philosophical
Well-Known Member
Diane Abbott messed up the numbers when unexpectedly put on the spot, Priti Patel carefully prepared her fuck up and even had it written down.
The ongoing stupidity of Home Secretary Priti Patel
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existentialist
Tired and unemotional
And, TBH, the numbers thing is a bit of a sideshow - the REALLY telling thing was the sorrynotsorry business about PPE. Numbers = stupid. non-apology = evil.
Gramsci
Well-Known Member
As posted above Priti Patel isn't interested in refugees.
www.theguardian.com
Here is something the government could do. Help refugees trapped on Greek Islands come here. She would rather they die than help desparate people stuck in over crowded camps. If the virus gets hold in the camps a lot will die. Solve one of her problems as home secretary.
And this government despite praising the "brilliant" NHS which contains a lot of recent migrants is still forging ahead with its "points based" immigration policy.
Id say she is a right winger. Make no mistake when this pandemic is over she will be busy deporting people and pursuing her anti immigrant agenda.
Patel refuses to take children from Greek camps threatened by Covid-19
The home secretary has ignored pleas from charities, as refugees already accepted to join family in the UK are trapped in travel chaos
Here is something the government could do. Help refugees trapped on Greek Islands come here. She would rather they die than help desparate people stuck in over crowded camps. If the virus gets hold in the camps a lot will die. Solve one of her problems as home secretary.
And this government despite praising the "brilliant" NHS which contains a lot of recent migrants is still forging ahead with its "points based" immigration policy.
Id say she is a right winger. Make no mistake when this pandemic is over she will be busy deporting people and pursuing her anti immigrant agenda.
Gramsci
Well-Known Member
Government: we don't want "low-skilled" workers after the pandemic - Free Movement
What a moment for the Home Office to update its guidance on the new immigration system to reiterate:
www.freemovement.org.uk
Same time as Priti Patel is saying the NHS is brilliant the government makes it clear with Brexit that "low skilled" ( during the pandemic "key workers") wont be welcome here.
Chilli.s
mingling jets and statuettes
Truly shows the extent of her humanity.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Patel is a lethal combination of incompetence, mendacity and evil. Taking those backwards, she doesn't give a shit about fucking up people's lives, she'll happily lie her arse off about the thing she doesn't give a shit about, and she will only have the vaguest understanding of the issues involved.
editor
hiraethified
She's just proudly informed the nation that shoplifting has fallen during the lockdown.
It's because most fucking shops are fucking shut, you imbecile.
www.theneweuropean.co.uk
It's because most fucking shops are fucking shut, you imbecile.
WATCH: Priti Patel ridiculed after announcing ‘shoplifting is down’ com...
Home secretary Priti Patel's announcement that the level of shoplifting has fallen compared to the year before has baffled viewers of...
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
She has a cunning knack of drilling through the distractions to get to the real meat of the matter, though. Global pandemic almost-worst-case-infectious disease? NHS creaking at the seams from years of punishment at her own party's hands? A series of flat-footed schoolboy errors in policy from start to finish. No, we're cracking down on petty crime. If we had a handle on the shoplifting problem, Covid-19 wouldn't get a look-in. It'll see what we're doing to those damn shoplifters and bugger off back to the wishy-washy liberal swamp it came from. In China.
teqniq
DisMembered
It's not even true. I was speaking to a friend yesterday evening and her local corner shop is getting a hammering from addicts/homeless types who are stealing from them with impunity. They are too afraid to come out from behind the plasic screens to accost them.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
"crime can't crack itself"She's just proudly informed the nation that shoplifting has fallen during the lockdown.
It's because most fucking shops are fucking shut, you imbecile.
WATCH: Priti Patel ridiculed after announcing ‘shoplifting is down’ com...
Home secretary Priti Patel's announcement that the level of shoplifting has fallen compared to the year before has baffled viewers of...
Bahnhof Strasse
Met up with Hannah Courtoy a week next Tuesday
In a much-needed boost to the restaurant trade, the number of people running off without paying their bill has reached zero 
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
Pah, the Cabinet Office inquiry will be a brazen whitewash. I suspect they won't even admit to "minor failings" or anything regrettable. All a fuss about nothing.
The employment tribunal could be more interesting.
How in the actual fuck is she holding such a senior position in government. She's actually got a screw loose.
teqniq
DisMembered
Very slight sidetrack but i think this article comes close to the issue at hand. Johnson has surrounded himself with weak people beacuse he is afraid himself of anyone who might actually stand up to him:
www.nytimes.com
Opinion | The U.K. Needs a Real Government, Not Boris Johnson’s Puppet Cabinet (Published 2020)
This prime minister has set his government up to fail. We can’t afford that right now.
LONDON — On the day a paler, thinner, notably less boisterous Boris Johnson returned to work after his near-death coronavirus experience, a Tory member of Parliament tweeted a GIF of a magnificent lion perched on a mountaintop, his mane blowing in the wind. “Good to see @BorisJohnson back at the helm!” he wrote.
This fawning sycophancy is not the norm in British politics. We haven’t, on the whole, run Trumpian courts, or implied that our prime ministers are kings among men. And yet, unusual and unwelcome as the adulation was, the tweeter had a point.
Mr. Johnson’s cabinet is so markedly weak, with so few politicians of intellect and experience, that the prime minister’s absence for nearly a month left an alarming void. A shifting cast of ministers stood in for him at the daily pandemic press briefings, with performances ranging from mortifying to faltering or defensive to occasionally, thankfully, competent.
The lack of depth in the cast around this cabinet table was mercilessly displayed, as was the nervousness of many of those obliged to face public interrogation at such a critical time. Some, like the new chancellor, Rishi Sunak, could handle their own briefs, but not one felt able or authorized to even begin to address the big questions Britain now wants answered: What is the route out of lockdown, and how should deaths be balanced against isolation, loneliness, futures and jobs? All those queries were diverted, with evident relief, to the stock response: We’ll have to wait until the boss gets back.
Against that background of anxious, stalling stand-ins, Mr. Johnson’s reappearance has, indeed, felt like the welcome return of a big beast. The country needs a leader. But his dominance is no accident. It’s the consequence of the deliberate choice he made after he became Conservative Party leader last year to expel principled opponents within the party and to surround himself with smaller characters, ones who will neither threaten nor challenge him, politicians chosen on the whole more for their malleability and their loyalty to Mr. Johnson’s Brexit project than for their talent.
Mr. Johnson’s calculation then was that the quality of his cabinet was pretty much immaterial. His priority was to deliver Brexit and economic policies that the Conservatives’ new Brexit-supporting voters were demanding. That would be driven by Mr. Johnson’s small team of political advisers in No. 10 Downing Street, led by his ruthless, controlling, Machiavellian chief adviser, Dominic Cummings.
In this centralization of power, a core group of insiders and allies would decide the government’s agenda and come up with the ideas and the strategies for carrying it out. The job of cabinet ministers would be to do, meekly, as they were told.
No opposition was permitted. Senior, able Tory politicians of independent spirit were passed over and exiled to the backbenches. Any cabinet ministers who imagined they were strong enough to subvert the new system had a harsh lesson in January, when its second-most-senior member, Sajid Javid, then the country’s finance minister and a Johnson ally, was ordered to fire all his advisers and replace them with those appointed by Mr. Cummings. He refused and was forced to resign. A fear of breaching the line has haunted the remaining ministers and encouraged timidity ever since.
The onslaught of the coronavirus has revealed how dangerous it is to deliberately weaken the cabinet in this way. In Mr. Johnson’s absence, his alternative power center at No. 10 could not hold. Not only did its principal members, including Mr. Cummings, fall sick themselves, but in this emergency, political advisers couldn’t take the place of an absent prime minister. Britain needed and wanted to see powerful public figures in the lead. What we got were politicians anxious about the future verdict of their puppeteers.
Britain needs better than this as it faces the most petrifying, unpredictable, multifaceted calamity in three generations. The breadth of the problem demands as much wisdom, competence and insight as can be brought into Downing Street. Last week, Mr. Johnson promised to consult widely, even with the opposition. He should extend that to where it counts, to a temporary cabinet and government of all the best and tested Tory talents.
Instead of contriving an obedient cabinet, he should model himself on those previous prime ministers who included rivals and ex-leaders in their governments, knowing that the vexations of resistance, argument and persuasion were a price worth paying for averting errors, clarifying problems, and learning from those who had been scalded by earlier crises.
Many ex-ministers would respond to a call to serve for a short time in the national interest. Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, could help expand the National Health Service. The former chancellors Kenneth Clarke and Philip Hammond and former prime ministers John Major and David Cameron could deploy their knowledge of financial crises and banks that won’t lend. Mr. Javid would be an infinitely better home secretary than the inadequate Priti Patel, and the critical backbencher Tom Tugendhat could run the Foreign Office. Mr. Johnson’s predecessor as prime minister, Theresa May, could use her best quality, her famed attention to detail, to oversee food and support for the shielded and vulnerable or the delivery of personal protective equipment.
Would this even be legal? Yes, easily: Technically, a member of the cabinet must be in the Parliament. Those who aren’t currently M.P.s could be appointed to the House of Lords, a step the prime minister is empowered to take. If the most anonymous and mediocre half of the cabinet were replaced by names like these, the caliber of the executive would soar overnight. Notable former politicians who didn’t wish to join — or were from other parties — say, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown or William Hague — could form an advisory panel. If Mr. Johnson worried that his temporary coronavirus cabinet would impede Brexit, its members could agree not to interfere with that.
None of this, of course, is likely to happen. Mr. Johnson dislikes sharing the limelight. That’s one reason the most experienced member of his cabinet, Michael Gove, wasn’t picked to deputize for him while he was out sick. But it is in Mr. Johnson’s self-interest, as well as the country’s, to act, for one notable reason.
His path to the top has been based on a simple strategy: He’s not a knowledgeable, able, policy-driven leader. He’s an optimistic figurehead who prefers an easy life and gets competent people beneath him to do the actual work. That strategy risks falling apart now because neither Mr. Johnson’s narrow group of advisers nor the ministers he appointed for their loyalty are the people best qualified to handle the grave perils ahead. He should broaden his base and stop his chief adviser, Mr. Cummings, ruling by fear. Britain doesn’t require a lion in this moment; it needs a leader with the humility and confidence to recruit every necessary talent to this fight.
This fawning sycophancy is not the norm in British politics. We haven’t, on the whole, run Trumpian courts, or implied that our prime ministers are kings among men. And yet, unusual and unwelcome as the adulation was, the tweeter had a point.
Mr. Johnson’s cabinet is so markedly weak, with so few politicians of intellect and experience, that the prime minister’s absence for nearly a month left an alarming void. A shifting cast of ministers stood in for him at the daily pandemic press briefings, with performances ranging from mortifying to faltering or defensive to occasionally, thankfully, competent.
The lack of depth in the cast around this cabinet table was mercilessly displayed, as was the nervousness of many of those obliged to face public interrogation at such a critical time. Some, like the new chancellor, Rishi Sunak, could handle their own briefs, but not one felt able or authorized to even begin to address the big questions Britain now wants answered: What is the route out of lockdown, and how should deaths be balanced against isolation, loneliness, futures and jobs? All those queries were diverted, with evident relief, to the stock response: We’ll have to wait until the boss gets back.
Against that background of anxious, stalling stand-ins, Mr. Johnson’s reappearance has, indeed, felt like the welcome return of a big beast. The country needs a leader. But his dominance is no accident. It’s the consequence of the deliberate choice he made after he became Conservative Party leader last year to expel principled opponents within the party and to surround himself with smaller characters, ones who will neither threaten nor challenge him, politicians chosen on the whole more for their malleability and their loyalty to Mr. Johnson’s Brexit project than for their talent.
Mr. Johnson’s calculation then was that the quality of his cabinet was pretty much immaterial. His priority was to deliver Brexit and economic policies that the Conservatives’ new Brexit-supporting voters were demanding. That would be driven by Mr. Johnson’s small team of political advisers in No. 10 Downing Street, led by his ruthless, controlling, Machiavellian chief adviser, Dominic Cummings.
In this centralization of power, a core group of insiders and allies would decide the government’s agenda and come up with the ideas and the strategies for carrying it out. The job of cabinet ministers would be to do, meekly, as they were told.
No opposition was permitted. Senior, able Tory politicians of independent spirit were passed over and exiled to the backbenches. Any cabinet ministers who imagined they were strong enough to subvert the new system had a harsh lesson in January, when its second-most-senior member, Sajid Javid, then the country’s finance minister and a Johnson ally, was ordered to fire all his advisers and replace them with those appointed by Mr. Cummings. He refused and was forced to resign. A fear of breaching the line has haunted the remaining ministers and encouraged timidity ever since.
The onslaught of the coronavirus has revealed how dangerous it is to deliberately weaken the cabinet in this way. In Mr. Johnson’s absence, his alternative power center at No. 10 could not hold. Not only did its principal members, including Mr. Cummings, fall sick themselves, but in this emergency, political advisers couldn’t take the place of an absent prime minister. Britain needed and wanted to see powerful public figures in the lead. What we got were politicians anxious about the future verdict of their puppeteers.
Britain needs better than this as it faces the most petrifying, unpredictable, multifaceted calamity in three generations. The breadth of the problem demands as much wisdom, competence and insight as can be brought into Downing Street. Last week, Mr. Johnson promised to consult widely, even with the opposition. He should extend that to where it counts, to a temporary cabinet and government of all the best and tested Tory talents.
Instead of contriving an obedient cabinet, he should model himself on those previous prime ministers who included rivals and ex-leaders in their governments, knowing that the vexations of resistance, argument and persuasion were a price worth paying for averting errors, clarifying problems, and learning from those who had been scalded by earlier crises.
Many ex-ministers would respond to a call to serve for a short time in the national interest. Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, could help expand the National Health Service. The former chancellors Kenneth Clarke and Philip Hammond and former prime ministers John Major and David Cameron could deploy their knowledge of financial crises and banks that won’t lend. Mr. Javid would be an infinitely better home secretary than the inadequate Priti Patel, and the critical backbencher Tom Tugendhat could run the Foreign Office. Mr. Johnson’s predecessor as prime minister, Theresa May, could use her best quality, her famed attention to detail, to oversee food and support for the shielded and vulnerable or the delivery of personal protective equipment.
Would this even be legal? Yes, easily: Technically, a member of the cabinet must be in the Parliament. Those who aren’t currently M.P.s could be appointed to the House of Lords, a step the prime minister is empowered to take. If the most anonymous and mediocre half of the cabinet were replaced by names like these, the caliber of the executive would soar overnight. Notable former politicians who didn’t wish to join — or were from other parties — say, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown or William Hague — could form an advisory panel. If Mr. Johnson worried that his temporary coronavirus cabinet would impede Brexit, its members could agree not to interfere with that.
None of this, of course, is likely to happen. Mr. Johnson dislikes sharing the limelight. That’s one reason the most experienced member of his cabinet, Michael Gove, wasn’t picked to deputize for him while he was out sick. But it is in Mr. Johnson’s self-interest, as well as the country’s, to act, for one notable reason.
His path to the top has been based on a simple strategy: He’s not a knowledgeable, able, policy-driven leader. He’s an optimistic figurehead who prefers an easy life and gets competent people beneath him to do the actual work. That strategy risks falling apart now because neither Mr. Johnson’s narrow group of advisers nor the ministers he appointed for their loyalty are the people best qualified to handle the grave perils ahead. He should broaden his base and stop his chief adviser, Mr. Cummings, ruling by fear. Britain doesn’t require a lion in this moment; it needs a leader with the humility and confidence to recruit every necessary talent to this fight.
MrCurry
right after this urgent rest
That is, of course, the real reason feeble minded bullies like Patel end up in positions of power in Boris’s team - because they can be controlled from above and it keeps the real power concentrated right where Boris wants it.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
I think it's more a case of these are the smartest people the tory right has to offer. The rest of them are basically just large blobs of yeast with expense accounts.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
I think it's a combination of both of these - it suits the chain of command to have pond life for underlings, and all the more so if they're compromised pond life who know they'd better toe the party line if they are to be forgiven for their past sins.
eatmorecheese
He's fallen out of the car again
Fuck off.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
Whatever she is, her ethnicity is irrelevant. Also, fuck off.
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