Food bank charity told to stop criticising benefit system or face shut-down – by the government

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BBC, benefit, benefits, blackmail, change, charity, Chris Mould, Citizens Advice Bureau, Conservative, critic, Daily Mail, Department, DWP, food bank, government, Iain Duncan Smith, IDS, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Pensions, people, policies, policy, politics, Reform, report, returned to unit, RTU, shut down, smear, social security, system, Tories, Tory, Trussell Trust, Vox Political, welfare, work

What would you do in that situation?

It seems that food bank charity The Trussell Trust has been making too many waves around the Conservative-led Coalition government’s policies regarding benefits, social security and welfare.

Readers may recall how the charity warned that Coalition policies had created a need for a huge expansion in the number of food banks across the UK. The Tories countered this by accusing the trust of “misleading and emotionally manipulative publicity-seeking”, and also of “aggressively marketing [its] services”.

After this failed to make a dent in public opinion, the Daily Mail tried to discredit the trust by claiming it was handing out food parcels without checking whether the people claiming them were bona fide.

But it turned out that the paper’s claim of “inadequate checks on who claims the vouchers, after a reporter obtained three days’ worth of food simply by telling staff at a Citizens Advice Bureau – without any proof – that he was unemployed” was not true. The reporter in fact committed fraud by telling a string of lies in order to falsely claim his food parcel in a flagrant abuse of the system.

The public response was immediate – donations to the Trussell Trust’s fundraising appeal shot through the roof.

Now the government has tried a different tack: blackmail. Instead of trying to justify the government’s position or undermine that taken by the trust in public, it has been revealed that, recently, “someone in power” told trust bosses that the government “might try to shut you down” if the trust continued to cause it embarrassment.

This detail was revealed while Trussell Trust chairman Chris Mould was giving evidence to the Panel on the Independence of the Voluntary Sector this week.

The Trussell Trust is in a fairly robust position with regard to government interference; a 2005 decision by the charity’s trustees to avoid seeking government funding means it is in a better position to resist pressure.

But the trust has to consider the worst-case scenario. If the government did manage to shut it down, hundreds of thousands of people would starve.

That is the real threat posed by the Conservative-led government. Shutting down the Trussell Trust won’t hurt anybody who runs the charity or volunteers for it.

But it could kill food bank users across the country.

It is exactly the kind of covert, backstabbing move we have come to expect from the likes of Iain Duncan Smith.

Oh, come on! You knew RTU (it means Returned To Unit and is our tribute to his Army career) would figure in this article somewhere.

According to Mr Mould, he received a phone call from “someone” in the office of the Secretary-in-a-State about Work and Pensions, back in 2011. He said it was “basically to tell me that the boss was very angry with us because we were publicising the concerns we have over the rising number of people who were struggling as a consequence of delays and inefficiences in the benefits system”.

Unfortunately – for sly abusers like Duncan Smith – the kind of threats recorded above are really only useful when they are kept secret. The idea is always to present the victim with a double-bind – in this case, not only would food bank users suffer, but the Trussell Trust would get the blame for having withdrawn the service (whether voluntarily or not).

Now that we all know the government itself is putting the screws on – and is doing so in retaliation against the Trussell Trust’s entirely legitimate attempts to raise awareness of government policies’ disastrous effects – it would be electoral suicide.

That being said, watch Iain Duncan Smith on Question Time today.

He’s probably stupid enough to go through with it anyway.

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Heavy rain expected to increase flood risk – in Newark?

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blackmail, bribery, by election, candidate, christies, Conservative, constituency, David Cameron, EA, economic threat, electoral fraud, Environment Agency, flood, George Osborne, house, mansion, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, misinformation, newark, people, politics, risk, The Guardian, Tories, Tory, Vox Political, winter

According to the Environment Agency, there is a “low but increased risk of flooding this weekend across the whole of England, as isolated torrential downpours are predicted”.

The Environment Agency is monitoring the situation and is also supporting local authorities who will respond to any reports of surface water flooding.

One can’t help but wonder if Newark is among the places threatened. The constituency that is hosting today’s by-election was hit badly by the winter floods that hit between November last year and February, but was sidelined by both politicians and the news media, who preferred sites in Oxfordshire and Somerset that were easy to reach along the M4.

Conservatives have been dangling the promise of extra money for flood defences in front of voters like a carrot for donkeys, according to The Guardian, which said George Osborne told residents: “I can’t make the announcement today, it wouldn’t be proper, but I think people in this community can rest assured that I have seen this for myself, I have listened to the community and we will act.”

The paper added that Southwell locals had indicated David Cameron had also been talking to local people about the flood money bid on Monday.

Will the Tories do anything about it if they lose? Doubtful.

Isn’t that electoral fraud, then? Blackmail, economic threats (flooding has a severe effect on local businesses), bribery… misinformation at the very least?

In that case, never mind their candidate’s undeclared directorship of Christie’s and £1.3 million house.

The Tories deserve to lose because they are trying to bribe the voters.

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Tories and scandal (go together like a horse and carriage)

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Scene of the – er – indiscretions: The Light ApartHotel in Manchester. [Image: Sunday Mirror.]

The Party of Sleaze shoots itself in the foot yet again.

It seems the Conservative Party has been keeping documentary evidence of Tory MPs’ indiscretions, crimes and bad behaviour in a “black book” (actually a blue folder), but this has now been destroyed for fear that the Party might be forced to reveal its contents under the Freedom of Information Act.

The information in the “book”, which was destroyed a little more than four years ago as the Tories prepared for the 2010 general election, was used by party whips – its official title was “Whips’ Notes” – if they needed to persuade a colleague to support legislation they opposed, or a minister under fire.

Sources within the Conservative Party say this persuasion did not go as far as blackmail – although you are perfectly entitled to form your own opinion about this, dear reader.

The book’s existence was revealed by the Sunday Mirror, which also carried details of several more ‘sleaze’ scandals, including allegations that:

• Taxpayers indirectly funded a £2,500 suite in the Light ApartHotel, used for a gay sex party during the Conservative Party’s 2011 conference in Manchester.
• Senior Conservatives regularly tried to seduce male parliamentary workers after getting drunk at the House of Commons.
• MPs and peers used ‘date rape’ drugs on junior activists, and paid for abortions after getting their staff pregnant.

The claims are eerily reminiscent of sleaze scandals from the Conservative Parliaments of 1979-1997, in which Cecil Parkinson was forced to resign after impregnating his secretary; David Mellor’s extra-curricular sporting activities with Antonia de Sancha; and sex scandals involving Tim Yeo and the Earl of Caithness.

The headline of this article is based on a song and is intended to evoke comparisons between ‘love and marriage’ and ‘Tories and scandal’.

To close, let’s remember another well-known saying and conclude that if a leopard cannot change its spots, neither can a Tory resist sleaze.

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What a fool: Cameron considers joining condemnation of his own government’s Queen’s speech

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Cameron contrite while Farage laughs: The longer the Crime – sorry, Prime – Minister wavers over Europe, the more of a fool he makes himself seem.

David Cameron seems determined to make his mark on the history books as the worst Prime Minister never to be elected in the United Kingdom.

Yesterday we learned that he is giving serious thought to supporting a Parliamentary vote that would condemn the Queen’s speech – that now-notoriously sparse proclamation of forthcoming legislation, spat out by Her Majesty like a rotting carcass last Wednesday – for failing to mention any law allowing an in-out referendum on Europe.

It’s as though he’s going out of his way to make a fool of himself.

Perhaps he is running scared of UKIP, a party that won the votes of just over 7.5 per cent of the British voting population in the local elections and is therefore – still – a considerable distance from forming any kind of threat to the Conservatives, who we should remember are the oldest, ugliest and nastiest political organisation in the country.

More likely, he’s running scared of his own backbenchers, who have become considerably more restless about Europe since the (perceived) rise of UKIP to prominence. It’s a false belief, based on the fact that the Eurosceptic party got 25 per cent of the vote in the locals. Total voter turnout was only 31 per cent, so a quarter of that means only 7.5+ per cent voted UKIP.

We should also remember that UKIP supporters were more likely to vote in this year’s elections as theirs was a vote of protest against the government, supporting the party they believe to represent that protest. Others were more likely to believe the locals were irrelevant in the larger scheme of things and stay at home.

However, Tories are not highly-regarded for their understanding and good stewardship of statistics – look at the example of Iain Duncan Smith – so it seems they’re putting the screws on Cameron.

This has been accentuated by calls to quit Europe from ex-heavyweights Nigel Lawson and Michael Portaloo, and the claim by Bore-us Johnson that leaving the EU will not harm the UK’s economy.

It’s as though they are going out of their way to make a fool of him.

You see, there are two very good reasons why Cameron should not support a vote that undermines the measures in the Queen’s speech:

Firstly: He wrote it. Even if he was not responsible for the exact wording, it is the document that outlines the legislative programme for the forthcoming year, to be followed by the government of which Cameron is the leader – and it follows, therefore, that he must have had the final say about it.

If he supports a vote against it, the public can conclude either that he is not a man of principle but one who does whatever he thinks will win him the support he needs, whether it is right or wrong, or that he is a brainless fool who didn’t pay enough attention to the content of the speech.

Secondly: No Parliament can bind the next. It is likely that ‘enabling’ legislation for a vote on EU membership was left out of the Queen’s speech for the very good reason that the vote will not take place during the lifetime of the current Parliament. Cameron has always stated that it would take place after an outright Conservative victory in 2015 – partly to blackmail Eurosceptic voters into supporting his party at that poll, but also because his Liberal Democrat Coalition partners won’t support a vote while they are a part of the government.

Finally, it seems Cameron should have remembered the coda at the end of the speech. It said, “Other measures will be laid before you.”

In other words, provision had been made, already, for legislation that was not included in the speech. He didn’t have to say or do anything.

It’s as though he’s going out of his way to make a fool of himself.

Postscript: New information has been passed to me which casts the situation in a whole new light.

The parliament.org website includes a page about procedures in a hung parliament such as, for example, that under which we are all currently living.

It states: “The first parliamentary test of a minority or coalition government is the vote on an amendment to the Queen’s Speech.  If the Queen’s Speech is amended, the Prime Minister must resign.”

Let’s all hope that this amendment is won and Cameron supports it. Because, guess what?

It’s as though he’s going out of his way to make a fool of himself!

Post-postscript: According to the New Statesman, the Commons Information Office reckons a defeat on the Queen’s speech no longer constitutes a vote of no confidence in the government. That Bill offered a definition of a ‘no confidence’ vote for the first time, meaning that a defeat on the planned legislative programme or, say, the Budget, are no longer regarded as votes of no confidence in the government.

That seems wrong to me; if Parliament doesn’t support the planned legislative programme (or spending plans, in the case of the Budget) then it follows logically that Parliament does not have confidence in the government that devised it.

Whatever happens, it seems this Conservative Prime Minister is happy not to conserve an ancient Parliamentary convention, if it doesn’t suit him.