3 September 2020
Diary of a Corbynista
The Cummings Gang
by Don Urquhart
30 July
The next General Election will be in 2024 so it matters not at all whether the Prime Minister is accurate.
The Independent reports:
Boris Johnson has been reprimanded by the UK’s statistics watchdog for repeatedly making inaccurate and misleading claims about the government’s record on child poverty.
The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) said figures used by the prime minister were incorrect after he claimed a huge 400,000 fall in the number of families of children in poverty since 2010.
1 August
Johnson and co. are using Covid-19 to advance their NHS privatisation agenda. They have it as a good thing that we will have to rely on private hospitals. A friend has to weigh up waiting a year for a hernia operation or find the money to go private. Another, a senior clinician at an NHS hospital, says they could not find a single qualified surgeon from the 400 people who applied. Are they being sucked in by the private sector?
2 August
Interesting tweet from tax expert Richard Murphy:
The idea that we’ve a national debt that must be repaid has been used to shackle UK government spending, and is untrue. The so-called national debt is private wealth seeking a secure place for saving its money, and unless we’re going to close that savings facility need never be repaid.
3 August
Conservative MP Iain Duncan-Smith on the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement:
You can’t be half in the EU & half out, the problem is the WA. It costs too much & it denies us true national independence. This WA giving the EU future control over us has to go. Now Britain faces a £160billion EU loans bill AFTER Brexit.
Michael Doyle’s tweet summarises perfectly:
Iain Smith Duncan MP finally reads the Withdrawal Agreement and disagrees with it, 8 months after voting for it, and 9 months after insisting that 3 days was enough time to read and debate it.
7 August
A deeply corrupt country. The authorities were warned repeatedly about the dangers but did nothing. Could easily have been about Grenfell Tower but on this occasion was ex MP Alistair Burt castigating the Lebanese.
8 August
Keep our NHS Public is a fine website for tracking the delights of government health policy. For example:
Hourly wages for nurses by country:
Sweden £23.95
Denmark £18.64
Ireland £14.86
Australia £14.80
Germany £12.60
UK £11.63
9 August
Many people get by very happily without a TV licence. I will soon be one of them if the Tory press really does express the will of the people as it claims. They have Andrew Neil as front runner for BBC Chairman with Nicky Morgan and Amber Rudd as contenders.
11 August
There is not a British immigration problem – there is a universal poverty problem. We cannot welcome all the world’s poor to Britain – we do a crap job of looking after our own poor people. At the moment it is a people traffickers’ bonanza. We need to take more people and implement a world-beating system for welcoming them. There has to be a way of doing this without shooting up people in dinghies.
12 August
This is the headline in the i.
From the first Covid-19 disruption of our schools, teachers have been saying that the mocks are a wakeup call which tells pupils what they have still to do. The Education Secretary displays ignorance or disregard of the real issues.
13 August
Gavin Williamson claims that increasing A-level grades would lead to pupils being over promoted into jobs that are beyond their competence. Touch of irony there?
Meanwhile BBC Breakfast reports the A Level results by focussing on a BTEC college where all of the students are thrilled by their results and the Principal says how fortunate we are to have such a wonderful government that understands higher education.
Charlie Stayt and Naga Munchetty repeatedly tell the A Level students who have been shat on not to worry it will all come out right in the end. I suspect that Charlie and Naga were told that if they did not convey this message things would not come out right for them.
14 August
Could this be the opportunity for another Marcus Rashford moment? The A Level results process was so clearly botched and unfair that a bit of cohesion among teachers and students might just push the government into a U-turn?
15 August
Five years ago today I recorded:
Read the candidate submissions for Labour leader and deputy leader, there were 4 of each. Jeremy Corbyn’s was the only one which did not contain the words “I” and “me”.
17 August
In about 1 hour’s time the UK Government is to make a statement about A Level and GCSE results. The OFQUAL algorithm doesn’t work. Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales have decided to discard it and accept the grades protected by teachers. Who will make the government statement? Will there be any attempt to save face by not U-turning, following the lead of the devolved administrations?
19 August
Labour List is, as you might guess, a website for Labour Party members. Every now and then there is a subscriber survey, and in this week’s we were asked whether we supported the 2019 manifesto policies. Here’s how it came out:
- Cut the substantial majority of carbon emissions by 2030 (82%)
- Create one million green jobs (74%)
- Close tax loopholes enjoyed by private schools (73%)
- Increase income tax for those earning over £80,000 (71%)
- Nationalise mail, rail, energy and water (67%)
- Repeal anti-trade union legislation (64%)
- Scrap tuition fees (61%)
- Extend full voting rights to all UK residents (61%)
- Set up a publicly owned generic drug company (60.5%)
- Compensate the WASPI women (57%)
- Maximum pay ratios of 20:1 in the public sector (56%)
- Aim for 32-hour working week within a decade (51%)
The two in our list of policies from last year’s manifesto that did not find majority backing among our survey respondents were free and fast broadband for all (very narrowly, at 49.6%) and renewing Trident (12.3%).
Jeremy Corbyn was personally opposed to renewing Trident but had his arm twisted to include it in the manifesto. Now it seems that the vast majority of Labour Party members think Corbyn was right.
21 August
Dame Louise Casey was appointed 6 months ago as the government’s chief advisor on homelessness. She resigned yesterday 3 days before the moratorium on evictions terminates.
Here’s an extract from the BBC report:
The BBC’s chief political correspondent, Vicki Young, said the former Victims’ Commissioner was known for her straight talking and had not always seen eye-to-eye with the Conservative government.
It is understood Dame Louise would consider returning to lead the rough sleeping review later in the year, but only if there was a broad remit to consider all aspects of homelessness.
You wouldn’t want to be homeless right now.
22 August
Landlords were getting quite perky as evictions day, August 23rd, approached, but another U-Turn from the government deferring the big day to September 20th. So another battle won against an incompetent, aimless government.
23 August
BBC and Sky major on Chris Whitty telling us how incredibly safe it is for children to return to school. The state propaganda machine in action. Dig a bit deeper and it is clear that many schools will be underprepared and understaffed to deal with the pandemic.
24 August
Johnson tells us it is a moral imperative for kids to go to school. Were he to appear on Mastermind, Moral Imperatives would not be his special subject. Meanwhile Education Minister Gibb blusters incoherently when asked what schools should do if they have a Covid case.
25 August
On Newsnight a headmistress tells us she has received no instructions for dealing with a Covid outbreak. Gavin Williamson says the schools all know what to do in such a circumstance.
It is compulsory for children to be in full time education until they are 16 but there is no intrinsic moral imperative that they should be taught together in a building. We should remember that the schools have been open for the children of front line workers and “disadvantaged” kids. The Johnson imperative now is to get adults away from working at home and back into offices, spending on lunches beers and transport.
I am convinced that pandemic cases will rocket once adults have more close contact with each other and getting children back to school is tailor made as a measure to achieve that.
School buildings should stay open for the children who really have nowhere else to go. That does not include those whose parents are working at home.
Working at home is the future from many standpoints. So also is online education. Let’s buy into the future with enthusiasm and investment rather than being dragged into it when our economy is in a ditch of the government’s making.
26 August
My analysis of Tory strategy is that they will pursue the Cummings radical agenda for 3 years then implement cuddly policies for the year before the next election.
My friend Neil disagrees. He believes they and their backers are raping the country while the going is good and will be off to the hills before the next election comes round.
27 August
I received emails from an organisation called “Barnet Transformed”. It seems to be a subset of something called “The World Transformed”. I was invited to a Zoom featuring a number of people I had not heard of apart from Jeremy Corbyn. The World Transformed is sponsored by a number of organisations including Momentum. Absent from the feast was the Labour Party.
31 August
Of course it is a wonderful vision – schoolchildren socialising, working together in the buildings constructed to educate them. But is it safe? We are advised by Gavin Williamson and the Prime Minister that it is all pristine. However, were you to make a list of people you would not trust to go down the road and buy a packet of fags, these two would be at the top.
A few days ago The Guardian reported on European efforts to get children back in the classroom:
Coronavirus in Europe: dozens of Berlin schools report infections
Even the much vaunted German approach could not prevent spikes originating in 41 schools in Berlin soon after reopening.
