I found this handy checklist on the internet as a reminder of what a Tory government has given us over 2010-2019, in case anyone missed it:-.
1,000 Sure Start centres closed.
780 libraries closed.
700 football pitches closed.
Food bank use up 2,400%.
Homelessness up 1,000%.
Rough sleeping up 1,200%
Bedroom tax caused mass evictions.
Evictions are running at record highs.
35% of UK kids living in poverty.
Student fees up 300%.
Student debt has risen 150%.
Eradication of EMA (education maintenance allowance).
National Debt has risen from £850 billion to £2.25 trillion.
Emergency Brexit stimulus from BoE in June 2016 of £175b.
Brexit related fall in national revenue £500 billion.
GDP - Gross Domestic Product fallen to -0.1%.
GB £ fallen by circa 15% versus Euro and US $.
Manufacturing in recession.
Construction in recession.
Services close to recession.
25-30% cuts to all govt departments.
25-30% cuts to all Local Authorities, mainly centred on Labour councils.
Half of councils facing effective bankruptcy.
185,000 extra deaths attached to the political ideology of austerity.
25,000 less police.
20,000 less prison officers.
10,000 less border officials.
10,000 less firefighters.
10,000 less medical professionals.
25,000 less bed spaces for mental illness.
OECD calculate 3 million hidden unemployed, rate is really 13%.
Creation of 1.3m jobs, mainly temporary, self employed, gig economy Zero Hour Contracts.
Only 30k full time work positions created.
Close on 50% of workers are self employed, ZHC, or part time precariat.
80% of the 5.3 million self employed live below the poverty line.
35% of self employed only earn £100 a month.
25% cuts for our disabled community.
80% cuts to Mobility allowance.
Closing Remploy.
40% of working households have practically no savings.
70% of households have less than 10k savings.
60% of households can only survive 2 months without a wage.
Household debt reaches new peak, despite emergency base rates.
Increase of 50% in hate crimes.
Increase of knife crime by 150% to 22,000 per year.
Increase in teenage suicide by 70%.
Suicide up 12% in the year 2018.
Self harm among young women up 70%.
Life expectancy down 3 years.
NHS satisfaction level at lowest recorded rate.
200k social homes lost since 2010.
Zero starter homes built, despite Tory flagship programme.
Council house building down 90%.
200,000 social homes lost since 2010.
One million families on council home waiting list.
100,000 increase on the council home waiting list since 2010.
36,000 teachers have left teaching.
--oo00oo--
Finally, a flavour of a full article in Byline Times about young Jake and why we are all going to have to wiseup about the future of our politics and democracy in the modern age:-
TROLLS, SOCK PUPPETS & USEFUL IDIOTS
An Anatomy of an Election Disinformation Campaign
The Local Journalist
First, some facts, as they are in precious short supply. Around noon on Sunday 8 December, Daniel Sheridan of the Yorkshire Evening Post published a story about Jack Williment-Barr, a four-year-old boy who was rushed to Leeds General Infirmary with suspected pneumonia. His mother Sarah had contacted the newspaper with a picture of her son lying on a pile of coats and claimed he had been left in the clinical treatment room for four hours.
Like any responsible journalist, Daniel Sheridan double-checked the story with the hospital and its chief medical officer, Dr Yvette Oade, who explained how busy the hospital was and apologised to the family. “We are extremely sorry that there were only chairs available in the treatment room, and no bed,” she said. “This falls below our usual high standards and for this we would like to sincerely apologise to Jack and his family.”
So far, a telling example of the vital importance of local journalism – a profession that continues to be gutted as newsrooms are cut or amalgamated, and Google and Facebook siphon off the billions of revenues that keep local accountability alive.
The TV Journalist
The next day, Joe Pike, a young journalist who had just joined Sky News as a political correspondent, was in Grimsby, following the Conservative Party leader as he posed for photos holding a large cod (not for the first time) in the fishing town which has often become an emblem of ‘taking back control’ of our waters by leaving the European Union.
Unlike the BBC interviewer Andrew Neil, Joe Pike has no reputation for skewering politicians, so Boris Johnson and his advisors probably thought they didn’t need to avoid this particular interview in the bowels of the fish warehouses. They miscalculated. Pike whipped out his phone with the photo of Jack Williment-Barr lying on the floor, and persistently questioned the Prime Minister about it.
In a psychologically revealing panic, Johnson tried to bluster that everything would improve once we “got Brexit done”. But Pike persisted. Johnson tried to steamroller him, but his darting eyes and demeanour showed that he didn’t want to answer the question and, in an effort to avoid it, the Prime Minister took the reporter’s phone and hid it in his pocket. This prompted one of the most remarkable comments of the campaign so far from Pike who remarked, calmly:
“You’ve refused to see the photo. You’ve taken my phone and put it in your pocket, Prime Minister.”Child psychiatrists would have a field day on this. The failure to realise that hiding your face does not make you invisible, or that stealing a reporter’s phone does not make the report go away, suggests that – under pressure – the leader of the Conservative Party has the social cognitive abilities of a four-year-old.
Apart from Johnson’s kleptomanic evasion, the film of this strange encounter had the additional problem of focusing on the NHS at a key point in the last few days of the General Election campaign. Conservative campaigners know that the NHS is not their strong point, so the Health and Social Care Minister, Matt Hancock, was dispatched to Leeds General Infirmary to firefight.
The Mainstream Media Campaign
As Hancock rushed to Leeds, a host of media figures sympathetic to Johnson rushed into action. Guido Fawkes (which registered the site Boris2020 seven years ago) was first off the mark, with a fake story that 100 Labour activists were being paid to go to Leeds to protest. This was followed up by his former colleague at the Sun, Tom Newton Dunn, who described a “flash mob descending”.
Soon, the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, was describing to her 1.1 million followers how “Labour activists scrambled to go and protest” and then “it turned nasty” when “one of them punched Hancock’s adviser”. The information had no attribution, or “I’ve heard” or “sources say”.
Not to be left out, Robert Peston, the political editor of the second largest broadcaster, ITV, identified the person punched to his 1 million followers, and named the special adviser to Matt Hancock, adding that the police had been called. The only problem with this breaking story – which quickly and conveniently replaced the story of Johnson pocketing the reporter’s phone in all the major news feeds – was that it was completely bogus.
There were about four noisy demonstrators outside Leeds General Infirmary as Hancock departed in his ministerial car, not 100. No punch was ever landed. Hancock’s SpAd walked into a cyclist’s hand as he pointed to the ministerial car rushing away. It took several hours of persistent correction from other Twitter users before both Peston and Kuenssberg corrected the damaging allegation of assault. But their apologies revealed even more…
Peston explained that he had been told the story by two Tory party sources. According to good journalistic practice, that would be the minimum to run an allegation of assault – but only if the sources were independent. They clearly weren’t. What would have been a rookie mistake for a young journalist was a catastrophic failure of judgement by the political editors of both major broadcasters, made even more so because it came in the crucial last few days of a landmark General Election.
I’m not of the the view that either Peston or Kuenssberg are consciously partisan, and I certainly don’t buy the allegation that they have been ‘bought’. But they have been played, and to rescue their reputations – and most importantly our trust in the two most important sources of news in the country – there should be a full inquiry.
For the real culprits here are the sources who lied to them both, consistently. They have no protection for deceiving the public and both Peston and Kuenssberg have a public duty to tell us who they are. Nothing short of that can begin to repair the damage caused.
Thanks for republishing that very well explained aricle from Byline Times - https://bylinetimes.com/2019/12/10/trolls-sock-puppets-and-useful-idiots-an-anatomy-of-an-election-disinformation-campaign/.
ReplyDeleteI have been following them since Hardeep Mathura started wirking for them. She once worked for Newsquest papers in Surrey, & produced a high quality report of a probation workers protest against Chris Grayling, I think at Epsom 5 or6 years ago.
She also wrote a good piece about the London Bridge murders by Usman Khan & I am very pleased to subscribe to the new Byline Times print copy which is distributed by Royal Mail.
https://bylinetimes.com/2019/12/02/the-humanity-of-the-london-bridge-victims-is-the-real-fight-against-terror/
In the two days following the deaths of Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones in the attack at London Bridge, the kindness, decency and humanity they lived and died for is abjectly lacking among those who claim they can lead us to a safer society.
DeleteJack and Saskia died working to advance a cause they believed in – one for which so many are afraid to stick their heads above the parapet. They were working at a Learning Together event focusing on offender rehabilitation, organised by their alma mater Cambridge University, which was attended by their killer, the convicted terrorist Usman Khan.
As Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party now exploit their murders to win votes for their ‘law and order’ agenda at the ballot box next week, they are being aided in their deception by right-wing tabloids such as the Sun. Photos of Jack and Saskia are splashed across its front page today, together with a headline screaming: The Angels Stolen by Pure Evil.
In response to this blatant politicisation of his son’s death in a number of newspapers, Jack’s father David Merritt wrote on Twitter:
“Don’t use my son’s death and his and his colleague’s photos to promote your vile propaganda. Jack stood against everything you stand for – hatred, division, ignorance.”
The Merritt family have said that their son “would not want this terrible isolated incident to be used as a pretext by the Government for introducing even more draconian sentences on prisoners or for detaining people in prison for longer than necessary”. They said Jack “lived his principles” and believed in redemption and rehabilitation, not revenge.
It is horrendous that these calls are being ignored.
Johnson’s claim that only he can be “tough on terrorists” and the Sun’s description of Khan as “pure evil” are insults to everything Jack stood for. He believed he could help create a safer society by recognising the potential people have to change their lives, in the right environment and with the right support. He was dedicated to building bridges not walls, while the response of Johnson and the right-wing press to Jack’s murder is to do precisely the opposite.
I attended the same university as Jack and Saskia, where I studied Law, including criminology. Like them, I graduated with a passion for criminal justice – because of the fundamental questions it raises about the human condition, its ‘grey areas’ and our profound complexity as human beings.
Like Jack and Saskia, I believe in the cause of prison reform, implicit in which is an understanding that a person’s humanity means acknowledging that people can do the most awful things and still have the capacity to change if they wish.
The cause is deeply important, but challenging and frustrating. Somebody once described it to me as the work of Sisyphus, who spent all day pushing a large rock up a steep hill, only to find it rolled back down once it neared the top – such as when a damaging knee-jerk reaction to a rare tragedy derails the cause.
Criminal justice is an area that demands a lot from the people who are brave enough to engage with it. It requires grappling with nuance, with moral and practical considerations, and gains little traction with the public. Politicians make the calculation that examining the issue constructively wins no votes. Cuts to the parts of our public services tasked with delivering our system of criminal justice go largely ignored.
DeleteIt is this which makes the work of Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones all the more honourable and courageous. People like them are trying to catch individuals falling through the cracks in our society, in the crevices where the state and politicians feel they don’t need to care.
Jack and Saskia were on the frontline, working with offenders placed in a system that has been completely decimated for the past decade under the Conservatives. Not only did austerity slash the resources of our prisons – where self-harm and suicide rates among prisoners and attacks between inmates and on staff are at record highs – but the probation service, tasked with supervising offenders such as Khan who are released from prison on licence, has not recovered from its catastrophic part-privatisation by Chris Grayling.
Headlines screaming of “evil” and campaign slogans announcing tougher sentences do nothing to fix these problems. Instead, we have taken an unsaid decision to turn a societal blind eye to all this in the deceptive hope that creating a psychic distance will keep us safe from it.
The real fight against terror is the work that Jack and Saskia were doing – not the right-wing populism served up by Boris Johnson and his party.
“How should we treat people who have done things that we abhor?” asked the former Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Hardwick at a lecture he gave in London this time last year. For him, the difficult issue we need to confront when it comes to questions of crime and justice is how an individual can do “something I personally find outrageous, but I can still think they have rights”.
DeleteIn the middle of a General Election campaign full of empty promises in hollow packages, the murders of Jack and Saskia have shown just how complex life is. How we live and what we stand for cannot be boiled down to simplistic slogans devoid of sentiment such as “Get Brexit Done”.
I truly hope their deaths make people stop and think – about crime; of the choices we make and the circumstances we find ourselves in; about what justice actually is; how we learn to live with those with whom we profoundly disagree; how, on an individual level, we can each do our bit to contribute to a better, safer, more just society.
The courage of these incredible individuals – and their dedication to creating a world with less hate, without fanfare or recognition – should be the true legacy of their murders. Not the lies now being told in their names.
Hardeep Matharu
Your republishing it - prompted me to read it again - before I read it first time I had not realised Hardeep Mathura, is a criminology graduate from the University of Cambridge.
DeleteHer article gets better as it goes on & again I am reminded that she interviewed Nick Hardwick in the last year or two - I think after the media peak when he was forced to resign as chair of the Parole board..
I am not sure if that article was for Byline - as she has reported for several other national media outlets since leaving the local papers in Surrey.
Hardeep Mathura's - interview with Nick hardwick was in May 2018 and for The Justice Gap.
Deletehttps://www.thejusticegap.com/nick-hardwick-interview-if-you-dont-like-the-heat/
Republished on here 8th May 2018:-
Deletehttps://probationmatters.blogspot.com/2018/05/nick-hardwick-speaks-out.html
https://youtu.be/VWhULqwTZQM
ReplyDeleteI think Adam Price the Welsh MP has the best policy I've heard during this election.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how the vote would go in Parliament if the Bill was ever put to the test?
https://www.partyof.wales/make_lying_in_politics_illegal
'Getafix
Plaid Cymru leader, Adam Price, has today published a new draft law which would make lying by politicians a criminal offence. Plaid Cymru has said they would seek to introduce a form of the law in the next Parliament.
DeleteCalled the Elected Representatives (Prohibition of Deception) Bill, the legislation would see elected politicians in the European, Westminster and devolved parliaments face criminal charges if they knowingly mislead the public.
Pointing to the collapsing trust in the leaders of Labour and Tory parties, Mr Price said that this would be a way to restore faith in an age of “fake news, fake views and fake figures”. He also pointed to the fact the Trade Descriptions Act, passed in 1968, has been in place for over 50 years to stop companies misleading consumers.
The proposed legislation is an update of the 2007 Private Members’ Bill introduced by Mr Price in the House of Commons.
Adam Price said:
“People have lost faith in our politics, and we have a duty to restore it before it’s too late. It’s depressing that it has come to this, but if we need a law to stop politicians from lying then that is what should be in place. I proposed a similar draft law over ten years ago, when the lies that lead to the dreadful Iraq war were surfacing. Our politics, once again, faces a crisis of confidence thanks to the fake news, fake views and fake figures that have been peddled, particularly by the main two Westminster parties. Over half a century ago we made it illegal for companies to lie to us with the Trade Descriptions Act. Sadly, it looks like now we need the same principle to apply to politicians. Honesty is the most important currency in politics. We have to restore it, before we bankrupt our whole society.”
The global 'right' continue to show their compassion & understanding (from AOL news feed):
ReplyDelete* A Conservative election candidate has apologised for "a moment of thoughtlessness" after parking his Land Rover across two disabled bays.
Richard Drax, who is seeking re-election as the Tory candidate for South Dorset, was caught out after a picture of his dodgy parking was posted on social media.
The photo shows a Land Rover emblazoned with a picture of Mr Drax parked diagonally across the disabled spaces at his campaign HQ in the Dorset Innovation Park near Wool.
"I rushed in and rushed out. I've never done it before and never done it since but it was a real moment of thoughtlessness and it won't happen again."
_______________________________________________________
Greta Thunberg, aged 16 years: Indigenous people are literally being murdered for trying to protect the forest from illegal deforestation. Over and over again. It is shameful that the world remains silent about this.
Jair Bolsonaro, aged 64 years: Greta said that the Indians died because they were defending the Amazon. It's impressive that the press is giving space to a brat like that.
https://www-vice-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.vice.com/amp/en_uk/article/payg5b/how-the-tories-fucked-the-country?amp_js_v=a2&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCKAE%3D#aoh=15760536858416&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vice.com%2Fen_uk%2Farticle%2Fpayg5b%2Fhow-the-tories-fucked-the-country
DeleteFrom 7th June 2017:-
DeleteHow the Tories Fucked the Country And what to do about it.
This election cycle has been full of Tory deception and distraction. For instance, after seven years of a Conservative government pursuing an economic strategy described as "repeatedly hitting yourself in the face", any alternatives offered up to soaring inequality and collapsing living standards have been ridiculed as relying on a "magic money tree", when it fact costs have been plainly laid out for the electorate to see.
So actually, Theresa May's insistence that "this is the most important election in a generation" is a rare moment of honesty. For the first time in decades, there is an opportunity to break with an anti-social past going nowhere, in favour of a shared hope of a better future.
At a recent leadership debate, Amber Rudd called for the Conservatives to be "judged on our record" – triggering howls of laughter from the audience. Understandable, when you consider the record of the Conservative Party in government includes: the trebling of tuition fees to £9,000 a year; the scrapping of EMA and Legal Aid; the closure of hundreds of libraries, youth centres and women refuges; savage cuts to schools, arts, mental health, social care and local authority budgets; humiliation of the disabled; victimisation of the unemployed; the bedroom tax; the illegal deportation of 50,000 people; racial profiling of school students; spiralling violence in prisons; the worst housing crisis in decades; and higher taxes for low earners.
Impressively, all this has been achieved before the Conservatives even reach the halfway point on the austerity measures they plan on continuing until 2025.
It's All Nearly Over?
ReplyDeleteSure it's not just the beginning?
The contracting during purdah has made it in to Private Eye again - pretty much covers same ground as this blog already has.
ReplyDeletehttps://essexandrew.wordpress.com/2019/12/11/government-quietly-seek-bids-fro-probation-contracts/
Seems "anything goes" is the motto of this election. After repeating an unverified Tory source about some SpAd allegedly being punched (later proven to be utter bollox), Kuenssberg fucks up again. Is she really that stupid or does she know what she's doing? Either way, how can she remain as Political Editor at the BBC?
ReplyDelete"The elections watchdog has warned that it may be an offence to share information obtained at postal vote opening sessions after the BBC's political editor said she had been told that ballot papers already in painted a "grim" picture for Labour.
Kuenssberg made the comments after being asked about voter turnout in Thursday's election during a live interview with the BBC Two show on Wednesday.
She said: "The forecast is that it's going to be wet and cold tomorrow, the postal votes, of course, have already arrived.
"The parties – they're not meant to look at it, but they do kind of get a hint – and on both sides people are telling me that the postal votes that are in are looking pretty grim for Labour in a lot of parts of the country."
LBC producer Ava Santina blasted Kuenssberg's actions, saying: "The reason broadcasters are not allowed to reveal postal votes before 10pm polling day is it influences the vote. "I really have no explanation of how this is allowed under broadcasting code."
Happy voting everybody.
Enjoy your day JB.