The beautiful new visage hiding old, failed policies
Would you believe it: half of this month is already gone! We hardly noticed, thanks to the diligent ‘reporting’ on the “Memoir of Misery”. The ‘nice’ point about that is that this allowed our esteemed MSM to sweep important news under the carpet.
Look at today’s headline of Auntie B’s compilation of print editions’ front pages: “Newspaper headlines: ‘Pupils face online lessons’ and ‘fury’ over police powers to halt protests” (link). More strikes: yeah right. Let’s have another ‘winter of discontent’ because we’re not sufficiently miserable.
And what about this ‘police powers to halt protests’? Well, just as with the digital ID ‘consultation’, our MSM have preferred not to say a word at the time. Right at the end of the relevant report in this morning’s Times, we read:
“The Public Order Bill is considered a successor to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act passed last year, which was criticised for introducing curbs on the right to protest.The bill is undergoing line-by-line scrutiny in the House of Lords, which will be given the task of debating the amendment.” (link, paywalled)
Correct me if I’m wrong – recollections may vary, as we’ve been told repeatedly – but I cannot recall any outcry in the MSM about this Bill. It clearly must have been debated in the HoC since it’s now landed in the HoL. What were we told to talk about instead? Strikes, wasn’t it?
Apparently this Bill is meant to address the ‘demonstrations’ by yon ‘activists’ who glue themselves to roads or paintings indoors when the weather is bad. You can find a short report here, with ‘due diligence’ given to an opposing point of view.
Staying with ‘strikes’ going to take place next month – the most terrible being that of 100,000 civil servants taking place on the 1st of February (link) – there’s one bound to bring the Nation to her knees: that of University lecturers:
“Academics have announced 18 days of strikes in what they said would be higher education’s largest ever walkout. The University and College Union (UCU) said industrial action would take place next month and in March after its executive committee rejected a pay offer of up to 5 per cent. […] The UCU, which represents 70,000 staff at 150 universities, has also threatened a marking and assessment boycott for April should its dispute over pay, conditions and pensions not be settled.” (link, paywalled)
There are two points which make this strike action especially delicate. One is the huge salary of universities’ Vice Chancellors who earn even more than NHS ‘CEOs’. Sums of £400,000p.a. were mentioned. The other point is the ongoing wokeness pervading universities, something which lecturers and professors seem to have taken in their stride. The DM has a report which is shocking:
“More than half of Britain’s universities are peddling controversial and radical ‘woke’ ideologies on students, a damning league table has revealed. Some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions are ‘poisoning the minds of generations to come’, critics said last night, by subjecting undergraduates and academics to ‘trigger warnings’ and guidance on ‘white privilege’. Elite Russell Group universities dominate the table, accounting for eight of the top ten spots. Cambridge and Oxford come first and second, […]” (link)
Why should we worry about this lecturers’ strike who seem extremely relaxed about promoting woke stuff? At least their students would be able to pursue knowledge on their own, like during the lockdown years, without ‘trigger warnings’ which apparently is now deemed to be so dangerous that the expression ‘trigger warning’ needs to be scrapped …!
There’s also the teachers’ strike. They have different trade unions so it’s uncertain if there’ll be a total walk-out. The DT writes:
“The full scale of potential disruption remains unclear, given details about how many teachers may strike and when will not be made public until after the ballot results are announced. It is understood that the NEU is planning a mix of national and regional walkouts, with two or three-day stoppages that could start next month.” (paywalled link)
Here’s the conundrum: these strikes affect our youth, the future of this country. Where are the Labour BigWigs writing articles for the MSM, pointing fingers at the government, demanding ‘moar money’? They do when it’s about the Sacred Cow, do they not, such as Starmer’s piece for the Sunday DT.
His proposals have been chewed over already. All I’ll say is that it’s staggering that he bemoans the bureaucracy which his former leader, a certain T.Blair, has introduced. You might like to peruse the comments under his piece – they are not paywalled, scroll down here.
Meanwhile The Times has resurrected the good old tradition of combining ‘A Campaign’ with ‘Investigative Journalism’, dedicating the top space of their online edition to this worthy effort. The ‘experts’ which The Times has assembled are of truly high calbre:
“The commission will involve a group of leading medics, business leaders and policy experts who will be commissioners. These include Lord Rose of Monewden, the chairman of Asda; Lord Darzi of Denham, the surgeon and former minister; Dame Jane Dacre, the former President of the Royal College of Physicians and Sir John Bell, Regius professor of medicine at Oxford University.” (link, paywalled)
Blimey! I’m feeling better already … Still, the report accompanying the leading article has even now produced some gems:
“The immediate crisis is about capacity. Between 1987 and 2019 the total number of NHS hospital beds fell by 53 per cent — from 299,400 to 141,000. […] The failure to plan for the long term has left the health service “over-reliant” on foreign born doctors and nurses, as Amanda Pritchard, the chief executive of NHS England, admitted at the weekend. Money is also being wasted on expensive agency staff, which last [sic!] the NHS about £3 billion last year. A single shift for one nurse came in at more than £2,500 and one doctor’s shift cost £5,200.”(link, paywalled)
Now why is it that for years every “NHS Crisis” is being blamed on ‘bed blockers’, all those geriatric boomers, rather than on this stunning lack of beds, in the face of the huge increase in population thanks to ‘diversity’ and immigration, kicked off by you-remember-who? There’s also this remark by Lord Rose of Monewden, the chairman of Asda, a member of The Times’ panel:
“At the moment in the NHS we’ve got a machine which is not fit for purpose. There’s a pile of bureaucracy. Everybody is more mindful about ‘have we met this target?’ [or] ‘have we got that protocol done?’” (link, paywalled)
Indeed. And where did this ‘pile of bureaucracy’ stem from? Which government introduced all the box-ticking exercises? All forgotten already? Why are the Westminster denizens so keen on installing a new government which would keep on that same box-ticking path, only with even ‘moar money’?
That’s all I have for today. Clearly, our ‘elites’, especially the lefty ones, have been and are working according to a saying from last century, by a lefty ‘hero’, Lenin: ‘Trust is good – control is better’. And we uneducated plebs wonder why Westminster, Whitehall and their propaganda outlets are so keen on controlling us to within an inch of our lives …
“Indeed. And where did this ‘pile of bureaucracy’ stem from? Which government introduced all the box-ticking exercises? All forgotten already? Why are the Westminster denizens so keen on installing a new government which would keep on that same box-ticking path, only with even ‘moar money’?
As far as I know it is still the case that no government can bind it’s successor.
The Tories have been asking us to vote for them for 12 years with promises to improve the productivity of the NHS. They have committed billions of pounds of tax payer money to doing so and it is in a worse state than they found it.
Exactly the same can be said for immigration, the rule of law, education, housing, inflation etc, etc,.
With respect what does it matter what Labour says or what the Westminster blob hypothesise about what Labour will do when it is the fake Conservative Party (for some 30 years now) that is the real evil in our midst and it is they that are delivering Labour policy anyway?
Yes wasn`t it Cameron`s ambition “to be like Blair”?
He certainly succeeded on the “devious” front – remember the `phoney deals` he was trying to do with the EU, so he wouldn`t have to give a referendum
Jake Bennett
As I understand it, the hitherto hidden hand of Soros and Globocap are the puppeteers behind all this. We have a Government of Occupation which is giving these bad actors everything they want from Britain and destroying it. According to “Pretty Polly,” a frequent commenter on ConWom, the rot really took off with principally Blair, also Major with their dodgy deals and sell- outs; their evil work has been continued by every subsequent PM. As “Pretty Polly” points out, not surprisingly none of these politicians Major Blair Cameron etc mention their association with Soros etc in their memoirs.
The Tory party’s toxicity lies in its deceit and muddying of the waters: fooling people into voting for a party that is not what it says on the tin. The overall direction they’re leading us in is IMHO the same as Labour but they’re not so direct about it. I’m sure a Labour government would reverse any small moves achieved towards Brexit (if there are any!) without even bothering to hide it.
Yes Mary. I fully agree with you. Good comment.
On the subject of control it seems that we have not even seen the beginning . Local authorities spending hundreds of thousands on all types of surveillance cameras on highways (and elsewhere ) now on poles several metres high for some reason but that apart there are more and more plans to reduce parking areas and introduce road use restrictions and speed limits in towns and cities near you never mind the the restrictions about to be imposed on residents of outer London Oxford and Canterbury with others set to follow their example . All new domestic battery chargers for those E.V cars will now have to have a smart metre fitted which will allow chargers use to be restricred at will by your local friendly energy supply company.
Telemetrics and self reporting ones at that are to be fitted to all new vehicles. Plans for the digital explosion of banking and currency are well advanced with bank local branches closing by the dozen . The digital verifaction proposals being ignored by the media and sold as a wonderful thing to make you and all your transactions safe and convienient are being finalised. Big government and state control happening in full view of citizens who still seem even after the lockdowns and over reach of the political class and the authorities over the last three years seem only interested in H & M and if the Daily Mail is anything to go by , the King is frightened of what H knows about his previous marriage despite him being only twelve years old when Dianna died and is worried that it may be discussed in another ( blockbuster book ) which says a lot about book sales in the U.K and many of the people that read them. Follow that with an article in yesterdays Telegraph regailing readers on why you should not shop in Aldi ( the author had never set foot in one as obviously it’s really not for people like us ) and continue to shop in Waitrose. With the press and much of the population entralled by trivia all I can say is may your god help you all because it’s increasing difficult to see who or what else will.
Spot on Norman, and all courtesy of the fake Conservative Party.