From the Guardian…
You know when you read something in the news and think, that can’t possibly be true. That’s happened twice already today.
Before we get to the latest Batshit Bulletins, let’s consider what you don’t read in the news. Exactly why Nadhim Zahawi has agreed to settle a tax bill in the region of £3.7 million, for starters.
This story has been reported to an extent. But the coverage has been scant, with the BBC just about acknowledging the story online after coverage by the Guardian and others.
If you look up Zahawi’s biography on the government’s website, he is basically the Minister for Was Previously, as those words stand before all the posts he has held, however briefly. One “was previously” post was as chancellor from “5 July 2022 and 6 September 2022” – basically a summer holiday job.
He also “was previously” allegedly (better bung that in there) not in a hurry to settle his tax bills. Now he has agreed to stump up that astonishing sum.
How did that £3.7 million slip his mind? We deserve to know more about how a Minister with a reputed £100 million personal fortune conducts himself, but there seems to be a reluctance to investigate.
Here’s something else you don’t see enough of – an honest assessment of the state of the NHS and how its problems have been caused by the Conservative party, not least thanks to George Osborne’s austerity drive.
Cuts, scrimping of NHS workers’ pay and reckless caretaking of our health system are in large part a legacy of Osborne’s cruel tenure as chancellor. Such squeezes take a long time to have an effect. And now everything is falling apart, however much the government pretends otherwise.
As nurses go on strike for the first time in their history, health secretary Steve Barclay, a winning combination of aggressive and useless, writes in today’s online-only Independent (above) that nurses calling for more pay are taking away money from patients.
No, they are not – they are asking for a decent pay rise, while also pointing out that without it, the NHS will disintegrate even more quickly as more staff leave.
Where is the deep and persistent reporting on the NHS at a time when the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Dr Adrian Boyle, argues that as many as 500 people a week could be dying due to delays in emergency health care?
If such a situation occurred under a Labour government, the papers would be full of it, the pressure relentless. Under a Tory government, such coverage remains muffled – and even Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t seem that keen on joining in the row.
Anyway, time for those Batshit News Headlines…
The government bill aimed at protecting children from online harm, an important piece of legislation, has reportedly been changed so that “video footage that shows people crossing the Channel in small boats in a ‘positive light’ will be added to a list of illegal content”.
A floundering piece of satire, you might assume. But no – that toxic amendment has been included at the urging of backbench Tory MP Natalie Elphicke.
We can all play that game. I’d like protecting from the online harm caused by seeing putrid flapdoodle splashed about by Nigel Farage, GB News, Boris Johnson, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Jeremy Clarkson, Piers Morgan – oh, any number of them.
Batshit news part two: A member of the House of Lords, an actual Lord, has proposed that students could have their loans settled earlier if they took a test to prove they had resisted “the high levels of woke indoctrination they face at university”.
Writing on the Conservative Home website (I went there so you don’t have to), Lord Wei argues that students could sit a national test to prove their non-wokeness.
Great – a test to prove something that doesn’t really exist but is a useful distraction for a weary government presiding over chaos, while at the same time tearing up rights to strike and or protest, almost as if they were trashing the house on the way out.
As a long-time resident of Woke Manor on Woke Road in Woke Town, this strikes me as barmy and malicious (two intolerances for the price of one).