the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Today, in a break from my normal interminably worthy posts, I’m going to play a quick game of ‘Bullshit or Bullshat?’, a game predicated upon the theme of yesterdays blog. Namely, who is worse, the bullshitter who bullshits or the people who deep down know that it’s bullshit, but go along with it anyway out of some expedient sense of self-interest, the bullshat.

Thankfully we have three prime examples of bullshit, each provided yesterday by the two main parties and the political dilution and combination of the two of them that is the Goldilocks party.

All it takes for the bullshat to realise that they’re being bullshitted to is a couple of minutes on Google, a healthy degree of scepticism and most importantly of all, the will to do it. That last one tends to be then that eludes some people. 

First off we have the Conservatives, who really have gone all out to put the con into Conservative with this epic bullshit,

‘Conservatives pledge to recruit 8,000 new police officers’ and as the BBC reported, ‘ The Conservative Party is promising to recruit 8,000 additional police officers over the next three years if they win the General Election…The new police officers would join the 20,000 already recruited since 2019, the Tories added.”

Great. Except that the 20,000 officers recruited since the last general election, had simply replaced the 20,000 officers who left the force between 2010 and 2019, on account of how government funding had been cut by 20%.

And if we consider the rather unhelpful statistic that 94% of all crime is unsolved, one can’t help but think that adding more crimes for the police not to solve is taking the piss. 8,000 more after 3 years? Seriously.

Next up, Labour who ‘pledges 100,000 new childcare places‘

The Labour party has pledged to create 100,000 additional childcare places and more than 3,000 new nurseries as part of its childcare plan…Labour has said it will turn classrooms in existing primary schools into “school-based nurseries”, for an estimated cost of around £40,000 per classroom.’

Which is all fine and dandy except Labour haven’t said how this is to be funded, aside from charging VAT onto private schools and using that. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, this might raise £1.6billion a year and we can be sure that they’ll be plenty of other claims upon that money, if they’re elected, that is.

Anyway, lets go with their 100,000 staff. Say we be generous and give them £15 an hour. Working a 40 hour week, because parents, and allowing for a 52 week year because parents work. That’s £78 million right there.

Then you have the costs of the training needed for them to qualify – because no doubt Labour is willing to put our money where its aims are and to provide non-repayable loans to incentivise people to train – and also to increase the funding to the educational system to ensure that there are the staff and the capacity in place train them in them, and most importantly of all, magically find enough people prepared to do the job in the first place. To see it as a career and not some diabolical torture from which there is no end.

And to my utter amazement, Labour haven’t said when this lofty ambition is to be achieved by or how many places they hope to make create each year if elected into government. I know!

And then we have the Goldilocks party so, called because they’re like the Tories but not too much like the Tories and they’re like Labour, but not too much like Labour.  They are a party effectively defined by what they’re not, and what they’re not is relevant. 

So yes, super, the ‘Lib Dems pledge £8bn NHS and care package in manifesto’ but then they could promise everything to everyone and they’d still be as useful as a cheese trumpet. 

Probably, it’d be some foul smelling, artisanal nonsense cheese. So awful you couldn’t even eat it.

 No doubt, the question will remain unanswered.