Soft-Spoken Aristo Thug Jacob Rees-Mogg Joins Boris as Latest Tory Celebrity

On Friday, Mike also put up a piece commenting on how Jacob Rees-Mogg, the son of William Rees-Mogg, the former Times and Independent journalist, has developed a cult following. Apparently he has his own fan group, dubbed Moggmentum in imitation of Corbyn’s greater and far better supporter’s group. Mike also supports his comments with a couple of Tweets from fans, who rave about how he has ‘class’, is better than ‘left-liberal misfits who would ruin the country’, and how ‘England needs him’.

As Mike then goes on to show, Jacob Rees-Mogg is the kind of right-wing politico Britain really doesn’t need. He is, of course, Eton-educated, and as his voting record shows, he believes in punishing the poor simply for being poor, while also demanding that Tory Toffs like himself get generous state handouts to retain their position of power.

In a long list of the policies favoured by the man dubbed ‘the minister for the 18th century’, Mike shows that

He generally votes against laws to extend equality and human rights.
Consistently votes for cuts to welfare spending.
Consistently votes against gay rights.
General votes against laws to tackle climate change.
Consistently supports the extension of the surveillance state.
Consistently voted against raising support payments for the long term ill or disabled.
Consistently votes against government spending to create jobs for young people, who have been unemployed for some time.
Nearly always votes for restricting the right of EU nationals to remain in Britain.
He was also nearly always in favour of reducing access to legal aid.
He was also a solid supporter of tuition fees, the bedroom tax and against raising unemployment benefit in line with rising prices.

As Simon Renshaw says in his Tweet, which Mike has also posted in his article, Rees-Mogg is not amusing. He is cruel, deplorable and dangerous. And another Tweeter, Paul, also commented

Sperminator Rees-Mogg would not govern for the people, he would rule for his class with a selective dose of his religion thrown in.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/07/07/mogg-mentum-the-tories-are-losing-their-grip-on-reality/

This last comment is extremely accurate. Rees-Mogg began his career as a politician by campaigning for the Tories in a depressed fishing area in Fife in Scotland. When asked what he would be campaigning on, Rees-Mogg declared that he would be trying to convince the locals that the country would be best served by retaining an unelected, hereditary House of Lords. Somehow, I’m not surprised he didn’t succeed on this occasion. The Scots aristocracy, led by the Duke of Buccleuch, had a greater degree of political power north of the border than their counterparts further south, until the guid Duke and his ilk were stripped of them by the Labour government in 1975. And obviously, the unkempt masses weren’t keen to bring them back. Given the spectacle of this strange, gangling figure stalking about the streets and vennels and addressing the locals in a cut-class, pukka Etonian accent, I suppose it was almost inevitable that the SNP would suddenly receive a massive boost in support. Heaven knows how he’d have got in Govan or the rougher parts of Glesgae toon.

A few years ago, Private Eye did a little feature on him as part of their series on the new boys and girls, who had entered parliament after that year’s election. Not only does Rees-Mogg expect people to defer to him because of his class, he also expects close family members to protect him personally in uncomfortable situations. By which I mean that once, at Glyndebourne, he got his nanny and his wife to hold a book over his head to protect him from the sun.

The aristocracy are also known for inflicting stupid names on their children. Rees-Mogg is no exception. Along with the normal names he has given his new-born son, Dominic and Christopher, he also inflicted ‘Sextus’ and ‘Dominic’ on the poor little mite. ‘Sextus’ is Latin for ‘Sixth’, and the little chap is his sixth sprog.

So why would anyone become a fan of this weird creature? I think part of it’s because he is so strange, as well as being personally very polite. He has a diffident, gentlemanly manner while at the same time he stands out as something of a character. He’s similar to Boris Johnson in this respect, who’s built his career on a very carefully crafted persona of being a good-natured chump, while he’s anything but in real life. Quietly spoken with a slightly diffident manner, it makes Rees-Mogg look for more harmless and reasonable than he actually is. But as his voting record shows, his political views are those of a typical vengeful Tory thug with all their class hatred and contempt for working people.

Rees-Mogg is a particular presence in my part of the world, because he’s the MP for North-East Somerset, which is just south of my bit of Bristol. I’m not surprised he got in down there. This is the same part of rural Somerset, where the Waldegrave family have their seat. There’s even a pub called ‘The Waldegrave Arms’ in Green Ore, one of the villages there on the Waldegrave estate. This is a part of Britain, where they still feel people should be tugging their forelocks in deference to the lord of the manor.

As for his supporters, from what I’ve heard personally, they’re deeply reactionary, true-blue members of the upper middle class, who really do want to drag us all back to the 19th century, when the upper classes were in power and the proles knew there place – in hovels, suffering from malnutrition and cholera.

There’s some speculation that the Tories are looking to put him into No. 10 at one point. Mike states that he’s not likely to go away, and we shall all do our best to make sure he doesn’t get in. If he does, you can bet that all the poverty, despair, joblessness and starvation the Tories have inflicted on the working class, disabled and poor in this country really will reach truly 19th century levels.

Theresa May Lies About NHS Funding on BBC Question Time

How do you tell when a politician’s lying? His lips move.
– old joke, dating from at least the 1980s.

I first heard the above one liner on the Max Headroom Show in the 1980s. And May’s appearance on Question Time bore out the great computer-generated compere’s witticism, if only in that it applied to her. I didn’t watch the show – I know, it’s terrible for a political blog like Mine – but I knew it would annoy me. But I did catch a bit, where one young woman took May up on her party’s funding of the NHS. She stated that the Tories had cut NHS funding, and that we have the lowest level of funding of any nation for our health service.

May denied this. She stated that the Tories have made more funding in real terms than every before, and that it was untrue that Britain provides less money that all other nations to its health service.

The first is a lie, the second a half-truth. May’s government has undeniably cut funding. They’ve been saying throughout that they intend to make millions of pounds worth of savings from cuts to the Health Service. She has somewhat ameliorated this by claiming that the Tories are now going to provide an extra £7 million for the NHS. But this is till much lower than the millions they intend to cut from its budget, so that funding will still be cut.

There’s nothing new about May’s statement. The Tories lie as easily as most people draw breath. It’s instinctive. And this kind of mendacity goes all the way back to Thatcher, if not before. I can remember how Thatcher was cutting funding to the NHS, but, when questioned on this, she replied that they were giving more money in real terms than ever before.

She also stated that the NHS would be ‘safe with us’, at the same time she was discussing its privatisation with Geoffrey Howe.

Her comments about providing more money for the NHS in real terms eventually became the subject of a joke in Spitting Image. One of her ministers was William Waldegrave, who, I am sorry to say, comes from a Somerset family. The sketch was about Waldegrave’s name slowly shrinking as letters from dropped from it, until there was nothing left but the ‘W’. All the time this was going on, Waldegrave was denying it was happening, and saying ‘In real terms, by name is longer than ever before.’

As for the Britain spending less on its health service than other countries, I’m sure there are many other nations that do spend less on healthcare. But for a very long time Britain has spent less on its health service than other, developed western countries.

May is lying about giving money to the NHS. She is actively cutting it, prior to its privatisation.

Don’t believe her Thatcherite lies.
Save the NHS, and vote for Corbyn on June 8th.

Michael Sullivan on the Poverty Caused by the Thatcher’s Sale of Council Housing

Yesterday I put up Nye Bevan’s speech to the House of Commons during Atlee’s 1945 Labour government to show the contrast between that government’s determination to provide quality council housing for everybody, and the present situation of rising homelessness and an acute housing shortage. It was in response to an article on Mike’s blog, Vox Political, reporting that the number of evictions has doubled. In it, Mike showed how Thatcher’s dream of a home-owning democracy has finally collapsed, leaving only debt and the threat of destitution.

Michael Sullivan also describes the negative effects of Thatcher’s policy of selling off the council houses in his book, The development of the British Welfare State (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf 1996).

But there were losers as well as winners. The effect of the policy was that the best houses were the ones most likely to be purchased by their tenants and the poorest stock was most likely to be left in council ownership. As a result of the policy the condition of the council stock therefore declined. Council house sales also meant financial loss for councils. Some councils found themselves repaying 60-7ear Treasury loans on properties they no longer owned. More than this, and as a means of ensuring that the revenue from council house sales did not go back into building council houses, the government also restricted the use to which receipts could be put. The government took increasingly tight control over council housing, the fixing of rent levels in the public sector, the determination of levels of subsidy, and the use of capital receipts from council house sales. As we have seen above, council house purchasers tended to be middle aged skilled workers. Elderly people, the young, single parents and people on low incomes were excluded from the bonanza. First, it was more difficult for them to attract mortgages. Second, many of their dwellings were regarded by them as unsuitable for their long term needs. They too might be regarded as losers…

The Housing Act (1988)

If the sale of council houses appears bold and radical, then more radicalism was to come in the third term. Mrs Thatcher wanted the withdrawal of the state from housing ‘just as far and as fast as possible’ (Thatcher, 1993, p. 600). Her Housing Minister, William Waldegrave, looked forward, in 1987, to the removal of the state as a big landlord. The same principles that drove the opt-out option in relation to schools also held sway in housing. The government applied similar tools for the job as well. For the Housing Act (1988) allowed tenants to opt out of local authority housing by choosing to transfer their tenancy to any number of new, approved private landlords. Under the Act’s provision landlords would be allowed to bid for property and for the worst, run-down estates, the government introduced Housing Action Trusts (HATs) which would take over the properties and improve them before passing them over to the private sector. Though introduced by the buccaneering free-marketer, Nicholas Ridley, the policy-so radical in intent – failed to lift off the ground. It proved, said this Secretary of State for the Environment, ‘most unpopular and it didn’t achieve its objectives” (Ridley, 1991, p. 89). For reasons that seem more to do with distrust of Mrs Thatcher than with self-interest, tenants of even the most ghastly estates failed to vote for the improvement monies tied to transfer of tenancy. For the most part, they opted to stay with the local authority.

Or maybe such tenants were displaying clear, shrewd common-sense. A change of landlord could have serious consequences. First, the change would not protect rent levels because the Act abolished tenants’ entitlement to an adjudication of ‘fair rent’. Second, this deregulation also involved a loss of secure tenancy. Thus tenants who could not afford to pay an increase in rent could more easily be evicted. Furthermore, the ‘right to buy’ legislation applied to local authorities and to housing associations, but not to the private sector. The tenants of homes transferred to private landlords would lose the right to become owner occupiers. Added to these factors, housing benefit was not available for rental costs on houses which became parts of privately managed estates.

In view of the disadvantages I have just enunciated, many tenants felt that they would be ill-advised to leave council tenure for the unknown perils of the private sector landlord. It can come as no surprise to learn that many tenants’ groups fought hard to resist the privatisation of their homes. Some groups feared that the legislation would deliver them into the hands of Rachman-like landlords and such fears were not wholly without foundation or precedent. The deregulation of rents in the 1957 Rent Act had led to exploitation in rent increases and other practices which clearly contributed to the defeat of the Tory government in the 1964 general election. (pp. 220-221).

The present rise in homeless is a direct result of Thatcher’s sale of the council houses, and the same destructive policies are being carried on today by Cameron and his fellow social parasites.