If you, like me, think Liz Truss is an idiot, brace your selves, there’s even worse lurking in the Government…
It beggars belief, doesn’t it?
Here’s the truth (get your handkerchief out before reading it though):
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Terrible 
not much more I can think to say.
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What planet do these people live on?
Blair stopped cookery lessons in schools and replaced them with nutrition with the result that very few of that generation learnt to cook, unless they had a helpful mother or grandmother.
You only have to ask at any food bank to know that fresh food, unless it is fruit, that the cost of cooking is beyond many households, even if they know how to do it. I heard on the BBC that it cost 7 pounds to cook a Sunday roast for a family using a pre-payment meter.
These Ministers need a dose of reality putting into their lives.
Do you remember Michael Heseltine going to Liverpool and sleeping rough?
Well this pathetic lot need to wake up and smell the coffee.
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I think it’s called detachment - it really does sadden me when I see this divide and the lack of appreciation for what real people have to deal with on a daily basis. I feel very fortunate not to be in that situation, but just wish the Government would somehow get a reality check, as I can see many people getting very upset and who knows where that leads. I remember the last spate of riots a few years ago now - I can very easily see a repeat, given the recent examples of hypocrisy such as Mrs Sunak’s tax avoidance scam, sorry, I mean plan! I very happily donate to a Leeds based charity whose sole purpose is to provide beds for kids, as some families just cannot afford such basic necessities - I constantly ask myself, are we really living in the 21st century!
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Certainly lack of empathy, or any desire to really understand the problems that people face on a day to day basis.
Channel 4 did some analysis.
Many, especially Tory, MPS are from middle or upper class backgrounds, almost 30% are privately educated (at least 4x the national average).
An alarming number are still Oxbridge graduates.
More and more are “career politicians”, and those who did have a job before entering politics may well have used their (or their parent’s) connections to get a leg up the greasy pole.
Plus the Tories purged the party of moderates (reflect on the fact that Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt are now what passes for the voice of reason in the Tory party).
The upper class have always sneered at the working class in the UK - believing themselves to be fundamentally better rather than merely benefiting from an accident of birth. that attitude underlies a lot of the problems in the UK from historically poor industrial relations to the current crisis.
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At the time I had no time for Heseltine (though I recognised of course that he tried to stand up to Thatcher) - but in retrospect the strand of conservatism that he represented - along with those thrown out of the party by Johnson - people like Ken Clarke, Dominic Grieve, etc - was very different from the extreme right that now dominates it.
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“A riot is the voice of the unheard” - Martin Luther King.
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Another delusional failure…
But a wonderful comment from…
J Heap 2 DAYS AGO
So the ‘Telegraph’ gives yesterday’s complete failure a platform to broadcast self-exculpatory retrospective nonsense — “The words started a process that led to my resignation”. Yeah, right! — but somehow you just didn’t actually do it.
This entire article is completely abject rubbish, written by a man who failed completely to manage these issues himself, and advocating an already failed approach that has zero chance of success. A man who lied to Parliament, assuring them that his work was based on “excruciatingly detailed” impact assessments (that he couldn’t reveal) before later having to admit that there were none and that the UK’s negotiations were based on nothing more incisive than his own complacent and profound ignorance.
Impact assessments were unnecessary, he claimed irrelevant, because it would be easy to “mitigate” any adverse impacts: when challenged as to how one could make such remarks without having assessment of what those impacts might be, he again insisted that the work had been done, before again denying its existence when finally instructed to produce them by the Commons.
He had to be forced by Parliamentary vote to produce a horrifyingly pathetic collection of documents, clearly copied-and-pasted wholesale from Wikipedia at the very last moment: apparently the fishing industry tend to be concentrated in coastal towns!
The fact that such a thoroughly incompetent and complacently ignorant liar should have been in charge of the UK’s negotiations speaks volumes of the intellectual coherence of the Brexit cult, and of the parlous state of our country and its benighted democracy. That he should now be offered a platform here to pontificate is a damning measure of the state of our so-called public life and an indicator 'Telegraph’s role in it!
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The extremes of privilege and detachment are obviously more prevalent in the Tory Party - but Labour has the ‘career politicians’ problem too. This is an aspect of the current dispute about Starmer imposing candidates - against the party’s own rules - for the Wakefield by-election. The entire management committee of the Wakefield CLP has resigned over it.
Starmer’s favoured short-list candidates were both ‘researchers’ - one employed by Labour itself, the other by an affiliated trade union; neither were local or had any real links or knowledge of the locality - the candidates favoured by the local party, who did live and work locally and had been active in the community for years, were kept off the shortlist.
Clearly a mistake, I agree.
Parking the fact that the thread is just another ‘pop’ at the Tories, what can people do when prices just keep going up and up?
I noted in the French Press (quite recently) that Pawn Shops are going through a revival.
Trouble is… debts of any sort have to be repaid… and some things might be too personally-precious to risk losing.
Very difficult times lie ahead for folk in many countries…
Inflation in the UK though is about double the rate in France.
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Your’re such an apologist for these bastards Tim. Where’s the visceral anger that any decent person would feel at what they are doing? A “pop”… well when you can’t feed your kids, you can’t keep warm, you can’t pay your rent a bleeding “pop” doesn’t seem too much to take at the arrogant, rich shits that lecture those suffering. Does it? 
I always had grudging respect for him. He was always his own man, unlike anybody in the Cabinet today.
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Riot?
Ca me tonnerait pas de tout. En fait, je l’attends.
And the point of that would be what exactly?
Like you I loathe the current UK government despite your assertion but neither you nor I can do diddly squat about what they’re doing.
Our day to day lives aren’t affected by Johnson’s latest antics half as much as what is announced by the Elysee Palace.
I was hoping for a genuine discussion about what people either here or in the UK can do when the cost of living rockets which is far more interesting and relevant surely?
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What I don’t get about this perspective Tim is the idea that it’s only what affects us personally that we should engage with. I’ve come to this thread having just posted on today’s election in Australia!
Maybe it’s because I have traveled a lot, and worked internationally for years, but I do care about what happens to people in distant places, even though it may not affect me directly.
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