Conservative Party used disinformation ‘with new level of impunity’ during 2019 general election, report finds
Comment please log in to view this image Why are the Conservatives governing like socialists? This Government's incompetence, spiralling debt and pervasive wokery makes it feel often as if Labour actually won the election Leo McKinstry 21 August 2020 • 1:10pm please log in to view this image Last December, the Tories won an overwhelming victory at the General Election. A new era of robust, patriotic Conservatism seemed to beckon. Yet now, as the Government sinks ever deeper into the mire of incompetence, debt and progressive dogma, it often feels as if Labour actually won the contest. Left-wing values are in the ascendant on everything from immigration to crime and bureaucracy to public spending. And, as always happens when the socialists are in charge, the expansion of the state is accompanied by chronic inefficiency and petty authoritarianism. It has been a bizarre experience in recent months to be living under a Government which in theory is Conservative, but in practice issues endless instructions about our behaviour, puts over nine million people on the state payroll, subsidizes visits to restaurants, obsesses about diversity, destroys the integrity of the exam system, and presides over spiralling crime. Ministers defend themselves by claiming that they have been faced by an unprecedented crisis because of the coronavirus outbreak, but that is a profoundly unconvincing argument. Even before the advent of Covid, the Government showed no inclination to tackle either the fashionable woke orthodoxy in civic life, or the culture of expensive inertia and managerial excess in the public sector. Just as importantly, ministers appear to have wildly exaggerated the incidence of coronavirus, with the numbers far below the doom-laden predictions of scientific experts like Neil Ferguson. Even now, the total of fatalities keeps being revised downwards. As this paper reported this morning, “hospital admissions for Covid-19 were over-reported at the peak of the pandemic” because those who died of other causes were included in the statistics if they had ever tested positive for the disease. At just 41,403, the death toll is barely half the estimated 80,000 who died in the UK from Hong Kong flu in 1968-9. Yet the Government half a century did not shut down the economy, impose a nationwide curfew, suck much of the population into the enervating embrace of the welfare system and demolish the travel industry. Today, the use of dodgy statistics and institutionalised fear-mongering is bad enough. But what makes the Government’s Covid response even worse is its spectacular ineptitude, reflected in the shambles over the supply of protective gear or the panic-stricken imposition of quarantine rules and local lockdowns. Just like a Labour Government, the Tories have miserably failed to challenge the teaching unions whose obstructionist policy has ensured the closure of schools since March, hence this fortnight’s exam chaos. The last Labour Government under Gordon Brown was also notorious for its profligacy, dragging Britain towards the brink of bankruptcy. Tragically, the same process is now apparent today, as the country accelerates down the slope towards fiscal ruin. This morning it was announced that Government debt for the first time has reached £2 trillion. As a share of GDP that is a level not seen since the Second World War, while borrowing this year is already above £150 billion. The Conservatives’ image as the party of sound money may have been dealt a terminal blow. That is particularly true because so much of this largesse is squandered through waste, cronyism, and the self-interests of the elite. It is outrageous that, under the Tories, the HS2 rail link has become a vast exercise in subsidized avarice, with the average worker on the £107 billion project now costing an incredible £95,000-a-year. Fat cats are still flourishing in Whitehall, quangoland and local government. According to the Taxpayers’ Alliance, there are 2667 municipal officials on over £100,000-a-year, 32 of them on over £250,000-a-year. Political favouritism is still rife, as shown in the dubious appointment of Tory peer Dido Harding as the Head of the new National Institute of Health Protection, despite her unimpressive record as boss of both Talk Talk and the Government’s track and trace programme. Given the job without even an interview, her rise cannot have been hindered by her passion for horses, an interest she happens to share with the health secretary Matt Hancock. Her elevation was hardly unique. The Government also announced recently that the former Tory MPs Sir Patrick McLoughlin and Nick de Bois have been given roles at the British Tourist Authority and VisitEngland respectively. Perhaps even more disturbing is the Government’s pathetic submission to the woke agenda. In his previous career as a journalist, Boris Johnson raged against the antics of loony left, which in the 1980s became a byword for ideological extremism. But under his premiership, the revolutionary spirit of the GLC and Islington Council now swirls through the corridors of power. As the mandarins of Whitehall drown in collective guilt, and every public body swallows the divisive nonsense of critical race theory, it is as if Ken Livingstone has taken control on a national scale. Diversity has become the official creed of the state, ruthlessly enforced by McCarthyite witch-hunts against any dissenters. Statues, buildings, street names and art works are all reviewed for their compliance with the latest social justice edicts. The school curriculum is “decolonised”. Race quotas imposed on everything from jobs recruitment to BBC output. The Critic magazine this week highlighted the case of one junior civil servant who complained about “a non-stop daily bombardment of anti-racist activism at work since the Black Lives Matter protests began.” No institution is safe from the new British thought police. The Victoria and Albert Museum, for example, has introduced staff training to “address hidden prejudices and micro-iniquities.” Public bodies used to be primarily vehicles for the delivery of vital services. Today, they are instruments for indoctrination, where quality and effectiveness count far less than correct opinions. The Government’s shameful tolerance of this shift is part of a collapse of confidence in traditional, Conservative values. It is a meltdown that led to this week’s absurd A-level and GCSE grade inflation, devaluing qualifications of any meaning. As one wit commented yesterday, “who knew that one side effect of Covid is to make children so much cleverer?” In fact, amid claims from employers of dire skills shortages, what the exam results increasingly resemble are figures on ever-rising tractor production in the Soviet bloc, as its agricultural system ossified. The handwringing “all must have prizes” mentality is matched by the “all must come in” mentality on border controls. Despite the tough rhetoric from the Home Secretary Priti Patel, her department has utterly failed to get a grip on the traffic of illegal migrant boats across the English Channel, which has enabled more than 5000 people, aided by criminal smugglers, to land in Britain by this route already this year. Indeed, there is no sign that Boris Johnson’s Government is willing to reduce immigration at all. According to the latest figures, a record-breaking 677,000 people – two-thirds of them from outside the EU - settled here in the last year, imposing a further huge burden on public services and undermining social cohesion. Contrary to all the upbeat propaganda from the open border brigade, less than a third of this huge influx of new arrivals actually came here to work. The Tories were once the party of “law and order”, but to make such an assertion today would sound laughable, as violence rises and the shadow of fear hangs over our urban streets. “The gentleness of English civilisation is its most marked characteristic,” wrote George Orwell in 1941. But those words now have a tragic poignancy. Even that globally renowned bastion of security, the British police, has succumbed to the warped values of woke oppression and gesture politics. While senior officers bend the knee or fly flags for travellers’ rights, just 7 per cent of crimes result in any action by the justice system. For all its chronic failings, the modern British state has lost none of its self-importance. Just the opposite is the case. A bloated, bullying attention-seeker, the ineffectual Government machine completely dominates our lives. Every news bulletin is hogged by reports by reports about the minutiae of the public sector, from tinkering with quangos to university admissions. Whether in vox pops or discussion shows, the views of public sector workers fill the airwaves. No one could guess from the endless roll-call of students, nurses, teachers and civil servants in the Question Time audience that, before Covid, 83 per cent of the national workforce was employed in the private sector. At the height of the lockdown, millions were encouraged to take part in a weekly ritual of applause for staff in the NHS, though such uncritical admiration is both unhealthy and a barrier to reform. It belongs to a socialist regime, not a democracy built on freedom and enterprise. Despite appearances, that is supposed to be the vision to which the Tories are attached.
please log in to view this image The Sunday Times @thesundaytimes The BBC is discussing whether to drop Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory from the Last Night of the Proms in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. please log in to view this image Kaptain Kobold @Kaptain_Kobold · 18h It's a tricky one - it's not the Last Night without those two tunes, and I'd hate to see them go. But the idea of gammons exploding with apoplexy does have an appeal all it's own. Maybe a performance of the 1812, with exploding gammons?
An interesting piece in the FT for those that are interested...and for The rest of you we have the Metro. The risk of a no-deal Brexit is rising, and that’s no bad thing https://www.ft.com/content/46087061-3fa7-4bd2-9f0d-d130fa58a409 Water rationing and food shortages’ if second wave clashes with no-deal Brexit. https://metro.co.uk/2020/08/23/water-rationing-food-shortages-second-wave-clashes-no-deal-brexit-13166025/
Here you go mate: It is pointless trying to predict whether or not there will be a deal between the EU and the UK about their future relationship. The EU is an accomplished dealmaking machine, but with only two months to go and nothing concrete agreed, there is surely a non-trivial possibility of failure. The two sides are hopelessly stuck, and there is no sign of movement on either side. It is safe to say, though, that any Brexit deal will not fail over fish. The really big issue is what the EU refers to as the level playing field. Within that category, the state aid regime is one of the toughest elements. The EU wants the UK to adopt a legal framework for competition policy that broadly mirrors its own. What the EU fears is a politicised state aid regime where a British government subsidises companies for opportunistic reasons, and thus undermines competition with EU companies. It is highly unlikely UK prime minister Boris Johnson could agree to this. Nor should he. It is easy to calculate the costs of Brexit. It is harder to calculate the benefits, as they depend mostly on subsequent policy. Competition policy will be absolutely crucial. The EU fears the UK will start subsidising steel companies in Wales or carmakers in the Midlands, and then dump the lot on European markets. Or that the UK will undermine international labour standards or environmental rules. Nothing is impossible, but this misjudges what the UK is likely to do with a new competition policy framework. To make the best out of Brexit, the UK will almost certainly need to step up industrial subsidies, but mostly in new high-tech industries. This is not mercantilist market share grabbing. The UK could, for example, supplement its strength in signal intelligence with strategic investments in high-tech military technologies. The UK is well placed, by European standards, in pharmaceutical research and the next generation of military and civilian artificial intelligence applications. Britain would be unwise to follow the EU’s framework for data protection — a nightmare for small businesses and an obstacle to any fledging AI industry. A further consideration is the shift in the EU’s own competition policy regime away from a rules-based, law-enforcement approach to a politicised one. The EU is nowadays much more focused on protecting European interests against China and US tech companies. It is absolutely right to adopt a more discretionary policy, but it cannot deny the same right to the UK. The critical issue is the changing nature of global trade. Much trade policy debate currently has a rear-view mirror perspective. It is all about widgets in containers. In the past, geography was the main determinant of trading relationships. But geography is irrelevant when you trade data. In the long run, technologies such as 3D printing will make existing industrial supply chains obsolete and reduce the volume of physical shipments. If the UK wants to make at least a limited success of Brexit, it should exploit the many high-tech opportunities the EU has missed and still misses. A well-managed Brexit means accepting short-term costs for long-term gain. An agreement is highly desirable — if only as a framework for future co-operation. But it would be wrong to conclude a deal at all costs. I did not support Brexit myself. But starting from where we are today, I would prioritise exploiting the potential of Brexit rather than minimising its costs. Unless EU leaders change the negotiating mandate, there is no hope for a deal. They have not yet wrapped their heads around the UK trade talks, having had to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic, the EU recovery fund and, more recently, tensions in the eastern Mediterranean and Belarus. They may not get around properly to the UK issue until October. If a deal happens, it will be last-minute, as always. The EU’s rejection of the UK’s wish list for sweetheart deals for individual sectors is understandable. The EU is also right to insist on a clear framework for rules of origin. But its position on the level playing field is wrong-headed. The way to deal with anti-dumping issues in trade agreements is through the World Trade Organization or with binding arbitration. You ought not to seek to micromanage your trading partner's competition policy, but to deal with the results. There is too much focus in the debate on the costs of a no-deal exit for the UK. There would be a cost for the EU, too. The EU stands to lose one of its biggest export markets and its closest geostrategic ally. The costs of no-deal may be more evenly balanced than most people think.
Interesting piece by a self-confessed Remain journalist (not sure who it is) from a Remain newspaper. Seeing the opportunities for Brexit in the hi-tech sector. And agreeing that the EU trying to bind the UK's hands on the way that the UK trades in the future is not acceptable. I hope this government, which is not averse to U turns, stays strong on this. We may get a No-deal and have a bumpy ride in the short term (as the EU will) but it will be worth it long term imo
