The visionaries amongst us

+Talk about swearing at the radio. Listening this evening to Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Impoverishment and Penury being interviewed by Evan Davis about Labour’s proposed £5 billion a year cuts to welfare payments was an excruciating experience. She’s told us the figure for the financial saving (which of course is not the main driver of change) but when asked by Davis how many people would now find work as a result of their new ’incentive’ to do so she declined to answer, merely telling us that we had to wait for a ’due process’ of the Office of Budget Responsibility to look into it. Why weren’t they asked to come up with an answer before she made her statement to the House of Commons? Shades of Truss here I think. Barely a week goes by without more justification for me having torn up my Labour Party membership card. But maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps we’ll just have to wait to hear how much extra the government is going to pour into the Employment Service (or whatever it’s called these days) to help people get back to work. Perhaps food banks too will get some government support. They’ll need it.
 
+Somewhat buried by today’s news of the government’s Scrooge-like impersonation was a suggestion from the leader of the opposition that perhaps the 2050 target of reaching net zero carbon emissions needs to be abandoned, lest it hurts our living standards. I’m not surprised—the Tories are fighting Reform on their hard-right flank—but this pronouncement surely must demolish any suggestion that Kemi Bad Enoch has any intellectual capacity whatsoever. On the climate change front, and with a load full of caveats, Tony Blair is beginning to look like a positive saint. I do feel a bit sorry for Ed Miliband though. He is attacked daily by the right-wing press (who obviously have Bad Enoch’s ear) and is clearly having to fight a rearguard action in government on climate change, in which Rachel Reeves’ love of new airports seems paramount.