“The government are philistines. We’ve got used to governments – especially the British government – just telling us lies every day, and I don’t feel OK with that… Look what they did with the NHS. After all that those people did during Covid, they give them a 1% increase. I find that extraordinary. It makes me so angry. I’m 74 years of age and I just don’t get this unfairness and this ridiculous ability to lie through your teeth every fucking minute of the day.” - Elton John
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The Guardian today:
The Swiss health minister, Alain Berset, echoed several of his European counterparts in saying that he believed the country’s greater use of the mRNA Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines should give sufficient protection against the Delta variant.
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Time for a mRNA booster.
Johnson now trying to claim, or at least imply, that he sacked Hancock.
The man truly has no shame.
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We all know what he said, does he think we are all as stupid as himself?
Answer, probably yes.
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can you hear the screeching of the tyres and the smell of burning rubber?
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Yup
besides anything else, they published Handjob’s resignation letter and Doris’ response accepting it so the history of this is a matter of record whether Doris wishes to try to erase it or not.
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Which is why no rational person would try to re-write history in this fashion.
So either Johnson is not rational (possible) or is so incapable of telling the truth and so contemptuous of the public that he can’t help himself (probable, but not mutually exclusive).
Either way how on earth did we end up with him as PM - I’d love to have a time machine just to find out how future historians evaluate this period in 100 years.
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All of this shit happened in Batley apparently - he’s visiting to persuade the good people there that they should vote for the Conservative candidate in the Batley and Spen by-election.
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Interesting. It’s not primarily to persuade people there though - it indicates the Tories are already pretty sure they’ll win it, but by visiting he’ll get some of the credit (in the eyes of Kuenssberg etc at least).
Voters probably will do and them Starmer will be on the rack…time to bring back Tony is being whispered by the opponents of Momentum.
You might just edit what you quoted of my post @strudball to correctly reflect that I am not for one moment suggesting that the people of Batley and Spen vote for the Conservative candidate, that it was actually Johnson going there to persuade them - thanks
Unbelievable, just when you think he couldn’t be any more of a louse, he proves you wrong.
Look at his majority 
the number of blithering idiots in the electorate could shake one’s confidence in democracy.
Phoney Tony, that bloke with the odd-looking wife that dragged the U.K. into 2 illegal wars that have killed hundreds of thousands of people, destabilised an entire region of the planet and cost trillions of dollars?
Labour would have more chance of winning back voters if they had Ian Huntley as leader.
Apologies, of course…it was just the way I copied it!
I should gave included this in front
…he’s visiting to persuade the good people there that they should vote……for the Conservative candidate in the Batley and Spen by-election.
Wouldn’t want to suggest, and people think, you root for Johnson!
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I was very active in the ‘New Labour’ movement in the 90s, which led to Blair’s premiership - I was at one point an electoral agent, and old hands that saw themselves as my mentors used to talk about me as a future MP - but like thousands of others I left the party in disgust over the Iraq war.
It was a much underrated factor in the decline of the Labour Party, votes for which indeed declined pretty continuously from 1997 through to the 2010 election defeat. But it wasn’t just voters turning away - the Iraq war gutted Labor of its bright young membership and talent (I don’t include myself in this description - in reality I could never have made a politician - but in general terms those that left really were the brightest and the best).
Blair, like Thatcher, is completely misinterpreted by the right wings of their respective parties - which see them as great successes when, in fact, both of them almost destroyed their own parties (and in the case of Thatcher severely damaged the whole country).
But the most egregious error of the Labour right now is the a-historical idea that ‘elections are won on the centre ground’ regardless of circumstances. New Labour was of its time - it was a response to the collapse of the planned economy model in Eastern Europe during the 90s, and the feeling (I remember it well) that we had to make capitalism work because there was no alternative. We were wrong - as the success (in conventional economic terms) of the Chinese model has subsequently proven, along with the 2008 crash, the subsequent failure of capitalism to recover from it (and speedy Chinese recovery), increasing inequality, and of course the intimate embrace of capitalism and climate/ecological breakdown.
Here is the latest from the Good Law Project on Monisters using private e-mails for government business:
Dear Jane,
A Number 10 spokesperson has explicitly denied that Government Ministers have used private email addresses:
“Both the former health secretary and Lord Bethell understand the rules around personal email usage and only ever conducted government business through their departmental email addresses”.
This is impossible to square with statements made by the Second Permanent Secretary in meeting minutes published by The Sunday Times. Those minutes clearly state that disgraced former Health Secretary Matt Hancock “corresponds only with private office via a gmail account”.
It is also impossible to square with emails we hold.
On 19 April 2020 Lord Feldman (who you’ll recall lobbied to win PPE contracts for at least one of his clients while working at DHSC) emailed Lord Bethell on his private @ jbethell .com address about Covid-19 test kits:
Plainly this is government business. And plainly Lord Feldman, once co-Chair of the Conservative Party, was writing to James Bethell at his private email address on that government business. This is far from the only email we hold involving Lord Bethell’s private email address.
It is shocking to hear the Prime Minister, via his spokesperson, mislead the public.
Tomorrow we will give you jaw-dropping details of the type of business that was being conducted using private gmail addresses.
If you would like to share this update with friends and family, you can do so below:
Thank you,
Jo Maugham
Director of Good Law Project
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There is also a question mark over the use of WhatsApp by the PM.