5 April 2018
Diary of a Corbynista
Enough is Enough
by Don Urquhart
29 March
What keeps me going is the deeply held belief that Theresa May has feet of clay. Has she learnt or is she repeating the errors of the 2017 election campaign? With great fanfare it is announced that she will be visiting the 4 constituent countries of the UK in one day, today in fact. We will see whether or not she is simply posed in front of a few tame Tories for photo opportunities. It still appears to be all about Theresa. And it is a Theresa who is long on rhetoric and light on delivery, most vividly for the NHS.
Yesterday NHS Providers, which represents chief executives, warned the service was facing an impossible task in 2018-19.
Waiting lists will grow and long A&E waits continue.
30 March
Whenever they are challenged on education funding, the government spokespeople tell us they are putting more money in than ever before. The Public Accounts Committee gives us a clue as to how this can be the case when there is so much anecdotal evidence of a crumbling public service.
The committee reports that 102 academy trusts paid some trustees over £150,000 a year and in two-thirds of cases where the government had challenged this, it had not been satisfied with the response.
So a gravy train for some at the expense of children’s education.
NEU general secretary Dr Mary Bousted said:
While most schools face brutal budget cuts, and teachers are experiencing real-term pay cuts, this report confirms what we have long known – that some academy trusts appear to be using public money to pay excessive salaries.
31 March
The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for an independent inquiry into yesterday’s violence at the border between Israel and Gaza which resulted in 16 Palestinians being killed.
This is an incident in a faraway land and the United Kingdom has no direct responsibility except in respect of the arms we may have sold to either side or to both.
We should not sell arms to Israel or to the Palestinians and it is no excuse to say that if we don’t sell them someone else will.
1 April
National Education Union (NEU) leader Kevin Courtney said official statistics showed that in 2017 4,050 English special needs pupils were without a school place. The corresponding figure for 2016 was 1,710.
This is no surprise to anyone who has any contact with schools.
The government is blameless having shovelled plenty of money at the thing:
High needs funding has been protected in real terms over the next two years, and our extra £1.3bn investment for schools and high needs means we are giving local authorities more money for every pupil in every school.
2 April
A joint survey by the National Education Union and the Child Poverty Action Group reports that half our schools run food and/or clothes banks and some offer low interest loans to families. Eight years of cuts to social services have brought about a situation whereby the schools are the front line in attempting to provide some sort of quality of life to an increasing number of children. We’ve heard the mantra “Enough is Enough” quite a lot recently. Well here is a very deserving campaign where it certainly applies.
The Department for Education response is that it wants to create a country where everyone can go as far as their talents can take them. Someone in the department has gone as far as being employed to write vacuous press releases. Is that the kind of thing they mean?
3 April
Yesterday Jeremy Corbyn celebrated Passover Seder with a group called Jewdas. They are anti-establishment and critical of the Israeli government. Watching the story develop on Twitter, Guido Fawkes and his ilk were salivating at another opportunity to pillory the Labour Party leader. Today’s newspapers, the BBC and the usual PLP suspects are joining in the fun. For the Corbyn supporter his action demonstrates defiance of the media and disaffected Labour MPs. Whatever anti-Semitism is it does not involve celebrating Passover Seder with Jewish people.
4 April
It’s a month since Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned.
On 12th March the case was debated in The Commons and Corbyn counselled caution:
Has high resolution trace analysis been run on a sample of the nerve agent and has that revealed any evidence as to the location of its production or the identity of its perpetrators?
In an interview on March 19th Deutsche Welle’s Zhanna Nemtsova posed this question to the Foreign Secretary:
You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find this out so quickly….
The Foreign Secretary had no doubts:
I interrogated very closely…the people from Porton Down and they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself are you sure? And he said there’s no doubt.
Yesterday ITV News asked Gary Aitkenhead, the Chief Executive of Porton Down:
How do you identify it as Russian?
He was quite categorical that Porton Down had not done so:
Our job within the whole of this investigation is and was to identify the agent used which is from the family of Novichok nerve agents. We have provided this information to the government who have used a number of other sources to come to the conclusions they have.
Sadly this is not the first time the Foreign Secretary has taken liberties with the truth in a serious matter.
