Looking back on the last week of abject Tory failures.
Lots of small things seemed to happen this week, making it a bit difficult to pick out an overarching theme. I reported on Nigel Farage’s praise of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban’s latest election win, and looked at John Malone, the US media tycoon who could buy Channel 4.
Partygate rumbled on, with the Metropolitan Police issuing £50 fines to some of the unnamed participants in the Downing Street lockdown parties.
The Commons was in recess, so there wasn’t much legislative deliberation to report on, but instead we got to watch Britain descend into supply chain chaos again as a glitch in the post-Brexit customs system led to lorries backed up along the M20 on their way out of the UK.
The perfect storm of Covid and Brexit also caused 500,000 vacancies in the UK’s agricultural sector, according to a Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee report. The report noted that:
- The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) reported that 24% of the UK daffodil crop was left unpicked at the start of 2021 “due to a staggering 33% shortage in seasonal workers”,15 while Lea Valley Growers’ Association noted that “10% of cucumber growing members didn’t plant a third crop” in July 2021 due to a lack of workers.16 Riviera Produce Ltd reported that it “left over £500,000 of produce to rot in the fields” due to a lack of staff,17 and Boxford Suffolk Farms Ltd said it “had to waste approximately 44 tonnes of fruit this year” due to labour shortages.18
The Lords was in session, however, debating the Elections Bill, which looks set to make elections less fair and electoral systems less proportional. The government won a vote which will change the electoral system for London Mayor, meaning you will no longer have a second preference vote in this election.
However, the government was defeated in the Lords over its plans to introduce Voter ID, with Mayor of London Sadiq Khan calling on the government to drop this element of the legislation which could disenfranchise millions of people.
Nevertheless, on Friday Prime Minister Boris Johnson called himself a “passionate advocate of democracy” at a press conference with German Chancellor Scholz.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s political stock has also taken a nosedive, as reports emerged suggesting that both he and his wife had US Green Cards and paid tax in the US. For Sunak’s wealthy wife Akhshata Murty, this meant that she may have been able to avoid paying more than £4 million in income tax due to her ‘non-domiciled’ status.
Labour suggested that the lack of transparency around their taxes and residency could mean that Sunak has broken the ministerial code. Sunak called the criticism of his wife’s tax situation ‘smears’.
The government was also forced onto the back foot over LGBT+ rights, after it broke a promise to ban the practice of ‘conversion therapy’ for anybody in the LGBT+ community. After attempting to exclude trans people from the conversion therapy ban, 150 groups who had planned to attend a global conference on LGBT+ issues organised by the government pulled out, forcing the cancellation of the event.
Ed Milliband criticised Tory backbenchers for holding the government’s energy policy hostage, as he accused them of blocking the creation of new onshore wind turbines. “If one person objects to a windfarm it doesn’t get built. I was at a windfarm yesterday and a guy there was saying ‘we’ve given up on windfarms on England because we can’t get them through.’”
And lastly, because we could all do with a laugh in the face of so much depressing news, Tory energy minister Greg Hands got laughed at on Question Time as he tried to explain how the Energy Bills Support Scheme announced by Sunak would not be a loan, even though it will eventually have to be paid back.
“It is not a loan, it is a discount which is taken back in the form of a levy”, Hands said. “It’s a loan!”, the audience shouted back.
John Lubbock leads on the Right-Watch project at Left Foot Forward
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