'You have cut funding, you’ve cut budgets in schools. We can’t recruit teachers. We can’t recruit teaching assistants.'
The failings of the Tory party were laid bare on BBC Question Time yesterday evening, after an audience member took apart the party’s entire time in office in just two minutes.
The audience member tore into the Tory party’s record, including on austerity, criminal justice, migration and on climate change, leaving Tory panellist Andrew Murrison MP utterly humiliated.
She said: “I’m staggered to be honest at the gap between the audience and the panel, and the notion that you think you’re succeeding on green energy, or that people support human beings washing up on our shores or being deported to Rwanda. I’m absolutely staggered.
“The way that we talk about serious youth violence is not to talk about crime. It’s to talk about the trauma that they’ve actually experienced in the last two years.
“You have cut funding, you’ve cut budgets in schools. We can’t recruit teachers. We can’t recruit teaching assistants. You’ve cut social workers, you have cut local services to the bone and then you’re worried about antisocial behaviour. There are no youth services.”
After much applause, she went on to add: “There is such a massive gap between what you’re saying and people’s experience. Why can’t people buy a house? Look at their wages – they’re a teacher, they have been through university, paid over £30,000, if not more, to go to university.
“Want to control rent? Use rent control. Want to have more houses? Build more houses because you can find the money to build HS2 and drill through forests.”
She continued: “This is what we’re talking about – these are ideological choices. You’ve done nothing for green energy in 13 years, nothing! Absolutely nothing! So, I think when we’re talking about young people and supporting them… what has been put in place for young people? That tutoring programme, a tutoring programme. That’s it. It’s woeful, it’s woeful.”
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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