While Putin engages in sabre rattling on the Ukrainian border, his acolytes in former Yugoslavia are also on the move. In this short but disturbing piece, Eric Gates alerts us to what is going on. Although Bosnia (officially Bosnia and Herzogovina or BiH) has been out of the headlines in recent years, and the Dayton […]
Various reasons are given for the Liberal Democrats’ stunning by-election win in Leave-voting North Shropshire on 16 December. In Helen Morgan, they had a strong, local candidate who fought a vibrant, positive campaign and was able to inspire tactical voting by members of other progressive parties, notably Labour. The Conservative candidate, impressive on paper, was […]
With the author’s grateful acknowledgements to ‘Louise’ and ‘Don’ (not their real names) for their personal insights into the North Shropshire by-election. “It was as if they had no real concept of democracy in action.” So says Louise, talking about the North Shropshire by-election in which the LibDems (Liberal Democrats) won such a stunning victory. […]
What was that he said about Brexit? “I’m very pleased and proud to have led a great UK team to secure today’s excellent deal with the EU. Both sides worked tirelessly day after day in challenging conditions to get the biggest & broadest trade deal in the world, in record time.” Or something like that. […]
This 2019 article is from Tom Scott and Molly Scott Cato’s Cabinet of Horrors blog. It remains extremely pertinent, especially so given Truss’s move to ‘negotiate’ Brexit following Frost’s resignation. That’s the same Brexit Johnson and Frost claim to have got done… It would be easy to dismiss Liz Truss as an intellectual lightweight, and […]
WARNING: This article contains strong language. Sunak slinks back through Heathrow, hoody and posture-political mask neatly in place. Ruffled and snappy. ‘Yes I’m looking at all this over the weekend’ – he told one reporter. Like a vexed dad, having to move his car cos it’s parked a bit on next door’s drive. Though I […]
The Royal Shambolica Express has finally hit the buffers, thanks to those gorgeous voters up in North Shropshire, and there remains only the traditional offer of the ‘last rights’ to the King of Bluster who is, even now, eyeing all that gold wallpaper and packing his bags. £890 a roll for a couple of months’ […]
Former civil servant Richard Haviland sets out a chilling and all-too-possible vision of a bleak future for the UK with a hollowed-out faux democracy. Ed With all the red lights flashing at the state of the UK’s democracy, I’ve seen it said we shouldn’t assume the next general election will even happen. The issue, though, […]
Ahead of International Migrants Day (18 December), the lives of vast numbers of EU nationals in the UK are still in turmoil thanks to the actions, and inaction, of the Johnson/Vote Leave government. Richard Haviland explains their predicament. The Home Office likes to trumpet the success of its EU settlement scheme and say that over […]
How many of us have experienced, or can begin to really comprehend, what it is to be without a home? How many of us have known the unsettling insecurity of living in rented accommodation at the whim of a landlord who might at any moment, once the fixed term contract is up, issue a Section […]
The prime minister may soon have cause to reflect on the lessons of the greatest gangster movie ever made. Tom Scott explains the connection. Boris Johnson’s sister, Rachel Johnson, once described her brother as “quite Sicilian” in his attitude towards loyalty. She was no doubt thinking of the Sicilian Mafia, and not just because one […]
The next unelected Tory prime minister will be chosen by members, and will be whoever most closely matches their paranoia on that particular day. It might be immigrants. Might be taxes. Maybe Europe. The fate of our statues. Uppity footballers. Or gay Santas in Scandinavian Christmas ads. Maybe they’ll vote to lower benefits for poor […]
A media tarts special double bill! “It’s media, darling!” would be a good phrase to describe Mangnall’s latest servings of pig swill to constituents. And what a marvellous couple of weeks it has been: Tory lies have flowed like sewage down the Dart, and Mangnall has worked tirelessly, attempting to transform his profile from an […]
Dear West Country Voices, When news about ‘the party’ first came to light, Johnson and his crew tried to spin it as a ‘Westminster bubble’ story. To everyone else, it looked as if they were just thumbing their noses at the suffering of ordinary people who had followed the rules and suffered greatly as a […]
We are putting this out again in the light of recent developments which appear to show Johnson, once again, lying. This story matters on so many levels. It should be the final curtain for Johnson, frankly. Ed Forget the wallpaper. Forget John Lewis. Forget the curtains and the chintzy sofas. This isn’t a story about […]
Most people seem to think that Dido Harding’s test and trace programme (NHST&T but nothing to do with the NHS) is a disaster. I won’t go into the reasons why; you can read some of it in the House of Commons committee report. Instead, let’s just look at the costs. The government allocated a budget […]
The former French ambassador to the UK, Sylvie Bermann, went into print a couple of days ago to reflect on what remains of her country’s relationship with the Brits. When she left office in 2017, there was a measure of mutual trust and conversations were conducted in good faith. Since then, Boris Johnson has barged into […]
Dear West Country Voices, I would imagine you are inundated with responses to that editorial. If not, you should have been! Whilst I have never been a member of the Conservative Party I have voted Conservative in parliamentary elections since getting the vote at 21 in 1968. (With one exception. I refused to vote for the […]
Brexit has had a devastating impact on the many British citizens who have second homes on the continent. Mike Zollo explains the work of campaign and support organisation Bremain in Spain. For my wife and me, as for many thousands of British nationals who spend time in Spain and/or have their own properties there, the […]
This government has a history of bad timing. During Anti-Bullying Week in 2020, news broke that prime minister Boris Johnson had decided to ignore that his home secretary Priti Patel had been found to bully her staff, and not to sack her. Then during Parliament Week in November 2021 he tried to undermine the very […]
Dear West Country Voices, Our PM isn’t very good with gates, actually he isn’t very good at anything – except, of course, at lying; and actually he seems to have lost his talent for that recently. You will remember when he was confused by Bill Gates on how much the UK would contribute towards Bill’s […]
This revelatory thread is from Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project: “Remember the story of Matt Hancock and Alex Bourne, the publican turned medical equipmemt supplier, a photo of whose pub Mr Hancock kept on his office wall? Well yesterday, Mr Hancock went on the attack. He said Alex Bourne “never got a contract […]
Dear West Country Voices, I was absolutely fuming when I saw in the news that MP and mother Stella Creasy was told that she could not have her baby with her when she was in the House of Commons. I was completely shocked because surely this is not anything new? MPs have been taking their […]
This is a letter we have yet to receive and even the idea of it may make the blood of some of our readers boil. But does it, or a version of it, languish in draft emails on computers right across our region, addressed but unsent? It would be good to think so.Go on. Open […]
“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad“. Sophocles did not, of course, have Boris Johnson in mind, but the dramatist’s line from Antigone has survived the passage of time, and two recent speeches – coupled with Johnson’s usual insouciance about the gathering storms that beset us all – suggest that Greek […]
Dear West Country Voices, Even the Daily Mail has been reporting on the “outside” earnings of Geoffrey Cox, MP for Torridge and West Devon. He earned £400,000 a year advising the British Virgin Islands tax haven over corruption charges and has agreed to take on two more weeks of work for that government despite the […]
On 16 November nine people were jailed for taking part in Insulate Britain’s road- blocking activism, including one person from our neck of the woods, the wonderful west country. The government managed to keep them out of jail before COP26 convened. It wouldn’t have looked good for climate activists to be jailed just before our […]
Any parallels drawn between Lee Majors’ six-million-dollar man of the 1970s and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s six-million-quid man of the 2020s can only be for the purpose of highlighting polar opposites. While the six-million-dollar man was intent on doing good, six-million-quid man — let’s call him “Squid” for short — seems wholly focused on filling his boots […]
In Part 1, I looked at the state of our electoral system, the iniquities of first-past-the-post and the measures this government is intent on taking to cement its stranglehold on power. Now I am going to look at the key institutions that exist to keep our politicians honest, to scrutinise and to police, as well […]
After the MP expenses scandal in 2009, anybody could be forgiven for expecting the bad old days of MPs making specious claims on the public purse to be over. Back then, voters were furious that MPs who had inflicted austerity on them in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis were claiming the costs of […]