The Tories Will Never Shed Enough Tears To Wash The Blood Off Their Hands

Made To Walk Behind His Mother’s Coffin.
Fair play to Prince Harry for coming clean about how he felt being made to walk behind his mother’s coffin days after her tragic death.
I was reporting from the Mall that day, and saw close-up a 12-year-old boy who was clearly traumatised yet felt a duty to look stoic.
It bordered on child abuse.
Harry also told Newsweek he doesn’t know a single Royal who wants to become a monarch.
Which is fabulously frank but won’t go down well with the Firm, as it allows those of us who don’t see ourselves as “subjects” to ask: When can we have our land back, and when can we become a Republic?
Gawd bless you, Harry.
( Brian Reade, 24.06.2017 )

Boris Johnson Is Permanently Appearing In A Two Ronnies Sketch.
A year ago he stood before a bus promoting a blatant lie that Brexit would free up £350million a week for the NHS.
After the Grenfell Tower blaze, footage surfaced of him as London Mayor telling a politician who challenged the wisdom of his fire service cuts to “get stuffed”.
And this week he did a radio interview with Eddie Mair in which he didn’t have the faintest grasp of what his government had announced in the Queen’s Speech.

Yet Boris Johnson wasn’t mercilessly trolled like Diane Abbott for a similar car crash interview, and he didn’t lead the BBC News the way Jeremy Corbyn did when he struggled to get his numbers right on a manifesto pledge.
Despite being Foreign Secretary.
Media bias against the Left? Probably. Media fawning over a dangerous, amoral egomaniac who hams up a loveable buffoon persona? Definitely.

Mair pointed out to him during that car crash that he wasn’t appearing in a Two Ronnies sketch.
But in a way, Johnson permanently is.
Because he couldn’t give a flying fork handle about the consequences of his actions so long as he seizes the Tory crown.
Which sadly for us all he no doubt will one day.
( Brian Reade, 24.06.2017 )

The Tories Will Never Shed Enough Tears To Wash The Blood Off Their Hands.

Before that towering inferno stopped us all in our tracks we were talking about vellum.
Yes, vellum.
The goatskin parchment on which the Queen’s Speech has to be written, which takes days for ink to dry on it, and was supposedly stopping the State Opening Of Parliament.
Like men in tights with black rods, us British have to do things just right when it comes to making our law. It’s tradition. It’s what sets us apart from the riff-raff.

As for the laws themselves, well, they’re secondary, really.
Take last year’s Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Bill, proposed by Labour, which may have stopped that Grenfell Tower inferno had the government voted for it.
But Tory MPs voted it down, 72 of whom were landlords who would have been out of pocket through all the extra nanny state interference.
One of them, Philip Davies, argued it would put “a huge burden on landlords” who are “an easy target for the Left in this country”. They certainly are now, Phil.

But not for the Right, who believe landlords (in many cases, them) should be free to make as much rent as they want without being bogged down by all that expensive red tape.
Not that the Right is totally against state intervention in housing.
Ask Jacob Rees-Mogg’s in-laws, whose ancestral pile, the 365-room Wentworth Woodhouse, was given a £7.6million restoration grant last year.
The same Rees-Mogg who repeatedly voted for the Bedroom Tax, which punished people with one extra room.

Oh yes, the Establishment can always find that Magic Money Tree when it suits them.
Which is why we’re spending £369million refurbishing 775-room Buckingham Palace to make it fit for one family, but can’t find the £200,000 to put sprinklers in flats a stone’s throw away, where 600 people lived, literally on top of each other.
The Tory media loves to bang on about how “elf ‘n’ safety” has gone mad and red tape is a needless burden on business.

Some have even maliciously tried to blame the Grenfell blaze on EU regulations, despite the killer cladding being banned in Germany because it’s deemed flammable.
But not here, where since Thatcher’s time we’ve been cutting corners to aid private profiteers.
Many on the Right hail Brexit as a golden opportunity to throw all of the EU’s overbearing rules and regulations on a bonfire.

Oh, the irony of that phrase, when we look at the heartbreaking inferno in London.
During the election campaign, Theresa May told us she wanted to lead a government that would rule for ALL the country.
Long-time Tory-watchers laughed out loud, knowing they never have and never will.
Grenfell Tower is a big, ugly, smoking symbol of the Tory’s callous lies.

A symbol made even uglier by news that May’s chief of staff Gavin Barwell sat on a report as housing minister which warned that such tower blocks were vulnerable to deadly fires.
He didn’t care, just as the local Tory council and his Government didn’t care.
Because all they cared about was cutting council budgets, fire brigade budgets, social housing budgets, safe in the knowledge that if the worst happened, it wouldn’t be their family left devastated, but the powerless ones at the bottom who don’t count.

Still, next week the vellum will be ready and ancient pomp and circumstance will take over Westminster as Her Majesty reads out May’s self-serving agenda, leaving many of those landlord Tory MPs teary-eyed with patriotism.
But they’ll never shed enough tears to wash the blood off their hands.
( Brian Reade, 17.06.2017 )

Food For Thought Next Time You Vote.
Certain joyous things have gone unsung about last week’s election.
Like one-time MP and wannabe Hello! celebrity Simon Danczuk, who said Jeremy Corbyn had lost touch with the ordinary people of Rochdale, so stood against him as an independent there to prove his point.
And lost his deposit.

Or the difference in calibre of the real celebrities who nailed their colours to the mast.
Jeremy Corbyn attracted some of the cleverest, funniest, most talented ones, including Stephen Hawking, Danny Devito, Maxine Peake, Rag ‘n’ Bone Man, Charlotte Church, Ricky Gervais, Steve Coogan, Jessica Hynes and Eddie Izzard.

While Theresa May drew on the backing of Jim Davidson, Peter Stringfellow, John McCririck and, erm, Katie Hopkins.
A guest list for a Celebrity Come Dine With Me episode that would have you serving arsenic fritters, followed by polonium pie, then cyanide soufflé.
Food for thought next time you vote.
( Brian Reade, 17.06.2017 )

Prices Of Rail, Water And Energy Keep Outstripping Pay After Tory Privatisation.

Virgin Trains has a TV advert out telling customers that when it comes to travel there’s no better choice than them.
To the soundtrack of Spandau Ballet’s True, a woman called Valerie arrives relaxed, stress-free, smiling and punctual at a job interview, having taken one of their lovely trains.
Meanwhile, an alternative Valerie is also shown arriving late, dishevelled and suicidal having gone by car.

Well, here’s my latest Valerie experience.
On Sunday I needed to book a standard-class open return from Liverpool to London to get to a job there the following morning.
If you haven’t done this kind of thing for a while I’d advise you sit down when you do in case you have a stroke.
Virgin wanted £318 (first class was £484) for taking me on a two-hour journey to London and back home again.

For that money I could have booked a weekend for two in Rome, and had enough left over to bribe a Swiss Guard to give me an audience with the Pope.
There are no planes from Liverpool to London, and motorways are slower than a cart and horse, so I had to use Virgin.
But I wasn’t going to give old Beardie £318, so bought a £159, second-class single for the 7am train which meant at least I’d get to the job in good shape and on time.
Well, sort of.

I was asked to pay extra for wi-fi (despite our local buses giving it free), struggled to get a laptop power-point even though the train was half-full, and it arrived in London 21 minutes late.
Meaning, unlike Valerie, I was late, stressed and snarling.
Virgin likes to tell you about all their cheap fares, but they need to be booked weeks in advance.
If you don’t, unless you want to travel in the off-peak hours, they delight in making tax-exile tycoon Branson even richer.

Take a train between major cities abroad and you’ll be baffled at how cheap it is in comparison.
You’ll also ask yourself why our government gives massive state handouts to private firms then lets them exploit commuters as they run a virtual transport monopoly.
For those who looked at Labour’s manifesto and said Britain can’t afford to go back to nationalisation, I’d say we can’t afford not to.

Between 2010 and 2015 the East Coast line was run by the taxpayer and returned £1billion in premiums, as well as several millions in profits, to the Treasury.
When the Tories re-privatised it again in 2015, new owners, Virgin, immediately hiked prices.
A senior Labour figure told me after the election campaign that nationalisation had been a big policy winner on the door-steps.

Because as prices of rail, water and energy keep outstripping pay, a majority of voters realise one of the biggest follies we ever made was flogging off our vital industries to private companies.
Many of whose shareholders are foreign governments profiting from UK consumers to subsidise their own.
Had the Tories won a landslide two weeks ago it would now be full-steam ahead for even more privatisation.

Chunks of the NHS are already being flogged off to private firms, one of whom is, surprise surprise, Virgin Care.
Who we know, from our experience of Virgin Trains, are only interested in running parts of the NHS because their Caribbean exile boss wants to make Britain a better place.
And definitely not to make loads more money screwing the already screwed tax-payer further into the ground.
( Brian Reade, 24.06.2017 )

Will This Steaming Idiot Dare Show His Face.
Beverley town council in Yorkshire is supporting this weekend’s Great Get Together in memory of murdered MP Jo Cox, inviting all the locals to join in.
I wonder if the town’s Tory councillor Dominic Peacock, who wrote on Facebook shortly after Jo’s murder that he’d “just donated the steam off my piss” to the appeal in her name, will heed the call and take part?
If so, can I suggest the best way for him to get involved is to be placed in stocks in a pub toilet and charge locals a fiver to stand over him and let off a bit of steam.
( Brian Reade, 17.06.2017 )

Boris Helps Hitler Achieve His Ambition.
The number of Britons who’ve applied to become German citizens has jumped by 361% since last year’s EU referendum, with experts saying it will soar even higher as Brexit approaches.
So take a bow Boris Johnson and your Leave campaign chums.
Your bus that promised to give £350million a week back to the NHS did more to ensure Hitler’s ambition to make British people German citizens than his entire Luftwaffe fleet.
( Brian Reade, 17.06.2017 )