Section: Politics

Moonshot: A fun-filled game of chance! HM Government has released a new version of ‘snakes and ladders’ to occupy citizens during self-isolation or new lockdown time.

Today Devon for Europe publishes Words on the Street, an e-book about its street stall campaign to stop Brexit. Here its authors, Simon Chater and Rosemary Schonfeld, write about the book’s genesis and contents. They hope to persuade you to download a copy and read it. Simon Chater writes: Though British by birth, I have […]

Editor: Once more we turn to @russincheshire for one of his twitter threads. This time, it’s a brilliant summary of the Brexit/trade/GFA situation. Please share it with those who’ve been subjected to government spin and gaslighting. If you are interested, you can read the Belfast Agreement/Good Friday Agreement yourself. Doing so will mean that you […]

Spare a thought for Boris Johnson. On 16 September, he had to face his worst nightmare across the dispatch box at Prime Minister’s questions (PMQs): a bona fide working-class woman. He was obliged to be careful and remain polite, because people in the former “Red Wall” seats might be watching to see how he treated […]

Here’s Neil Parish, MP for Tiverton and Honiton. Sometimes he’s a really good guy, like when he proposed an amendment to the Agri Bill in an attempt to get our EU-derived food and animal welfare standards enshrined in law. It was defeated because, yeah, the government has given assurances that there’ll be no race to […]

“I may be wrong,” tweeted Tory MP Michael Fabricant the morning after a late night before, “and please correct me if I am – but aren’t all the Conservative MPs (and former MPs) now campaigning against the government’s pragmatic UK Internal Market Bill all ones who campaigned vigorously against Brexit? #plusçachange #correlationcoefficient #yawn” He was […]

There are tragedies that transcend the normal accidents of life, searing themselves into the public consciousness. The fire at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2014, in which 72 people lost their lives, 74 more people were injured, and 151 homes were destroyed, is one such event. Many children were among the dead and, in some […]

As Conservative and DUP MPs vote to break international law, threatening trade talks, EuroDog contemplates what no-deal means for UK canines.

Events on both sides of the Atlantic this week have heightened fears that the US and the UK are sliding towards autocracy under their right-wing populist leaders. In the US, Trump has hinted heavily that he will not accept an election result that goes against him, prompting an alarmed Pentagon to insist that the US […]

As this economical-with-the-truth government continues to claim that testing is working fine, the facts on the ground tell a completely different story. Here is a message for our Prime Minister from a Devon mum with young kids, caught up in the testing chaos. Dear Prime Minister, This is what your handling of the pandemic is […]

Mel Stride, Conservative MP for Central Devon, was photographed wearing a wheatsheaf brooch in support of the Back British Farming Day, whilst failing to vote for Neil Parish’s (Conservative MP for Tiverton and Honiton) amendment to the Agriculture Bill. This amendment was designed to maintain our food and animal welfare standards in any future trade […]

The figures for positive covid-19 tests have been climbing inexorably since a lull in the summer. Figures of 3000 new cases a day, despite the shambolic breakdown in testing carried out by the private sector (Pillar 2), look very much like the beginning of the second wave and have coincided with the return of schools […]

Where is our humanity? In a week in which the UK Government is further shamed by its willingness to break international law over the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, Border Collies team up with Newfoundland sea rescue dogs to demonstrate a more compassionate welcome to asylum seekers crossing the Channel.

In case you missed these acerbic gems…

No-deal Brexit threatens British farming: The annual campaign by the National Farmers’ Union to Back British Farming on 9 September was a timely reminder of the economic, welfare, safety and environmental benefits of the UK’s farming and food sector. Farming is for life, not just for one day!

Margaret Boyde is not happy. She is unamused that the NFU have sent wheatsheaf brooches to all MPs and beyond livid that the 51 who voted against measures to protect our food and animal welfare standards in any trade deals are wearing this mark of support for farming ahead of ‘Back British Farming Day’ . […]

Note from the editor: there are some great, informative tweets out there that need to go way beyond the twittersphere. Here is one such. Please share widely. We’ve had enough of the lies. Time for truth. I’ll give you one example of how devastating #NoDeal will be. AstraZeneca is a British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant. It accounts […]

Imagine the surprise in Devon, Dorset and Somerset when people awoke to discover that Robert Jenrick — he of regeneration-funds-for-votes and cash-for-planning-favour infamy — has initiated a massive land-grab of their counties. Wielding a Henry VIII clause, the millennial Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (HC&LG) has drawn up Statutory Instrument 2020 […]

A message from the Editor-in-Chief:It’s not clear whether the Johnson government is playing games or kite-flying with this outrageous idea that it is considering whether to renege on the Withdrawal Agreement by bringing in legislation which will override international treaties*. These are people who like to try to inure us to future outrages by trialling […]

This is a government that is careless with words when it chooses and a Prime Minister who believes that the truth is whatever comes out of his mouth at any given moment. But it’s the even darker misuse of language and the assignment of more sinister meanings to innocent and generally positive or neutral words […]

Intermediate class reopens and the classmates share their feelings.

Appointing an Australian  misogynist, homophobe and climate science denier as joint president of the UK Board of Trade may seem bizarre – but not when you look at Tony Abbott’s ideological affiliations. Abbott is on the advisory board of the so-called Initiative for Free Trade (IFT), an opaquely-funded lobby group. It styles itself as a […]

So what do populist leaders do when they’re in trouble? Answer: the same things they did to gain power. You don’t need the Cummings playbook to work out that it’s one of two things (or, better still, both): it’s play the blame game – blame the Jews, blame immigrants, play on people’s fears and prejudices; […]

Examgate finally laid bare the hollowness of the Tory “levelling up” mantra, which helped them win over voters in the so-called “Red Wall” seats in the 2019 election. Was this utter catastro-shambles merely an unfortunate accident, or was it a deliberate act —the Government’s boldest move yet in a covert class war? Looking back over […]

Despite the guidance to help classrooms to be safe, the likely realitydemonstrates the urgent need for a Plan B…

Does it not fill your heart with dread, when a minister in the current government states that a proposed new organisation will become “world-renowned”? Well, Health Minister Matt Hancock has recently said this about the body he is planning to set up to replace the battered Public Health England (PHE). PHE, itself, was only established […]

Message from the Editor-in-Chief: We’ve only been going five weeks, but we’ve already built up what we think is a pretty strong back catalogue of articles with a long read-by date. We thought you might like to catch up on a few grouped by author. We kick off with the articles from Tom Scott, the […]

‘CIA! CIA!’ the man wobbling towards me on his bike shouted as I tried to take his photograph. It was a shock. My embarrassed companions moved me on. We were standing in the main road through a small village deep in southern Belarus in the early 1990s where foreigners were a rare sight indeed, probably […]

Editor’s comment: please note that this is a straight repro of a twitter thread, unedited! To start off #TheWeekInTory, some good news —possibly because it’s got nothing to do with Tories. 19AUG20: The 1st polar bear to be born in UK for 25 yrs will move from its Scottish home to an English Park. Hmm. […]

The U-turn approach of Johnson’s government, whilst creating uncertainty, at least results in some sound outcomes.