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.

Once again, I am faced with a riddle that has long vexed me, and that especially at election time, seems both more pertinent and more intractable than ever. Namely, who is more culpable, the bullshitter or the person who deep down know it is bullshit, but goes along with it anyway, the bullshat.

This self-serving avoidance of reality, which I discussed here in relation to war and Israels prosecution of it, also has a domestic public policy element to it. An unwillingness to examine in any great detail claims made during an election campaign, claims that a combination of common sense and few minutes Googling would expose to be bullshit.

Yesterday it was Labours turn, as according to The Observer,  ‘Labour pledges 80 new rape courts in bid to tackle backlog crisis. Plan for specialist unit in all police forces amid manifesto drive to reduce violence against women and girls.’ It’s a fantastic proposal, as much needed as it is long overdue. As the article all too clearly explains,

‘ Between the end of 2019 and the end of 2023, Labour says, there was a 346% increase in the number of adult rape cases in the crown court backlog, leading to claims that rape was effectively being “decriminalised”.

Just 2.6% of rape cases result in a charge. Labour leader Keir Starmer has said he will halve violence against women and girls, and bring in tougher sentences for rapists, under his “missions” for government.

Last month, the National Audit Office said it no longer believed that the Ministry of Justice’s ambition to reduce the overall backlog of cases to 53,000 by March 2025 was achievable. Of the 67,573 cases awaiting trial, almost a fifth (18%) are sexual offences.

The NAO says this is partly because there has been a large increase in the number of rape cases – the number of these going to trial increased from 624 (1.6% of all cases) in 2019 to 2,786 (4.1% of all cases) in 2023. Rape cases are more complex, with a lower proportion of defendants pleading guilty, so take longer on average to hear.’

All very depressing and what’s even more depressing still is that there isn’t the remotest likelihood of this becoming a reality any time soon, because there doesn’t exist in the justice system the capacity to make it so.

First off, solicitors. The people who advise the accused of their rights when they are arrested by the police. They are also the initial point of contact with alleged victims of crime which might eventually result in that arrest. Many solicitors are leaving the profession, and those that do perform the ‘duty solicitor’ role at police stations are often very inexperienced juniors, calling into question the advice they give. But let’s imagine all of that doesn’t exist and a case goes to trial, like most of them don’t, 95% of them.

The solicitor will have instructed a barrister to either defend or prosecute the case at court. Unfortunately, there are dwindling numbers of barristers too and those that remain recently went on strike over pay. And this creates another problem, because judges are only drawn from the available pool of barristers and despite the government increasing their working age to 75, they too are leaving creating a staffing crisis and cancelled trials.

Which means that even if a rape case somehow does manage to get to trial, that trial can up to three years to happen.

It only took me a few Google searches to find out that, and I didn’t even bother with searches regarding staffing problems with the people who help make the whole court system function smoothly. Them that provide the necessary skills and perform the many tasks needed to make everything happen, the court stenographers, the clerks, the ushers, the people who oversee and then jury selection, the legal secretaries and well, you get the gist. Such people have experience, experience of how the system actually works in practice and not theory, of the little workarounds needed to ensure the smooth running of the court, and have built up informal networks to facilitate this.

We all do in whatever job we have, those little shortcuts and deals one makes to get things done. And one only develops them because experience will have taught us that we need them, to save both time and frustration.

And if I know about the problems of capacity in the legal system, then I can only imagine the scale of the problems that Labour are privy to. Which brings me back to the question I ask every election, who is worse, the bullshitter or the bullshat?

One would have thought that given the commemoration’s to mark D-Day being just a few days ago now, people might finally come to their senses about the realities of war. 

Namely, that in order to successfully prosecute a war there are certain unavoidable circumstances one has to accept from the start.  Tragic as it is, there will be civilian loss of life, especially if one’s enemy combatants have deeply embedded themselves within the civilian population. There will be destruction of housing and infrastructure, because the very nature of sustained bombing makes that inevitable.  And many others.

Quite why these inescapable truisms seem so difficult to comprehend, and allowed this impossibly absurd distortion of reality to become a fashionable virtue to signal, has no more egregiously offensive manifestation than in the very public condemnation of the way Israel is prosecuting its war in Gaza.

I’ve thought this from the beginning of the war in Gaza, the way in which Israeli military actions are continually judged against an unrealistic and constantly altering number of moral precepts. Precepts, it has to be noted, that none of the countries now condemning Israel, have themselves ever followed when at war.

The USA and its ‘collateral damage’ in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. The UK’s notion of ‘precision drone strikes’ in Afghanistan. Turkeys own genocide against Armenians and more recently, war crimes in Syria. The French in Algeria. South Africa in Angola and Namibia. You get the gist.      

The only thing to account for any of this is not that the conduct of war has changed, but more that expectations regarding how a war is prosecuted have changed, and it seems to me that these higher expectations are only expected of Israel.

 Hence we had another outbreak of delusional posturing in, shock horror, yesterdays Guardian, ‘Israel has destroyed or damaged 80% of schools in Gaza. This is scholasticide’ 

Hooray they’ve created a new word whilst also ignoring reality. Does the sub headline, ‘The attack on Palestinian education, educators and cultural knowledge isn’t new, but it has reached horrifying new levels,’ make any kind of sense to anyone with even the most basic understanding of what bombing means?

The article explicitly makes the point that the Israeli’s are deliberately targeting educational establishments, as opposed to them just being part of an urban landscape that has been violently remodelled.

What, one wonders, would the writer of such an obscenely reductive piece of blame-mongering – if she can make up words, then so can I – have made of the bombing of the French town of Caen in Normandy in June 1944? Over 6,000 tons of bombs were dropped on it by the Allies. 73% of the town was destroyed. Deaths necessarily ensued.

But efforts to take Caen had been thwarted for nearly two months because of heavy German resistance.  Both sides were aware of the strategic importance of Caen, of how crucial it was to the liberation of France and to the eventual defeat Germany.

Had any of this this criticism by armchair generals and all of this dangerously naive absurdity that we see now happened then and had we had lost the war, then all of my Jewish friends would never have been born, and the freedoms we take as a given would never have been.

Either you set out to win a war or you are destined to lose it. 

Shit happens.

The Leaders Debate on ITV on Tuesday night between Prada and NotHardie was like watching two bald men fighting over comb. 

The most obvious thing to remark was that the host, Julie Etchingham seemed as capable of hosting a debate such as that as I would be to run The London Marathon. Why she wasn’t given a mute button for when either man spoke on after his allotted time, repeatedly talked over his opponent or transgressed in some other way, I don’t know. Instead all she had were her increasing ineffectual plea’s for them to stop behaving like the entitled stuffed shirts they were, plea’s which they quite happily ignored

That’s the trivial point made.

According to his Wikipedia page, NotHardie became an MP in 2015, and held a number of Shadow Cabinet posts prior to becoming Labour leader in April 2020. Before that, in 2008, he became Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service, holding these positions until 2013.

I draw your attention to these facts because to me they suggest a man who should be used to public speaking. He became a barrister in 1987, after all, so one would think he’d have had gained at least some proficiency by now. Someone possessed with flexible mental acuity, a recall of facts and figures all the better to help him to weave a convincing narrative. And if along the way, a commanding and engaging presence developed, so much the better. One would’ve hoped so, if only for his clients sake.

And as an MP, from campaigning to become one – attending hustings and addressing constituency events – to making the transition from backbencher, then frontbencher and eventually leader, you’d think all that would’ve sharpened his skills somewhat.

No.

Before television became the main vehicle for politicians to communicate with the electorate, how politicians presented themselves didn’t much matter.  But for better and worse, progress has dictated otherwise and now we live in an age where this matters. Famously, Margaret Thatcher had lessons to soften her voice, to make it seem less hectoring and to not alienate viewers.

How a politician presents themselves is important, especially now when every move, every utterance can be forensically speculated over, discussed and criticised in our endless media nightmare. This being so, and things having been heading this way for many years now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that NotHardie would’ve realised the need to ensure that the way he presented himself matched his ambition. That upon becoming leader, that he would’ve immediately charged his media team with preparing him for moments such as Tuesday night and that they – and him – had risen to the challenge. 

I saw no evidence of this.

I saw no passion, no burning sense of injustice on behalf of of families struggling under the cost of living crisis, no indignation about the woeful state of a nation that needs over 2,500 food banks and no controlled anger at the systematic underfunding, staffing shortages and the increasing use of the private sector in of the NHS. Something one would imagine he has more insight about than most, given that his wife works for the NHS in Occupational Health.

Neither was there much sense of a foundational principle, one that has informed his entire way of political thinking. Come to think of it, it is almost impossible to think of any principles he truly believes in, other than that he wants to be PM and will say or do anything to get elected. 

The only thing he does stand for is the National Anthem.  

Wikipedia also gifted me the absolute treasure that his middle name is Rodney. 

Which means that from now on I’ll be calling him Plonker, obviously.

Today is the 6th June and it has always been a constant source of unique amazement to me that this date isn’t immediately synonymous to people as the anniversary of the single most important day in European history.

I once knew someone whose birthday was on the 6th June and upon him telling me this I remarked that it was a day of incomparable import. His look of total incomprehension was matched only by his subsequent casual indifference when I told him why. 

This was someone who had just completed a P.hd in Art History, so had received an education sufficient to detect numerous meanings from the types of crockery used in old paintings, or how the use of certain colours were signifiers of social status  – I jest not – but somehow D-Day had passed him by. Despite all of his schoolings, his exams and his comfortable life in academia, he had no knowledge of it.

He voted Remain in the European Referendum and whilst not as vociferous as others regarding his belief that a profound injustice had been orchestrated upon him, he was still possessed with a low-level simmering resentment about it. The sheer hypocrisy that permits such opinions to be championed are no less offensive if one is ignorant of the fact that such a hypocrisy exists. 

The European Referendum, no matter its causes and eventual outcome, was a democratic exercise enacted by our democratically elected government. The right to protest about the verdict is itself a product of our democracy, from parliamentary agitations, the legal challenges, constant media criticisms down to the basic freedom of an individual to hold, let alone express or communicate, a dissenting view. 

The democracy that allows all of these concepts to grow, to embed themselves in a society so much that they become part of what we understand democracy, indeed the very idea of a parliamentary democracy, was so fundamentally antithetical to Nazi ideology, but for D-Day we might never have known.

But for D-Day and the eventual liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny, the world would be very different. I probably wouldn’t be here in London, because I doubt if my parents would’ve left the Republic of Ireland if Germany had won the war. The decision might not even have been theirs to make, if Hitlers desire for total domination of Europe was left unchecked.

That’s why the anniversary of D-Day is so very resonant now, why it isn’t just another dry fact of history, why it doesn’t just exist in faded black and white newsreels, increasingly few personal recollections full of unspoken heroism or patriotic nostalgia. Instead all of us owe a debt of the most sincere and boundless gratitude for the fact we are in the middle of yet another election campaign because Britain robustly defended the democracy we enjoy today.

The simple fact that we take for granted what we consider inalienable rights, rights that could so easily been crushed under a jackboot, is precisely why D-Day is for me the single most defining moment in European history. 

In just under two hours from now, there’ll be live head to head debate between Prada and NotHardie on ITV. Unfortunately it won’t be the sort of head to head one tends to find online, but the much more boring and less interesting spectacle of two men both desperately wondering exactly how Farrago’s announcement yesterday that he will be standing for election will affect them.

It’s a pity he hadn’t waited until today to make the announcement, because that would really have scuppered their carefully rehearsed strategies for the debate. Like him or not, no-one can seriously deny that Farrago has done again what he’s always done, which is to shake things up. 

By entering the fray, he’s perfectly illustrated how both Prada and NotHardies dullness is matched only by their lack of ambition. Farrago pretty much single-handedly brought about the Brexit referendum, while all the other two have given us are similar versions of uninspiring.

So the spectre of Farrago will be at their shoulders, the question is whether they’ll rise up to the challenge and show some gumption or will they retreat into easy soundbites. Thankfully their spin doctors will be on hand to tell the assembled media whores that what was said we actually misheard and that was meant was actually quite different.

Spare a thought for ITV though. A commercial broadcaster having to give up an hours prime-time slot and for what? Low viewing figures and being forced to fill the breaks with plugs for its own shows because no advertiser wants their brand to be tainted by such a visual cure for insomnia.

 Diane Abbott is certainly a great many things to a great many people but to me, she is the first politician in this election campaign to have called upon the services of the irony police. 

To deny a claim of racism made against her, many of her supporters have claimed that her suspension from the Labour Party and its subsequent treatment of her by them, was itself motivated by racism with the wholly predictable result that the original offence has been largely forgotten. 

The issue that now preoccupies the media and has engulfed The Labour Party is the both disingenuous and dangerous falsehood that she is the victim.

Lest we forget, the original charge of racism against her and which led to her suspension from the Labour Party was a letter she sent to the Observer newspaper in April 2023. For reasons unknown, she made the incredibly offensive claim that ‘It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus.’.

I’m not even going to bother to explain why I think what she wrote is so offensive because I trust that anyone reading this post knows why. But the notion of her being a victim of racism, that her suspension from the Labour Party is itself essentially motivated by racism, being both disingenuous and dangerous I will explain.

The former Labour leader, Corblimey had the Labour whip withdrawn in 2020, after he said anti-Semitism within Labour during his leadership had been ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons’, following a damning report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. 

That’s why its disingenuous. Corblimey’s entire leadership was, it seemed to me, forever being assailed not just by accusations of anti-Semitism within the party but accusations about the way those accusations were dealt with. 

Its dangerous because by suggesting that racism is a contributory, if not the primary reason that has motivated her treatment, then it not only calls into question the motives of those who are only too eager to find examples of racism everywhere, but it additionally creates a culture whereby that thinking takes root, allowing other racist incidents to be all too easily dismissed.

On a more obvious note, there was a headline in The Observer on Sunday ‘ Starmer on Abbott: ‘I’ve actually got more respect for Diane than she probably realises’, which to me seems like a back-handed compliment, if the starting point was way less than zero anyway.

Is it just me or does the conviction yesterday of Donald Trump remind anyone else of the show trials in the Russia of the 1930’s under Stalin? Where the charges, such as they were, were incidental. The main purpose of his trial, as I understand it, was to put Trump on trial for something, find him guilty and thus scupper his chances of being elected as President in November.

The more that I learn about the whole sordid affer, the more sordid it becomes. Yes paying a porn star to keep quiet about an alleged affair is sordid, but much more sordid is a prosecutor using frankly inconsequential misdemeanour and somehow turning into a serious felony to bolster his own electoral prospects.

Donald Trump isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a proponent of any kind of politics I’d defend, he is a rabble rouser who exploits peoples fears for his own ends. But isn’t that what politicians do, what they’ve always done and what this trial is about? 

I imagine that a fair amount of Trump opponents may have at best a few of the talking points that the media has relentlessly repeated over the last eight years to affirm why they revile him so but doesn’t this echo the constant lambasting that Boris’s Johnson has been subjected to?

Like I wrote, sordid and like it as not, this kind of of lawfare – the weaponisation of the law to achieve political ends – is already here and only going to get worse.

They were at it again yesterday in The Guardian, once more promulgating the totally disingenuous and blatantly self-serving idea that what is needed to combat the threats posed to humanity is to do everything except having less humanity. 

They published an article by David King, chair of the global Climate Crisis Advisory Group, entitled, ‘Humanity’s survival is still within our grasp – just. But only if we take these radical steps’. However, having read the article, he should be chair of the global society of ostrich impersonators, so deep is his head in the sand. Possibly that’s because he knew that the article was intended for The Guardian, which as I’ve pointed out on this blog before, has its entire business model predicated upon telling its readers what they want to hear in order that they keep funding it. 

Which they do, giving so much money in fact, that over half of its income comes through its readers. This means that instead of having one cigar chomping, pin stripe suit wearing and stinking rich old white man as proprietor, one who influences its editorial content to better advance his business interests, they have thousands of proprietors, many drinking fair trade coffee with soya milk, wearing ethically sourced clothing and who possibly identify as non-binary. All of whom are eager to read about how they can still have children and care about climate change.

Hence we have this this choice selection of pandering nonsense ‘But we have agency to change this, and a thriving future is still on the table. To grasp it, we must embark on a radical journey encompassing an essential “4R planet” pathway. This means: reducing emissions; removing the excess greenhouse gases (GHGs) already in the atmosphere; repairing ecosystems; and strengthening local and global resilience against inevitable climate impacts.’

All of which would no doubt help alleviate the situation, but the single most effective solution, the one would that would unquestioningly reduce global consumption and the energy needed to produce the things consumed, halt the expansion of cities by reducing overcrowding and therefore protect natural habitats more would be a curb on population. I have no idea how that might be achieved, only an awareness that whilst such an idea might be unpalatable to some, it doesn’t make it any less necessary.

The scale of the necessity of doing so is only matched by the political avoidance of even discussing it. Indeed, as the United Nations observed recently ‘The world’s population is more than three times larger than it was in the mid-twentieth century. The global human population reached 8.0 billion in mid-November 2022 from an estimated 2.5 billion people in 1950, adding 1 billion people since 2010 and 2 billion since 1998. The world’s population is expected to increase by nearly 2 billion persons in the next 30 years, from the current 8 billion to 9.7 billion in 2050 and could peak at nearly 10.4 billion in the mid-2080s.’

So whilst David King may worry that ‘the world is emitting over 50bn tonnes of GHGs annually into the atmosphere, expressed as CO2 equivalent. Since we are unlikely to achieve a removal rate exceeding 10bn tonnes per annum, there can be no way forward without reducing emissions to a very small figure.’, the most obvious way forward would be to reduce the numbers of humans producing those emissions in the first place, which to me is far more practical than changing the things consumed if there are increasing amounts of consumers to consume them. Or am I missing something?

And in an election campaign, when the electorate are hopefully more engaged with politics than at any other time, politicians should have the moral courage and integrity to be honest. They’re forever banging on about ‘needing to make difficult choices’, but to me there are two choices, one astoundingly simple and the other almost impossibly difficult. Is the current amount of people alive today sustainable and if we don’t want that number to increase, how do we achieve it?

So yes, ‘a seismic cultural shift is imperative to steer humanity away from self-destruction towards a just and sustainable future. We must realign our political will, economic priorities and societal values to recognise that ecological wellbeing is matched to human wellbeing.’ But if that ‘seismic cultural shift’  doesn’t involve addressing the most blindingly obvious causative factor of increased greenhouse gases, continued use of fossil fuels and and the increase of extreme weather events – an increasing population – then any changes are about much use as re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Deckchairs ethically sourced and made from sustainable materials by workers in the global south, if one is a Guardian reader of course  

One of the many reasons why the electorate holds politicians in such contempt is because they make wildly preposterous claims which they expect to be taken seriously. This wholly rational way of thinking has been borne out time and time again, but reaches a cyclical peak every general election campaign.

Nothing epitomises this truism more than taxes, specifically any claim a politician makes that they won’t raise taxes. Both the main parties will make this pledge that even as they make them they must know to be if not untrue, then highly improbable. Because in making such a pledge they deny reality by ignoring the challenges that the double-whammy of an increasing and ageing population population presents.

Yesterday it was Rachel Reeves Labours Shadow Chancellor turn. Speaking on BBC1’s ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’ she said that Labour supported lower taxes, but she would not put forward “unfunded proposals”. Pressed repeatedly on her tax plans, she said: “What I want and Keir [Starmer] wants is taxes on working people to be lower and we certainly won’t be increasing income tax or national insurance if we win at the election.

The bad news for her is that her notion of ‘want’ and ‘support’ is as effective as a child making a wish as they blow out the candles on their birthday cake. The demographics bear this out.

According to the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), whereas today 18% of the population is over the age of 65, by 2065 they predict it will be 26%. The OBR also has a lot of forecasts, analysis and projections that I’m sure are as fascinating as they are terrifying but what I takeaway from it is this; 26% of people in 2065 will be costing the state much more than they contribute. The older people get, the more they’ll be prone to age related illness, meaning more pressure on the NHS and because of the increasing onerous obligations that statutory social care places on councils, a state of affairs that’s clearly financially unsustainable.

And with 15% of the population predicted to be under 16 by 2065, that means that 41% of them will be paying no tax. Even if the OBR forecasts are wrong – and that hasn’t happened before, has it? – we still face the same problem albeit it being a tiny bit less of a problem. How on earth does Ms Reeves – or MisLeading as she is now – imagine this ever worsening problem is to be resolved?

She dare not because it is another truism of politics that the older someone is, the more likely to vote they are. No politician wants to risk the kind of political shitshow that engulfed Theresa May when she inexplicably chose to announce her plans to reform adult social care in the middle of her 2017 election campaign. But several large hats off to her for even attempting to be honest with the electorate about the sums of money involved. Adult social care alone cost £26.9 billion in 2021/22, up 3.8% from 2020/21 and the more older people there are and the more they keep living longer, that cost is only going to increase.

And then there’s pensions.

According to the OBR, pensions will account for 42% of the welfare budget this year, that’s £124 billion, the largest single expenditure and it follows that the more pensioners there are, and the longer that they live, the greater tax burden they’ll place on the decreasing amount of people paying that tax.

When the current crop of pensioners – those over 80 I’m talking about here – were adults of working age and paid tax, successive governments had a realistic expectation that their time as a pensioner might last for maybe 15 years or so. Wasn’t that the deal with state pensions? That their tax paid for the pensions of the old, and when they were old the tax paid by others paid for theirs. However, the Office for National Statistics estimates that by 2045 there will be 3.1 million of them or 4.3% of the population. So to my way of thinking, anyone over the age of 85 who is claiming a state pension is guilty of benefit fraud. It may well be through no fault of their own, but they’re still claiming a benefit to which they’re not entitled.

Not that I care too much about it as I’ll most likely be dead by 2065, at least I hope so if the meat runs out before then. But that doesn’t excuse the blatant sophistry of MisLeading, because whilst she may well rule out raising taxes, she doesn’t rule out introducing new ones, does she?

Did Londoners see the ULEZ scheme coming?