Peter Hitchens banging on about privatisation being the big con.
I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can’t deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.
I thought – this now seems especially funny – that private British Telecom would be automatically better than crabby old Post Office Telephones.
I think anyone who has ever tried to contact BT when things go wrong would now happily go back to the days of nationalisation. Soviet-style slowness was bad, but surely better than total indifference.
…
And now the remains of our steel industry are vanishing, not because nothing can be done (any determined government could save it if it really wanted to) but because we’re all still worshipping that free-market dogma that captivated us 30 years ago.
I never thought I’d yearn for the National Coal Board or British Steel or, good heavens, British Leyland. But I do begin to feel I was fooled into thinking that what was coming next would be any better. At this rate it may soon be much, much worse.
Opportunistically holding this up as a reason for Brexit, when in truth they voted against the measures to help the situation.
Some brass balls there. Then again, the majority of their far-right leaning followers happily swallow any old bullshit Farage throws at them, so no doubt they will lap it up.
It really isn’t looking good for the Tories and any aspirations they might have had with their BME representation. Some may remember the principled resignation of Sayeeda Warsi awhile back over Palestine. We’ve already commented on Zac Goldsmith’s toxic mayoral campaign.
This article in the New Statesman, from a former candidate for Leigh, is particularly damning.
The way the Zac Goldsmith mayoral campaign is being run is disgraceful. Reading the rhetoric and leaflets led me right back into my mind to the incident in Wales. It seems little has changed. The Conservative party talks about “One Nation” and “we are all in this together”. But as the Goldsmith campaign has unfolded, to me it feels more like divide-and-rule.
Friends have said to me: “If you have any kind of political aspirations within this party keep quiet.”
I just can’t do that anymore. It’s not who I am. If that means I never fulfil my dream of serving my country as an elected Member of Parliament, then so be it. That would be a sad indictment of the party political system, suggesting it is more interested in career politicians, who choose to set aside their beliefs mindlessly in order to swallow the party line, instead of genuinely standing for what they believe.
Do we actually have the option to exempt the NHS? Or is this a rule that we are having foisted upon us warts and all? Can we veto it?
Or was the price of DC’s “hard won concessions” from the EU re the Brexit, to roll over and have our tummy tickled by the EU on TTIP?
The concept that a US business can sue us and be awarded compensation by a court outside UK jurisdiction for not letting them do what they want to any part of the UK (let alone the NHS) is terrifying and probably the best reason yet why we should stick two fingers up at the EU.
I thought UKIP were anti-EU on the grounds it eroded our soveriegnty and was bad for the man on the street?
Yet, they support TTIP.
I am so surprised by this. It’s almost as if they are total and utter hypocrites (see also reaction to Tata Steel), only concerned with keeping Johnny Foreigner out of the country.
That homophobic piece of shit Roger Helmer is also rather fond on TTIP. Interesting UKIP vote against EU bills to help the steel industry, or to make marital rape illegal (women’s safety was a big concern of theirs around NYE, I wonder why?) out of principle (i.e. oppose anything EU), but will vote in favour of TTIP.
Farage has also flat out refused to show his tax returns. I’ve made the quip before, but I’m guessing he has a lot of cash that is independent from the UK tax system. Fancy that!
There’s a lot that winds me up about UKIP, I’ve never really been shy in expressing that.
But the thing that winds me up most is this idea that they have any regard for ‘the everyman’. It’s utter bollocks, they care less than the Tories, and that says something.
Yet today he sparked fury by admitting he knew the giant wanted to close the UK’s biggest works in Port Talbot “immediately”.
And it appears he had accepted Tata was offloading the South Wales site before his trip Down Under - because he negotiated a short “reprieve” to keep blast furnaces running while a buyer was found.
