Nick robinson would have done and Amal Rajan. and Andrew Marr.
From The Guardian:
Top story: MPs hold emergency debate on standards
Morning everyone. I’m Martin Farrer and these are the top stories today.
A watchdog had to prevent ministers breaching a strict code on political neutrality and independence during the search for new leaders for the BBC and the British Film Institute. A Freedom of Information Act response by the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments has revealed that ministers were asked to replace interview panellists for the high-profile jobs because they were “not sufficiently independent”. The regulator has described such breaches as “threatening to undermine the independent status” of a role intended to bring “challenge and rigour” to finding appointable candidates for selection by cabinet ministers, including the prime minister.
It highlights concern that the government is seeking to “rebalance” the boards of public bodies – particularly in the arts, heritage and broadcasting sectors – and comes as MPs hold an emergency debate on standards in the wake of the Owen Paterson scandal. The Commons standards committee is considering a ban on MPs from holding consultancy roles which could affect around 30 members. The Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, is also expected to make an intervention, with one report claiming he is set to propose his own review of the standards rules for MPs.
The juggernaut of sleaze and corruption rolls on.
A few weeks ago I predicted that under Starmer, Labour could only win ‘by default’ - ie. if things got so bad under the Tories that sufficient numbers would vote for anybody but them.
The latest opinion poll - reflecting the current ‘corruption’ concerns - I think illustrates this. The Tories are losing support (down 4% on 35%) BUT Labour and the LibDems are not gaining (unchanged on 36% and 9% respectively) - it’s the Greens that are up 5% on 11%. My guess is that Labour and the LibDems are actually gaining disenchanted Tory voters - but losing even more on the left.
COP26 might explain the uplift in the Green support - I wonder how long lived it wil be.
The problem remains that the centre/left is still fragmented much more than the right and Labour *still* won’t consider strategic alliances (nor will the LibDems for that matter).
Until the main opposition parties concentrate on cooperating in opposing the most malignant government in the past 200 years the country is just going to continue to go downhill.
Although I strongly believe Labour and the Greens should work together (and under Corbyn could even have merged to form a more united left) I’m really not sure Labour and LibDem co-operation is now possible. The central problem is that most of the potentially winnable seats for the LibDems are Tory seats, and alliance with Labour makes them harder to win (which in turn makes it harder for Labour to win as well). This is why LibDem strategists always advise going hard against Labour even when they are in reality close on policy - they’re not really that opposed to Labour, just posturing to reassure soft Tories in target seats.
If the clown Johnson hadn’t let his “I’m in charge” hubris get on top of him and had let Paterson just take his 30 day suspension this whole can of worms wouldn’t have been uncovered.
Sir Geoffrey Cox – £970,000
Theresa May – £760,000
Sajid Javid – £366,000
Sir John Redwood – £248,000
Andrew Mitchell – £170,000
Sir John Hayes – £118,000
Stephen Hammond – £103,000
Chris Grayling – £100,000…
…
90,000 vacancies! This “project fear” thing is getting, well, rather frightening. It’s one thing not having truck drivers but it’s another not having doctors.
Nobless oblige…
So why did he continue with paid consultancy for other law firms on an ‘ad-hoc’ basis?
The only thing that can fix British politics is for Her Majesty to send the Gurkhas into Westminster and have a good old fashioned heads on spikes party at the Tower for anyone who’s lined their own pockets during their time as a public servant.
I’m seriously worried about family in the UK - especially my mother-in-law who is in her late 80s. It’s an absolute tragedy what has befallen the UK over the last decade of Tory/LibDem government.
Do you think the LibDems had any control over events, other than simply getting shafted?
I usually find it hard to unravel whether LibDems are malicious or merely myopic - but either way, we have to see them as complicit in ‘austerity’, don’t we? - and there is a direct line from the economics of this not only to the current public finances mess, but also to brexit, and hence the May and Johnson governments (because without the failure to recover from the 2008 crash, and the consequent draining of optimism from the UK, the vote would have gone the other way).
Having been rather unknowing about a lot of this stuff till recently as I’m really not political, what they called Austerity that seems to have come about after a world financial crash was narrowly avoided in 2008, seems to have revealed an enormous transfer of wealth, power and prospects from ordinary working masses to ‘the establishment’ including the likes of Boris and even Farage.
'Twas ever thus this divide of course. It’s just that little people who lose out from anything negative that comes along seem to be propping up big people who seem to just take more out of the system to cover their losses and yet profits seem to be less taxed or shared than before
I just read this summing up of the job Johnson and his govt has been and still is doing on Covid.
We are too ! We get out and have a picnic somewhere roughly every 2 weeks, when the weather looks OK. But we’ve limited that to a 2 or 3 hr drive to somewhere pretty unpopulated !
Seems to have put off most visitors…
Yup the biggest own goal was stopping tax-free shopping. Those are indeed high rolling visitors, particularly Middle East and more recently China. Several of the big London department stores will be very seriously hit. But don’t worry Paris will take up the slack.
The extra enormous spending of these shoppers in hotels, restaurants and other services, did not seem to have been taken into account by the UK government either. Massive own goal.
What was this about the UK government agreeing to dump untreated sewage into waterways and the sea? Is this a sign of public health and protection standards in the UK after Brexit? The EU would have fined the UK Government massively for that I suspect. What other standards will the UK now compromise?
The recent Shell announcement tells the story:
The multinational oil and gas company is shifting from the Hague for two main reasons; first is to break free from strict tax regulations, and the second is to avoid pressure from the Dutch government to decarbonize its operations faster than it had planned.
When I took up a post as an economic development officer in a northern England council in the 1990s, I was shocked to find that a previous economic development policy had been to attract ‘dirty industries’ - explicitly (internally, not in public of course).
‘Deregulation’ - aka trashing the UK - was always the explicit aim of brexit, wasn’t it?