Anne Widdecombe Declares People Have No Right to Cheap Food during Inflation

More evidence of what a nasty, callous and thoroughly unsympathetic piece of work Anne Widdecombe is. With more people suffering real hardship and starvation due to the cost of living crisis, it’s now been reported that Widdecombe really doesn’t have much sympathy for their plight. She was in some kind of debate over the rising cost of food. The prices of some articles have risen by 25 per cent. Cheese sandwiches were cited as an example, the price having risen enormously from its previous price of 40 p. What was Widdecombe’s response to the question? She said that people shouldn’t make cheese sandwiches if they couldn’t afford the ingredients, and that people had no right to cheap food because of inflation. It was the same complete lack of any kind of empathy for the public displayed by 30p Lee Anderson.

But people do have a right to expect staple foods will be kept affordable. During times of famine in the 18th century, when the price of bread rose beyond the ability of the poor to buy it, mobs broke into bakers’, seized the loaves and sold them to the public at a price they considered just and affordable. According to historians of the working class such as E.P. Thompson, this was part of a growing working class consciousness. This has been challenged by right-wing historians, who see it as middle class consciousness. Regardless of the niceties of such debates, the lesson is that ordinary, working people did feel they had a right to cheap food, and when this was unable, took matters into their own hands. I am not suggesting that people similarly break into modern bakers and their local supermarkets to steal or seize items. I am merely saying that people have a right to expect official intervention to ensure that some items remain cheap even during inflation.

Widdecombe departed to Richard Tice’s Reform party a few years ago, dissatisfied with the Tories over Brexit. I caught a bit of her speech on YouTube at their conference a week of so ago before I turned it off in disgust. She’s still suffering from the delusion that we can make wonderful deals with countries independently of the EU, despite the fact that the Tories glaringly struggled to do so. Liz Truss’ deal to export British cheese to Japan, where most of the people are lactose intolerant, was being promoted as some kind of success. Instead it provoked widespread laughter and ridicule. She hasn’t learned anything from that. But what really made me turn off was when she looked back nostalgically at the days when you could just turn up at your doctor’s and be seen without an appointment. Yes, I remember those halcyon days as well, Anne. They were right before Thatcher’s healthcare reforms of privatisation and cuts started to bite, and created the horrific mess healthcare is in today. Widdecombe was part of Major’s administration, which helped create it. She can’t blame Labour or socialism for the state it’s in. It’s purely the Tories’ fault, although I don’t think Blair helped. And it won’t get better if Tice’s lot get voted in, although they are better than the Tories in that they do recognise the benefits of partly renationalising the energy companies.

But Widdecombe has shown herself to be out of touch and completely unsuited to be anywhere near government. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

A Message from Keir Starmer after the Local Elections Victories

I got this message from the Labour leader celebrating Labour’s victories in last Thursday’s local elections, and praising the great work he expects the new Labour councillors will do.

‘David, last week’s local election results saw Labour become the largest party in local government.

Labour offered a positive alternative, and people have given us their trust. It’s now our duty to tackle the Tory cost of living crisis and ease the burden on working people.

Now, we cannot waste a day in delivering on the Labour commitment to put money back in people’s pockets.

That’s why we’re setting the pace. I’m working with our new council leaders to create emergency cost of living action plans and review local housing plans.

We’ll act now, to ease the squeeze on people’s pockets, and support their aspirations.

Our new leaders will review their inheritance and pull every lever possible to relieve the pressure that this government has placed on working people.

Because, where Labour is in power, we deliver. We make fairer choices for working people and their families, and we improve lives.

I’m proud of the gains we made last week, but that pride will now fuel our pursuit of change.

We have a chance to show that Labour can not only improve communities across the country, but that we have plans to build a better Britain for everyone.

It’s time for change and Labour will make that change happen.

Thank you,

I’m sure the new councillors will work hard for their communities, but last week’s elections weren’t the golden victories Starmer seems to believe. To many people, Labour doesn’t offer an inspiring alternative that fills them with enthusiasm for a Labour government. It’s why the cephologists are predicting a hung parliament. Starmer has rejected all the socialist policies that gave working people such hope for real change under Corbyn. And Starmer has also shown himself to be personally vindictive, persecutory and untrustworthy. When Rachel Reeves was called upon to defend him during a brief TV interview and the list of all the promises he’s broken was mentioned, she could only reply with telling the interviewer all he policies he had kept: that’s right, all three of them. Policies to tackle the cost of living crisis and provide proper, affordable housing are sorely needed. But I’m not sure Starmer can be trusted even here. His promise that the new Labour councillors would cap council tax was meaningless. By the time he stated the policy, the tax had been set for the year. And it was only a cap. The tax would still remain at a level many citizens would find difficult to afford. Any true reform could only come from a Labour government.

There are a whole range of local issues that require reform at the national level. Bus services have been cut so that many working class, suburban communities around the country – my home city of Bristol is one example – don’t have them are effectively cut off. Privatisation of the bus companies has failed. But national legislation passed by Thatcher prevents local governments from renationalising them. This needs to be repealed, but I doubt that Starmer will do it. Similarly, we need a return to council housing, but Thatcher again banned local councils from doing so. A piece of legislation that also needs to be repealed. But I doubt he’ll do that either.

Labour offers to make things a little better than the Tories, but that’s all. It won’t do any more when the leadership, the bureaucracy and the parliamentary party are still in thrall to Blair and his brand of Thatcherism. I’m glad Labour did do so well last Thursday and want it to win the national elections. But I also want a leadership that recognises that, whatever the establishment says, Thatcherism is a dismal, destructive failure.

But that won’t come from Starmer.

No, Starmer Isn’t Ditching Wokeness, But Attacking the Tories for Opposing It

Okay, I’ve got to confess to making another mistake. Earlier today I put up a piece reporting that Starmer had told the leaders of the Labour party that people weren’t interested in woke, and condemned the Tories for being ‘out of touch’. This had been covered in a video put out by That Preston Journalist. I watched it and got the wrong end of the stick. He seemed to me to be saying that Starmer had decided that woke policies weren’t appealing to the public and was ready to ditch them. At the same time I thought that Starmer was also attacking that part of the Conservative party that is woke.

How wrong I was! It seems Starmer isn’t prepared to ditch ‘woke’ at all. He just doesn’t think that voters care enough about it to vote against Labour because of it. Instead they’re more interested and concerned about the NHS and the cost of living. When he said that Sunak and the Tories were out of touch, he meant that they failed to appreciate that these issues took precedence over the woke policies Starmer is promoting and defending and that the British public generally didn’t share their concerns about woke policies. This is how it’s been interpreted by GB News and their presenters.

Before I go further, let’s try and unpack what is meant by the term ‘woke’. Gillyflower, one of the great commenters here, remarked that I should refresh my memory over what it means. As I understand it, it’s Black slang meaning being awake to injustice. Looking at how it’s now being used, it seems to have replaced the old term ‘political correctness’ for extreme and intolerant anti-racist, feminist, anti-homophobic and anti-transphobic views. More narrowly, it’s being used to describe the various Critical Social Justice ideologies derived from the Postmodernist, Critical Theory revision of Marxism which narrowly sees societal issues through the lens of privilege and oppression. These differ from previous forms of anti-racism, feminism and so on in rejecting individualism. In Critical Race Theory, all Whites are privileged because of their skin colour and the fact that some Whites are less privileged than some Blacks is ignored. It isn’t enough to be non-racist, and judge people on their merits and character regardless of race. You must be positively anti-racist and fight against White privilege and for Black uplift through social programmes that demand the granting of opportunities to Blacks and other underprivileged minorities simply because of their colour. For example, in America Black and Mexican students generally do less well at Maths at school than Whites and Asians. So some schools in California are trying to even these results out by giving pre-calculus lessons only to Black and Hispanic students to the exclusion of Whites and Asians.

In the eyes of GB News’ Mike Graham, however, woke means just about every anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist and radical gender view or ideology. Yes, he conceded, people did care about the NHS and the cost of living, but people also cared about: woke teacher telling kids there were 73 genders, environmental protesters gluing themselves to the road, petrol and diesel cars being phased out in favour of electric vehicles, and the cost of power rising due to green energy policies. And so on.

Piers Morgan also did a piece about whether people cared about ‘woke’. This included Reform’s Richard Tice and a woman from the Labour party. Unsurprisingly, Morgan and Tice believed that people did care about ‘woke’. The lady from Labour didn’t. She didn’t like biological men being allowed into women’s private spaces and sports, nor rapists in female prisons, when asked by the former editor of the Mirror. He replied with, ‘Ah, but they’ve prevented you from talking about this’. She replied that they hadn’t, and she’d been talking about it for a year or so. This contrasts with the case of Rosie Duffield, who has been isolated and shunned by Starmer and other senior Labour members for her views. I can’t remember whether the lady believed that people didn’t care about woke policies, or did, but that they were far more concerned about the cost of living and the NHS. I think Morgan had claimed that it was because Labour was pushing these woke policies that it looked like they would not have an absolute majority at the election next year.

My guess is that the Labour lady is probably right. People are directly affected by the cost of living, and wondering how they will afford food, heating and their rent or mortgages. The latter was one of the major issues on the local news tonight in Bristol, which has been revealed as the most expensive city outside London. One woman spoke of how she had been forced to move back in with her parents after the landlord raised the rent by 66 per cent. And they are very much concerned about getting hold of a doctor, thanks to all the wonderful privatisation that Rishi’s so proud of. These are issues that immediately affect everyone. I’m not sure how many people are aware of the debate over transgenderism, let alone so concerned that it affects the way they vote. Some are, and it may become a more important issue in the public consciousness by the time the next election comes round.

But Starmer’s less than exciting performance can also be blamed on other problems apart from the ‘woke’. Like he broke every promise and pledge he made, and has done his level best to purge the left. Corbyn’s policies were genuinely popular, and he enthused and inspired the public in a way Starmer can’t. The turnout at the local elections was low, and my guess is that many of the people Corbyn had appealed to didn’t vote. They had been alienated by a party leadership that was actively hostile to them and which to many people just offers the usual Tory policies, or something not too different from them. Tice, I think, said that Labour’s woke policies wouldn’t appeal to the socially conservative voters of the red wall. He might be right, though if they do become disenchanted with Labour, it’ll be far more to do with the lack of proper, old-style, socialist Labour policies.

And that will apply to the rest of the country.

38 Degrees Launches Cost of Living Catastrophe Map

I got this email from internet democracy site 38 Degrees earlier this evening.

‘BREAKING: the Government has ripped up their disastrous mini-budget – and now they want us to pick up the pieces. [1] They’ve put our livelihoods, our homes and our futures on the line with their reckless plans, and turned the cost of living crisis into a catastrophe. [2]

But with no sign of the rescue plan we’ve needed all along, we need to show them the price we’re paying. And we’ve got just the thing.

So we’ve just launched a HUGE, ambitious new project: the cost of living catastrophe, mapped.[3]Our interactive map spotlights more than 1,000 stories from across the 38 Degrees community – and the country.These are the real lives behind this catastrophe.

This is what the map looks like

Together, thousands of us have forced the Government into the biggest U-turn we’ve ever seen – but we can go further. [4]If all of us share this map far and wide, we’ll put the stories behind this catastrophe front and centre, so journalists, MPs and the Governmentwill have no doubt that we need a proper rescue plan for the country.

So, David, will you help keep up the pressure on the Government by sharing our cost of living catastrophe map – and show the real price of this crisis?

Twitter is the best way to ensure as many MPs and journalists see this map. Just click below and retweet the 38 Degrees tweet or – if you can – ‘quote tweet’ it and share your own cost of living story. You could even tag your MP!

SHARE ON TWITTER

If you don’t have Twitter, you can share on Facebook or WhatsApp instead.

SHARE ON FACEBOOK

SHARE ON WHATSAPP

Or, if you don’t use social media, will you consider chipping in so we can help share it via online and offline ads.

Thank you for being involved,

Flo, Angus, Matt, Jonathan and the 38 Degrees team

NOTES:
[1] BBC News: New chancellor reverses ‘almost all’ tax measures 
The Telegraph (paywall): Energy price cap could be torn up under plans considered in Whitehall
[2] BBC News: What was in the mini-budget and what has changed?
The Independent (paywall): Kwarteng confirms further cuts of up to £18bn for public services
Sky News: Cost of living: More mortgage products now on offer – but interest rates continue to rise
[3] 38 Degrees: The cost of living catastrophe, mapped ‘

I’ve absolutely no problem with posting this on social media. The Khazi may be gone, but Liz Truss and her Tory hordes are still in power, and people are still hurting. And they don’t care about the poor – only about the rich, and getting re-elected.