[Tubby Isaacs]

Lucky we've got a cavalier funster who appreciates the arts in charge. Oh hang on.

Does this sort of stuff really please the "Red wall switchers"? Doubtless lots of them didn't like Corbyn and liked Brexit, but do they really tell their kids/grandkids "Don't do that art shit, get a trade, my boy/girl"?

[kreuzberger]

A painful lump had been discovered on the forum. It has been excised.

[Samanfur]

Good work, mod team.

[Andy McDandy]

They watch ITV, they think all actors and musicians are luvvies, and artists are all pooftahs (apart from Michael Caine, he's alright), and they don't read books. They don't go to the theatre (save the panto at Christmas and Grease for the wife's birthday), and concerts are too expensive. Festivals are for drugged up hippies and students. They think the arts are a bit of a dodge at best, a waste of time otherwise. They don't care about school subjects as long as the kids are kept in line. Besides, Branson and the like didn't do well at school so put that in your pipe and smoke it, four eyes.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Haven't those people always voted for them?

Johnson isn't exactly the best person to push this. He's not Norman Tebbit.

[kreuzberger]

The '"Till Death Us Do Part" was a documentary' brigade? Yup, pretty much.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

A painful lump had been discovered on the forum. It has been excised.

Thanks, Doc.

[Samanfur]

Boris Johnson wrongly cleared over Covid contracts, say MPs

A cross-party group of MPs has pushed for formal action against Boris Johnson for allegedly misleading the Commons over the transparency of Covid contracts, saying the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, incorrectly cleared the prime minister of wrongdoing.

In a letter to Case the three MPs, who are working with the Good Law Project, said it was “abundantly clear” Johnson had breached the ministerial code by telling parliament on 22 February that details of multibillion-pound Covid-19 government contracts were “on the record for everybody to see”.

Three days earlier a high court judge had ruled that the Department of Health and Social Care acted unlawfully by failing to publish the government contracts within the necessary 30-day period, after a challenge led by the Good Law Project.

In March the Labour MP Debbie Abrahams, Layla Moran of the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens’ Caroline Lucas first wrote to Case, the most senior UK civil servant, to ask him why Johnson had said contracts had been published when at that time they had not.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Not sure this one is worth pushing that hard, really. You can't prove he did this knowingly. Most that would happen is that he has to say "I thought that was the case, but I was wrong, sorry". The underlying thing is that some contracts were published late in a pandemic. Hancock showed they're happy to wear that as a badge of honour. Starmer rightly swerved that one.

Going to be much bigger examples of lying, with more obvious links to the welfare of the general public. Those are the ones to go for and make stick.

[Tubby Isaacs]

[Boiler]

Ah, yebbut, Full Fact is run by centrists, don'cha know?

[kreuzberger]

Yebbut squared., Oborne certainly isn't.

[Boiler]

That little gem came courtesy of an anarcho-syndicalist elsewhere....

[Tubby Isaacs]

This will pile up. The worry is that Johnson leaves just as it does.

[Bones McCoy]

This will pile up. The worry is that Johnson leaves just as it does.

He isn't doing this alone.
It's up for people like us to ensure that all the Richard Hammonds go down with the Jeremy Clarkson.

[Tubby Isaacs]

No surprise here. As somebody says BTL, definitions and metrics are a way of holding people to account. Why would you allow that, when you can run on hard hat photo ops?

[Tubby Isaacs]

This plan was ready to go. Another lie.

Labour actually have a care policy, or at least tax rises to afford it. I've no idea why they don't tell anyone about it.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Oh look.

[Andy McDandy]

I suspect the "levelling up" plan will amount to little more than a relaxation of planning rules on brownfield sites and a few more out of town shopping centres.

[Tubby Isaacs]

There'll be a few targeted investments in places that then come to stand for "the north". Tesside is being set up like that, "with more to come".

Though Torsten Bell rates Neil O'Brien and thinks he could do some good work. Pretty amazing that we're 18 months after an election before the job's even started, Covid or no Covid.