It’s not the first time it’s been said and it certainly won’t be the last: you couldn’t make it up – the Tories’ latest tactic for taking on Labour in the House of Commons is: running away.
Labour won votes in Parliament on tuition fees and pay for nurses – sadly, non-binding ‘Opposition Day’ motions – unanimously. Because the DUP had announced it was going to back the motions, so the Tories just ran for cover.
Not only that, but Theresa May has taken the extraordinary step of telling Tory MPs not to vote against any Labour motions for the entire two years of this Parliamentary session – which is two years long only because May is terrified she won’t get the traditional yearly Queen’s Speech past Parliament if she has one next year.
It was a move that even the mainstream media described as ‘humiliating’. Because it was.
The Tories are plumbing new lows almost every week in their desperate, shambolic desire to cling to power – well, to office at any rate.
So scared is Theresa May running of Jeremy Corbyn’s soaring polling and obvious superiority – and of Labour’s clear difference and popularity – that she has evidently decided it’s less damaging for the Tories to be seen running and hiding than it would be to vote and getting their arses kicked.
Wrong and feeble – and somehow managing find new barrel-bottoms to scrape on an almost daily basis. The Tories are performing the political equivalent of ‘bed-blocking’ – and for the sake of the whole country they need shuffle off to the obscurity they so plainly deserve now, not later.
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The Conservative Party has no mandate, no vision, no programme for government, no principles and no policies.
It failed to win a majority and in order to cling to power was forced to bribe an organisation with close ties to terrorist groups with £1.5 billion of taxpayers’ money.
It has most recently contravened the convention of our parliamentary democracy by stealing seats it is not entitled to on committees in order to allow it to bypass parliament by providing the executive with unaccountable powers.
By doing so the Conservative Party has created a constitutional crisis.
Reblogged this on disabledgrandad.
Oh what an absolute f***ing mess, we as a nation must be the laughing stock of the world.
Reblogged this on sdbast.
But they are still mightily proud of their stewardship of our ‘strong’ economy (with the lowest growth in EU), catastrophic emergency interest rates of 0.25%, record debt, a broken dysfunctional housing market, worst productivity and income stagnation since the nineteenth century, yet mysteriously with ‘full’ employment (inc. swathes of self-employed and zero hours contracts all earning so little they barely scrape into paying any income tax), primarily because DWP is starving and bullying the unemployed off the workless register!
The Gawke mouthpiece was at it again on QT last night, bragging about their strong economic management.
They are so proud of their low skills, low productivity, low wage economy.
The BBC’s presenters are useless at challenging this nonsense, cowed as they are by Tory attacks on their funding.
A lot of people now desperately want change and what Labour might offer as an alternative.
But I have to say, Labour are bloody poor at communicating a strong coherent vision for people to get behind. Their confusion over whether they would prefer to stay in the EU or leave to a Customs Union doesn’t help.
Today’s opposition spokespeople are generally rather weak and relatively incoherent compared to the powerful Labour orators of a generation ago.
Thus we are frequently presented with either Barry Gardiner or Emily Thornberry as their two most eloquent front benchers and neither of them could be described as ‘impressive’!
It is a sad juncture we find ourselves at politically: Tories are utterly useless, venal and mendacious, as ever.
Yet Labour are divided between their two wings, bumbling and amateurish as an alternative.
So much of UK economy and tax base has been concentrated in the City since Thatcher trashed our manufacturing base and Blair/Brown did nowt to rebalance the economy.
Depressingly, I see no way that a Corbyn McDonnell led government could work with that avaricious lot of City spivs to effect productive change and growth.
So a decade of fracture and distress lies ahead of us, I fear.
I do not agree with your counsel of despair, Andrew.
The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership offers a comprehensive and achievable programme which will not only deliver economic growth but will distribute that growth across all regions of the country.
A Labour government will create a national investment bank which will deliver targeted investment through regional investment banks to upgrade the infrastructure of the whole of the UK.
This will be accompanied by a UK wide investment in education and training so well trained and educated people can operate within that upgraded infrastructure.
In addition, it will build a million new homes in its first term, will increase the minimum wage to £10 an hour and will support small and medium sized business by legislating that payments owed by large companies are paid on time.
The Labour government will deal with corporate tax evaders and avoiders both domestically and abroad by shutting down tax havens.
These measures will, on a conservative projection, deliver 5% growth by the end of Labour’s first term in government.
This is just the beginning of a four term Labour programme which will provide this country and its people with the hope and tools to compete and prosper in the modern world.
I too disagree with your counsel of despair. Labour have far more than Barry Gardiner and Emily Thornberry – they have Kier Starmer, Becky Long-Baily, Angela Raynor, John McDonnell, Richard Burgon, and Laura Pidcock, just to name a few off the top of my head. All strong, passionate, capable speakers. The problem is gaining the MSM platform, not the dearth of leading speakers. In fact I disagree – Emily has a fantastic way of putting ideas across, in a most delightful way that never descending into pugilistic slugging matches, but she can really turn on the gravitas when she has a big point to make. Barry is actually one of the toughest in the field too, the way he came out swinging on the TV interview berating the presenter for “letting the Tory” get away with non-answers was a real turning point.
Your Eyore view of a weak divided Labour party I do not doubt reflects your obvious desire for it to be so, but that does not make it true. It just makes your whole argument collapse like a soggy cornflake, left stewing in the bottom of the bowl for too long.
Well Keir Starmer has gravitas, certainly, but rarely does his stint touring the studios as spokesperson for the Party, as do Emily T and Barry G. Too busily absorbed in horrendous Brexit nonsense, no doubt.
The others you mention are still to mature into senior politicians with achievements on their CV. They come across as sincere and enthusiastic but still young and unsophisticated in the hard world of political knockabout and skulduggery at Westminster.
Florence, your last para is nonsense. I have supported the Labour party and paid my subs all my life, ever since Jim Callaghan and Dennis Healey’s days.
I would like nothing better than a strong, united, dynamic Labour party dominating the political landscape.
That is what we wish for but it is not what we have got, despite the best efforts of Labour’s youth wing and Momentum.
The party is divided between left and right and, sadly, Corbyn and McDonnell have too much political baggage and MSM enemies to ever dominate the political scene in a way that could drive through incisive change. Change which we so badly need, such as:
introducing comprehensive tax reform, introduction of a Land Tax or Wealth Tax, abolishing the House of Lords and the Monarchy and Honours system and creating an elected upper chamber or Senate; abolishing the special tax status of all UK’s overseas territories to bring and end to off-shoring, non-doms and tax evasion; abolishing the charitable status of private schools and introducing VAT on their school fees and reinvesting the proceeds into state education to equalise standards between state and private schooling; banning non UK citizens like Murdoch from media ownership in UK and bringing our national sports coverage back to free-to-air television; stopping the creeping privatisation and commercialisation of dentistry to rescue the nation’s oral health by re-establishing NHS dentistry as a world class service with a totally new properly funded contract where dentists do 100% NHS work, not mixing private and NHS; the same with the health service and social care; renationalise the railways and the energy and water utilities. Plus 50% top rate of tax on £100k+ which together with a Land Tax/Wealth Tax would redistribute wealth from the hoarders and rent seekers in the top 5% to the other 95%.
It will need a new dynamic leadership team with the political will of Corbyn/McDonnell but in the mould of Blair/Brown, with brains and oratory, but without their fatal flaws to drive all that lot through.
I doubt we will ever see much of it happen, if anything at all in the next decade or so.
The Tory party has always been the political wing of the landed rent-seeking class of aristocrats and financiers and it is about time the country woke up politically and stopped voting rancid Tory MPs like Rees-Mogg, Grayling, Fox, Johnson and Duncan Smith into office against the best interests of the 95% of us.