The banker loving, baby-eating Tory party thread (regenerated)

[chrisp65]

So, I very rarely interact with the tweets of others, other than my cosy little friendship group.

But I made an exception yesterday when little Alun Cairns tweeted out that he'd enjoyed Boris Johnsons closing speech at the Welsh Conservatives conf..

I asked if Boris had mentioned who he voted for.

Most people have understood that. But I've had five complete strangers respond to explain to me that he didn't actually vote, he'd been lying, that there were no elections in London so he couldn't have voted for anyone.

I mean, pffff.

 

[HanoiVillan]

4 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

So, I very rarely interact with the tweets of others, other than my cosy little friendship group.

But I made an exception yesterday when little Alun Cairns tweeted out that he'd enjoyed Boris Johnsons closing speech at the Welsh Conservatives conf..

I asked if Boris had mentioned who he voted for.

Most people have understood that. But I've had five complete strangers respond to explain to me that he didn't actually vote, he'd been lying, that there were no elections in London so he couldn't have voted for anyone.

I mean, pffff.

 

I guess not everyone's as Extremely Online as you are 

[chrisp65]

Just now, HanoiVillan said:

I guess not everyone's as Extremely Online as you are 

it's true, my missus often says she thinks I'm special

[peterms]

On 04/05/2019 at 09:08, ml1dch said:

Never gets old. Unfortunately.

However, "Long term economic plan" seems to have aged, and expired, quicker than a mayfly.

Makes you wonder if it really was long term.

Or a plan.

[bickster]

1 hour ago, peterms said:

However, "Long term economic plan" seems to have aged, and expired, quicker than a mayfly.

Makes you wonder if it really was long term.

Or a plan.

Or even based on an economic theory

[peterms]

20 hours ago, bickster said:

Or even based on an economic theory

Oh, I don't know about that.  I think Karl Marx would say it's pretty straightforward class struggle in pursuit of capitalist accumulation.

I think he'd be right.

[Chindie]

The number one story on the BBC today is May meeting 'senior Tories' about them wanting her to resign.

What, over the last few years, would lead anyone to believe that such a meeting is going to have the blindest bit of difference in absolutely anything at all?

[bickster]

2 hours ago, Chindie said:

The number one story on the BBC today is May meeting 'senior Tories' about them wanting her to resign.

What, over the last few years, would lead anyone to believe that such a meeting is going to have the blindest bit of difference in absolutely anything at all?

Another day ticked off the calendar of survival though

[peterms]

 

[Chindie]

I was shocked and astounded to discover in todays news that Theresa May will not be resigning.

The sun setting tonight will be slightly less shocking.

[mjmooney]

4 hours ago, Chindie said:

I was shocked and astounded to discover in todays news that Theresa May will not be resigning.

The sun setting tonight will be slightly less shocking.

You clearly misunderstood. When she said she was going to 'resign', she actually meant she was going to re-sign. 

[Dr_Pangloss]

On 06/05/2019 at 20:46, peterms said:

Oh, I don't know about that.  I think Karl Marx would say it's pretty straightforward class struggle in pursuit of capitalist accumulation.

I think he'd be right.

Whilst he made many good contributions, that was always a pretty appalling theory.

[peterms]

[peterms]

Schools are feeding families that can't afford to eat.

This situation is a deliberate political choice by the Conservative Party.

They must be removed from all positions of political responsibility.

 

 

[peterms]

Thread on Hat Mancock and his totally spontaneous, unstaged pics of what a cool guy he is.

 

[ml1dch]

Electoral Calculus analysis of what Parliament would look like on current voting intentions.

Labour easily the largest party on only 28% of the vote. Would see a lot fun Tories lose their seat including Penny Mourdant, Amber Rudd, Irritable Duncan Syndrome and even Boris.

[snowychap]

Coming soon: the great universal credit deception

Quote

How to sell the unsellable? How to pretend utter chaos is a plan coming together? How to persuade the public, who just refuse to buy it, to at least keep on paying for it? I believe I have found the answer.

It comes in the form of an internal memo from the Department for Work and Pensions that somehow floated past my desk. Published on the staff intranet just a few days ago, on 2 May, it is signed by three of the department’s most senior officials, including the DWP’s director of communications and Neil Couling, its head of universal credit. And it is that toxically controversial benefit which is its subject.

Addressed to the department’s employees, the letter sympathises: “We share your justified frustration when our hard work – in particular our work on Universal Credit – is portrayed incorrectly and/or negatively in the media.” The circular condemns this “negativity and scaremongering”, and blames it for putting people off even applying for the benefit.

It was said that Steve Jobs could conjure up a “reality distortion field”, bending facts into a parallel universe to spur on Apple designers to achieve the impossible. I can only assume that the DWP’s overlords are creating their own distortion of reality, because I cannot think of a single bigger policy failure this decade than universal credit.

After years of ministers pretending otherwise, Amber Rudd, the DWP secretary, now admits universal credit’s introduction has left people so short of cash that they have resorted to food banks. What Iain Duncan Smith hailed in 2011 as a transformation of welfare has turned into something grotesque, with massive delays and huge flaws both of administration and design, repeatedly damned by MP select committees. The independent National Audit Office judges that universal credit has neither saved public money nor helped people into work. But it has left thousands of vulnerable claimants penniless, while others starve and even lose their homes. In a House of Commons debate last summer the London Labour MP Catherine West recounted how one of her constituents had “fallen off benefits” and ended up “sleeping in a tent in a bin chamber” on a housing estate.

Such are the horrors whose very documentation by journalists the DWP letter dismisses as “unfair”. Rather than halt universal credit, as demanded by so many groups, the department’s managers now say they will respond “in a different way … very different to anything we’ve done before”.

What follows is an elaborate media strategy to manufacture a Whitehall fantasy, one in which the benefits system is running like a dream while a Conservative government generously helps people on the escalator to prosperity. It begins at the end of this month with a giant advert wrapped around the cover of the Metro newspaper; inside will be a further four-page advertorial feature. This will “myth-bust the common inaccuracies reported on UC”. What’s more, “the features won’t look or feel like DWP or UC – you won’t see our branding … We want to grab the readers’ attention and make them wonder who has done this ‘UC uncovered’ investigation.”

Not only is this a costly exercise, with a Metro wraparound going for a headline rate of £250,000 (of your money, let’s not forget), but the Advertising Standards Authority will doubtless be interested in that description of the feature. Its guidelines stipulate that“marketers and publishers must make clear that advertorials are marketing communications”.

Two and a half million adults pick up a daily copy of the Metro freesheet, and they will see these advertorials every week for nine weeks. Meanwhile the secretary of state, Amber Rudd, will invite “a wide range of journalists at regional and national publications … to come [to a jobcentre] and see the great work we do”. Doubtless, the Jobcentres will be carefully chosen and everything will be arranged so that when the dignitaries descend, all will be as precisely ordered as the innards of a Swiss watch. Perhaps it’s not too indelicate to mention here that the Tory party is weeks into an unannounced leadership contest, during which plummy columns commending Rudd for turning round a failed service do no harm to her prospects.

Then comes the letter’s grand reveal: BBC2 has commissioned a documentary series, which is “looking to intelligently explore UC” by filming inside three jobcentres. “This is a fantastic opportunity for us – we’ve been involved in the process from the outset, and we continue working closely with the BBC to ensure a balanced and insightful piece of television.” Wading through such adjectives, one remembers how the most important of the letter’s signatories, Neil Couling, told Holyrood parliamentarians that the rise of food banks was down to “poor people maximising their economic opportunities” and that “many benefit recipients welcome the jolt that … sanctions can give them”.

When the BBC’s Panorama last November went to Flintshire in north Wales and found single, elderly men being made homeless as a result of universal credit, and the local council in meltdown, the DWP criticised the corporation for its “lack of balance”, even complaining that the interview with a minister was “unfairly cut”. A Tory backbencher was wheeled out to declare the investigation “fake news”.

No such danger with this three-part series, which is driven by access rather than led by a reporter. When the civil servants’ trade union, the PCS, found out about the filming, it asked if staff could talk frankly to the crew, only to be told no: they would still be subject to the civil service code, which demands complete impartiality. Perhaps this explains an internal PCS note on the BBC series I have seen, which remarks that staff are unhappy about being identified on screen. At one of the nominated jobcentres, in Toxteth in Liverpool, “It is our understanding that there have been no volunteers to take part in the filming.” The risk is that any staff who do participate toe the management line, making the film an advert for universal credit.

The PCS briefing also reports a senior universal credit manager telling union reps that “the DWP would have access to the film before transmission”. The BBC confirms that is the case, although it says it has “editorial control”. When I contacted the DWP it refused to answer even the most basic of questions, advising me to submit them via a freedom of information request.

It’s not uncommon for the Ministry of Defence to use newspapers to recruit soldiers, nor for government departments to grant TV crews access to their workings. What is very unusual is to see a car-crash policy damned even by the Archbishop of Canterbury airbrushed with vast public resources into a triumph.

After reading the documents, I spoke to Jennifer Jones of Sheffield Stop and Scrap Universal Credit. Severely disabled, she is awaiting transfer to the benefit, a move that she believes might deprive her of nearly £400 a month. She showed me Facebook posts of others, who have already lost out under universal credit, and told me how after her autistic son goes off to school she neither heats the house nor cooks, in order to save money. What would she do with the £250,000 that the government may spend on a single newspaper advert?

“I’d make sure there was enough on the gas and electric, that we had food in the cupboards and new school uniforms,” she said. “Then I’d see about the neighbours.” I weighed up the smallness of her wants, against the DWP’s planned extravagance. So what did Jones make of the government’s PR campaign?

“They’re taking money off the public, to lie to us about how well universal credit is working. They could be spending that money on us, but they’re spending it to con us,” she said. “It’s scary our government doing that.”

 

[snowychap]

Home Office misses deadline to access EU poverty relief funds

Quote

A catalogue of errors by the Home Office has led to a loss of access to £600,000 of EU funds earmarked for the most deprived people in Britain and has put a further £2.9m at risk, it can be revealed.

The government had tried to claim the money for Theresa May’s flagship policy of helping the victims of modern slavery, but Sajid Javid’s department missed the deadline to recoup the ringfenced money.

Under the watch of the home secretary, who has ambitions to replace May in Downing Street, the UK has been left as the only EU member state to fail to deliver aid to its citizens through the programme, and it is still yet to make an application for the remainder of the £3.5m that was available.

The €3.4bn European Aid to the Most Deprived fund was established as an attempt to help member states meet a poverty reduction target of “lifting at least 20 million people out of the risk of poverty and social exclusion” by the end of 2020.

The British government initially intended to use the money to support breakfast clubs in schools that had particularly high rates of social disadvantage.

Last autumn, the government changed its mind and decided instead to use the cash to back the prime minister’s modern slavery campaign, one of the few policies that has survived her time in Downing Street.

The Home Office took over the application for the funds with the aim of aiding vulnerable 16- to 24-year-olds who had entered the UK through a resettlement scheme, been granted refugee status through the in-country asylum process, or identified as potential victims of modern slavery.

But the Home Office did not draw up the necessary paperwork and secure the agreement of the European commission in time. As a result, the UK failed to claim the initial tranche – £600,000 – of its allocation under the fund by the end of 2018.

The Home Office then set a target of having a proposal ready to submit to the commission provisionally by the end of March 2019, with the programme of works scheduled to begin in July 2019, and with the fund becoming operational in the UK by the end of the year.

As of this week, the proposal has neither been completed nor implemented, raising concerns further funds are going to be lost due to the department’s failures.

... a little more on link

 

[Chindie]

I look forward to this being a interminable topic of criticism for the Tory party to the extent that it is implied it defines them

... thankfully I can look forward for a very long time.

[Dr_Pangloss]

They are right to reject that particular definition.