Tonight you can enjoy the excitement of Jeremy Hunt, Josephine Cumbo on the Pensions Dashboard, Police diversity drivel, Photo-propaganda, and the Blairation of David Cameron.
I have today invented a new noun, the falsehunt. It is like a falsehood, except that for an utterance to become a falsehunt, the mendacity-counter has to reach further heights of hideous hypocrisy and counterfeit caring.
Above is a classic example. It is not enough for Jezzer Rhymeeng-Slange to say he’s excited about opening a school: ooooooh dear me no. He has to be very excited about opening a special needs school.
For only a tumescence of enthusiasm alongside copious bleeding of tomato ketchup all over the Savile Row suit will do for the ultimate Tory Dorian. Especially as – in earlier news during the release of which Mr Punt was unavailable for comment – he was revealed as the far-too-modest author of swingeing cuts to the NHS he treasures.
And that’s the curio in this little corner of complete copulating distraction. For Jeremy is the besieged Secretary of State for Health facing Britain’s first ever full-on hospital doctor’s strike….not the Edukashun Sekwetawy.
This sort of thing is trending in the Conservative Party: Philip Hammond is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he talks about little beyond his beloved
European Union – and the need to take the Brexit process a decade at a time.
Theresa Mayormaynot is the Prime Minister, but she’s jolly keen on fee-based Grammar schools. Liam Fox is supposed to be helping David Davies on the Brexit project, but spends far more time briefing against the Foreign Secretary. And Michael Felon is supposed to be defending the Nation, but also spends most of his time defending Grammar Schools.
Next week: Work & Pensions secretary Damian Green weighs in on the Nursery Schools debate, Scottish secretary David Mundell calls the Welsh “a shower of sheep-shaggers”, and Transport secretary Chris Grayling dubs Motorway service stations “breeding grounds of Jihadist junk food”.
One of the FT’s more usefully gobby journalists Josephine Cumbo floated this tweet onto troubled waters over the weekend:
The choice of words was a little unfortunate, even if she was referring to private (rather than State) pensions. Women knocked sideways by unacceptable delays to their State pensions – the so-called Waspis – would love to seek advice about the location of their pensions….but the fact that they’re in the deeply secret pockets of the Treasury does render this assertion from, um, the Treasury somewhere far beyond ironic.
If the Waspi ladies had been allowed to keep 40-45 years of NI contributions and stick them in a proper pension fund (rather than the current account of HM Treasury) they would not today be in clover. But they would have far more money at their disposal than the State payout at the minute, given that they don’t have anything from that State….because 75% of the way through the term, Whiteminster welched on its oft-repeated promise to give them a pension at age Sixty.
I do not know, by the way, what a pensions dashboard is. My best guess is that it’s a novel idea whereby Government actuaries look through the windscreen rather than the rear-view mirror, but I couldn’t be sure.
When I settled in Devon some years back, the new head of Devon & Cornwall police wrote to tell me he was a leader in cultural diversity. The following week, my neighbour’s son was beaten up by a gang of yobs. The police didn’t turn up.
Two months later, a serial crook with a record of petty crime tried to steal some celebrity phone numbers off my computer. The police didn’t turn up.
Six months after that, the same crook put his retail neighbour in hospital. The bloke was half his size. The police called the assault “a case of knock for knock”.
In my entire 13 years in Devon, I saw one black person and three Chinese who ran the local chippy. As you can see, this kind of careerism is infectious. This is why people vote Brexit, UKip and other things infinitely less innocent. Racism has nothing to do with it: they are just tired of people on the public payroll taking the mickey.
Based on the picture below, you are asked to believe:
- This bloke is in the SAS
- He has just fired one shot at a member of ISIS
- The ISIS member had a flamethrower and was about to use it
- By firing his gun, the Squaddie saved 12 lives.
I make myself eternally unpopular with the varietal rentamobs calling for this and that in Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, South Ossetia and a hundred other unhappy locations around the globe.
The principle I apply to this shot is exactly the same as the ones they turn up with….almost always involving dead children: without proof, they are so much lachrymose propaganda and utterly worthless as evidence.
But year after year, naïfs are taken in by – and circulate – such things. Truly incredible, and profoundly disturbing.
Anyway, on this less than historic day, I could not close without making mention of Dave, King of Camerlot. I laboriously counted the first 237 tweets on this subject. Only one was nice about Cameldung:
You did? You do? You mad or what?
So I couldn’t resist this personal goodbye to Sam’s Scam Man:
The Slog 