Mailwatch(ed) Forum

It's all Labour's fault

The energy minister has refused to apologise for soaring household bills, blaming instead the “dire situation” inherited from the Labour government.

On Monday, it was announced that the average consumer energy bill would rise from £2,100 a year to about £3,000 after the government stops giving grants. The price hike is due to the increasing cost of gas.

At the Conservative Environment Network (CEN) net zero conference in Westminster on Monday, Graham Stuart refused to apologise to the British public for rising bills.

When asked by the Guardian if he would take responsibility on behalf of the government for sluggishness on insulation, heat pump installations and renewables investment, he refused and instead criticised the previous Labour government, which was last in office in 2010...

https://amp.theguardian.com/money/2023/ ... ergy-bills

I wonder who has been in power for the last 13 years?

The shadow climate minister, Kerry McCarthy, said: “Graham Stuart is living in a fantasy world. It was the Conservatives who crashed the market for onshore wind, costing British families £150 in higher bills. It was the Conservatives who gutted energy efficiency programmes, to the extent that installation rates are 20 times lower than under the last Conservative government. And it was Conservatives whose own net zero strategy is so poor that the UK’s own courts deemed it unlawful.

“The Tories’ failure on this agenda has undermined Britain’s energy security and kept energy bills high.”

It's incredible. After thirteen years in government, some of these cretins are still trying to blame the last Labour government for their own shit. Still, Stupid is as Stupid does, I suppose.

Ha ha. Misleading the house?!

Kieran Mullan (Con) claims Labour has misled the public about the government’s record on handling the pandemic. He says Labour should apologise for that. Labour said the UK had the worst death toll in Europe, but its record wasn’t the worst, and was broadly in line with France’s and Germany’s, he says.

I actually trust Hancock more than the Telegraph, and am happy to wait for the inquiry. But the minister (Helen Whateley) is nonetheless playing a blinder.

Daisy Cooper (Lib Dem) why Jacob Rees-Mogg was able to get a Covid test sent to his home by courier when there was a national shortage of tests.

Whately says she needed a test for her family, and used the same app as everyone else.

Great effort here from one of the Tory Wanktankers. Deduct benefits from people who don't take up something that's voluntary- put their kids in nursery. Someone BTL points out this is hardly "party of the family" stuff, and the egghead asks him if he supports abolishing the 1880 Education Act on compulsory schooling.

The "sensible policy" from Gove is also bollocks.

Their only instinct is to punish.

Clue is in the word benefits. Financial penalties for those who can least afford them. After all, my children enjoy enriching activities their school can't provide. Yours play truant.

Gove’s Spad invented this policy in the back of the limo on the way to a speech. ‘Quick, give me a policy that doesn’t cost anything.’

My Masters dissertation was about truancy.

Over half of all truancy is 'condoned' - in other words, parents know and in many cases encourage. There are many push and pull reasons, but none of them speak of positive home circumstances, from kids earning to make ends meet, to addicted parents, the results of bullying (both parents and kids) to serious mental health issues, to parental loneliness. Some are from families where education is, for many reasons, undervalued, but by no means all.

It's not fecklessness...

Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 4:33 pm My Masters dissertation was about truancy.

Over half of all truancy is 'condoned' - in other words, parents know and in many cases encourage. There are many push and pull reasons, but none of them speak of positive home circumstances, from kids earning to make ends meet, to addicted parents, the results of bullying (both parents and kids) to serious mental health issues, to parental loneliness. Some are from families where education is, for many reasons, undervalued, but by no means all.

It's not fecklessness...

Can't they already do fines, but often choose not for very good reasons?

I have to hand it to Isabel Oakeshott. In her ham-fisted, backstabbing-laden attempt to further a bullshit anti-lockdown agenda* she has managed to make me feel a pang of sympathy for Matt Hancock.

*and by “further”, I mean “try to make out there was some deliberate avoidance of health advice rather than just a difficult decision based on limited resources, but in doing so inadvertently makes the case that an earlier lockdown and better pandemic prep would have been even better”

(To be clear - it’s a single, very small pang heavily tempered by the fact he was a complete fucking moron to have given the information to anyone ideologically opposed to his policy, let alone someone employed by a newspaper that also opposed his policy and who already had form as a journalist for immediately selling out her sources when under pressure because they’re a principle-free cowardly ghoul, in the first place)

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 4:43 pm

Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 4:33 pm My Masters dissertation was about truancy.

Over half of all truancy is 'condoned' - in other words, parents know and in many cases encourage. There are many push and pull reasons, but none of them speak of positive home circumstances, from kids earning to make ends meet, to addicted parents, the results of bullying (both parents and kids) to serious mental health issues, to parental loneliness. Some are from families where education is, for many reasons, undervalued, but by no means all.

It's not fecklessness...

Can't they already do fines, but often choose not for very good reasons?

Yes, but not always. Sometimes families under considerable stress are stressed further.

I can believe that.

What do they think a benefit sanction could do that a fine wouldn't? That's what I don't understand.

Crabcakes wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 5:14 pm I have to hand it to Isabel Oakeshott. In her ham-fisted, backstabbing-laden attempt to further a bullshit anti-lockdown agenda* she has managed to make me feel a pang of sympathy for Matt Hancock.

*and by “further”, I mean “try to make out there was some deliberate avoidance of health advice rather than just a difficult decision based on limited resources, but in doing so inadvertently makes the case that an earlier lockdown and better pandemic prep would have been even better”

Me too. If Chris Whitty had said, "but I get that this isn't possible now", she wouldn't even tell us.

Didn't the same thing with care homes happen in Wales and Scotland? And the states in the US that got hit hardest and fastest?

If anybody wants to read a 100+ page dissertation I'll send it!

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 5:59 pm
What do they think a benefit sanction could do that a fine wouldn't? That's what I don't understand.

They're not PLU and it'll make their lives even more miserable.

Tory thinking in a nutshell.

I get that, but they could make their lives more miserable by fines. Why do you need to combine it with the benefit system in that way? Do people think fines don't involve money or something?

There's an understood and well used system with fines where they can be paid by installments, deferred, paid over a longer period etc. Legal professionals and the CAB would be pretty good on this stuff.

There's no such thing with benefits.

The title "Nasty Party" doesn't quite fit the bill any more. The word "Thick" needs including. It's not just Lee Anderson, Andrew Brigade, Peter Bone and the rest of the usual suspects.

Dumb enough to think something grossly offensive was funny, then takes two months to realise he "made a mistake" and apologise for it.

Nasty and thick.

A councillor who said on Twitter that it was "more likely" a rape victim was a prostitute whose "punter... didn't pay" has apologised.

Shaun Slator commented on a post about a news report about a rape inquiry in Plumstead in south-east London.

While Mr Slator remains a Conservative Party member, he has been suspended from the Bromley Conservative group.

Bromley Council voted to condemn Mr Slator's comments, in a meeting in which he also personally apologised.

Shortly after the comments were made in December 2022, Labour group leader Simon Jeal described Mr Slator's remark as "revolting"...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64810566

ConservativeHome are outlining a new electoral strategy.
Their resident geniuses want to appeal to all the people the Tories haven't fucked over in the last 13 years.


I'm reminded of:

"Congratulations, that speech guarantees you the vote of every intelligent American".
"That's all very well, but I was hoping to secure a majority".

They could hold their rallies in a phone box.