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Tory Party Watch: parts 8245–8249 & 117

Started by Absorb the anus burn, March 02, 2019, 11:16:30 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Absorb the anus burn

Why the fuck are we always talking about the Labour party when they are not in power? Why do the media make us discuss Corbyn, Abbott, McDonnell, Williamson when we should be talking about May, Hammond, Hunt and...

Chris Grayling

Why the fuck is this clown in a position of power?

How many controversies has this man been involved with?



Go to an internet browser and open a random news link from the past 48 hours...

https://metro.co.uk/2019/03/01/failing-grayling-long-long-list-chris-graylings-blunders-8789780/

".... The Transport Secretary dubbed 'Failing Grayling' is at the centre of two political shambles – and that's just today. Just this morning the Government announced it had been forced to pay Eurotunnel £33 million over his handling of the much-maligned Brexit ferry contracts. Transport Chris Grayling has been dubbed 'Failing Grayling'. And this came just hours after it emerged his decision to begin privatising the probation services as Justice Secretary had cost the taxpayer £500 million, the National Audit Office (NAO) revealed. Grayling's six-and-a-half years in the Cabinet have been rocked by controversy after controversy.......

Forced to repeatedly deflect calls to resign, he has ploughed on through several serious headaches since taking the helm of the Department for Transport (DfT) in 2016. Seaborne Freight Grayling awarded Seaborne Freight a contract worth £13.8 million to run services across the Channel – despite the firm having no ships and no experience running a ferry service. When it emerged the company had zero ferries, begging the question who or what they would be ferrying, Grayling defended the decision, saying it was an example of the Government 'supporting new business'. But it ended up costing the government nearly three times the size of Seaborne's original contract – which was later terminated – when Eurotunnel sued the DfT over the 'secretive' way it handed out tenders totalling £108 million to shipping companies. But it was only the latest in a long line of mishaps......

Grayling was put under pressure over his response to the drone chaos at Gatwick Airport over Christmas that affected thousands of passengers. He was accused of shelving plans to regulate drones and ignored warnings about how they could cause disruption at airports......

His major reforms of probation services in 2013, when he was Justice Secretary, were found to have led to 'skyrocketing' numbers of released offenders returning to prison after serving short sentences. The NAO's damning report found the part-privatisation of the probation service in England and Wales cost taxpayers almost £500 million. It saw 21 companies awarded contracts to supervise low and medium-risk offenders, while the new National Probation Service looked after high-risk offenders. Sir Amyas Morse, head of the NAO, said the ministry 'set itself up to fail' in how it approached the reforms........

Nearly 800 trains were cancelled every day on Northern and Govia Thameslink Railway after the timetable was introduced in May last year. It was this chaos that prompted the Yorkshire Post to give birth to his unflattering nickname 'Failing Grayling'. Passengers had to put up with strikes, ongoing engineering works and infrastructure problems.... Grayling was also forced to bring the East Coast Main Line back under public control last May after an agreement with Virgin Trains East Coast (VTEC) ended five years early. Grayling said the parent companies of VTEC – Stagecoach and Virgin – had 'got their bid wrong' in terms of revenue from the franchise, which was originally due to run until 2023.......

Several decisions he made as Justice Secretary from September 2012 to May 2015 had to be overturned. He introduced new fees for employment tribunals, banned people from sending books to prisoners, and brought forward court fees which the then chairman of the Bar Council warned could incentivise innocent people to plead guilty. All of the moves were subsequently overturned. Other failures included his decision to bring forward legal aid restrictions for domestic violence victims, cut legal aid for prisoners and set up a body which won a £6 million contract to train prison staff in Saudi Arabia...."


This is not a Grayling thread 'per se'... Please feel to join in and talk about how useless he is - but this thread is intended to be your one-a-day (®) prescription for discussing the latest government shitshow.


pigamus

BBC News website bigging up Amber Rudd today I see. Nauseating.

petril

same old Tories, always wanting to have a fight with each other, but all too much of a shitebag to actually do it. they should have their real fight


Absorb the anus burn


Fambo Number Mive

It's a shame the Independent put an important article like that behind a paywall, especially when they have the indy100 clickbait website to make money from.



Sherman Krank

It's almost as though Grayling is deliberately undermining all of Tom Watson's efforts to keep the Tories in power.

jobotic

Hunt trotting off to Germany to beg on behalf of the Saudis and their appetite for weaponry last week was particularly edifying.

BlodwynPig

Will I be imprisoned for wishing the guillotine for this shower of beige?

jobotic

#12
Grayling's cacked out of facing questions about Eurotunnel today, instead the very talented Hancock will take the flak.

Crisps?

Quote from: Fambo Number Mive on March 02, 2019, 03:02:12 PM
It's a shame the Independent put an important article like that behind a paywall, especially when they have the indy100 clickbait website to make money from.

If you're on Firefox, reader view shows the full article (works on other fake paywalls too, but may require a reload while still in reader view). If you're on Chrome, uninstall it because it's shit, and use Firefox.

Johnny Yesno

I use Little Snitch and I always have to allow Firefox to connect to a large number of components built by other providers as sites like the Indy's load. It's a pain, but I managed to nab the text while the site was waiting for me to allow the final zagent component.

QuoteBrexit has exacerbated existing policy missteps as firms hold off investment, waiting in vain for some clarity from Theresa May about what lies ahead

    Ben Chapman
    @b_c_chapman
    3 days ago
    14 comments

Is the government economically malign or simply in denial?

The economic cost of the government's austerity agenda has now been laid bare, destroying any remaining hope the Conservatives had of claiming to be the party of economic competence.

Massive budget cuts over the last eight years at exactly the time when stimulus was needed have left the country £100bn worse off than it would otherwise have been, according to analysis by the New Economics Foundation.

The astonishing bill for austerity equates to £3,600 of lost wealth this year for every UK household, specifically because of the government's regressive policies.

That's before you factor in the £100bn or more thought to have been wiped off economic growth by the prospect of Brexit.

Massive cuts in the name of keeping taxes low and balancing the budget have meant less investment in police, schools, hospitals and roads; less money for companies and contractors that provide services to government; less for families reliant on benefits and, it turns out, less for just about everyone else.

Actively investing public money to promote growth could have been even more beneficial than a neutral approach. With interest rates close to record lows, it would also have been incredibly cheap for the government to borrow the necessary cash.

Yet the self-styled party of business has done next to nothing. Where it has stepped in, it has done so incredibly poorly.

One of its most notable attempts to intervene in the economy – Help to Buy – has effectively handed subsidies to relatively wealthy prospective homeowners from general taxation. This is exactly the wrong form of wealth redistribution.

The scheme has mostly served to pump up already inflated house prices at a time when mortgages are cheaper than ever.

Housebuilders have seen profits soar while their shareholders have enjoyed billions in dividends. The biggest beneficiary of the government's selective largesse has been Jeff Fairburn, the former boss of Persimmon.

Helped by a state subsidy for buyers of new-builds, Fairburn pocketed a £75m bonus for his valuable work putting up the often sub-standard identikit homes for which his firm has gained a reputation.

But more alarmingly for a government that sells itself as the friend of entrepreneurs, turbo-charging the housing market has sucked investment away from sectors that actually innovate and invest.

Content to cash in on a house price bubble, banks have had little incentive to lend to companies. A period of ultra-low interest rates might have been expected to prompt businesses to borrow money and go on a spending splurge that would ultimately help the economy.

In fact, while total mortgage lending is now more than £1.4 trillion and growing at a steady rate, lending to small and medium-sized businesses has remained pretty much flat for more than four years at around £165bn.

This means less money to invest in training, development, research and growth. It is little wonder therefore that growth in productivity – the amount of goods and services created for each hour of work – has remained pitifully low, and has now even gone into reverse.

Brexit has exacerbated the problem as firms hold off on investing, waiting in vain for some clarity from Theresa May about what lies ahead.

Meanwhile, stagnant wages combined with easy access to cheap credit have led to consumers propping up the economy with unsecured debt to fund their spending.

In his Spring Statement this month, Philip Hammond will no doubt point to rising average pay and high levels of employment as proof that his policies are working.

But, when adjusted for rising prices, average earnings are still lower than they were before the financial crisis.

Most of the jobs created have been in low-paid, low productivity sectors where it has been cheaper for firms to hire easily expendable staff than invest in technology, training or other improvements in efficiency.

To say, as successive chancellors and prime ministers have done, that the country needs to "balance the books" might sound superficially appealing but it is economically illiterate.

The government's budget is not the same as a household budget. Withdrawing billions from the economy while implementing savage cuts to benefits and doing nothing to lift productivity has hurt economic growth every year since 2010, according to the NEF.

While the worst of the damage was done between 2010 and 2012 and putting an exact figure on the cost of austerity will always be a contentious issue, what is clear is that the effects are still being felt now.

There are two obvious interpretations of the government's actions. The first is that it knows all this but has proceeded anyway; that it truly is the "nasty party"; that ministers simply do not care about the soaring child poverty, homelessness and use of food banks that has come with austerity.

But we must also accommodate perhaps the more likely second interpretation: that the government simply does not know what it is doing.

So wedded is the Conservative party to its low-tax, small-state, free-market prescription that it has become blind to the huge economic and social damage it is causing.

We quite naturally focus on the individual human tragedies that stem from such regressive policies. But we should also look at the broader picture that these new figures paint.

In the name of an inflexible, outdated ideology, Tory-led governments have for almost nine consecutive years made aus significantly poorer, on average, than we would have been if they had essentially done nothing.

imitationleather

The worst thing about Chris Grayling is that he looks like he's in a window for a suit shop but they've run out of and mannequins so have just tethered a balloon with a face drawn on it to the collar.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, he has done to destroy transport in this country can be worse than that.

idunnosomename

Grayling is indispensable to May. Not only did he run her leadership campaign, he's about the only Brexiter left in the cabinet, and he's very loyal to her

Also all the shit he does is Tory party policy of fucking over the many for the needs of the few so yeah

Podgy bald cunt

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: imitationleather on March 04, 2019, 10:22:13 PM
The worst thing about Chris Grayling is that he looks like he's in a window for a suit shop but they've run out of and mannequins so have just tethered a balloon with a face drawn on it to the collar.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, he has done to destroy transport in this country can be worse than that.



I reckon he thinks he corrected transport. And prisoners.

jobotic

May's - crime? Nah, nothing to do with police cuts, don't be daft - has really made her look like the cunt she is. Might as well have said I DON'T GIVE A SHIT

garnish

She said today that the "numbers" show there isn't a correlation between decreasing police numbers and increasing knife crime, which is utterly fascinating.  I'd love to see the analysis they've put together to work that one out.

Menu

I wonder what it's like to be Chris Grayling. He must know he's rubbish because of all the objective fuck-ups he's made, but he also knows that all his colleagues, civil servants, staff, constituents, family and friends know he's rubbish. So what must that feel like? Do you think he's depressed? Does he feel embarrassed in front of his wife's family? Was Christmas really awkward?

I remember seeing Mark Oaten with his family a couple of years after the shitsuitcase story broke. His wife looked genuinely gutted, even after all that time had passed. She knew people were looking and what they were thinking. I wonder if Grayling or his wife feel that same(sort of) embarrassment.

BlodwynPig

Quote from: Menu on March 05, 2019, 02:25:17 AM
I wonder what it's like to be Chris Grayling. He must know he's rubbish because of all the objective fuck-ups he's made, but he also knows that all his colleagues, civil servants, staff, constituents, family and friends know he's rubbish. So what must that feel like? Do you think he's depressed? Does he feel embarrassed in front of his wife's family? Was Christmas really awkward?

I remember seeing Mark Oaten with his family a couple of years after the shitsuitcase story broke. His wife looked genuinely gutted, even after all that time had passed. She knew people were looking and what they were thinking. I wonder if Grayling or his wife feel that same(sort of) embarrassment.

QuoteIn 2011 Oaten accepted a position as executive of the International Fur Trade Federation

Out of the frying pan...

idunnosomename

He's rich aint he. Not arsed. Hes above all that shit when hes at home.

Also he just will think he's a "hardworking public servant". Never underestimate the self-delusion of cunts like this

pigamus


Quote from: garnish on March 04, 2019, 11:47:46 PM
She said today that the "numbers" show there isn't a correlation between decreasing police numbers and increasing knife crime, which is utterly fascinating.  I'd love to see the analysis they've put together to work that one out.

Thing is, she's probably right. The decrease in police officers probably doesn't lead to an increase in knife crime.

But what does lead to that is the cuts that the Tories have made everywhere else. Schools are barely functioning so more kids get left behind, low income families are frozen out of after school activities, they've cut access to libraries, leisure schemes and other youth and community services. These kids have nothing but boredom and frustration in their lives, they've nothing to aspire to. They are easy pickings for gangs.

Funcrusher


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/mar/05/tories-suspend-14-members-over-alleged-islamophobia

A spokesperson for the Muslim Council of Britain said the posts showed that "the scale of Islamophobia at all levels of the party is astonishing". The council repeated its call for an independent inquiry into anti-Muslim abuse within the Tory party.

The Twitter account owner said: "I was disgusted by the racism and Islamophobia that I was seeing in these online groups, and felt it was going unreported.

"Until I started focusing on Conservative party members, I was simply trying to get Jacob Rees-Mogg to acknowledge the horror that was being written in a group devoted to him."

Sayeeda Warsi, a former Conservative party chairman, repeated her calls for the party to hold an inquiry into Islamophobia, saying the party had "a deep-rooted problem of anti-Muslim comments, Islamophobic comments, racist comments".


Any chance of this being taken seriously and widely reported, given how very, very concerning prejudice and bigotry in any political party is according to our media establishment?

Absorb the anus burn

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-abuse-peter-morrison-conservative-mp-not-reported-a8807636.html

"...Allegations made about an MP's "penchant for small boys" were passed to the security service but were not then investigated or reported to police, an inquiry has heard. The claim concerned Peter Morrison, the Conservative MP for Chester, the wide-ranging Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) was told..."

Replies From View

The Independent are still obscuring their articles with an insistence that I remove my ad blocker, sadly.

idunnosomename

Islamophobia was a little in the news today but it was way down the itinerary after the ANTI-SEMITISM CRISIS AND MARGARET HODGE GOING OFF ON ONE

I mean considering the Tories unprecedentedly revoked someone's statehood basically because they were brown and said some weird things, you'd think they'd be higher up

I mean not least, if you can revoke citizenship on the basis they can claim it somewhere else they've never been to, you could revoke citizenship for everyone who looks a bit Jewish because they could go on a birthright tour back to where they came from if they put the paperwork in

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: Replies From View on March 05, 2019, 10:04:05 PM
The Independent are still obscuring their articles with an insistence that I remove my ad blocker, sadly.

QuoteChild abuse inquiry: Complaints against late Conservative MP 'not reported to police'

Inquiry into handling of allegations against Peter Morrison and others branded 'witch hunt against dead politicians'

    Adam Forrest
    @adamtomforrest
    22 hours ago

Allegations made about an MP's "penchant for small boys" were passed to the security service but were not then investigated or reported to police, an inquiry has heard.

The claim concerned Peter Morrison, the Conservative MP for Chester, the wide-ranging Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) was told.

The Westminster part of the inquiry is expected to sit for three weeks and aims to address "outstanding questions of public concern" related to child abuse allegations.

Lead counsel to the inquiry Brian Altman QC said that during its work the inquiry has obtained a copy of a 1986 letter, written by then-director general of the security service Sir Antony Duff.

Mr Altman said: "The letter makes it clear that the information that Mr Morrison had 'a penchant for small boys' had been passed to the security service by a member of the Westminster establishment, who had heard it from two sources.

"We have obtained other documents relevant to this correspondence from both the Cabinet Office and the security service. Those documents make it clear that neither the security service nor the Cabinet Office took steps to investigate this allegation, nor did they report them to the police."

It was one of a series of matters raised on the opening day of an inquiry, which was earlier branded a "witch hunt against dead politicians".

The hearing was told the inquiry will not consider allegations made by Carl Beech, previously known as "Nick", about a Westminster paedophile ring. Mr Beech has since been charged with perverting the course of justice and fraud.

Mr Altman stressed the inquiry will look at how organisations responded to child sex abuse allegations rather than the truth of claims against individuals.

The IICSA has already stated allegations against people accused of wrongdoing during the hearing are not necessarily true.

The probe will look at seven topics during its investigation, including whether political parties turned a blind eye to allegations and if there were attempts to cover up abuse claims.

The Morrison case study will be considered alongside how the Liberal Party, now the Liberal Democrat Party, responded to allegations made against the late MP Sir Cyril Smith and a more recent incident regarding Green Party member David Challenor.

The operation of the Whips' offices in parliament and the existence of so-called "dirt books" containing "scandal" about MPs will also be examined, as will the honours system, following concerns around honours potentially being granted to people accused of abuse either before or after their nominations.

The inquiry will also consider a claim the Paedophile Information Exchange received £30,000 in funding from the Home Office's then Voluntary Services Unit (VSU), disguised as payment to the Women's Royal Voluntary Service (WRVS or now RVS).

Mr Altman said a question raised by Labour's Tom Watson in the House of Commons in 2012, saying there was "clear intelligence suggesting a powerful paedophile network linked to parliament and No 10", could be seen as the "catalyst for the establishment of this inquiry".

But Geoffrey Robertson QC, acting for Harvey Proctor – whose home was raided under the Metropolitan Police's Operation Midland before the probe closed in 2016 without a single arrest – claimed Mr Watson and "various febrile journalists" had "started a moral panic" over an alleged paedophile ring.

Daniel Janner QC, son of the late Labour peer Lord Janner, who died in 2015 after being found unfit to stand trial over alleged sex offences, claimed the allegations forming part of the probe were based on "tittle tattle, false rumours and dodgy dossiers".

He said the inquiry was "a witch hunt against dead politicians".

The hearing was adjourned.

Additional reporting by Press Association