The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 19th February 2021
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 19th February 2021
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
EVIDENCE has recently come to light which surprisingly suggests that some things going on in the upper reaches of the Government at Westminster are not entirely cricket. Things are just as bad in Edinburgh, but these can be read about on page nine.
In yet another example of cronyism, Boris Johnson’s former éminence grise Dominic Cummings has been discovered to have been devoting his energies to lobbying for a company called ‘People First’ to be awarded government contracts without any sort of competitive process. One of the owners of this business had worked with Cummings for two decades, the other helped to write the 2019 Tory Manifesto.
The campaign group ‘Good Law Project’ is taking the case to court alleging that the lack of a tendering process was “unlawful”, even under COVID emergency laws, and that “apparent bias” led to Public First being given the work.
Cummings has, of course, denied any improper conduct, saying the fact that he knew Public First’s owners was “a bonus, not a problem”. In all, they were awarded about one million pounds worth of contracts for no useful work. Even senior civil servants objected to the contract. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The matter of choosing which ‘communications agency’ to test who is paying attention to government health messages is a comparatively unimportant matter compared with the equally dodgy multi-billion-pound contracts for the failed test and trace system, and the contracts for PPE (personal protective equipment) going to donors to the Tory party who never actually had any PPE.
Shocking
Another matter which has highlighted the fact that other people are not playing by the rules is the shocking revelation that Her Majesty the Queen and her heir play a more active role in shaping out laws than is admitted in public. We look forward to the exposure in the Guardian telling us that the Pope is Catholic.
The Guardian, a pretentious daily newspaper which would like to see Britain ruled by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, has got terribly upset at making the surprising discovery that our unelected Queen has a say in making British laws.
No less than 1,062 laws that in some way affect the Monarchy have been vetted by the Queen since 1952 under “consent rules”, before being approved by MPs. These laws relate to matters in which the monarch has a personal interest. These are not limited to such matters as the welfare of racehorses or the importation of corgis, but to landownership and inheritance tax, which of course matter a great deal to a family with more money than sense. One matter she was interested in was in a 2006 Act to prevent the mistreatment of animals, but this excluded inspectors from entering her private estates. Other examples include the 2013 Act to build the High Speed 2 rail line between London and Birmingham, which affected the “interests of the crown” because it involved acquiring 21 plots of land owned by the crown estate during the construction of the line.
Meanwhile, goings at Westminster have not dented the Prime Minister’s popularity, which has seen recent poll putting Johnson well in the lead over the insipid Starmer by a hefty margin of 43 to 32 per cent. So feeble has Starmer been that the role of the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition seems to have been taken on by the Times, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph. Starmer’s efforts to wrap himself up in the Union Jack seem not to have reaped the rewards he hoped for.
Even one of Starmer’s early supporter’s, Tom Kibasi of the Blairite think tank IPPR, said of Starmer: “His first year has seen an unnecessary war on the left and the lack of any authentic vision for the country,” adding that: “Were he to depart as leader tomorrow, he would not leave a trace of a meaningful political project in his wake.”
The same phenomenon can be seen north of the border where despite presiding over a litany of failures in the economy, health and education, to say nothing of corruption and favouritism that makes the court of Boris Johnson look like a Sunday School, the SNP seem be on track to refute the adage attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,” such is their lead in the polls.