The County Durham Day Rover ticket is still only four pounds. If you can, then buy that. It is 20 per cent cheaper than a return ticket now is, although credit where it is due to Kim McGuinness on having kept that down to a fiver. Likewise, credit to Labour-controlled South Tyneside Council on making £200 payments to those pensioners whose incomes were just above the threshold for Pensioner Credit. Over to Durham County Council to do the same, since it is led by a Liberal Democrat in coalition with the Conservatives, with the Greens, and with Independents whose national affinities would likewise be with MPs who had voted against the withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment.
At least there was a vote on that at all. This evening, there was another instance of the increasingly common waving through of Bills at Second Reading once the reasoned amendment had been defeated. Based on Dame Siobhain McDonagh's denunciation of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, the remaining hardcore Blairites from the olden days were presumably intending to vote against it. It would still have passed easily, but Keir Starmer could not have been seen to have had a rebellion on the Right. So there was no Division.
The reasoned amendment would have denied Second Reading due to the absence of provision for an inquiry into the grooming gangs, and this was procedurally the wrong way of going about that. Amendments to that effect could still be tabled at committee and report stages. I remain profoundly sceptical about who would be appointed to that inquiry. In the background, the Conservatives are now angling for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon's support base, and perhaps also for Elon Musk's money, in the way that the UUP and the DUP used to vie for the affections of Loyalist paramilitaries, and sometimes still do, or in the way that the Gaullist and non-Gaullist parties of the French Right used to seek to outbid each other for the votes of Jean-Marie Le Pen's rabble, always vociferously denying that any such bid was being made. And behind that is the lunatic imposition of austerity in response to soaring government bonds due to the absence of economic growth. Yaxley-Lennon was sent down for only 18 months. He will be out in July.
364 MPs voted against holding another 10 year inquiry, into something that already had an inquiry into it, which released its results 4 years ago and was completely ignored, by the people who are currently calling for another inquiry.
ReplyDeleteThere needs to be a very tight amendment at committee or report stage.
DeleteStarmer, Rayner, Reeves, Lammy, Streeting, Healey, Miliband, Reed and Reynolds all abstained. Pushing their cannon fodder colleagues into the firing line (their names are recorded forever) while quaffing champagne miles behind the line. Labour MPs, your leader threw you under the bus. The front bench abstained so it’s your names smeared on the world stage for continuing to cover up a stain on our history of hundreds of thousands of child rapes. Starmer conned you. Now you look like the monsters.
ReplyDeleteThey are like something out of one of those films, in which at the right moment the misshapen little creatures turn into, as you say, monsters.
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