2 days to go - In which Dave gets down with the proles

05/05/15

Dear Claire,

Well, we’re definitely on for a hung parliament, despite Cameron and Miliband both insisting they will have a majority government come Friday morning.

On the 6 o’clock news this evening, Cameron said “Judge us on our record”. Are you able to tell me which record that would be Claire? Is that “A contract between the Conservative Party and you”, as issued by Cameron before the 2010 general election?

As we have already shown beyond doubt (see letters dated 27^th, 28^th and 30^th), the Tories have failed to deliver on every single promise they made. People would love to judge the Tories on their record. We’d love to see Cameron answer some questions and face a challenge in a debate. But he’s not really making himself available for any of that is he? As we all know, he has chickened out of at least 5 or 6 opportunities to face any questions from any other politician or local candidate.

Cameron claims that no one wants to see him and Miliband go head to head. Don’t they? Has he asked anyone? Of course he hasn’t. It’s that old Tory arrogance again: ignore the electorate; we know what’s right for them and for us. Having just seen the monster-shiny-forehead on the 10 o’clock news once more, I see it’s ‘Action-Man-Dave’, in shirt sleeves, trying to get down with the proles and display his new-found passion, leering rictus on his unpleasant features. “That’s why we need 5 more years of Tory government, so that we can finish off what we’ve started”. That’s what frightens me Claire, the fact that people genuinely don’t seem to know what your party has done. It’s nothing short of a huge catalogue of ineptitude, incompetence and spin.

Incidentally, I challenged you at a 2010 hustings meeting about proportional representation. You responded that it led to ‘weak government’. Well if the collection of inbred mutants, used car salesmen, liars, hooray henries, spivs, maladjusted misfits, estate agents, chinless wonders, genocidal maniacs, banking fraudsters and personality-disordered social rejects, all with undeclared conflicts of interest – if this lot is anything to go by, we have just ‘enjoyed’ the most catastrophic period of weak government in living memory.

Anyway, in today’s accompanying picture, I am illustrating what effect proportional representation would have on the no. of seats each party might get. With PR, it would certainly give quite a different picture of which parties might try and form a coalition.

 

It was quite revealing during today’s Daily Politics debate chaired by Andrew Neill, which today looked at Welfare and Benefits. It featured our favourite Minister, IDS. What a mendacious conman he is! Every time he opens his mouth, he lies. That he has the audacity to criticise his rivals when they say we need to support the most vulnerable just beggars belief.

The Tory party is a con. It is utterly self-serving. It focuses on protecting those that need it least, at the expense of those that can least afford it.

In 1952, Aneurin Bevan defined the Tory party way thus:

“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.”

Kind regards,

Polly

3 days to go - In which David is not panicking at all. No siree - he's got this one in the bag!

04/05/15

Dear Claire,

Well it’s really heating up now. Cameron insisting that Miliband is panicking, Cameron insisting that Clegg is panicking, Cameron insisting that the SNP will be part of any coalition with Labour, and most insistent of all, Cameron insisting that the Tories will have a majority!

Well, that’s a laugh, because all the online polls put Tory & Labour support at roughly 280-285 seats each, so whichever party gets the most seats will have to do some serious arse-licking to form a majority government. Anyway, we’ll come back to that later.

A few things that have come to light in the last 24 hours or so: Cameron has chickened out of yet another debate! No surprise there.

Cameron snubbed a key rally with hundreds of first-time voters today (4^th May). More than 2,200 students, community campaigners and faith leaders will take part in an assembly in Westminster.

They will debate key issues including poor social care, low pay and debt. Miliband and Clegg will be there, but Dave Snooty has ducked out AGAIN! That’s the fifth debate he has either chickened out of, or fixed things such that there won’t be any awkward questions. Cameron has gone to speak to Tory party loyalists. Why? If they’re already Tory sycophants, why does he need to talk to them? Should he not be trying to justify his policies? Or might it be that he would need to defend the indefensible? Cameron is avoiding ANY situation in which he may get an awkward question, be it from another politician or a member of the public. He’s fooling no one. He is chickening out.

Cameron insisting that Miliband and Clegg are panicking rings a little hollow in the light of Cameron avoiding yet another debate. If anything, Dave Snooty himself is panicking. The problem is, Claire, the cat is out of the bag. People KNOW what a shambles it’s been these last five years.

The DWP deaths, the false claims on turning the economy round, the steady erosion of human rights, the silencing of any whistle-blowers working in public office, the sheer abject misery inflicted on millions of people, well, those that weren’t killed by the DWP that is. The lies, the false promises, the refusal to debate the opposition. The utter failure to deliver on a single commitment from the “Contract between the Conservative Party and you”, the Orwellian nightmare that is the Tory party in government. I thought it was traditionally the far left that was supposed to be covertly going for the control of free speech and the removal of democratic rights. Instead, I’m waiting for the knock on the door any night now under this Tory regime!

I’m currently reading a very interesting book on the Kim dynasty in North Korea. It doesn’t take much of a leap to imagine…..no, I’m being silly now. The Tories would never remove the right to free speech would they? Would they Claire?

A lovely snippet of your past has recently shown up on the internet again. I had completely forgotten about this: this was your famous remark about poor people having children:  

You were attending a Commons committee hearing when a Labour MP said the £190 hand-out, paid to all pregnant women, prevented many being plunged into abject poverty by the expense of having a baby. You said "Given that the families are in extreme poverty, as the honourable lady points out, should they be having children at that point?" Labour MP Alison McGovern later described your comment as being "like something out of the Victorian era"!

I’m struggling to think of a single nice thing I can say about the Tory party. Maybe we’ll give the last word to Graham Whitam, a Tory councillor in Sutton for more than 50 years. Last week, he publicly quit the Tories and is now backing the Lib Dem candidate. Bit of an embarrassment eh?

Here’s the good bit: Mr Whitam described the Tory manifesto as "an uncosted fantasy"!

You see, not everyone is fooled by Osborne ducking the question about where the £12billion savings will be made from.

We fight on.

Kind regards,

Polly

4 days to go - In which 'There may be trouble ahead'!

03/05/15

Dear Claire,

Today, we’re going to look at some last-minute bad news. A few things bubbling away on the back burner which the Tory thought-control police are trying to hide.

Credit to Mike Sivier and his Vox Political blog, for providing some of today’s content.

Firstly, let’s talk about our dear old friend, Irritable Duncan Syndrome. You may remember that the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) published figures for 2011, showing that 10,600 people died within 6 weeks of being declared fit for work by the ATOS Work Capability Assessments (WCA) between January and November of that year. That’s approximately 1,000 deaths per month.

It will come as no surprise that Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for these figures for subsequent years have been withheld by the DWP. Well, no one likes bad news do they?

Ah, but bad news will be coming very soon: The Information Commission has ordered the DWP to disclose the number of Incapacity Benefit and ESA claimants that died between November 2011 and May 2014. That’s a 30 month period. Using the average figure from above, that gives us an additional 30,000 deaths on top of the 10,600 from 2011. So, a conservative (Ha! See what I did there?) estimate would be more than 40,000 deaths. Taking that average, and applying it to the period May 2014 to May 2015, gives another 12,000 deaths, a grand total of more than 50,000 deaths, directly attributable to IDS’s welfare reforms in the DWP.

Now, the DWP have been told they must release this information within 35 calendar days of April 30^th 2015. The Information Commission had this notice ready to serve on the DWP in February. Had they served this at the time, this data would already be in the public domain. The Information Commission didn’t serve this notice until April. No one seems to know why.

Might it just be that the Coalition may not look too good by these figures appearing in the run-up to the general election? Maybe it’s just me being cynical.

Anyway, our friend Gideon, from no. 11, with the large profit (£450,000) made on his ‘second home’, (you know, the one we all paid the mortgage interest on) doesn’t escape scrutiny either.

Following growth in 2013 and early 2014 by a booming housing market, city analysts were taken aback by the halving of growth in the first three months of 2015. The feeling was that this was merely a blip in continued growth. Instead, the PMI (Purchasing Managers Index) weakened sharply. Manufacturing is growing – just about – but only because of demand for consumer goods. Companies making investment goods or intermediate goods (products used to make things by other manufacturers) are having a tough time.

What does this tell us? Firstly, the economy has come off its sugar-rush high. Since the Bank of England reined in mortgage demand, the pace of activity has slackened. This is despite more than six years of 0.5% interest rates and the halving of oil prices in the second half of 2014.

Secondly, the economy remains dangerously unbalanced. There has not been the shift to manufacturing, investment and exports promised by George Osborne back in 2010. The strong pound is hitting sales of goods to Europe and companies are not investing. Consumer demand remains the main source of growth.

Finally, the government’s claim to have turned round the economy in the past five years is rubbish. The Conservatives chose this week to focus on the economy in the expectation they could point to signs of success. Their timing could not have been worse.

First it was the halving of the growth rate. Now the news is that the outlook for UK manufacturers is deteriorating fast. This has not been a good week for the government’s claim to have turned round the economy.

So, allowing the Tories to ‘finish the job’ (© Dave Snooty irritating soundbites) looks like it’ll allow them to raise the 50,000 deaths to 100,000 due to DWP reforms, as well as lowering growth and failing to turn the economy round.

A fine legacy indeed!

Kind regards

 

Polly

5 days to go - In which David uses his 'Coalition of Chaos' soundbite to divert attention

02/05/15

Dear Claire,

Today, I’d like to have a look at the election campaigns that have been going on.

We’ll put to one side, pro tem, the fact that Cameron has chickened out of all head-to-head debates with any other leaders, apart from the farce that was the 7 party leaders at one go, in which there was plenty of opportunity for Cameron to keep his head down.

For the record, we’ll list them here, lest we forget:

1.      26^th March: Cameron & Miliband grilled by Paxman. Cameron chickens out of head to head.

2.      2^nd April: Cameron appears alongside Miliband, Clegg, Farage, Bennett, Sturgeon & Wood.

3.      10^th April: Cameron’s only hustings meeting in his constituency. Cameron’s office prevent an Independent candidate and Dr Clive Peedell of the NHS Action Party from taking part. As well as chickening out of a debate with these rival candidates, Cameron also stopped a photographer with a local newspaper (sympathetic to Labour) attending, and brings along a mate of his to take the snaps.

4.      16^th April: Miliband, Farage, Bennett, Sturgeon & Wood go head to head. Cameron chickens out again and stops Clegg participating.

5.      30^th April: Cameron, Miliband & Clegg appear sequentially on a Question Time format. Cameron again chickens out of a head-to-head with Clegg and/or Miliband.

So, four times, Cameron has been ‘feart’ (© M Thatcher. Scottish colloquialism for ‘frightened’). Impressive. 

Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on them, well not today anyway. What I’m going to talk about is the impression the party leaders of the traditional ‘big three’ parties have given various people I have spoken to. Not all are socialists I can assure you.

Let’s start with Nick Clegg. Fighting from a seriously wounded position, will his traditional supporters forgive him for climbing into bed with your lot? The perception seems to be that he’s putting a brave face on it. He’s trying to distance himself from the Tories, but isn’t cosying up to Labour either. He comes across as sincere, and is positioning himself as the party to keep either Labour or the Tories honest, should his party go into coalition government with either of them. Bit of a paradox there: the words Tory and Honest in the same sentence.

Now let’s have a look at Ed Miliband. Yup, he is a bit geeky, but he has noticeably grown in stature during these political debates, particularly following Cameron chickening out of so many potential head-to-head debates. Above all, he comes across with an air of compassion, sincerity and integrity. He is credible and believable.

OK, time for your dear leader. Everyone, but everyone I have spoken to, even loyal Tories, say he projects an image of oily insincerity, smugness, and patronising condescension. Someone that talks ‘at’ people, rather than with them. Someone that nobody trusts, someone that is coming out with increasingly unbelievable promises and bribes in a desperate attempt to cling on to the power he believes should be his, as his birth right. Someone running scared of direct debate with his main challenger for the keys for no. 10. Someone incapable of answering a direct question or making a commitment. Someone making empty promises e.g. “We’ll pass legislation to prevent VAT, National Insurance or Income tax going up”. What sort of rubbish rhetoric is this? If he remains Prime Minister, do they need to implement legislation to stop themselves putting these taxes up? This is a ruse to implement something to use against any subsequent government that needs to scrap this legislation. Empty promises and weasel words. He lies as fluently as he draws breath and he oozes insincerity.

Cameron keeps talking about the ‘Coalition of Chaos’, referring to a potential alliance of Labour and SNP. This is an attempt to divert attention from his government's abysmal failure to deliver on any single promise in their 'Contract with the people', issued before the 2010 election.
So who would Cameron choose as a partner? The Tories will not get enough seats for a majority. The spectre of Naughty Nigel and his bunch of racists, misfits, Tory rejects, and foul-mouthed MEP fraudsters climbing into bed with the Tories is something infinitely more worrying than anything they might predict about a Labour coalition. The Tories and UKIP? The worst of both worlds. A ‘Coalition of Chaos’? More a deeply unattractive bunch of ignorant bigots, divisive liars and utterly deluded revolting individuals, hell-bent on preserving their own interests and those of their wealthy supporters, at the expense of those at the very bottom of the pile.

I’ll risk the Coalition of Chaos any day thanks.

Kind regards

Polly

6 days to go - In which Claire makes a bit of a fool of herself

01/05/15

Dear Claire,

I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with various Facebook threads, but it seems you’re making rather a fool of yourself with regard to your defaced election banners.

I'm appalled you feel that scattering 350 of these eyesores around the constituency represents a sensible use of money. When I hear that someone's income support allowance has been messed up, again, by the DWP, and that they were assured it would be sorted out 'in a fortnight or so', but in the mean time these people need to feed their children and heat their homes, as well as fend off the local council chasing rent payments, it beggars belief that you feel this is money well spent. Had you spent the money on a month's holiday abroad, the result of the election in Devizes would never be any different, and you'd be a lot more popular with the local electorate for a) making yourself absent and b) not inflicting this visual pollution on them.

You have made it widely known that you have reported the matter to Wiltshire Police, stressing that it’s the trespassing matter you are most concerned about. Trespassing where? On the verge of the road?

The banners nearest me are on the A338 just north of East Grafton, ½ a mile further on at the junction with The Fairmile, and at the entrance to Savernake Forest from the A4 at Marlborough.

Are you really trying to suggest that access to these signs constitutes Trespassing? Were I to stand next to any of these signs, would a passing police car stop and challenge me for trespassing? Of course not. Would the owner of adjacent land challenge me about trespassing? Of course not. Your signs are within a few feet of the road. I once sat for a couple of hours on the verge at the Fairmile junction with a broken-down motorbike, waiting for a recovery vehicle. I wasn’t charged with any crime, nor yet was I even challenged about it.

In addition, when was the last time you heard about anyone being prosecuted for trespassing by standing on somebody's land for a few minutes? How many times do people set up camp with several dozen caravans on someone's land, only for the landowner to discover that there's virtually nothing they can do to shift them, without resorting to months of appeals, injunctions and the like, maybe one day resulting in sufficient security contractors moving in to clear the site?

You are attempting to use scare tactics. That you threatened one of your constituents with an injunction for writing letters to you, points, once again, to breath-taking arrogance and stupidity. You were quoted in the  Marlborough Gazette and Herald as saying that the defacing of these banners had backfired in your favour. Whether or not that is true, your habit of brandishing the law when a) you don’t have a case, b) you don’t  know who defaced these banners and c) you really believe the police will waste time investigating these petty complaints, has backfired hugely on yourself. Given your well-publicised education and early career choices, I would have hoped for a little more common sense and a bit less self-righteous indignation on your part.

You claim you need to 'protect your family'. Who from? The phantom defacer of the banners? Who gives a damn about your domestic situation and/or your family? You flatter yourself that anyone is particularly bothered. If anything, you’re drawing more attention to the matter. Had you bothered to think it through, I hope you might have realised that it would have been far better to rise above it, ignore it or laugh it off. Now you’ve just made a complete arse of yourself. Again.

Kind regards

Polly

7 days to go - In which we look at more of David's broken promises

30/04/15

Dear Claire,

Here is the third part (of three) of what Cameron promised in his ‘Contract between the Conservative party and you’, issued before the 2010 election.

I put the contents of the initial letter from Cameron in my letter of the 25^th. We’ll just remind ourselves of the closing line from that letter:

“So this is our contract with you. I want you to read it and – if we win the election – use it to hold us to account. If we don’t deliver our side of the bargain, vote us out in five years’ time.”

I must, once again, thank Thomas G Clark and his excellent blog ‘Another Angry Voice’.

The third of these three parts addressed society.

“We will change society”

“We face big social problems in the country: family breakdown, educational failure, crime and deep poverty. Labour’s big government has failed; we will help build a Big Society where everyone plays their part in mending our broken society”

 “If you elect a Conservative government on 6 May, we will:

1.      “Increase spending on health every year, while cutting waste in the NHS, so that more goes to nurses and doctors on the frontline, and make sure you get access to the cancer drugs you need”

Despite a lot of ‘smoke and mirrors’, Jeremy Hunt was forced to admit in 2012 that spending on the NHS had been decreased since the coalition came to government. 4,000 senior nurses have been sacked since 2010 and frontline staff have had either zero or a derisory 1% increase in their salaries.

2.      “Support families, by giving married couples and civil partners a tax break, giving more people the right to request flexible working and helping young families with extra Sure Start health visitors”

Sure Start funding has been ruthlessly slashed, resulting in the closure of some 600 Sure Start centres. The married couple’s tax break is a fraction of the financial losses due to the longest real terms decline in wages since records began.

3.      “Raise standards in schools, by giving teachers the power to restore discipline and by giving parents, charities and voluntary groups the power to start new smaller schools.”

The restoring discipline part is rhetoric. The other stuff about creating schools allows £billions worth of public property to be given away to unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities.

4.      “Increase the basic state pension, by re-linking it to earnings, and protect the winter fuel allowance, free TV licence, free bus travel and other key benefits for older people.” 

The link to earnings has been put in place, but given that earnings have undergone the longest real terms decline since records began, that’s not of much benefit. The winter fuel allowance was cut in 2011.  

5.      “Fight back against crime, cut paperwork to get police officers on the street, and make sure criminals serve the sentence given to them in court”

34,000 police jobs have been cut since 2010. Slashing the number of working police is an odd way to “get police officers on the street”. There have been no reforms in sentencing at all.

6.      “Create National Citizen Service for every 16 year old, to help bring the country together”

National Service for every 16 year old is typical right-wing ideology. Well, we’re able to say that of the 16 promises made in this document (6 today, 5 on the 28^th and 5 on the 26^th April), the last broken promise is one that nobody would have wanted anyway.

That’s three sections of broken promises. A shockingly inept and incompetent performance. Cameron is claiming that the Tories need five more years to finish off the job they started. Would that amount to another five years of broken promises?

How can anyone believe a word Cameron, or any Tory candidate says? You’re all making promises which won’t come to fruition. It’s a big con. We’re doing what we can to ensure as many people understand this.

Kind regards

Polly

8 days to go - In which we encounter the mystery of the missing Tory!

29/04/15

Dear Claire,

I was going to write about the third part of what Dave Snooty (© Private Eye) promised in his ‘Contract between the Conservative party and you’, issued before the 2010 election: ‘We will change society’. That will wait for another day, because today I’d like to talk about the disappearing Conservatives!

In the ‘Contract between the Conservative party and you’, Cameron wrote “So this is our contract with you. I want you to read it and – if we win the election – use it to hold us to account. If we don’t deliver our side of the bargain, vote us out in five years’ time.”

Well, it would seem that quite a few of the electorate WOULD like to hold the Tories to account. The problem is, the Tories aren’t making themselves available such that they may be held to account.

First off, Le Grand Fromage himself ensured that two candidates standing in Witney were excluded from the only hustings meeting he was able to attend. An independent candidate, Christopher Tompson, and Dr Clive Peedell of the National Health Action party. Do you think Dr Peedell (a clinical oncologist) might just know what it’s like at the sharp end of the NHS, and might be well-placed to tear Cameron apart over his ongoing destruction of the NHS?

Of course Cameron’s refusal to debate head-to-head with Miliband set the precedent for his cowardly avoidance of any situation in which he would be held to account, as well as being made to look like a complete idiot, who has presided over so many failed and inhumane policies and undelivered promises.

A little closer to home, you yourself avoided the Green hustings meeting at Pewsey, having committed to attending it some six months previously. The organisers pressed you as to why you refused to attend, and you said you needed to be ‘elsewhere’ without any further explanation. Could it be that your rough ride at the Pewsey hustings meeting the week before scared you off? Could it be that Cameron’s failure to deliver on any green policies (quote to aides, from Cameron: “Cut the green crap out”) meant you would have been held to account? Perish the thought!

Heading north to Merseyside, we find the very lovely Esther McVie ducking out of a pre-scheduled interview with LBC radio, who visited the area with their mobile bus/studio on their current round-Britain tour.  It seems that McVie’s agent didn’t even know where she was, and got very flustered when pressed. I wonder if there was going to be anything vaguely uncomfortable in the LBC interview, possibly concerning Welfare reforms.

Andrew Marr’s interview with Cameron on Sunday 19^th April, in which the death of a claimant was raised, appears to have got the Conservative party spooked when it comes to talking about their record on benefits.

A disdainful Cameron showed no humanity or remorse when quizzed by Marr about diabetic former soldier David Clapson, who died after his benefits were sanctioned. Clapson was unable to keep his insulin at the correct temperature in the fridge and died, his dead body surrounded by piles of CVs he’d printed off.

Perhaps the experience may have convinced the Conservatives that this isn’t their strongest subject.

On Tuesday 21^st April, Tory minister for disabled people Mark Harper cancelled an appearance on Newsnight. He had been due to take part in a three party debate on benefits. Because Harper dropped out just two hours before the programme was due to be broadcast live, the BBC cancelled the two other politicians in the interests of impartiality. As a result the BBC had to draft in non-politicians to talk on the same subject.

Well, I’ve saved the best till last today: Yup, it’s Irritating Duncan Syndrome, the old arse-ache himself.

On Monday 27^th, IBS was supposed to be appearing at a hustings meeting in his own constituency, Chingford.  He dropped out at the very last minute, claiming that he’d been called to the north of the country urgently.

Could it possibly have been because the sister of David Clapson, the soldier mentioned above, was at the same meeting, and wanted to question IBS about his Welfare cuts?

Iain Duncan Smith is due to appear for a debate about benefits on Andrew Neil’s daily politics show at 2pm on Tuesday 5th May. He will be appearing on a panel with Labour’s Rachel Reeves , Lib Dem Steve Webb, Suzanne Evans of UKIP and Jonathan Bartley for the Greens.

At least, that’s the plan. But the Conservatives appear increasingly desperate not to talk about either their record on benefits or their plans to cut another £12 billion from social security in just two years.

Could it be that Andrew Neil and Alison Holt may yet be talking amongst themselves two days before the election?

The mystery of the disappearing Tories: the plot thickens!

Kind regards

Polly