The Conservative Party

Buried in the small print of last week’s Budget is what looks like an attack on yet another core constitutional principle: that public money should not be misappropriated to private ends, here the ends of the Conservative Party.

What Rishi Sunak said was that he was going to spend the vast sum of £4.8bn on “redrawing the economic map” through a “Levelling Up Fund.” But the evidence suggests much of that money is instead going to redrawing the political map: prosperous areas with Conservative MPs are being prioritised over struggling areas with Labour MPs.

Analysis carried out by the Financial Times revealed that Conservative areas were consistently pushed up the queue for money and Labour voting areas pushed down the list. Diane Coyle, the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at Cambridge University, described the bias in favour of Tory seats as “pretty blatant really.”

Although the Treasury promised it would show its workings they have yet to be published. Professor Coyle was, once again, pretty scathing: “I am sure there are civil servants trying to retrofit the methodology to justify the rankings as we speak.”

This is pork-barrel politics on a grand scale. £4.8bn is more than enough to give our 670,000 nurses a pay rise of 25% rather than the meagre below inflation 1% offered to them.

We are deeply unhappy at this and have instructed Bindmans LLP, backed by a team of public law Counsel and a leading academic, to write to the Treasury, demanding it makes good on its promise to show its workings. If those workings reveal, as independent analysis suggests, a misuse of public money to benefit the Conservative Party we will issue proceedings without delay.

Thank you,

Jolyon Maugham
Director of Good Law Project
 
Vic said:
The politics of envy!
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The politics of envy always comes from the Tories, they just try and portray it as the lefts envy.

Its the Tories who are envious that people with nothing get a free school dinner for their kids, that's why they try so hard to get away with doing it and only do it when shamed by the likes of Marcus Rashford. They understand that you see because Marcus earns "tory" sort of money.

It is the same with Class War, always portrayed as being something the left use, when the Tories are masters at Class War, they use it everyday to try and keep the working class divided. They fear a united working class so they go to war with the Working Class.
 
Rascal said:
The politics of envy always comes from the Tories, they just try and portray it as the lefts envy.

Its the Tories who are envious that people with nothing get a free school dinner for their kids, that's why they try so hard to get away with doing it and only do it when shamed by the likes of Marcus Rashford. They understand that you see because Marcus earns "tory" sort of money.

It is the same with Class War, always portrayed as being something the left use, when the Tories are masters at Class War, they use it everyday to try and keep the working class divided. They fear a united working class so they go to war with the Working Class.
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You see it from posters on here. It's as if they have completely swallowed the Tory playbook.

Objective thinkers need not apply.
 
bonespost said:
Oh and how we laughed, Boris Johnson said £12 billion a year for EU membership was unaffordable. However, spending £37 billion on a test and trace system that doesn’t work is fine.
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Work it out. £37bn over 10 months, £3.7bn a month; bbbbbuuutt it has reached 1.5m people; again over 10 months that is 5000 people a day or £26.7m per person.
 
Grant Shapps says it’s too early to book a holiday for the summer - says the clown who went to Spain in the middle of the first pandemic and who had to come home and self isolate when his policies were proven to be wholly inadequate last summer. I guess unlike our esteemed PM Shapps does seem at least seem to have learned something.
 
Fred_Quimby said:
Work it out. £37bn over 10 months, £3.7bn a month; bbbbbuuutt it has reached 1.5m people; again over 10 months that is 5000 people a day or £26.7m per person.
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A stray "m" in there (at the end)?

The question is why didn't they use established local public health resources? (First port of call would have been STD tracers, used to making awkward calls.)
 
Fred_Quimby said:
Work it out. £37bn over 10 months, £3.7bn a month; bbbbbuuutt it has reached 1.5m people; again over 10 months that is 5000 people a day or £26.7m per person.
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I think it's 22 Bn so far, and a further 15 Bn budgeted.

Shapps was asked about it and tried blustering that tracing had reached 9 million people and was the reason that the new variants were found, and that showed it had been effective. At only £2,500 a trace (based on 22 Bn)!
As an attempt to disguise the gross cost, it was as shambolic as expected from Shapps, as it completely ignored that the local tracing would still have found the new variants in all probability.
 
MillionMilesAway said:
I think it's 22 Bn so far, and a further 15 Bn budgeted.

Shapps was asked about it and tried blustering that tracing had reached 9 million people and was the reason that the new variants were found, and that showed it had been effective. At only £2,500 a trace (based on 22 Bn)!
As an attempt to disguise the gross cost, it was as shambolic as expected from Shapps, as it completely ignored that the local tracing would still have found the new variants in all probability.
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As I said on the Covid thread, Harding has claimed that 80% of the £22bn was spent on 83m tests leaving £4.4bn on tracing. So it’s about £500 per trace and £200 per test. As 90% of traces are probably a 10 minute phone call and mass testing shouldn’t be more than a couple of quid a pop there must have been some serious misappropriation of funds along with some stunning incompetence. Shocking that the government are boasting about it being a success.
 
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