11 October 2018
Diary of a Corbynista
Council of Despair
by Don Urquhart
4 October
Clacton is one of the most deprived towns in the UK. Andy Wood represented North Clacton as a Conservative on the Essex County Council but has defected to the Liberal Democrats.
His reasoning:
I no longer believe that the Conservatives are listening to the ordinary person on the street; you only have to look at what is happening to Brexit to see this.
I want a health service that works without people having to travel miles for an appointment, a police force that is able to do its job properly with more police on the street, a party that does not put housing before infrastructure and a highways department that works.
5 October
Yesterday my wife saw three women in discussion near Westminster Abbey. They were deciding which pitch each would occupy in order to optimise the revenue they could obtain from passers-by using the time-honoured techniques of agonised expressions and supplicating outstretched hands. They operated as a typical entrepreneurial small business and with Mrs May ending austerity in the next few months they might well go from strength to strength. It’s the Conservative Party building a better Britain. What’s not to like?
6 October
Nice to get out of London but still rendered gloomy and dyspeptic by the Prime Minister’s attempts to dance into our hearts.
As I entered the shower cubicle I thought of my friend Debbie. We had been colleagues in an investment bank going through hard times and our line manager called all of us together in the main boardroom. He asked that the sliding doors behind us be closed thus creating a claustrophobic fug in the room. To say that Nick’s presentation was depressing does not do it justice. Think Andy Murray after defeat by the world no. 200.
But at the end of it he said there would be drinks.
Open the doors at the back please!
and Debbie whispered
Thank God, I thought we were going to be gassed.
The shower head in the B&B was fixed and out of reach but I am still here to tell the tale.
7 October
News that the Tories are attempting to woo Labour MP’s unimpressed by their party leader and his policies. I am trying to visualise the Labour MP more impressed by Theresa May and her crowd than their own bloke.
What on Earth is going on?
8 October
Chris, can you tell us how wonderful austerity is for us all? And could you possibly speak even faster and less coherently than Michael Gove.
Had Jo Coburn actually said that to Chris Skidmore MP on today’s Politics Live he would have scored 10 out of 10.
While the rest of the panel and the viewing public could only wonder open-mouthed at his performance, Will Self was kind enough to attempt to take him seriously:
I think more damning of your record is that half of disabled people in this country are reckoned to have their human rights being ignored as we speak and I have disabled friends who have been denied their benefit. I have friends who have been switched over to universal credit and cannot meet their bills right now. And it’s a bit thick I think for the governing party to sit here and say it’s all coming up roses.
But Chris just regurgitated some more of the party show-and-tell sheets he had been given.
Such people are governing us.
9 October
I have just returned from a couple of days in leafy Kent, enjoying visits to Down House the family home of Charles Darwin and Chartwell where Sir Winston Churchill lived. It was all uplifting for one inclined to feel pride in our nation’s achievements. So I was surprised this morning to come across an article by Patrick Butler in The Guardian where the leader of Kent County Council is quoted:
No Conservative came into local government to do this.
He is referring to the swingeing cuts all county councils are having to make to core public services and as Mr Butler signposts with his headline:
Even Tory councils are now calling on ministers to ease the pain of cuts.
So not everything in the Garden of England is lovely.
10 October
It’s the second day running that I rely on the Guardian. Aditya Chakrabortty has an article on the fate of the Latin American village near Seven Sisters station. The local council is planning to sell the area off to developers who will build 200 luxury dwellings and leave space for some anaemic chains like Costa. The rub is that it’s Haringey Council which describes itself as a “Corbyn Council”. Chakrabortty milks the irony with his headline:
How would Corbynism work in government? Here’s a clue
-which of course is tendentious nonsense.
It’s a council making bad decisions, hopefully not in a corrupt manner. They need to explain themselves. Sad to say Theresa May will use it in PMQ’s later today.
