Most people seem to think that Dido Harding’s test and trace programme (NHST&T but nothing to do with the NHS) is a disaster. I won’t go into the reasons why; you can read some of it in the House of Commons committee report. Instead, let’s just look at the costs. The government allocated a budget […]
This government has a history of bad timing. During Anti-Bullying Week in 2020, news broke that prime minister Boris Johnson had decided to ignore that his home secretary Priti Patel had been found to bully her staff, and not to sack her. Then during Parliament Week in November 2021 he tried to undermine the very […]
Dear West Country Voices, Our PM isn’t very good with gates, actually he isn’t very good at anything – except, of course, at lying; and actually he seems to have lost his talent for that recently. You will remember when he was confused by Bill Gates on how much the UK would contribute towards Bill’s […]
This revelatory thread is from Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project: “Remember the story of Matt Hancock and Alex Bourne, the publican turned medical equipmemt supplier, a photo of whose pub Mr Hancock kept on his office wall? Well yesterday, Mr Hancock went on the attack. He said Alex Bourne “never got a contract […]
This is a letter we have yet to receive and even the idea of it may make the blood of some of our readers boil. But does it, or a version of it, languish in draft emails on computers right across our region, addressed but unsent? It would be good to think so.Go on. Open […]
Dear West Country Voices, Even the Daily Mail has been reporting on the “outside” earnings of Geoffrey Cox, MP for Torridge and West Devon. He earned £400,000 a year advising the British Virgin Islands tax haven over corruption charges and has agreed to take on two more weeks of work for that government despite the […]
Any parallels drawn between Lee Majors’ six-million-dollar man of the 1970s and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s six-million-quid man of the 2020s can only be for the purpose of highlighting polar opposites. While the six-million-dollar man was intent on doing good, six-million-quid man — let’s call him “Squid” for short — seems wholly focused on filling his boots […]
In Part 1, I looked at the state of our electoral system, the iniquities of first-past-the-post and the measures this government is intent on taking to cement its stranglehold on power. Now I am going to look at the key institutions that exist to keep our politicians honest, to scrutinise and to police, as well […]
After the MP expenses scandal in 2009, anybody could be forgiven for expecting the bad old days of MPs making specious claims on the public purse to be over. Back then, voters were furious that MPs who had inflicted austerity on them in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis were claiming the costs of […]
Get Brexit done! Remember that old chestnut? The catchphrase which landed Johnson and his cabal an 80 seat majority and the power to really get stuck in to dismantling our democracy and economy? It was a con, of course. He and his bellicose sidekick, the inappropriately-ennobled Lord Frost, rushed to sign a deal that, it […]
In the context of the tsunami of sleaze that has been coming at us over the past few weeks, the theyworkforyou.com website’s name has acquired some extra irony. It is also ironic that searching an MP’s voting record brings up this message: Geoffrey Cox, MP for Torridge and West Devon, was hampered rather more than […]
Dear Editor, MPs’ payments, hospitality and gifts from outside interests are under the spotlight. The Government has U-turned on their shocking plan to overturn the parliamentary standards process to help their friend Owen Paterson avoid suspension as an MP for 30 days, after he was found by the parliamentary standards committee to have broken the […]
The past week has been Parliament Week. Boris Johnson couldn’t possibly blow it up the way he blew up Anti-bullying Week last year, could he? Back then he undermined a massive government anti-bullying campaign for schools by refusing to fire Priti Patel as Home Secretary after she was found to have bullied her staff. What […]
The government is pursuing its by now familiar strategy of ramming through hideous legislation on very short timescales with no time for scrutiny. Why else did the government publish its plans late on Friday? In the hope that we would have no time to analyse or react. BIG MISTAKE. Feargal Sharkey posted this today, alerting […]
I have already noted this morning that Trump is looking as if he might return in the USA. I have also noted the UK government’s plans to turn a blind eye to corruption and the rule of law. [And has done so. Leadsom amendment passed. A dark day for democracy. Ed] I am not alone in desparing. Jessica Simor QC […]
As Politico reports this morning: As the prime minister returns to Westminster, the news is quickly moving on to a remarkable attempt by Downing Street to use its parliamentary majority at a vote this afternoon to overturn the 30-day suspension handed to scandal-hit Conservative MP Owen Paterson. No. 10 appears to be plotting to crush the independence […]
We received a copy of this letter to MP Conor Burns this morning. It could, with suitable amendments, be sent to every Conservative MP considering hammering another nail in democracy’s coffin today: Imagine my horror at reading the following article by Christopher Hope in The Telegraph this morning: “Boris Johnson will attempt to reform the […]
Some background ahead of an important vote in parliament on 3 November: in September 2019, The Guardian published their scoop on MP Owen Paterson’s breaches of parliamentary rules by lobbying for companies that he was paid to advise. To quote: The documents [detailing meetings and letters] raise questions over whether the North Shropshire MP has broken parliamentary […]
One of our readers gets emails from the Conservative Party and was shocked to read that they are using a government document to generate funds for the party. Are there no depths to which they will stoop? We’re looking forward to seeing you online tomorrow at 6:45pm for our in-conversation Budget day event with the […]
Here’s a collection of news stories that probably won’t be covered in any detail by the BBC or much of the mainstream media. We’ll try to put a selection together for you at least once a week. There’s no shortage of material with this government! Russian interference in our democracy: Remember the Russia report into […]
Back in July 2020, we ran a story (which you can read by clicking on the image above) in which, Mike Temple explained how Dr Cathy Gardner, from East Devon, a microbiologist with a doctorate in virology, had recently challenged the government in the High Court for not protecting elderly people in care homes, with […]
The BBC’s new docudrama The Trick dramatises events around ‘Climategate’ – the hacking and subsequent false representation of thousands of emails between climate scientists, just before the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit. It’s an episode that can now be seen as a blueprint for a later – and even more devastating – disinformation operation. Writer Owen […]
Shirley Williams Memorial Lecture. October 15 2021 19:00 POWER AND FEAR – THE TWO TYRANNIES Before I begin, I’d like to offer my sincere condolences to the whole of the Amess family – what happened today is not just a tragedy for them but for all of us who believe that democracy must operate free […]
Dear Editor, Further to your article “Lying and Liars are killing our democracy“, here are two pertinent quotes: George Orwell: “The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear […]
Make lying in the House of Commons a criminal offence “The Government should introduce legislation to make lying in the House of Commons a criminal offence. This would mean that all MPs, including Ministers, would face a serious penalty for knowingly making false statements in the House of Commons, as is the case in a […]
This is a compilation of some of the interviews, tweets and videos documenting deeds, lies, ignorance and incompetence that in any other time would have resulted in sackings and resignations. We feel it is important that these are neither normalised nor forgotten. These people are serial breakers of the ministerial code and unfit for office. […]
Most mornings, over tea and toast, I read the online newsletter by Heather Cox-Richardson. She’s a history professor at Boston College and has a huge global following. I find her daily accounts of events in the US – current and historical – make fascinating reading and fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge. […]
In the first four videos in this series on tax havens I have explored how they work, what they abuse, and why that abuse should worry anyone who is concerned for fair markets, the rule of law and democracy, all of which tax havens (or secrecy jurisdictions as I prefer to call them) actively seek to undermine. This then leads to the obvious question, which […]
Gleichschaltung is one of history’s most sinister euphemisms. The word is German and it means ‘co-ordination’. Hitler and other architects of the Third Reich used it to build a totalitarian state that purged Germany of all opposition. From 1933 onwards, das Volk, the people, were urged to march in perfect formation towards a future that […]
For the purpose of this article, let us accept that the Conservatives are in power and were in power when some of the events referred to occurred. Readers may say “But what if it had been Corbyn or Starmer?”. Please set that alternative scenario to one side. I am looking at what was genuinely a […]