Section: Politics

Tobias Ellwood MP goes to school – a student writes his report

Martin Day
official portrait of Tobias Ellwood MP

November 5: Parliament Week. As the fallout from the Owen Paterson affair began to crescendo in Westminster, and Boris Johnson considered making a speedy escape north, one MP made his own trip down to his home constituency. The MP for Bournemouth East, Tobias Ellwood, visited the local grammar school on Friday afternoon to meet its […]

Follow the money! Letter to the editor

Editor-in-chief

Dear West Country Voices, Even the Daily Mail has been reporting on the “outside” earnings of Geoffrey Cox, MP for Torridge and West Devon. He earned £400,000 a year advising the British Virgin Islands tax haven over corruption charges and has agreed to take on two more weeks of work for that government despite the […]

The NHS: where does all the money go?

Sally Miller

As NHS watchers are only too aware, there’s constant wrangling over NHS finances: it’s a bottomless pit; it’s mismanaged; it’s a huge amount; it’s not enough; will never be enough….Where to start with all of this? Let’s take a look… Does the UK spend on healthcare match that of comparable countries? Well, no. Neither as […]

Jacob Rees-Mogg: the six-million-quid man

Sadie Parker
Meme of Rees-Mogg as Squid, the six million pound man

Any parallels drawn between Lee Majors’ six-million-dollar man of the 1970s and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s six-million-quid man of the 2020s can only be for the purpose of highlighting polar opposites. While the six-million-dollar man was intent on doing good, six-million-quid man — let’s call him “Squid” for short — seems wholly focused on filling his boots […]

A monumental COP-out

Tom Scott
'climate criminals': Putin, Morrison, Bolsanaro masks at COP26

“It’s hard not to see the Glasgow Climate Pact as an elaborate suicide note couched in the language of blah-blah-blah”: Tom Scott’s powerful COP26 report. I returned home from a few days at COP26 in Glasgow more bone-tired than I think I’ve ever been in my life, and watching the news coming out of the […]

REDmembrance and the poppy

Mike Zollo

Red is and always has been my favourite colour. I am by no means unusual in this: red is one of the top two favourite colours. It is also a colour which represents so much. Red is the colour of love, fire, blood, the sun, energy, life-force, violence, danger, anger, adventure and extremes. It can […]

Remembrance 2021

Anon

For most of us in this country, war is something that happens to other people. We have lived in peace since 1945 and the wars in which the United Kingdom has engaged since then have been on foreign soil (my apologies to readers in Ireland who may feel that they spent a good many years […]

The Brexit red tape explosion – letter to the editor

Editor-in-chief
email icon

Reader Phil Biles has been frustrated by his attempts to get this letter in the Bournemouth Echo, not least because another letter writer seemed to secure publication of his letters on a weekly basis, despite his assertions “having no basis in fact”. Here is the letter which failed to get exposure: In response to the […]

Tory corruption: defending the indefensible

Sadie Parker

The past week has been Parliament Week. Boris Johnson couldn’t possibly blow it up the way he blew up Anti-bullying Week last year, could he? Back then he undermined a massive government anti-bullying campaign for schools by refusing to fire Priti Patel as Home Secretary after she was found to have bullied her staff. What […]

It’s as if the government want to open the floodgates to corruption

Richard Murphy

As Politico reports this morning: As the prime minister returns to Westminster, the news is quickly moving on to a remarkable attempt by Downing Street to use its parliamentary majority at a vote this afternoon to overturn the 30-day suspension handed to scandal-hit Conservative MP Owen Paterson. No. 10 appears to be plotting to crush the independence […]

The Paterson ban: urgent open letter to all Conservative MPs

Editor-in-chief

We received a copy of this letter to MP Conor Burns this morning. It could, with suitable amendments, be sent to every Conservative MP considering hammering another nail in democracy’s coffin today: Imagine my horror at reading the following article by Christopher Hope in The Telegraph this morning: “Boris Johnson will attempt to reform the […]

That Morrison’s chicken story – letter to the editor

Editor-in-chief

There’s been quite some furore on social media regarding product-labelling in supermarkets geared, seemingly, to play well with a Brexit-supporting customer. The trend for union-flag-badging of some groceries to denote them as 100 per cent British has encompassed such items as bananas (!) and tomatoes (that were also specified as being from Spain in the […]

Boris Johnson and the fall of the Roman Empire

Sadie Parker

On 30 October, when interviewed by Channel 4’s Gary Gibbon at the Colosseum in Rome, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson made a claim that, even by his standards of magniloquent mendacity, was absolutely extraordinary. He said: “The Roman Empire, they weren’t expecting it, went into a reverse and we had a Dark Ages. When the […]

A plea to the region’s Conservative MPs: show you are not careless, callous or corrupt – don’t let Paterson off the hook. UPDATE: now with dire MP response!

Editor-in-chief

Some background ahead of an important vote in parliament on 3 November: in September 2019, The Guardian published their scoop on MP Owen Paterson’s breaches of parliamentary rules by lobbying for companies that he was paid to advise. To quote: The documents [detailing meetings and letters] raise questions over whether the North Shropshire MP has broken parliamentary […]

COPnes26: what’s on!

Editor-in-chief

COP26 is set to dominate the news over the next two weeks. Where does this leave our region and local communities? Totnes has started its own parallel environmental event to COP called ‘COPnes26’, continuing the town’s now well-established tradition of environmental and sustainability awareness. Here are some highlights: One of COPnes26’s roles is to enable community […]