- Let’s start #TheWeekInTory with PartyGate, where randy Honey Monster and (no, really) Prime Minister Boris Johnson denied 20 fines meant there had been wrongdoing.
2. This doesn’t quite explain why he had personally phoned the Queen to apologise for all the wrongdoing.
3. Regardless, The Metropilitan Police issued MASSIVE fines of £50 for breaching lockdown rules.
4. Last week a £2,200 was handed down to a member of the public (who didn’t live or work in Downing Street) for breaching lockdown rules, thus proving we’re all equal in the eyes of the law.
5. Maria Caulfield said the PM was “very clear there was wrongdoing”.
6. Same TV show, she said the PM “did not believe there was wrongdoing”.
7. Dom Cummings (Lucius Malfoy after a flash-fire) said “the PM encouraged attacks on junior officials” to distract from his own crimes.
8. Having promised to release all party photos to the Sue Gray inquiry, Number 10 now refuses to release photos, and denies they even exist
9. Anyway, off (very slowly) to Dover, to find a week of 23-mile, 30 hr traffic jams as a combination of Brexit paperwork and P&O problems hit.
10. Last week the government promised to sue P&O.
11. It dropped that promise four days later, once it had attracted enough good headlines.
12. The government had also promised to improve worker’s rights.
13. This week the government shelved those plans for the second year running.
14. Kent had a “temporary traffic management system” that we were told would be scrapped in October 2021, by which time Brexit would be simply marvellous.
15. This week that temporary traffic system was made permanent, in recognition that Brexit will never stop being dog-sh*t.
16. This brings us on to a cross-party report this week, which found Brexit has caused 500,000 agriculture vacancies…
17. So the government issued 30,000 temp visas, which is 6 per cent of what we need.
18. Amazingly, this didn’t solve the problem.
19. Nor did a 50 per cent increase in farm pay.
20. But it has led to a huge increase in food prices and costs for farmers.
21. Lack of workers means crops are going unharvested, and left to rot.
22. The loss of crops, cost increases, and damage to supply chains caused by Brexit has been “financially ruinous” to UK farmers.
23. And it has led to 27,000 healthy pigs being culled cos we don’t have enough staff to prepare them for the table.
24. That’s 27,000 healthy animals shot and chucked in the bin, while we have over 2.5 million people using foodbanks.
25. You definitely voted for that, right?
26. But at least it’s better than the horror of Ukraine, where 6.5 million refugees seek homes, and our world-leading govt has taken 43 days to issue just 2,700 visas.
27. So far only 500 refugees have been allowed into the country. Out of 6.5 million.
28. Naturally, given the urgent crisis, this week the Home Office chose to shut down part of its visa system, which officials called “chaotic”.
29. And then the govt admitted they’ve been “giving Ukrainian refugees the wrong guidance” on how to apply to come here for over a month.
30. The Tory refugee minister in the Lords said his own government’s response to refugees was “embarrassing”.
31. Undeterred – but definitely still turd – Home Secretary and rabid Dolores Umbridge cosplayer Priti Patel has put forward lovely new plans to criminalise refugees.
32. They were rejected by the House of Lords after the Lord Chief Justice pointed out they “breach international law”.
33. Over to Number 11, where Rishi Sunak, who is being chancellor during his gap year, made loads of friends in yet another devastatingly successful week.
34. He began by blocking the Green Homes plan that would have reduced energy bills.
35. Then he forced everybody with rocketing and terrifying fuel debt to take on an additional £200 of fuel debt, whether they like it or not.
36. Sunak then insisted giving people money that they had to repay “doesn’t make it a loan”.
37. Brandon Lewis, out of his depth on a sheet of graphene and battling to hold two ideas in his head at once, told an interviewer “It is a loan, let’s remember. No, it isn’t”
38. To show how much he sympathised with the desperate plight of the poor, Sunak generously donated £100,000 to foodbanks…
39. No, hold on: let me correct that: he donated £100,000 to his old boarding school Winchester College, alma mater of some of the richest people on earth.
40. In his next act of empathy, Sunak demonstrated a great way we could all avoid freezing as his fuel and tax policies cause catastrophic hardship: leave behind all the massive problems you just caused, and fly off to your £5m holiday home in sunny Santa Monica.
41. Feral gonad Sajid Javid said it was “right and fair” that we all pay more tax than we can afford
42. He then said it was right and fair for Rishi Sunak’s billionaire wife to avoid tax she can easily afford, cos what are we: animals? Or – god help us – Belgians?!
43. Akshata Murthy (Mrs Sunak) has non-dom status, so doesn’t pay tax on most of her billions of income
44. This includes income derived from the £727m stake she has in Russian businesses that her husband spent last week telling the rest of us we shouldn’t invest in.
45. Sunak said his wife was only avoiding tax cos she’s Indian.
46. But being Indian doesn’t make you exempt from UK tax if you live/earn here.
47. And being non-dom isn’t an accident of birth: she pays £30k a year for the privilege.
48. But it has allowed her to avoid £20m of tax.
49. The average Brit worker pays £6k per year in tax, so Murthy’s greed has wiped out the entire contribution of 3,330 British workers.
50. And then the government, by some amazing twist of happenstance, chose her family firm to be recipients of £50m in contracts.
And don’t let’s forget the green card! Sunak, by obtaining a green card, pledged eternal loyalty to the USA and an implied promise to make it his permanent home in due course! So THAT’S weird! Editor
51. Let us enter the (presumably quite large) orbit of Eric Pickles, former housing minister and current twat, who respectfully attended the Grenfell Inquiry.
52. He respectfully told them he was too busy to answer their questions.
53. He said the fire killed 96 people. It killed 72, which he respectfully couldn’t be arsed remembering.
54. Still, he’s an improvement on Nadine Dorries, who ignored a committee of MPs telling her the new Ofcom head shouldn’t get the job because he has a “clear lack of depth”.
55. The same flaw hadn’t stopped Dorries getting into cabinet, so she pressed on regardless.
56. The last time Dorries appointed a head of the Charity Commission – and a friend of Boris Johnson’s, wouldn’t you just know it – was December, and he lasted barely a week.
57. So this week, without bothering to run an appointments process, she appointed a different member of the Tory inner-circle as the new charities head.
58. MPs had already rejected this one too, as being “slapdash”, and I think I’m starting to spot a pattern.
59. The Tory chair of the culture committee said the actions of Dorries simply proved “the public appointments process is broken”.
60. Taking her queue from this, Dorries then moved on to breaking Channel 4.
61. Dorries (the actual Culture Minister, and not a woman dragged in front of the cameras straight from a fight outside a flat-roofed pub) said C4 being publicly funded was “holding it back”.
62. C4 isn’t publicly funded, and Nadine is so thick you could stand a spoon up in her.
63. Dorries’s sterling native stupidity didn’t stop Ben Bradley (the Lego form of Al Murray) from using her as a role-model, so he also claimed C4 gets “£ from the taxpayer” and can’t raise its own funds.
64. It raises its own funds via advertising.
65. Grade B MP David Warburton was suspended for class A drugs and for sexually assaulting three women.
66. It probably won’t help his defence that he’d posed for photos next to a baking-tray full of cocaine.
67. Tory whips knew about his drugs/assaults for weeks, and did nothing.
68. Warburton has checked himself into a psychiatric unit.
69. He somehow jumped the place of the 60 per cent of children’s mental health referrals currently being rejected, because a decade of Tory cuts (which Warburton voted for) has left us unable to care for our kids.
70. Perhaps Warburton will pay for his own care, maybe using the undisclosed £100k he just took from a Russian businessman.
71. This was hot on the cloven-heels of Priti Patel, who this week took a £100k “donation” from an oil trader.
72. A donation is not the same as a bribe. One is illegal, the other legal. But occasionally, by some chance-in-a-million fluke, they produce identical results.
73. For example, days after getting a donation from an oil trader, Patel opposed windfall taxes on oil company profits.
74. Which brings us to the energy crisis, and two weeks ago the PM promised a “long-term energy policy” based around windfarms.
75. And then nine cabinet ministers – the usual supercluster of arrant gobshites, Patel, Dorries, Rees-Mogg etc – demanded a cut in support for windfarms.
76. So the PM’s “long-term energy policy” has lasted two weeks, and today’s wild, sweaty fumble in the policy tombola has led to a new one: six nuclear power stations instead, which won’t open for decades, and for which there is no money.
77. There’s also no money for home insulation, which is the cheapest, fastest, and greenest way to conserve energy and reduce bills, and could start tomorrow.
78. However, ministers did launch a plan to drop the ban on fracking, contradicting their own manifesto pledge.
79. Other manifesto pledges: a mini-thread, as if you haven't suffered enough
a. “We will not raise National Insurance”
b. National Insurance increased by 10%
c. “We will keep the pension Triple Lock”
d. They abolished the triple lock
e. “No-one will have to sell their home to pay for care”
f. People still have to sell their homes for care
g. “We'll build rail between Manchester and Leeds”
h. Scrapped
i. “40 new hospitals”
j. Isn’t happening
k. “We will cap energy bills”
l. Energy bills are up 54 per cent
m. “0.7 per cent of GDP on international aid”
n. They ended most international aid
o. “We will host the first ever LGBT conference”
p. So this week govt cancelled that conference as hundreds boycotted it in protest at Tories failing to outlaw conversion practices for transgender people.
80. Anyway, back to the main thread, which – yep – is still grinding on, you poor folk. The latest broken pledge on clean energy came the same week the IPCC said “extreme steps” are needed immediately to avert “catastrophic climate change”.
81. Faced with this existential threat, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the result of a Dalek having hate-sex with a pendulum, said he supported extracting “every last drop of oil from the North Sea”.
82. Bear in mind this lot hosted the COP26 climate summit less than a year ago…
83. Although Boris Johnson did take a private jet to get back to a London dinner, which should have given us a hint about his intentions
84. And if that wasn’t a big enough clue, the Tories let Shell pay £0 tax on oil and gas production last year, and instead we PAID THEM £92 million!
85. Research this week showed in two years the PM has told seventees uncorrected lies in parliament, and ministers a further 27.
86. The ministerial code says any falsehood must be corrected, or the minister must resign. But still they cling on.
87. And finally, 5 million people had Covid last week, experts called the cancellation of health measures a “perfect storm”, and 3000 NHS staff per week are off sick with the virus
88. So naturally, we chose this exact moment to cancel free rapid testing.
Thanks for reading and following.
1 May is the deadline for supporting my forthcoming book, so if you want your name printed in the back (and bear in mind this will be an evidence-trail when they come for us in vans) you’ve only got a few weeks.
Originally tweeted by Russ Jones (@RussInCheshire) on 08/04/2022.
