today is the fact that it is Conservative members of Parliament who are rebelling against Boris Johnson for that reason.

They reckon his ‘Plan B’ Covid-19 restrictions, announced on Wednesday, are just a rather vain attempt to distract us all away from the fuss over a series of parties now alleged to have taken place in Whitehall and/or Downing Street while the rest of us were locked down and separated from our loved ones as they died with the virus at a rate of around 500 a day.

We shouldn’t be too surprised, though; many Tories have consistently pushed the view that Covid-19 should not be allowed to interfere with the national economy and they think any restrictions will have an effect. Nightclub owners have already said they’ll have to close so there is weight to these claims.

For our purposes as seekers of the facts, though, it doesn’t matter. They can do the right thing for the wrong reasons if they want. The result should be the same.

So we should welcome claims by Tory MPs that they may undermine Johnson’s ‘Plan B’ when it comes to Parliament next week, not on public health grounds – that it is not needed – but because they think he’s only doing it to get himself off the hook.

We could see which way the wind was blowing when Sajid Javid stood up to give a statement in the Commons about the proposed measures on Wednesday evening – and was immediately greeted, from behind him (it was Tory William Wragg), with the call, “Resign!”

When Javid protested that the decision to impose them was not taken lightly, another Tory shouted, “What a load of old tripe!”

These Tories had been led to believe that Johnson and Javid had decided to wait for further information on Covid’s Omicron variant on Tuesday, but the prime minister had hastily changed his mind when the video of Allegra Stratton laughing about the party in Downing Street on December 18 last year went public.

Johnson’s insistence that the increased transmissibility of Omicron meant he had to act – and he could no longer wait for the data he had previously said was needed on how serious the threat from the new variant was – seems unbelievable when one understands that the only change between his decisions was the release of the video clip.

According to The Guardian, many of these Tories were now saying they had “grave doubts about their own credibility with the public” as a result of the about-face and the apparent reason for it.

And they’re saying they will not help Johnson and Javid legitimise it at a retrospective vote on Tuesday (December 14) – either because of the scandal or because they don’t believe the rationale, which comes to the same thing if you think about it.

Tory MP Marcus Fysh said he would vote against the plan for Covid passports because they were a “massive imposition on our liberties” that should not be imposed “without absolutely crystal-clear need and evidence”.

William Wragg (him again) suggested the announcement was a diversion from allegations about parties at Number 10.

Former chief whip Mark Harper questioned why people should listen to the government and follow the rules “when people inside Number 10 Downing Street don’t do so”.

Steve Baker, a former minister and prominent critic of lockdown restrictions, has urged the “maximum number of MPs” to vote against Plan B measures.

Outside Parliament, the chairman of South Basildon Conservatives has resigned live on BBC Essex. Charlie Sansom said, “I cannot morally defend a party that I consider to be moving in a very tyrannical direction.”

In all, around 22 Tories have said they’ll oppose ‘Plan B’ for varying reasons – but this is not enough to stop it or undermine Boris Johnson and his lies, for one very good reason.

Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is going to support it.

‘Plan B’ doesn’t make any sense in its own right – businesspeople who’ll be affected by the new measures say they are contradictory (the classic is the distinction between restrictions at social venues that can hold more than 500 people and none at those with lower capacity. People are asking why ministers think Covid-19 will turn away from the smaller places) and will do little or nothing to stop the spread of the virus in any of its forms.

But Starmer is whipping Labour to support it.

It is a clear opportunity to rid the UK of a lying, corrupt prime minister who poisons everything he touches and who will continue to destroy the fabric of UK society if allowed to do so.

But Starmer is whipping Labour to support him.

It’s more evidence, as if any were needed, that Starmer is as bad a chancer, as much an opportunist, as Johnson.

He is happy to let Johnson continue destroying the UK and its people because he thinks Johnson will be easier to defeat in a general election than anyone who might replace him now – and the rest of us can go to Hell for the sake of his career.

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Will Tories rebel against extension of English lockdown to July 19?

Staying closed: many businesses may be forced to remain closed for a further four weeks – unless Tory backbenchers ruin Boris Johnson’s plans. But will he welcome that?

Well, there it is.

Boris Johnson is expected to announce an extension to the English lockdown, meaning most remaining restrictions won’t be lifted until July 19.

There are good grounds to do so:

Many scientists have called for the reopening to be delayed to enable more people to be vaccinated and receive second doses, amid rising cases of the Delta variant.

A delay would also allow more work to be done on whether vaccines are breaking, or simply weakening, the link between infections and hospitalisations.

But it is possible that the plan will face resistance – from Conservative backbenchers who are sick of the demand that we all wear masks when we go out, observe social distancing and keep some businesses closed, harming the economy.

On the last point, the BBC provides these examples:

If the lifting of restrictions is pushed back, the UK Weddings Taskforce – an industry group – estimates that 50,000 weddings planned in the four weeks from 21 June could be cancelled, with the industry losing £325m for every week of delay.

UKHospitality, which represents pubs, bars and restaurants, said businesses faced losing £3bn in sales if the relaxation of restrictions is delayed by a month.

The Night Time Industries Association said businesses such as nightclubs had already spent millions preparing to reopen, and the association will legally challenge any delay to reopening.

But the BBC also reports that projections based on the current trend show that if the current rate of increase continues, there could be 15,000 new cases per day – at least – by June 21. That’s double the number on June 13.

Ignoring that could be a public relations disaster for Johnson, who has been vilified as a dimwit for failing to acknowledge the warnings and delaying previous lockdowns, thereby assuring the deaths of thousands of people who might otherwise have avoided infection.

Still, collective responsibility for such recklessness is better for Johnson than having the blame piled on his shoulders alone, so he may welcome a vote that defeats his extension plan.

After all, how many of you will remember if your MP votes to end lockdown too soon? How many of you will even check what your MP does?

Source: Covid: Lockdown easing in England to be delayed by four weeks – BBC News

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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