Happy Christmas kids, especially those unaccompanied kids who find themselves abandoned on the continent. Yes, we know we had a Brexit deal ‘ready to go’ before the election, an ‘oven ready’ deal that would help reunite you with parents and carers but that was then. The Tory monsters have won their majority now so they can drop the act. They don’t give a damn about you and now it shows.
For pity’s sake – these are children!
This is a screenshot of the tory manifesto. It’s an unusual combination of part fact and part fiction intended to make working class voters think that leopards really could change their spots. Here the conservatives promise to raise the minimum wage to £10.50 an hour by 2024. That was nothing compared to the fully costed Labour plan to increase it to a tenner immediately but hey ho – you pays your money and you takes your choice. And pay we will – through the nose.
Now, despite claiming that their manifesto was fully accounted for (it seems that it wasn’t), the tories have rolled back their commitment to our lowest paid workers. Now it’s more an aspiration “if economic circumstances allow”.
Well what did you expect? They are tories, after all. They don’t give a stuff about the working class.
During the election campaign Boris Johnson and the rest of his team promised that there were no plans to meddle with the rights of Working people. My own local candidate, now tory MP for Workington, Mark Jenkinson went
on record at the local hustings explaining that there were no plans to reduce workers rights in the event of a tory majority. I’m afraid I wasn’t convinced.
The October withdrawal bill, the one that Boris withdrew because parliament wanted time to scrutinise it (and refused to let it pass without such scrutiny) included such protections. That’s the one the EU had agreed to in principle, assuming that it gained the consent of the house – a consent that could only come if parliament was allowed time to consider it in sufficient detail.
After the election Johnson has an 80 seat majority with many of his MPs new to the chamber, unsure of their position and presumably not sufficiently brave to stand up to Boris’ whips even if they wanted to. This means he can do what he likes, with or without parliamentary scrutiny and so…
The December version of the withdrawal bill lacks the appropriate clauses about maintaining working peoples’ rights. Michael Gove, long time opponent of anything that stands in the way of large multinationals exploiting their workers has reassured us that everything will be OK because rights will be considered separately at some unspecified later date. The excuse is that they don’t want to complicate the road to Brexit so they’ll sort the rights part out later. Oh really?
Needless to say Mr. Jenkinson, newly elected MP for Workington voted in favour of the revised withdrawal bill and its implications for workers and Europeans despite the lack of time for proper scrutiny.
Now remember that the previous deal which included workers’ rights has already been agreed by the EU. Boris could pass whatever bill he likes in this new parliament so what could possibly be so difficult about workers’ rights that they need to be removed to let the bill carry through the house? That just doesn’t make sense.
In fact the opposite is true. It is precisely because of the changes to the October version of the bill, particularly relating to working peoples’ rights and the rights of EU citizens that the EU may not ratify this new version after all. Far from making the road to Brexit easier, abandoning workers’ and EU citizens’ rights is actually making it more complicated – and we all know where that can lead.
So what’s the real reason for the removal of working peoples’ rights?
Well? What do you think?
So parliament is back after the general election. That was an exercise in national decision-making that is yet to be judged by history but the early signs aren’t good.
Many people, especially in the ‘red wall’ constituencies of the Labour heartlands voted conservative with such fervour and passion that you’d think hen’s teeth were going out of fashion. Instead, the once rarer than rocking horse excrement tory MPs in towns like Workington in Cumbria have become ‘common as muck’ in Boris’ brave new world of national asset stripping.
First off the blocks in this collective race to the bottom was Andrea Leadsom, one time candidate to lead the party herself but now content to do her master’s bidding and sign off on one of the biggest defence betrayals since William Joyce defected to the Nazis in 1940 and ran a wartime propaganda radio show to undermine British resilience.
Not quite so accomplished a radio presenter, Leadsom had to content herself with what she is good at – selling people out for profit. And just who are the patsies in this little deal? Whose security has just been compromised in the name of profiteering foreign nationals? Well, ours of course – including every single one of those ‘red wall’ voters who lent the tories their vote this December.
Cobham is a British firm, responsible for much of the defence infrastructure our country relies upon for national security since before WW2. Winston Churchill relied upon Cobham to keep Spitfires flying during the Battle of Britain – and they did! American private equity firm, Advent just took over. But here’s the kicker…
The takeover was agreed by Shareholders in the middle of 2019 but not agreed by the government until after the general election. Now then, why do you imagine that was? Cynics might suggest that the deal was allowed as part of a more general, post trade trade agreement with the USA. Realists might suppose that to tell the public about it before the votes were cast might have left the tories with a few hard questions to answer about the defence of the realm and our newly subservient relationship with our American financial overlords.
According to Simon Murphy’s article in The Guardian…
Lady Nadine Cobham, the daughter-in-law of the company’s founder Sir Alan Cobham, said: “This is a deeply disappointing announcement and one cynically timed to avoid scrutiny on the weekend before Christmas.
“In one of its first major economic decisions, the government is not taking back control so much as handing it away.
“In Cobham we stand to lose yet another great British defence manufacturer to foreign ownership, through a takeover that would never have been approved by the Americans, French or Japanese, all of whom have taken steps recently to raise protections for their own defence sectors.”
In what may well prove to be one of the year’s most prophetic questions Ed Davey, acting Lib Dem leader asked in the same article…
“If Boris Johnson’s government are happy to sell off a leading UK defence and aerospace company to Trump’s America, how can we expect his government to protect our defence and manufacturing sectors, not to mention every other sector of our economy, as they negotiate trade deals after Brexit?”
How indeed, Ed? How indeed?
As hate crime rises again in the wake of Boris Johnson’s far right ‘nasty party’ victory I thought it worth dusting this old 3 minute video down for another airing. This is me not being harassed, attacked or even looked at in a funny way in the supposed ‘no go’ area of Bury Park in Luton.
Mia and Jade are just a couple of ordinary Northern women – but they have a dream. Not only that, they have a plan to go with it.
Like many others, these two Lancashire ladies were devastated when the news broke of a Tory majority last Friday. They knew all too well what that landslide result will mean for Britain’s most vulnerable people. 130,000 unnecessary deaths due to Tory policy already is hard to ignore, after all.
Like true Northeners the pair decided not to wallow in despair, despite the disaster that has befallen the nation. They decided to sort things out.
As Mia told me
“It’s time for the many to look out for the few!”
So Boris is going to table a bill making delay in the face of a no deal Brexit in 2020 illegal. Ask yourself this…
Why on Earth would a PM with a huge overall majority in the house need such a bill? It’s pointless.
Unless of course he’s just being a smug child. The old Etonian continues to show his true colours.
It’s just a matter of days since the tories learned of their landslide general election victory and already their manifesto promises are looking shaky. According to the Independent…
“The government plans to reintroduce the withdrawal agreement bill, which implements Mr Johnson’s deal, this week. No 10 said it would be based on the deal that the prime minister secured with the EU, and would not necessarily include the guarantees made since then.
“The original draft of the legislation included provisions to ensure that workers’ rights were not weakened after Brexit. Under questioning from MPs in October, Mr Johnson also promised to include a similar measure on environmental protections.
“However, No 10 refused to say that the guarantees would be in the revised draft being brought back this week.”
Workington MP Mark Jenkinson, conservative and hard right wing Brexiteer promised in the run up to the general election that there were no plans to reduce working peoples’ rights…
He also promised that the conservatives, if elected would seek to further protect the environment.
So we need to ask ourselves… was Jenky lying or is Workington’s new MP just a fool who couldn’t see what was so obvious to so many of us all along? Surely, the tory candidate should have known what his party planned to do, shouldn’t he?
It’s almost as though he doesn’t care about working people at all, especially since he even admitted that he didn’t even understand the question.
Whilst the press was jumping over the Labour party because of around 0.01% of members with anti-Semitic views, British Muslims were looking in a different direction. They saw plainly what many others did not. They saw the rampant Islamophobia and racism that has overtaken the Tory party.
I’ve never been all that impressed by the conservative party and its callous attitude towards ordinary people but at least it used to maintain at least a veneer of fairness and decency. Nowadays the party that brought us forced deportation of genuine Brits, Grenfell and the hostile environment is almost as openly racist as it was in Enoch Powell’s day.
Of course there’s more evidence to come but for now I recommend you read this little article from the Metro detailing the fears of British Muslims fleeing the country. This is what a Tory victory means for them. They know the signs all too well and the rest of us had better start watching too.
If we are to prevent a national decline into full on racism we need to do two things, and we need to do them relentlessly…
1. Challenge racist and religious bigotry of all kinds whenever we see it.
2. Make it clear to our Muslim, Jewish, European, Black and Asian neighbours that they are accepted by the decent majority of Brits – especially by those of us from a white, working class, Christian heritage.
Unless you want to live in an increasingly racist, bigoted, mean-spirited and hate-filled society please consider this a duty.
Already? For pity’s sake, give us time to mourn the NHS ethos before you pick up the hammer to start driving in the nails.
What about all those promises to protect our NHS?
Last night at 10pm the exit polls announced their results. Right from the word go, even as the count was only just getting started TV pundits were predicting a landslide majority for the conservative party. And they were right.
The tory party now has a massive overall majority in the British parliament and there’s nothing to stop them doing exactly as they please. And there’s the rub.
No excuses
There are no longer any excuses for Boris and his disreputable gang of bully boys. There’s nobody to blame for their failures or for their cruelties. Whatever they do in the next five years, longer if they implement their ‘enabling act’ (see p.48 of the Tory manifesto) will be entirely down to them.
Well, they made a lot of promises, as tories always do. Election time is the only time when the conservative party starts talking like socialists. As if by magic they suddenly begin en masse to care about the NHS waiting lists they created. They start to worry about people struggling in poverty due to Tory party policies and they claim to want more educational opportunities for our young people who’ve had their prospects decimated by 9 years of Tory rule.
We’ll be watching
So let’s make sure they do what they set out to do. Let’s make sure they keep those promises too. After all, we know they’ll keep the right wing pledges they made to take even more from ordinary people and give it to the super rich. We know they’ll be falling over each other to flog our NHS to the Americans and there’s absolutely no doubt that they’ll further decrease our access to legal redress when our rights are trampled. That’s the trajectory they’ve been on for years.
Let’s hold them to their words about the good stuff too.
Left eye view
Left eye view will keep watching this government and compare its actions to its manifesto and election promises. New laws, changes to taxation and reductions in funding for necessary services will be compared against Boris’ promises to us, the people. Let’s see how sincere this government really is.
Just to be clear – it was the tories who refused to support Moorside. Labour has factored it into their plans and sees it as a vital part of economic growth and greener energy strategies.
To hear Jenky speak you’d think it was the other way around – that’s when he’s not displaying his ignorance of the role of Workington’s MP in the nuclear industry’s management structure.
Left eye view 