Tag Archives: Robert

Watch this junior doctor shred Tory claims about strikes

The Tory government’s policy on strike action by junior doctors was shredded into mincemeat when health minister Rachel Maclean tried to argue it out with Dr Robert Laurenson, co-chair of the British Medical Association’s Junior Doctors’ Committee on the BBC’s Politics Live (June 14, 2023).

Challenged over whether junior doctors should begin a strike in a heatwave, he pointed out that the NHS is in crisis whether in a heatwave or not – and specialist staff were in place to handle any respiratory issues (for example).

He pointed out to the government minister, whose salary has remained stable up to the present day, that her government has cut pay for junior doctors, repeatedly, for the past 15 years.

This is in line with overall pay stagnation across the UK since 2005, that has been reported recently. Tories like Ms Maclean have presided over the longest period of pay stagnation since Napoleonic times, while making decisions that made inflation skyrocket. Ms Maclean had claimed that pay is rising and this is not true.

The housing minister said strikes must be called off for talks to continue, but Dr Laurenson pointed out that this is not practical for junior doctors – they would be disarming and putting themselves in a position where the government could simply continue to cut pay, year on year.

The government didn’t even recognise the full recommendations of the “supposedly” independent pay review body that said without addressing junior doctor pay there would be a significant impact on patient safety, not because of strikes but because of the effect on productivity and staff retention, said Dr Laurenson.

Challenged over whether it was practical to give junior doctors the 35 per cent rise that would replace all the pay they had lost, he said it’s an increase from £14 per hour to £20 per hour, which is not a huge hike.

And when MPs have managed to keep their own already-high pay at parity with its level in 2010, they don’t have a leg to stand on.

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Robert Jenrick banned from driving for six months after he was caught speeding

Robert Jenrick on one of his many media appearances: if he has to travel for any in the future, he’ll have to turn them down.

Immigration minister Robert Jenrick has been banned from driving for six months and fined more than £1,600 after he was caught breaking the speed limit on the M1, following an appearance on the BBC’s Any Questions.

The Tory MP for Newark was recorded driving his Land Rover at 68mph in a temporary 40mph zone on the M1 southbound in Northamptonshire on August 5 last year, after appearing on the radio show at Wakefield Cathedral in West Yorkshire.

Jenrick admitted the offence in February and said in a letter to the court that he “sincerely apologised”.

He was fined £1,107 and ordered to pay a £442 victim surcharge and £90 in costs, the Courts and Tribunals Service centre said.

Ironically, the case was heard in private under the single justice procedure at Northampton magistrates court yesterday (April 4). The procedure was introduced by the Tory government for minor offences, to clear a backlog in the judicial system.

Members of the press and public were unable to attend, but that didn’t help Jenrick as the details were already known and it was possible to get the result from the CTS.

So he came clean in a statement in which he claimed that he had not realised that a variable speed limit was in operation.

That doesn’t clear him of the fact that he’s habitual: In March last year Jenrick was fined £307 and handed three penalty points for breaking a 40mph speed limit on the A40 in west London in August 2021.

It won’t affect his work; undoubtedly he’ll have the use of a ministerial car if he needs it.

But it might curtail extra-curricular activities like media appearances. That’s a small mercy for which we should all be grateful.

Source: Robert Jenrick banned from driving for six months for speeding | Robert Jenrick | The Guardian

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The chairman of NatWest understands the problems facing the UK – why can’t Rishi Sunak?

Rishi Sunak: the economy is beyond the understanding of this former Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is now the UK’s prime minister.

This Writer is guilty of terrible omissions in my political viewing habits; I keep forgetting Robert Peston’s interview show.

This week, he was talking to Howard Davies, chairman of NatWest, along with Labour’s John McDonnell and Ruth Davidson of the Conservatives, and it was Mr Davies who proved most interesting.

He laid into former PM Liz Truss, who has claimed she was brought down by a mythical “left-wing establishment”:

His words were supported by Mr McDonnell, who explained how he had planned for a future Labour government in 2017 and 2019 by liaising with the relevant economic movers and shakers in order to be sure that everybody knew what he was planning. He considered Truss’s failure to prepare as “incompetent”:

Mr Davies also described the economic levers that he believed were tipping the UK into recession – including Brexit, despite Tory claims to the contrary:

And he said although the recession was likely to be shallow, it would be hard to bring it to an end because the government has no plans to do so:

This is unsurprising. If a government refuses to accept the reasons for recession (like Brexit), then it is unlikely to be able to plan a successful way out.

But that leaves the question: if Howard Davies can recognise the problems, why can’t Rishi Sunak?

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Does anybody STILL believe Labour’s lies about Jeremy Corbyn and anti-Semitism?

Laughter: it’s the only sane response left to the wild nonsense spouted by Liz Kendall and the rest of the Starmer-Labour mob.

ITV’s Robert Peston opened a can of worms when he invited Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Kendall onto his TV show.

Mr Corbyn has been treated disgracefully by the Labour Party, having been suspended from its Parliamentary membership by current leader Keir Starmer on the basis of a flimsy falsehood about anti-Semitism. Kendall is a senior member of Starmer’s team, who promotes that falsehood.

You can hear her doing it in this clip:

Kendall had the lion’s share of attention there, so let’s have a balancing view (look out for the strong language):

For those of you who have a milder disposition:

Let’s have a think about what she was saying. Failure to apologise? What’s this then?

Note that Mr Corbyn said he accepted EHRC report, and the Forde Report showed the scale of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was as Corbyn said:

Additionally:

She’s proud that Starmer has changed Labour. But what did she mean by “firm action”? Well…

“The “firm action” @Keir_Starmer has taken – which Liz Kendal is so proud about – is to expel dozens of left-wing Jews from @UKLabour, making it more antisemitic than it ever was with Jeremy Corbyn as leader,” tweeted “Oliver”.

Why did she talk about the Armed Forces and pride in the UK? ‘George SUROS Regime’ tweeted: “Quite frankly I am amazed that Jeremy Corbyn would appear on this tv show when Peston himself would be aware that Corbyn has apologised time and time again. Liz Kendall suddenly shifting the goalposts from antisemitism to “armed forces” was an incredibly dumb move.”

And why did she twist his words, trying to make it seem as though he’d said that the evil of anti-Semitism was exaggerated?

Mr Corbyn has won praise for his dignified response to Kendall’s tirade:

And there has been a huge backlash against Kendall online:

“People like her are the reason I didn’t vote before Jeremy Corbyn became leader, and why I won’t vote for them now,” tweeted Andrew Stephen. “Utterly horrendous and extremely unpleasant individual who’s personality won’t allow her to give a flying duck about anyone but herself.”

‘Sharon’ tweeted: “One duplicitous lady. The fact that Jeremy Corbyn still bothers them, shows that they know full well what they did was dishonest and has led to all this turmoil we are now facing.”

(For the sake of balance, I should point out that some have tweeted in support of Kendall.)

But why bring back this old debate at all? It is months since the Forde Report confirmed that factionalism within Labour had killed the party’s chance of winning an election with Jeremy Corbyn as leader, and anti-Semitism was one of the sticks used to beat him at that time. There’s no current news that justifies bringing this back.

So is it just a ‘dead cat’ – a distraction to take attention away from other news?

Well, there’s this…

… and this…

… and this:

It’s a flawed strategy, if the aim is to paint Jeremy Corbyn and socialists as villains. Remember: he was right about many of the Tory-created crises facing the UK now.

For example, the tweet by Dan Hodges, below, hasn’t aged well:

And just because he’s been booted off the Labour benches by Starmer and his bullies, that doesn’t mean Mr Corbyn has gone quiet. You can see what he’s doing in a few online shows coming up soon:

What do you think? A dead cat? Or is there more behind this? Perhaps there’s something coming that we’re yet to discover?

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Tories line up to challenge Liz Truss over benefits and inflation

Robert Halfon: He’s supporting benefit uprating in line with inflation.

After Penny Mordaunt told Liz Truss she should honour a promise to uprate social security benefits in line with inflation, other Tories are lining up to support her.

Here’s Robert Halfon, saying Truss should not effectively cut benefits in order to pay for her tax cuts for the very rich:

If you didn’t catch what Mordaunt said, it was in an interview with Times Radio, which you can see here:

This Writer has tweeted on the subject (of course):

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The Castex letter DIDN’T say the UK should be punished. Kuenssberg was WRONG

Laura Kuenssberg: by publicising an apparent mistranslation of a letter by the French Prime Minister, she has caused a major international political row. Can she even read French?

The BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, misrepresented a letter on the UK/EU fishing row by French Prime Minister Jean Castex – apparently to stoke international tensions on the eve of the G20 and COP26 summits.

The UK and France are sabre-rattling over rights to fish in each other’s waters, after the UK prohibited some French trawlers over a technicality.

Kuenssberg aggravated the row by publicising a letter from Castex to European Commission President Ursula van der Leyen, claiming it said the EU needed to demonstrate that there was “more damage to leaving the EU than remaining there”.

This is based on a translation publicised by Alex Wickham of Politico. In tweets, he claimed the letter said:

“It is indispensable to demonstrate to European public opinion that more damage is suffered by leaving the EU than by remaining.”

The implication is that the EU should actively punish the UK.

An alternative translation by Edwin Hayward states the following:

“The UK’s uncooperative stance today threatens to cause great harm not only to fishermen, especially the French, but also to them [European] Union as it sets a precedent for the future and challenges our credibility and our ability to enforce our rights in relation to the international commitments signed by the union.

“It therefore seems necessary for the European Union to show its full determination to achieve full respect for the Agreement by the United Kingdom and to exercise its rights in a firm, cohesive and proportionate manner using the levers at its disposal.

“It is important to make it clear to European public opinion that respect for commitment is non-negotiable and that leaving the union does more harm than staying there.

“If a satisfactory solution is not found in this context, the European Union must apply Article 506 of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement and take corrective measures proportionate to the economic and social damage that [violations] will cause.”

That makes it a little different, once it’s put into context!

As Hayward states in his own article,

It should be immediately clear from the above text that there is no active intent to punish the UK. All the French want to do is to highlight the problems that Brexit has been causing — they are not trying to inflict new ones on us.

And people know:

(He means “…can’t be as advantageous as being IN” of course.)

Robert Peston said in his tweet that Boris Johnson has swallowed the Wickham translation and is “visibly angry” about the letter. But is he?

If Johnson is as well-educated as he’s supposed to be (Eton and Oxford) then it is entirely possible that he can read French for himself and knows exactly what the letter said. If so, then he is simply trying to manipulate a situation created by reporters (who probably can’t – with apologies to Kuenssberg and Peston if they turn out to be fluent, but that just implies that they know they’re peddling falsehoods and don’t care either).

This Writer, as a journalist and editor of nearly 28 years’ standing, agrees with Marcus Chown, below:

Indeed. Or indeed any journalist-training organisation such as the one that taught me (the National Council for the Training of Journalists). Where did Peston and Kuenssberg get their qualifications?

Actually, let’s check.

Kuenssberg, it seems, has no qualification as a journalist. She studied History at the University of Edinburgh, then spent a year studying (but the subject is not clarified) at Georgetown University in Washington DC, where she interned at the NBC News political programme. Returning to the UK, she eventually joined the BBC as a trainee journalist – but that doesn’t mean she was doing any training. ‘Trainee’ is just the name applied to a working reporter who hasn’t passed the test to become a Senior Reporter. If she was trained in the States, it was in an American standard of reporting.

Peston’s degree at Oxford was Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He then studied at the Université libre de Bruxelles – but again, it’s not clear what the subject was. He entered journalism via another back door, writing for the Investors Chronicle after being a stockbroker.

Those details aren’t very reassuring!

But it shouldn’t be up to the Kuenssbergs, Pestons, or even the Johnsons of this world to sort out this row. It’s a matter for the French.

All Jean Castex has to do is come out and read the relevant part of his letter, along with a translation into English saying exactly what he intended it to say.

That should end any ambiguity. How about it?

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Bent Bob Jenrick won’t be making any more dodgy decisions on housing developments

Jenrick and Johnson: both had personal connections with property developer Richard Desmond. It has been suggested that Jenrick only stayed in his post after the Westferry scandal broke because Johnson also had a hand in the decision.

Robert Jenrick, the Tory Housing Secretary best-known for fiddling an inner-London development in order to deprive the local council of a huge fee, has been kicked out of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet – and not a moment too soon.

Not only did he override both the local planning authority and the Independent Planning Inspectorate to grant planning permission for Richard Desmond’s controversial Westferry development, despite it having been found not to meet acceptable planning standards…

… but he did it to allow the developer to avoid paying a £45 million levy to Tower Hamlets Council that he had decided should not apply – and then used that as his reason for granting the application.

Text messages between Desmond and Jenrick show the former Express newspaper owner and pornographer pressured the minister to grant planning permission, saying: “We don’t want to give Marxists loads of doe [sic] for nothing!”

He broke Covid-19 lockdown rules to travel between his three homes – and then insisted that young people should adhere to restricts, even though there was no evidence to suggest they did not.

He corruptly induced a fellow MP to approve a grant for his constituency totalling £237 per person recently – but negotiated Covid-19 support for the people of Manchester down to £7.95 per person.

So it is undoubtedly good that Boris Johnson has finally had the guts to kick Jenrick out of the Cabinet.

The only question is, why did it take so long?

Was it because Johnson himself was also involved in helping Desmond? I guess we may never know.

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Buckland judged unworthy – but plan to put government above the law lives on

Robert Buckland: he had one job – to put Boris Johnson above the law.

Robert Buckland has become the second Cabinet member to be sacked in Boris Johnson’s reshuffle.

If you can’t place the name, he used to be Justice Secretary and has been behind the plan to ensure the courts will not be able to stop Johnson’s Tory Government from breaking the law in the future.

The idea is to restrict the courts’ powers of judicial review to prevent them from examining government legislation and deciding whether it conforms with the law – or breaks it.

It would give Johnson the ability to do anything he wants – by making sure the rest of us have no legal power to stop him.

Johnson was deeply embarrassed by judicial reviews that overturned his decisions to mismanage Brexit and to prorogue Parliament, back in 2019, and it seems this is the entirely selfish motivation behind the proposed law.

MPs from every party apart from the Conservatives have pointed out that the plan is based on a lie by Johnson and his government that a panel led by Lord Faulks QC had found that courts in judicial review cases had become more prone “to edge away from a strictly supervisory jurisdiction”.

Faulks himself has contradicted this Tory lie. He said his panel did not identify any such “trend” and “was not ultimately convinced that judicial review needed radical reform”.

The plan to put the government above the law has been condemned by the  Bar Council, Law Society, Constitutional and Administrative Law Association, Liberty, Justice and the Public Law Project for the same reason.

The Ministry of Justice – and therefore Buckland, as the Secretary of State, responded: “We made a manifesto commitment to ensure the judicial review process is not open to abuse or delay, or used to conduct politics by another means.” Fine words that are not borne out by the substance of the plan.

So we are losing a Justice Secretary who wanted to put injustice at the heart of Tory government decision-making. But is Johnson only replacing one such character with somebody worse?

ADDITIONAL: As I was typing this story, it was announced that Dominic Raab has been demoted from Foreign Secretary to Justice Secretary. It seems likely to This Writer that this is in order to push through the plan to put Johnson above the law more quickly.

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What is Jenrick really saying by telling us masks may be a ‘personal choice’ after July 19?

Robert Jenrick: he announced the change in policy on Andrew Marr’s BBC show. That look on his face is known as ‘duper’s delight’ and indicates that he thinks he’s making fools of us all.

It seems to me that our slippery Tory government is trying to change the rules of its own lockdown easement – again.

Robert Jenrick has said England is going to move into a period where legal restrictions related to Covid-19 will be relaxed, meaning that decisions on whether to consider following them – like wearing masks – will become a matter of personal choice.

Does that seem like pre-emptive blame-shifting to you?

Boris Johnson is determined to lift social distancing restrictions on July 19 – and to make the changes irrevocable.

Logically, the only time at which such a choice is reasonable would be when the risk of contracting Covid has become negligible.

Jenrick’s comment suggests that this will not be the case. His suggestion that people will exercise “personal responsibility” in their choice of whether to wear a mask or note means the government is passing the buck.

If people remove their masks en masse and the number of Covid cases increases, then he, Johnson and all the other Tories will blame the rest of us, rather than admit that their own decision to lift lockdown was at fault.

It’s a low-down, dirty trick – and they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.

If they lift the legal requirement to wear a face mask in public from July 19, then that must only mean that medical evidence dictates it is safe to do so…

… because I, for one, am desperate to get rid of the bloody masks and I know that most people feel the same way. If the government says it’s allowed, they’ll put the rags in the rubbish whether it’s safe or not.

So we need to make it clear:

If the government removes the requirement to wear a mask on July 19, then it must make it perfectly clear that it is because the government considers it safe to do so.

Any rise in Covid infections may then be – correctly – attributed to Tory policy.

Don’t let Jenrick or any other Tory stooge try to push responsibility for the pandemic onto you.

Source: Covid-19: Masks will become personal choice, says Robert Jenrick – BBC News

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Denial of ‘surge’ vaccination suggests Tory Covid-19 response is now politically biased

Mealy-mouthed: Jenrick said he was following scientific advice by denying “surge” vaccinations to Greater Manchester. But isn’t it more accurate to say he is starving a Labour-voting area of the help it needs?

Would they have said “no” if Greater Manchester had a Conservative mayor?

That is the question that should be on everybody’s lips after Tory minister (and he’s as corrupt as they come) Robert Jenrick rejected GM mayor Andy Burnham’s call for “surge” vaccinations in his metropolitan area, where there has been a significant increase in Covid-19 cases.

Jenrick said: “We are going to stick with the advice we have received from the JCVI, our advisers, which say that it is better to continue to work down the age categories on a national basis, rather than adopt a regional or geographical approach.

“Their advice has served us well so far as a country, they have got the big calls right since the start of the vaccine rollout.”

Oh really?

In that case, why are Covid-19 cases on the increase in the UK yet again, boosted by the rise of a variant that probably would not have had nearly as large an effect if vaccination doses had been delivered on the timescale advised by the manufacturers?

For example, The Writer had the first Astrazeneca jab on April 4 and – according to the government – should receive the second dose between eight and 12 weeks later. I’m now in the middle of the 10th week since that injection and haven’t heard a whisper about a second inoculation.

Burnham’s call has won approval from the public:

And Jenrick’s dismissal of Burnham is being treated as political favouritism:

Others have suggested that the Tories simply don’t care about the North (ex-Red Wall Tory voters please take note).

In a rational society, when there is a pandemic infection with a vaccine available, inoculations would be concentrated in areas with increased cases of the disease.

But we don’t live in a rational society. We live in one that is run by Tories.

They do not understand or care about Covid-19 and its effects on the stock (which is what they call you).

They are simply going through the motions in order to appear to be acting competently.

And if they can use a fatal disease to reduce support for their main political rivals, then they are low enough to do that.

Source: Ministers reject Burnham demand for surge vaccination in Greater Manchester – LabourList

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