Countries, like people, often disagree. Grown-ups deal with that through negotiation and compromise. Sometimes a bit of petulant shouting is part of the negotiation. Lookatme Truss, UK Foreign Secretary and Self-Publicist has made clear the UK intends to throw its toys out of the pram over the Northern Ireland Protocol, the UK-EU deal her boss …
Tag archives: Conservatives
Edinburgh Council Elections
This Scotsman has to vote tomorrow, but they won’t tell me who to vote for. Council elections here use the Single Transferable Vote method. This is the only sensible electoral system. It’s a Proportional Representation system, unlike the laughably awful First Past The Post (FPTP) used in Westminster – rant here – and lets us …
Tories Rebel Against Johnson – Who’s the Good Guy?
Last night Honest Boris Johnson scraped a parliamentary victory only with Opposition Support. The most incompetent and corrupt UK Prime Minister of the modern era was opposed by 100 Conservative MPs voting against measures to protect people from infection and death from a pandemic. I’m not quite sure where you begin with that.
Parliamentary Standards – and Government – Remain
This November morning was looking to hint at the first signs of spring for UK politics. It all came to naught. That might sound counter-intuitive to anyone reading the chaos of UK news, but here’s the logic… Conservative MP Owen Paterson broke some clear rules. The House of Commons Standards committee – which polices these …
Continue reading “Parliamentary Standards – and Government – Remain”
Teamwork – UK Foreign Policy
Tobias Ellwood, Conservative chair of the Commons defence committee said after the Afghan debacle “We should be clear that Britain’s leverage is negligible as an individual country”…”The only means of influence we now have is if we pool efforts together with the international community” Quite right. Perhaps he should let his boss know that right …
Universal Credit Top Up To Go – Who eats bread and who eats cake?
The UK is miserly with social security. There’s a logic that this makes people look for work, which makes them better off. We won’t go into that, but Saint Rishi added £20 per week to the dole (Universal Credit) when Covid landed, which is an admission that it’s not enough to live on. £20 a …
Continue reading “Universal Credit Top Up To Go – Who eats bread and who eats cake?”
Poots Quits
(Headline could have been Northern Irish Political Turmoil, but that’s a bit of a Dog Bites Man one) Edwin Poots resigned as head of the Democratic Unionist Party, the largest in Northern Ireland, tonight. He was defenestrated by his colleagues after three weeks in office. Not because he’s a creationist who believes in fairy stories …
Fourth of July All Over Again?
Most of those likely to die are vaccinated, so it doesn’t matter if everyone else catches Covid, right? Mmm not quite, for three reasons. There’s many who can’t vaccinate. With few infected they’re probably safe, but when there’s lots of it about they’re at big risk. Some of them are refusers and we mightn’t feel …
Dominic Cummings told a load of truth. Will it make any difference?
Grima Wormtongue aka Dominic Cummings had his day on camera today. It sounded great fun. Honest Boris is ‘unfit’ to be Prime Minister, ‘tens of thousands’ of people died unnecessarily from Covid due to government incompetence, Hancock the health minister is a liar and a fool. The thing is none of this is news. We’ve …
Continue reading “Dominic Cummings told a load of truth. Will it make any difference?”
The Honest Party
It’s been a busy couple of days for Tory probity news. Former Conservative chairman Andrew Feldman got a job advising the health minister James Bethell last year, and advised him to give a £22.6m contract to one of his firm’s clients. Honest Boris had a suspicious £15k Carribbean holiday, oh and there’s updates to the …