David Gillon

 I stayed up until 4AM, then the programme I was doing some work in while listening to the BBC election show crashed, and given it would take a while to restart, plus the Beeb were running Suella Braverman's victory speech (bah!), I said 'bugger it' and went to bed. I'd probably have stayed up longer if I hadn't ended up with less sleep than planned on Wednesday night.

It says something that the exit poll for a massive Labour majority actually seemed disappointing, I was hoping for less than a hundred Tories surviving. OTOH it did predict all three Medway constitituencies (Chatham, where I live, Rochester and Strood, and Gillingham) going Labour, which turned out to be the case. It's just a pity I think my new MP, Tris Osbourne, is completely wet. Vince Maple, the former Labour candidate would have been far better, but he's now running Medway Council instead.

I did get to see Grant Shapps (Defence Minister) lose his seat, his reference to the armed forces in his concession speech was the first time I've ever thought he sounded sincere in his entire 20 year parliamentary career. Unfortunately IDS retained his, even with an exit poll forecast of a less than 1% chance of him surviving, as the vote to unseat him, while easily large enough, split between the current Labour candidate and the former Labour candidate running as an independent - not the only time Keir's party discipline ended up shooting Labour in the foot.

I'm worried about where the Tories will turn for a new leader, hard right is probably the answer given Penny Mordaunt, the leading moderate, lost her seat. On the plus side so did arch-brexiteer and ultra-libertarian Steve Baker. Unfortunately that probably reduces the choices to Suella Braverman (dangerous) and Kemi Badenoch (even more dangerous).

And even more worried about the Reform vote (a substantial part of which is undoubtedly the racism/far right vote), Farage in parliament is going to be thoroughly unpleasant.

I just hope we can have a solid Labour government for the next five years that convinces the floating voters that Labour can do the job. Ideally while the Tories and Reform tear each over to shreds.

Just had a frightfully posh Tory volunteer on the phone trying to convince me to vote Tory. I'd say I gave him short shrift, but he didn't get off that easily, it was definitely long shrift!

He seemed to make a definite effort to avoid discussing national issues, but I started with the disabled people killed by DWP sanctions, the increasingly corrupt nature of disability assessments, and then segued into their deliberate attempt to court the Reform vote by returning to their Nasty Party roots, throwing up first immigrants, then trans people, and then disabled people (again) as objects for hate. Told him they were deliberately indulging in bigotry to court the racist vote. 

Poor guy barely got a word in edgeways.

Honestly, you'd think they'd have a note against my number saying 'Lost Cause', or possibly 'Flee, you fools!'.

The Tories' head of campaigns has had to take a leave of absence in the middle of the election, because his wife's the latest Tory found to have placed a bet on the election date. I wonder how she could have guessed what it would be....

So far that's two Tory candidates and one of Sunak's close protection officers found betting on the date. It's like the Tories corrupt everything they touch.

And the fact the cop has been arrested and suspended, while the other two are still Tory candidates really doesn't look good.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/20/gambling-watchdog-looks-into-second-tory-candidate-over-alleged-election-bet-laura-saunders

Utterly puzzled by this article in the Guardian:  The most effective cure for Northern Irish unionism? Attitudes in England, which itself is puzzled that Brits from the mainland keep thinking of Unionists as Irish.

It's perhaps summed up by this quote:

"This mainland indifference towards Northern Ireland was exemplified in a 2020 YouGov poll which showed that 54% of the British public would not be bothered either way by Northern Ireland leaving the UK.

This disconnection is partly the result of a lack of education and knowledge: pupils in England learn little to nothing about the Irish famine, the Irish war of independence, the creation of Northern Ireland, and the subsequent decades of violence."

There's apparently no consideration for even a moment that the problem might be Unionism itself, not the mainland Brits. I've got a pretty good understanding of all of those, did much of them in O Level history, learned more later, and Unionism doesn't come out of the 20th Century looking like anything the majority of the mainland wants a part of. And it hasn't gotten better since, if anything the media coverage of DUP shenanigans at Stormont probably massively exacerbates that tendency.

 Anger as Sunak scraps dedicated minister for disabled people.

TLDR: previous Minister of State swapped over to Immigration (he was already clearly a law enforcement wannabee) and not replaced, disability role given to an existing Under Secretary of State).

(kaberett, check out the chair pictured, looks familiar!)

Disabled people don't need a minister, thinks Sunak - they just need to try harder (caution, may contain sarcasm) 

I actually wish they'd axed it entirely, because then we could make the case for reinstating it in the Government Equalities Office, rather than the Department of Work and Pensions where it is now, and separate it from the benefits enforcement role. Obviously we'd first want rid of Kemi Badenough from GEO so it can actually start working for equality instead of against it.
 

Tory junior finance minister Laura Trott has been out today chumming the water for her boss (Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt) in advance of his Autumn Statement and telling anyone who'll listen that disabled people who are unable to work in the workplace and therefore are in receipt of disability benefits have "a duty" to work from home.

The cohort of disabled people she's talking about here are those judged to have 'limited capability to work'. Which basically means "In an ideal world we might be able to find them jobs, but in practise we can't get employers to even look at them" and for a good chunk of them "Working would actually probably be damaging to their health". And in many cases they should actually be in the next cohort up from Limited Capability, with no capability for work related activity, but the assessments have been fixed by the Tories since forever.

Of course the idea of DWP providing useful support for disabled people to work from home is risible, DWP doesn't see us as capable of anything beyond shelf-stacking, so the likely assumption driving this is everyone can get a zero hours contract doing remote call centre work. It's actually going to move disability employment backwards, because why should the government invest in schemes like Access to Work to make workplaces accessible, when they can just throw us all at remote minimum wage call centre jobs? And the employers will know it, and that there's no political will to drive Equality Act enforcement.

I think the language Trott was using is revealing. By talking about us having 'a duty', rather than the normal Tory waffle about 'work being good for you' - based on some extremely dubious 'science' that looked at abled workers, not disabled, Trott is tacitly acknowledging that they can't make the 'work is good for you' argument for the people affected, and if that's the case, then she's really acknowledging that work will be bad for them.

Over and above the direct damage that's likely to accrue from forcing disabled people to work when they're medically unfit, we know from every other time DWP have been let loose to sanction disabled people on a whim that it will lead to despair, destitution, and all too likely cases of suicide. The Tories know this as well as anyone else, they fought long and hard to stop the DWP's internal inquiries into the deaths being released, but they clearly think they can get a few positive headlines in the Tory rags and/or find a few extra pounds for Hunt to give away to party donors in tax cuts. The Nasty Party is back.

In more positive news, the Court of Appeal has ruled that people are perfectly entitled to call Iain Duncan Smith "Tory Scum".