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The Tory psychodrama drags on
Astonishingly, depressingly, and ridiculously, the Tory psychodrama is still continuing. Or, rather, the utterly pointless drama starring two psychos.
Please do bear in mind that these two hopeless grifters were selected by MPs, and it is now up to the Tory party members not the general public to vote for one of them to be the new Prime Minister.
About 200,000 people (including children) that represent 0.29% of the population will be elegible to vote. According to The Guardian, 44% are pensioners, 97% are white, and 54% live in either London or the Home Counties.
Rishi Sunak
On one side, we have the wealthy tax evader Sunak, with his equally rich and tax evading wife - neither of which are a good look if you used to be in charge of the economy.
To get an idea of how in touch he is, he left a meeting to do with this pointless leadership race wearing a suit that cost three months of minimum wage.
He has recently performed a few U-turns on things he said earlier, which suggests that he considers his plans based upon what would appeal to the Tory faithful rather than what would actually be useful to the country.
Still, we can't really blame Sunak for that, given that has been the basic direction of the Conservatives for the past decade or so.
He has tried hard over the past few years to cultivate an image of being The Good Guy, he even responded to the Covid crisis with the "Eat Out To Help Out" campaign, which went down well with many.
But all of that has fallen apart since he simply failed to do anything useful at all as the Cost Of Living Crisis loomed on the horizon. Now it's not so much away on the horizon but more like Godzilla stomping on houses, and still...nothing.
But we don't need to look far to see that Sunak, for all that he might want to be seen as some sort of hero, is really Just Another Bloody Tory. During the aforementioned Covid situation, the derisory (and least generous in Europe) Statutory Sick Pay was not increased. This left people with the option of either going to work and spreading the virus, or isolating and... eating what?
In Sunak's time as Chancellor, nearly nine billion in PPE fraud and a little over four billion in Covid-19 fraud has been written off. This is the largest amount any Chancellor has had to deal with. Imagine what could be done with thirteeen billion quid, if it wasn't being spaffed over some tosspot mate-of-a-prominent-Tory.
There are around three million self employed people who not only were not included in the furlough scheme, they haven't received so much as a rusty tuppence. Note, again, over thirteen billion was written off.
Plenty of tax rises over the past two or three years. Mostly aimed at low and middle income families. Meanwhile he has fairly consistently voted against higher taxation on banks and the banking industry.
He is, as if it wasn't already abundantly clear, the sort of Tory who gives rise to the nickname "The Nasty Party".
Having him as Prime Minister would be a catastrophe, especially if you're poor.
Liz Truss
On the other side, we have Liz Truss. Her policies are nigh incomprehensible and she has made more U-turns than a twisting mountain road.
She began her political career in the mid '90s as a Liberal Democrat, and was primarily known as that mad cow that wanted to do away with the monarchy.
Now? Now she's a Tory that didn't see any particular problem with going to a private Mayfair club (owned by a Tory donor) and dropping three grand which was put on "expenses". Expenses such as three bottles of white at £153 apiece, followed by two bottles of red at £130 each. Two bottles of dry gin... It was for her and her guests. Truss didn't drink all of that herself, though I suspect if she had, she might have arrived at a moment of actual clarity.
She has happily followed the party whip to vote forty eight times in favour of benefits cuts. Typical sodding Tory wankbiscuit.
2014 was an interesting year for Truss. A rather infamous speech about the UK importing so much cheese, and how This! Is! A! Disgrace!, followed in the same bloody speech by her proud proclamation that she'll be in Beijing in December opening up new pork markets.
If you want to know who was the architect behind the Northern Ireland Protocol bill, you know, the one that risks breaking the Good Friday Agreement and starting a trade war with the EU... go on, guess. I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count.
Speaking of trade deals, post-Brexit, she managed to arrange a trade deal with New Zealand that looks as if it will help out New Zealand's economy to the tune of about five hundred million quid. The effect on the UK economy? "Negligible" was the word used. In fact, it was reported at the time that Kiwi television got the government to confirm the specifics of the trade deal twice just to make sure it wasn't some sort of prank.
On one of the televised leadership debates, talking about her policy on China, one of the best soundbites of that discussion was "freedom is a price worth paying".
Don't actually try to rationalise that. Truss is an eccentric madwoman who likely became an MP because she wasn't capable of existing in the real world. After all, when she was Justice Secretary back in 2018, she said that barking dogs in prisons should work to deter drug delivery drones.
She has also promised to issue a directive to every police force in the country telling them to reduce murders by 20%. As if there's some sort of knob on a wall of the local nick that they can adjust. Maybe if she issued that directive a little sooner, Olivia Pratt-Korbel would still be alive.
And now, today, she stated that she's more than happy to reach for the nuclear button should it be necessary. A question that most sensible PMs avoid actually answering. But Truss doesn't seem overly bothered about global annihilation, stating that she would be ready to do that while appearing completely emotionless.
Perhaps the lack of emotion was due to the big word "annihilation" (oh, five syllables!) causing a cerebral hiccup.
That being said, we must remember that we are talking about Liz Truss. Illogical gibberish is her superpower. I mean, for god's sake, she would fail a Turing Test.
Having her a Prime Minister would be a catastrophe, but would give foreign press outlets no end of column inches.
We might laugh at some of the things that Dick Cheney/Dubyah/Palin have said, but there is a sort of logic behind it, even if they're talking about known unknowns or rather saying squicky things about their own daughter.
Truss? Truss' logic comes from a place so outlandish that unicorns probably do fart rainbows. And with Truss as PM, we'll all have to try to figure out what the hell she means every single time she opens her mouth...
...only to immediately regret the effort as she'll have done a(nother) U-turn.
None of this crap matters
There are people who go to bed when the sun goes down as they can't afford the electricity.
There are children who bathe while wearing their school uniforms in order to clean both at the same time and with the same barely warm water.
There are parents who are getting progressively sicker because they are skipping meals in order that their children can eat.
There are some children, however, who only eat whatever is on offer at school.
This is real and this is now. For some people times were hard. But nowadays? Not so much hard as defying belief. Soaring energy prices, spiralling inflation, and damn near everything else going up in price because it's a convenient bandwagon (think of the shareholder profits!).
If this is real and this is now, what the hell is going to happen when winter comes? Long nights, cold days...
Neither Sunak nor Truss have any coherent policy for helping those who need it (indeed, any Tory government is actively hostile to those who need welfare), and honestly neither strikes me as having any coherent policy for bringing the economy back under control.
Indeed, I rather get the feeling that the entire campaign, and all the U-turns, is not because any of them are trying to convince you that they are good for the country, but because they're trying to convince you that their opponent is worse. It's like being given a choice of a bullet in the head or in the heart. Neither option is good and both options have the same outcome. Sophie's choice.
So flip a coin. Sunak or Truss. I don't have a coin, so evens it's Sunak and odds (because she's very bloody odd), it's Truss.
>PRINT RND(1234)
193
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Truss it is, then.
Britain doesn't need either of these ridiculous cockwombles.
It needs a General Election, an Opposition that stops trying to be a Tory tribute act, and a public brave enough to vote for an alternative instead of parroting meaningless mantras that usually involve "getting Brexit done".
I despair for my former country.
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| J.G.Harston, 26th August 2022, 21:43 |
Liz Truss on trade reminds me of David Cameron on benefits.
In the noughties a big chunk of my benefits casework was child benefit. The rules were very clear. It was the primary carer (gobbledegook for "the adult the child lives with") who had to apply. It was the primary carer who was assessed, it was the primary carer who was the applicant, it was the primary carer who received the money, and it was the primary carer's local benefit office that they applied to.
So then we had this nonsense about non-UK workers in the UK getting UK child benefit for children living back home with relatives back home. Naturally, UK benefit recipients, administrators, and taxpayers were saying "ey up, if Mischa is living with Babula in Warsaw, she should be damn well applying to Warsaw DSS, not Wath-on-Dearn".
Cameron said "I'll go to Brussles and sort this!"
He came back and said: "It's all sorted! Instead of kids in Poland being paid UK child benefits, I've got the EU to agree that....... kids in Poland will be paid UK child benefit, but at Polish rates."
You. Had. One. Job....
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Last read at 06:25 on 2024/04/26.
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