Agency, Work

In Birmingham, a Labour council is breaking the ILO Convention on Private Employment Agencies by using agency workers to break a strike, in this case a strike by the members of a trade union affiliated to the Labour Party. At Westminster, Rachel Reeves is muddying the waters by promising that PIP would remain available "to those genuinely unable to work", a condition to which it is in fact irrelevant, as part of a general cultivation of all manner of misconception about PIP, the Motability scheme, the Blue Badge, and much else besides.

Would you fight for that? Conscription it is, then. The same individuals who, during the Brexit referendum campaign, called us every name under the Sun for merely reproducing the EU's own words about its desire for direct control over defence, are now saying that we have to rejoin the EU precisely in order to be part of that arrangement. There is to be an EU Army after all, with our youths compelled to enlist in it.

And amidst it all, MPs' pay is going up, because of course it is. Every family in the country will be worse off by 2030, but some will be a lot worse off than others. Even passport fees are to increase again next month, meaning that they will have risen by 25 per cent in two years, lest the sick and the disabled, the starving children and the freezing pensioners, the workers priced off the buses and the farmers forced to sell up, attempt to access British public support by fleeing to Ukraine.

After all, who is going to fight for them here? Reform UK's candidate at Runcorn and Helsby is one Sarah Pochin, who was expelled from the Conservative Group on Cheshire East Council in 2020 when she became Mayor on the votes of Labour and Independent councillors against the Conservative candidate, and who was expelled from the Independent Group in 2022 when she rejoined the Conservative Party to vote in its Leadership Election. Does anyone know for whom?

If Labour won at Runcorn and Helsby, then all of the above would get even worse, and very considerably so. The first candidate to declare there was Peter Ford of the Workers Party of Britain. The BBC still refuses to list that former Ambassador to Bahrain and to Syria, but everyone should put aside any reservation about that party, or about its Leader, or about anything else, and do everything to get Ford elected.