Corbyn’s improvement continues. He thumped away at a single issue today – social care – in a determined attempt to corner Teresa May and stick the word ‘crisis’ on her jacket, like a brooch. A crisis for the elderly, he said. A crisis for families. A crisis for the NHS. ‘A crisis made in Downing Street.’ His delivery still havers and wavers a lot but the drum-machine technique, banging out identical noises in a hypnotic rhythm, was effective.
She met his assault with verbal trinkets composed by back-room smart Alecs in Westminster: the future Osbornes and Camerons. Rejecting the word ‘crisis’ she called it ‘short-term pressure’. She also mentioned ‘sustainability’, ‘integration’ and ‘reassurance’. For a final flourish she linked ‘short-term pressure’ with its verbal cousins, ‘medium-term need’ and ‘long-term solutions’. Formulaic sophistries like this don’t come cheap. Branding gurus and other costly nuisances are making a fortune from the Government by coining flippant rhetorical devices that obscure reality and protect ministers from scrutiny. But Labour and its allies are richly subsidised as well. Corbyn listed three separate gangs of lobbyists – Age UK, the King’s Fund and the NHS Confederation – which all believe the social care system is in meltdown. Fair enough. But do we need three sprawling bureaucracies stuffed with overeducated busy-bodies to conduct identical research and to reach the same verdict? The vast budgets of these sly locusts would be better spent hiring teams of kindly Portuguese nurses to warm Granny a mug of Complan.
The PM was keen to hold Corbyn responsible for the Aslef train strike. She did her washerwoman voice and told him to pick up the phone and get his unions mates to start driving their flipping choo-choos. He met this request in the seated position, with an amused smirk on his face, his head tilted at a ‘yes-dear’ angle. What the Prime Minister and the public have failed to grasp is why God made rail passengers in the first place. Only Mr Corbyn and the Aslef racketeers understand this. Never imagine that passengers exist to be taken from A to B. They exist to take the pay-grade of drivers from A to A-plus.
Several MPs brought up Syria. Lucy Powell yearns for the days of Pax Britannica. She called the Aleppo crisis ‘heart-breaking’, and advanced an idiosyncratic solution, ‘a UK-led strategy to protect civilians’. Perhaps she should be told that Britain has for many decades been the joint-fourth weakest member of the Security Council. And that the words ‘UK-led strategy’ have as much political leverage as ‘Bambi on roller-skates’ or ‘wallpaper gravy’.
Philip Davies wants Britain’s aid-coffers spent on care for the disabled. ‘Charity begins at home,’ he said. A wise theory but perhaps unnecessary. Huge amounts of UK aid are spent here anyway, on marketing geniuses, on skyscraper offices, on gender-fluidity awareness classes and on outback suppliers who kit out our intrepid charity staff in the right clobber for their glamorous careers in the bush spooning millet into the mouths of polyamorous orphans. An even larger slice of the budget comes flooding back as the wives and mistresses of El Presidente descend on Knightsbridge to acquire the jade ear-rings and croc-skin clutch-purses that are rather harder to find at home. That’s all aid is. Unearned income lavished by one tribe of parasites on another.
Comments