I have chosen to write about one of my most visceral fears – that of a government whose primary purpose is to protect me and the people I love. And I am terrified that this current government, and many in the conservative parliamentary party including my MP, neither know, nor care about doing either.
Consequently, I have tried to explain below where my fears arise and give some examples of a government who lie, are plainly corrupt, still hang onto climate change denialism through delaying tactics, are economically illiterate and are utterly unreliable and untrustworthy incompetents.
Lying
Jacob Rees Mogg and Daniel Hannan said food, tax and energy bills would be lower after Brexit. In addition, Boris Johnson claimed there are more people in employment than pre-pandemic. He also promised that the Tories would cut taxes, that the UK had the fastest vaccine roll out, had the fastest economic growth in the G7, and the government would fix the crisis in social care. All lies.
Home Secretary Priti Patel and Johnson lied both about the crime rate, and that she had followed Public Health advice about the conditions in Napier Barracks. Johnson also lied repeatedly to parliament and the public about the Downing Street parties. He’s still doing it.
Incompetent
Astonishingly, there were NO mechanisms in place to prevent fraud from the covid bailouts. Consequently, £4.8 billion of money from the public purse has been written off by Chancellor Rishi Sunak.
The NHS PPE debacle has resulted in a missing £8 billion. The Test and Trace, which failed to do much of either, cost £37 billion. Such spending was judged by the Public Accounts Committee to be ‘unimaginable’.
Corrupt
The government broke the law in failing to publish covid contracts and committed a ‘wholesale failure to comply with obligations of transparency’. In addition, they were found to have acted unlawfully in enabling a VIP lane for their cronies to gain contracts, who gained billions from our taxes.
Additionally, my MP, Richard Bacon, not only voted to protect Owen Paterson, he signed the original Leadsom amendment which put the whole issue before parliament. Utterly corrupt.
Climate Change Delayers/deniers
The same MP, when asked how he was going to expand renewables and stop fossil fuels replied “We recycle all our photocopying paper”. Unsurprisingly, he successfully opposed building new wind turbines in South Norfolk, claiming the scheme was unviable.
The new price cap from @ofgem announced today has a disproportionate impact on lower income households with the poorest facing a 7.5 times larger rise in energy costs as a fraction of income compared to high earners. pic.twitter.com/qs2gclx6dU
— chaitanyakumar (@chaitanyakumar) February 3, 2022
Cameron threw out the ‘green crap’. Now, many homes are inadequately insulated and we are at the mercy of fossil fuel companies for our failure to build renewable energy infrastructure, the cost of which has plummeted over the past ten years.
Shell plans to pay dividends of £8.4 billion from their £14.3 billion profit, while BP stated they have “more cash than we know what to do with.” Meanwhile, our gas and electricity bills will be going up 54 percent from April. Sunak refuses a windfall tax on fossil fuel firms. Instead, he is forcing a £200 per household ‘loan’ which he claims is a ‘discount’. Across the Channel, the French government has taxed EDF and held the price rise to four percent.
Here, BP has paid no tax on its North Sea oil and gas for five years and taxpayers subsidise fossil fuel companies by €12 billion a year.
The government is refusing to stop airport expansion which is estimated will cost £13.4 billion in climate damage. They have overruled Bristol City council’s rejection of Bristol airport expansion and more locally, stripped Uttlesford Council of its planning powers after it opposed Stansted expansion.
We have only to look at Norfolk County Council and the Wensum link road to see climate change denialism in full throttle.
Economically illiterate
The decision by Thérèse Coffey to cut unemployment benefits from three months to one was described thus ‘inhumane & economically illiterate’ by Alfie Stirling, Director of Research and Chief Economist of the New Economics Foundation when “Most would have found work within weeks anyway. [It lets] employers off the hook for poverty pay & insecure jobs.”
In the context of increasing poverty in this country and the increasing number of hungry children, who the Tories voted not to feed, this is an additional squeeze on the lowest earners.
And then there’s the ‘spring statement’. It’s an object lesson in economic illiteracy, incompetence and malevolence, and noted by the CEO of the Rowntree Foundation to be fiscally incoherent.
Duplicitous
Brandon Lewis pretended the DUP’s demand for a stop to Northern Ireland border checks was a matter for Stormont. Not so. The Protocol is part of international law, which the UK government signed up to. This is the second occasion Lewis chose to enable the UK to break our international treaty obligations.
On so-called levelling-up, Michael Gove has rehashed the same old talking points which have been shown not to work in the past, at huge cost to the public purse. This was reinforced by the National Audit Office this year which stated in its report: “The Department (Levelling Up, Housing & Communities) therefore lacks evidence on whether the billions of pounds of public funding it has awarded to local bodies in the past for supporting local growth have had the impact intended”.
Charlatans
The Tories are absolutely committed to maintaining their power and wealth through FPTP, disenfranchisement and corruption, and systematically destroying mechanisms of opportunity for the people of this country, such as good health, education and a functioning legal system.
This is a shameful indictment of a bunch of lying, incompetent, corrupt, climate change denying/delayers, economically illiterate, duplicitous charlatans for whom I will never vote.
