Ms Widdecombe came to west Cornwall this week
Ms Widdecombe came to west Cornwall this week, presumably to update us on how her scientific project to “cure” homosexuality is going. I may have missed it. Though I’m sure it’ll be reported elsewhere in this newspaper.
Meanwhile the rest of us are considering whether her homophobia could be cured by science…
Three years ago her Brexit Party leader darkly warned that if Remain won the Brexit referendum by something slim, like 52/48, Brexiteers like him would cry foul and declare the result far too marginal to accept – or “unfinished business”, as he put it at the time. So he’s been proven correct. But not for the reasons he expected. And he’s also right about “unfinished business”.
In fact, three years on from the referendum it’s worth taking stock how the famously decisive ‘Project Leave’ campaigners are getting on? ‘Fabulously well’ according to the squirearchy of old Etonians and their followers who have largely led the country to this pretty pass.
However, never fear. Conservative Party members are about to appoint your next Prime Minister. Both candidates are promising to Brexit by the end of October (that’s October 2019 by the way!) and to send Johnny Foreigner packing when he asks the UK to settle the bill. They’ll also give the good old money tree a jolly good shake to cut taxes and increase spending on all the nice stuff you want.
These 160,000 Conservative members represent just 0.35% of the UK electorate and will make decisions on all our behalves. A recent poll of those Conservative Party members showed they’d rather have a hard Brexit even if it resulted in the trashing of our economy, the break-up of the United Kingdom (with Scotland and Northern Ireland going their own way) and the destruction of their own Party! Happy leaving such decisions in their hands?
Meanwhile local councils across the country are warning they’ll soon run out of money. Many already have. Ministers respond with the usual blizzard of impressive-sounding re-announcements of squillions of pounds of largess. Government Ministers of all persuasions are coerced to live in a weird parallel universe where they’re indoctrinated to perpetually reel off large numbers very quickly while carefully ensuring they’re not tied to specific time spans and to always make old money sound brand new.
The truth remains that central Government budgets have been slashed. Local Conservative MPs have consistently voted to support cuts to Government funding for Cornwall Council. An 88% cut since 2015. Oddly they don’t mention that in their columns each week…