At PMQs today Keir Starmer was furious, not for himself, but for the care sector where 1 in 20 residents have died from coronavirus. He was stony faced as he demanded an apology for the care workers the PM had appeared to blame for the horrific level of deaths.
Starmer asked numerous times for an apology and one didn’t come; of course it didn’t. It is time to pin blame on anyone else as the dust settles and people want answers.
The PM said there has been 30 years of inaction in the care home sector. Basically, Labour has been out of power for that long that to blame them for this failure you have to go back to the Brit Pop era. Starmer picked him up on that as they have been in power for a decade, it is time to own your failures, but of course the PM didn’t.
The PM accepted that mistakes were made and if we looked back the Government would have done things differently.
But Starmer wasn’t having that, he told Johnson that every week at PMQs these warnings were raised, in the chamber, not in hindsight, the Government was simply too slow to act.
The PM shouted Jobs, Jobs, Jobs and Build, Build, Build. It is shame he didn’t test, test, test when the WHO told the world as the pandemic began to spread.
To add insult to injury the Labour leader wanted to know why NHS staff will soon have to pay for parking again (Scotland made it free years ago), but the time for clapping is over, have a heart for those privately-run car parks in hospitals and their shareholders, he didn’t say that, but he didn’t need to.
Then the session moved onto the ending of the furlough scheme. Spain is looking to continue the furlough scheme until 2021, but Boris refused to extend it.
Is this because we simply can’t afford it, or is it ideological? It is the most socialist policy the UK has ever had, it mustn’t sit well with the double-barrelled land-owning Tories who want people to get on their bikes, but to where? Barnard Castle or Greece via Bulgaria?
Sunak rode in on his horse ‘Furlough’, shot it and turned it into cheap glue to try and stick our economy back together.
Now there is a job retention bonus of a grand to take people off furlough and if you keep your employee until Jan you get the cash.
But if there is no work, businesses will lose money on salaries, wait until the new year, take the grand, and then let them go. Even doing that doesn’t make economic sense. The scheme looks more like a handout to firms already going to take back workers anyway.
After banning people from having any fun in pubs and restaurants we are now being bribed to go back with the ‘eat out to help out’, basically an early bird special from Monday-Wednesday in August, that restaurants have been offering since The Restoration to get people in. The discount is worth up to £10 per head for eating out in August. So that’s Monday to Wednesday sorted, sort of, now just Thursday-Sunday to scavenge in bins with the other nine million unemployed in our post-covid dystopia.
Related – PMQs – Johnson shut down, Leicester lock down, Country let down
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