Tag Archives: scrap

Anti-Labour labels appear at shops linked to donors after Starmer scrapped Palestine recognition plan

Has anybody else seen this?

A friend has sent This Site a few images of altered labels at shops whose owners are known to be Labour Party donors, after Keir Starmer u-turned on recognising Palestinian statehood.

The image above was taken at a branch of Sainsburys, one would conclude.

Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!

They’ve done a bit of research and have located a template for these rogue labels, which you can see here.

Although I understand such campaigns have been carried out to good effect on peak shopping days in the past, it would be hugely irresponsible for This Writer to suggest using these labels as the basis of your own campaign

So I won’t.


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Cruel Britannia is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The Livingstone Presumption is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Rishi Sunak shows his true colours – scraps ‘Minister for Disabled People’

[Image: Black Triangle Campaign].

The leader of the Tory government has decided that there is no more need for a minister looking after the interests of people who are disabled.

Rishi Sunak’s decision flies in the face of what is needed; disabled people are in more danger now than they have ever been.

Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!

But here it is:

“Retrograde” is right. Here’s what they’re saying:

[Scope] director of strategy, James Taylor, who described the move as appalling and retrograde, added: “What kind of message does this give to Britain’s 16 million disabled people? That in the middle of a cost of living crisis we are now less important?”

Mims Davies has been appointed minister for disabled people, but she remains a parliamentary undersecretary of state rather than becoming a minister of state, which Labour described as a “downgrade” of the post.

Vicky Foxcroft, the Labour MP and shadow minister for disabled people, said it was “outrageous it took the government so long to finally agree to appoint a minister for disabled people”.

She said: “When they finally do, they have demoted the role to parliamentary undersecretary of state and the role was previously minister of state. Disabled people deserve better than this.”

And here’s what the rest of us are saying:

A general election is coming. It might be next May, it might be next December. Or January the following year. But it is on its way.

16 million disabled people might change the fortunes of every political party taking part in that election.

All they need is the will to do it – and this might give it to them.


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Cruel Britannia is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The Livingstone Presumption is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Rishi Sunak’s big conference announcement is that the Tories’ flagship project is a failure

Rishi Sunak and HS2: he’s probably wishing the locomotive was more than just a concept image – then it could run over him and release him from the humiliation of its failure.

The high-speed rail link between London and the North, that has been under construction for most of the Tories’ 13 years in office, is a nearly-£100-million white elephant, Rishi Sunak will say in his keynote speech to the Conservative conference.

He will announce that the stretch of the line from the West Midlands to Manchester is to be scrapped, meaning the entire project is now just a slightly faster route from a town just outside London to Birmingham.

Sunak will try to save face for his party by outlining alternative transport projects in the north of England and Wales which he’ll claim will be better value for money and can be completed more quickly.

Let’s hope he’s right about that, because another 13-year wait with no certainty of anything at the end would make the UK a laughing st- well, more of a laughing stock internationally than it is, even today.

It was the project’s ever-rocketing costs that killed it in the end. It was projected to take £71 billion of public money back in 2019 – before the inflation crisis of the last year or so. No figures have been mentioned in relation to its current cost – and that could be to save the prime minister his blushes.

The BBC is reporting that HS2 was originally proposed in 2010, as a flagship infrastructure project for the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition government. It was approved in 2012, when “then-Transport Secretary Justine Greening called it ‘the most significant transport infrastructure project since the building of the motorways’.”

Hindsight can be cruel, can’t it?

The Tories soon descended into squabbles over price and place – how much it would cost and whose constituencies would be disrupted by its construction. According to the Beeb,

At least £22.5bn has already been spent building the London-Birmingham section, while £2.3bn has gone towards the second phase, on things such buying up land and property.

There are also people whose lives have already been uprooted by property purchases along the planned HS2 route north of Birmingham.

If Mr Sunak announces that HS2 trains will go to Manchester using existing tracks, it follows that no extra space would be created and journey time benefits would be reduced.

What a disaster.

And, again according to the BBC, Sunak is going to announce this monumental failure in a speech when he will tell the audience that he is the man to “fundamentally change our country”. For the worse?

Apparently he and his team want this speech – possibly his last before the next general election – to turn around both his fortunes and those of his party, which has been lagging behind Labour in opinion polls for more than a year. Wishful thinking? Forlorn hopes?

It seems to This Writer that he might just as well not give a speech at all but simply throw in a towel instead.

It would be a symbolic admission that his party’s project since 2010 has failed as utterly as HS2.


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.


The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Starmer SCRAPS (not ‘waters down’) his pledge to strengthen workers’ rights

Keir Starmer: if he bothered to do some work instead of lounging around listening to right-wing donors, he’d known that protecting workers’ rights means employers’ productivity and profitability improves. His claim that watering down those rights is pro-business is ridiculously silly.

Keir Starmer has really done it this time; he has scrapped the Labour Party’s reason for existence.

In case it hasn’t occurred to you, the “Labour” in that party’s title means it was created to represent working people and people who have to seek work in order to make a living.

Not very long ago, Starmer pledged (he loves to pledge) stronger rights for workers if his party were to form a government.

Now that pledge is as much a part of history as all the others he has made:

Let’s be clear on this: Starmer has gone on the record many times, stating that his word is his bond and if he makes a pledge, he’ll stick by it (the following clip discusses renationalisations of privatised national utilities and the scrapping of university tuition fees, which are both Starmer pledges that have since been consigned to history):

Saul Staniforth points out that Starmer’s supporters have excuses for his decisions to withdraw all the pledges he made when he became leader of what was still, then, the Labour Party. But Saul also clarifies that the same conditions are not relevant to the pledge on workers’ rights:

It seems clear from shadow minister Stephen Morgan’s interview response below that the pledge on workers’ rights is now history:

Here’s the at-a-glance guide to what Starmer has done:

Alternatively, follow the link below for a more in-depth examination:

Amazingly, Angela Rayner is still claiming that the policy is intact and the only difference is that, now, the way it will be implemented is being laid out:

But nobody is taking that seriously, including leading figures within the party:

Ultimately, last week’s announcement means just one thing to most people:

And finally: here’s Damo with exactly the kind of earthy commentary we should expect from him:

The punchline is that Starmer’s claim that scrapping this policy is pro-business… is childish nonsense.

Firms whose employees have strong rights and support are more successful than those whose workers don’t – because their job security instils loyalty, pride in their work and a genuine desire for the entire business to prosper. They are healthier in body and mind, and more productive.

Firms that treat their employees as they will be able to continue treating them under Starmer’s new policy… well, they go under. And then the bosses blame the workers they mistreated.

Starmer would know that if he had bothered to do any research.

Sadly, it seems he doesn’t know the meaning of work.


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.


The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Tory NHS fail: they want to scrap most cancer treatment targets

Steve Barclay: if there is a problem with cancer in the English NHS, he is the tumour that needs to be removed.

How will Rishi Sunak be able to complain about the Welsh NHS now?

And is this just a shabby bid to boost private cancer treatments?

The Tory government reckons it is being advised by clinicians and cancer charities to scrap six out of nine treatment targets – but two such charities have objected to the plan, just in the BBC’s article announcing it!

The head of the Radiotherapy UK charity said she is “deeply worried”.

Pat Price, who is also an oncologist and visiting professor at Imperial College London, said… “the clear and simple truth is that we are not investing enough in cancer treatment capacity”.

Naser Turabi, Cancer Research UK’s director of evidence and implementation, said… “Despite the best efforts of NHS staff, it’s incredibly worrying that cancer waiting times in England are once again amongst the worst on record.”

He blamed the missed targets on “years of underinvestment” by the government and called for more cancer staff and a clear strategy.

“Without bold action, more people will miss out on lifesaving services,” he said.

We have seen recently that restrictions on NHS services – such as those that are likely to be imposed if treatment targets are scrapped – tend to “nudge”* people into taking private treatment, even if they can’t afford it.

Personally, This Writer thinks Barclay is simply putting more patients between a rock and a hard place: what difference is there between waiting for help that may not arrive in time and putting up with a private ‘specialist’ dancing around you, waving his beads and rattles?

*Remember the Tory “nudge unit” that was attached to 10 Downing Street under David Cameron before it was privatised, and recommended ways of… shall we say “persuading”?… people to do things they would not consider in the normal scheme of things? Clearly, making it impossible for patients to get life-saving treatment in time is a way of “persuading” people to fork out extra cash for private treatment that they would not otherwise have considered and should not need.


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.


The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Labour does u-turn on green investment pledge. Does that party have ANY policies at all?

Rachel Reeves: it’s a big smile but the eyes are utterly vacant – like her policy platform.

Rachel Reeves has announced yet another StarmerLabour u-turn, leaving voters questioning whether the party has any policies it will not betray and asking why they should ever vote for it.

Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, Reeves scrapped Labour’s promise to invest £28 billion per year on green projects, funded by borrowing. This was in line with a Labour commitment that it would only borrow to invest, and not to support day-to-day spending.

She said she would increase investment after the time of the election, reaching £28 billion per year “after 2027”.

How long after 2027? We’ve heard weasel words like these before. It’s a “sometime/never” promise that means nothing.

Remember: the entire planet is in an environmental crisis, with catastrophic and irreversible disaster only a few short years away if no change happens.

Tory politicians have been talked out of shifting to green policies by the fossil-fuel industrialists who stand to lose profit by the change. They probably threatened to cut donations to the party.

Has the same now happened to Labour?

The announcement has been greeted with disgust on the social media.

See what I mean?

That’s an easy question to answer: under Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, David Lammy, Wes Streeting and the rest, UK Labour stands for the acquisition of power for its own sake and the enrichment of the individuals named above – in the same way Tony Blair’s New Labour did. Or so it seems to me.

Labour’s problem now is the sense of betrayal that voters are feeling across the nation:

And those voters are already looking for alternatives:

People will certainly be looking for a political movement to support that won’t betray its promises and make liars of its representatives on a regular basis.

Obviously that won’t be Labour. Let’s be honest – it hasn’t been Labour for years. Think of the way Starmer lied his way into the party leadership and then systematically ditched every single promise he made in order to get there.

Who will you support, now?


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.


The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Starmer ditches pledge to scrap tuition fees: YET AGAIN he doesn’t deserve your trust

The genius at the top of the Labour Party has shot himself in the foot – again.

Keir Starmer has ditched yet another of the pledges on which he managed to get elected as leader of the Labour Party – and has already been lambasted for it in the pages of The Spectator:

The article states – rightly, it pains This Writer to admit:

In the latest wheeze to … prove that Labour is now a Serious Party of Government, the spin doctors at Labour HQ have opted to ditch the party’s long-standing pledge to abolish tuition fees.

As recently as 2021 he was lambasting it as ‘a huge debt for young people that they carry around for a long time’ which is ‘why we rightly committed at the last election to get rid of tuition fees.’

Starmer told Radio 4’s Today programme that: ‘We are likely to move on from that commitment because we do find ourselves in a different financial situation. But I don’t want that to be read as us accepting for a moment that the current system is fair or that it’s working.’ So, er, the system is broken but we’re not going to fix it? So much for an end to sticking plaster politics…

The abolition of tuition fees was of course one of Starmer’s ‘ten pledges’ that secured him victory in the 2020 leadership race, back when he was live action role-playing as a Corbynite. Among those include ‘common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water’, ‘defend free movement as we leave the EU’, ‘increase income tax for the top five per cent of earners’, ‘abolish Universal Credit’ and ‘end outsourcing [in the] NHS, local government and justice system.’ All this at a time when he’s asking the country to vote him in on the basis of his so-called ‘five missions’.

It begs the question, as one BBC journalist put it to Starmer, ‘Why should we believe your five pledges when you binned your ten leadership pledges once you were elected?”

The relevant trade unions – and remember, Labour relies on the unions for support – hate the new posture:

Others are picking out video clips of Labour figures talking up the former policy to flag up the hypocrisy of the new position; representatives who proudly proclaimed that they would end tuition fees now have to proudly proclaim the exact opposite:

And others are bringing it home by tying it to the local elections on Thursday (May 4):

It’s nauseating. We’ve gone from “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” to “Ugh! Keir Starmer!”

The current Labour leader has abandoned everything that distinguished Labour from the Conservatives.

Voting for his party – now – means voting for no change at all.

And that is as true with the local elections as it is with a general election: he has made sure all party representatives are terrified of dissent so electing them is putting in place somebody who will do their best for Starmer… and not for you.

If you were thinking Labour looked like a smart choice, you’d better think again.


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.


The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Work Capability Assessment to be scrapped for benefit claimants. But what will replace it?

Uncannily accurate: The Conservative government’s genuine policy towards PIP claimants may as well have been as it appears in this cartoon from 2017. But what will replace the assessment system it satirises?

I should be pleased.

This Site has campaigned against the Work Capability Assessment for sickness and disability benefits, practically since I started publishing it at the end of 2011.

In my opinion, it has been misused, as a tool to force people who are too ill to work onto job-seeking benefits that carry sanctions if a claimant fails to carry out particular tasks – tasks which the long-term sick and disabled are often clearly incapable of doing.

In many cases, the results have been fatal. I know this because it took me two years to force the Department for Work and Pensions to release figures showing that 2,400 people died within a limited period (two weeks) after being found fit for work, between dates in 2011 and 2014.

That’s right – these people had been found fit to go to work by this hopelessly flawed tick-box assessment system, and then they had proven themselves to be nothing of the sort.

And the Tory government carried on as though nothing was wrong.

I also have personal experience of the system’s flaws. After my partner – Mrs Mike; remember her? – was wrongly put in the work-related activity group for Employment and Support Allowance, she appealed in the hope of being relocated to the support group.

Instead, whoever received her letter slapped a “Do Not Contact” tag on her file for no discernible reason and allowed her claim to end after 12 months, while she waited – in considerable confusion and distress – for a response that was never going to come.

Fortunately, I was around to kick up a stink and get the situation sorted out. But that just highlights the fact that many thousands of people don’t have that kind of help at hand.

And now, we’re told, the Work Capability Assessment is to be scrapped.

But we’re not being told what will replace it.

This Independent article has comments from a couple of organisations that have a stake in what happens:

Trades Union Congress general secretary Paul Novak [said:] “Scrapping the work capability assessment will be welcome if it means an end to assessments that cause anxiety instead of helping people achieve their aspirations,” he added, while urging greater investment in public services to get people off NHS waiting lists and reduce barriers to training.

James Taylor of the disability equality charity Scope said axing the assessment was “the minimum change needed to even begin improving a welfare system that regularly fails disabled people”, and stressed the need for “a more person-centred system” offering “specialist, tailored and flexible” support.

“Those that want to work should be supported. But for some, that’s not an option and disabled people shouldn’t be forced into unsuitable work,” he said. “There is a lot of work to do for the government to restore trust in our benefits system.”

Notice that they both mentioned ways of getting more people back into work; this is Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s aim with the changes to the benefit system.

And that’s why I fear for the future of sickness and disability benefits in the UK.

I think the odious Hunt is planning another push to put sick people into jobs they can’t do. If I’m right, his plan will fail on many levels.

The Tories have (again) dropped their plans for a new ‘royal yacht’

Expensive vanity project: this artist’s impression of the Tories much-desired Royal Yacht project was released when it was announced last year.

What a circus.

A little more than a year after launching a competition to build a new ‘royal yacht’ to replace the long-since-mothballed Britannia, the Tory government has withdrawn the project.

The ship was commissioned by Boris Johnson in June 2021, to host trade fairs and diplomatic events – and Defence Secretary Ben Wallace announced that the £250 million plan to build it had been terminated today (November 7, 2022).

The announcement came as part of the government’s search for spending cuts, and 10 Downing Street said it was right to “prioritise” spending “at a time when difficult spending decisions need to be made”.

The plan had been criticised as Boris Johnson’s “vanity project” – not least by This Writer – but in fact it has long been a Tory dream to have a new state-of-the-art maritime toy on which to gad about the world pretending to be players.

I wrote about it when the project was announced last year:

Tories have been trying to build themselves a new luxury yacht – at our expense – since at least 2012, when Michael Gove suggested spending £60 million on it to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee:

“This boat would cost £60 million, apparently – a million for every year she’s been on the throne. It would be a pointless present because, at Her Majesty’s age, she’s hardly going to be able to steer it.”

By 2016, the projected cost had nearly doubled:

“Now we learn that Conservative MPs want to give the Queen another yacht – at a cost of £100 million that could be better-used elsewhere, perhaps on benefit payments for a further £16,666 sick people for a year.

“When [Gove] suggested it, back in January 2012, the cost was said to be £60 million. Why has it nearly doubled in the years since?

“At least we have an answer to my question of the time – whether Tories try to spend our money on such unnecessary lavishments habitually.

“Yes. Yes they do.”

Amazingly, that price had remained static when the possibility was floated yet again in 2020:

“The twist this time is a proposal to split funding three ways between businesses, the public and the National Lottery (so the public pays twice).”

The idea of boosting trade has been there since Gove, and I addressed it last year:

“The point about trade deals is interesting at a time when the Tory government is desperately trying to re-establish the UK as a trading nation after severing ties with the European Union.

“But who benefits from such deals?

“Rich businesspeople, perhaps – but would they pay their taxes or send the cash to tax havens?

“If the latter, then why should the public pay for something that will not help us in the slightest?”

Exactly. Thankfully, the public will be saved from having to pay for this monumental White Elephant – this time.

How long until the idea is resurrected yet again?

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.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.


The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Starmer turns away from Labour’s ‘foundational document’ in new lurch to the Right

Offensive gesture: ‘where are Labour voters going to go?’ is the question Starmer seems to be asking. He seems to think left-wing voters will have no choice but to support his hard-right sub-Tory version of the party. Is he correct?

Labour’s leader has betrayed the party’s members yet again.

After wooing leadership voters two years ago with a vow that the 2017 manifesto, devised under Jeremy Corbyn, that brought millions of voters back to the party was its “foundational document” and that “we have to hang on to that as we go forward”… he’s ditching it.

It’s the latest volte face against the policies on which he was elected party leader in 2020 – and possibly the last. After turning his back on his “10 pledges”, is any of his original leadership platform left?

What does it mean, in practise? Well, “left-wing campaign group” Momentum had this to say to The Independent:

“Our country faces huge challenges, from the cost-of-living crisis to the existential threat of climate breakdown. The status quo is failing millions of people – and socialist solutions like public ownership and raising the minimum wage enjoy widespread support amongst the British public.

“But the truth is that the Starmer leadership is avoiding facing these challenges in favour of a reheated and deeply unpopular Blairism. Whether it’s abandoning transport workers fighting for their livelihoods, or offering a windfall tax less ambitious than that of the Tories, Starmer’s tepid, unprincipled approach will neither tackle today’s challenges, nor invigorate a winning electoral coalition.”

And Ian Hodson of the Labour-defying Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union, tweeted this:

He makes a good point, doesn’t he?

But with Labour taken over by Tory squatters (including Starmer himself), where will the 10 million who voted for Corbyn’s – authentic – version of the party go?

Source: Keir Starmer says he is scrapping Labour’s last manifesto and ‘starting from scratch’ | The Independent

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.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.


The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook