When they let their guard down, politicians can reveal their true colours.
Education secretary Michael Gove on Socialist Party member Martin Powell-Davies:
“Martin Powell-Davies of the National Union of Teachers National Executive has claimed that our education reform plans will make teaching ‘a totally unbearable profession’. It has come to something when the General-Secretary of the NUT ranks almost as a voice of moderation. But even though Christine Blower doesn’t indulge in the hyperbole of others she still presents teaching as a profession in the grip of some terrible malaise.”
See electmartin1.blogspot.co.uk for Martin’s response
Ian Liddell-Grainger, MP for Bridgewater and West Somerset and descendent of Queen Victoria, on anti-badger cull campaigners after finding a dead badger on his doorstep:
“I thought most of them were in the habit of lying in bed until the pubs open, or until the postman arrives with the benefit cheque (or do such things get paid straight into their accounts these days?).
“Either way, since they are all malingerers and scroungers there is no real incentive to leap out of bed as soon as the dawn chorus strikes up.”
Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom, on foreign aid:
“How we can possibly be giving a billion pounds a month when we’re in this sort of debt to bongo bongo land is completely beyond me.
“To buy Ray-Ban sunglasses, apartments in Paris, Ferraris and all the rest of it that goes with most of the foreign aid.
“F18s for Pakistan. We need a new squadron of F18s. Who’s got the squadrons? Pakistan, where we send the money.”
A second entry for Michael Gove, showing awareness and sensitivity on the reasons people are forced to turn to foodbanks:
“I had the opportunity to visit a foodbank in my constituency only on Friday and I appreciate that there are families who do face considerable pressures.
“It’s often as a result of some decisions that have been taken by those families which mean that they are not best able to manage their finances.”
Caerphilly Labour council seems to have taken Gove’s comments on board and is considering compulsory money management courses for anyone in rent arrears because of the bedroom tax.
Universities minister David Willetts explains why it’s feminism, not neoliberalism, that’s responsible for the lack of ‘social mobility’:
The feminist revolution in its first-round effects was probably the key factor. Feminism trumped egalitarianism.
It is not that I am against feminism, it’s just that is probably the single biggest factor. One of the things that happened over that period was that the entirely admirable transformation of opportunities for women meant that with a lot of the expansion of education in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the first beneficiaries were the daughters of middle-class families who had previously been excluded from educational opportunities.”
Tory MP for Scarborough, Robert Goodwill, showed what he thinks of young unemployed people when attacking the Youth Fight for Jobs Jarrow March in 2011 after false press reports about the march:
“They are not fit to walk in the memory of the Jarrow marchers. If this is their level of commitment no wonder they can’t find a job.
“It must have been a big shock to have to get up in the morning and march rather than watch Jeremy Kyle.”
The Jarrow Marchers responded with this song, to the tune of Clementine:
Robert Goodwill
Robert Goodwill
Do you even know our names?
Just a Tory on a high horse
Are you that scared of our gains?
Goodwill’s hunting
Goodwill’s hunting
For the rights that we have won
For the youth clubs, for the healthcare
Just another Thatcher son
Where’s the goodwill
Robert Goodwill?
Where’s your human decency?
One in five youth on the Dole now
And you still refuse to see
Rob the public
Rob the public
Strip away the welfare state
Haunted by the 1930s
And you think we’ll sit and wait
What we saw
Andy McSmith for the Independent on 11 September:
The newspapers today all reported that Ed Miliband’s most uncomfortable moment during his visit to Bournemouth for the TUC conference was when Janice Godrich, President of the PCS civil service union, demanded a ‘yes or no’ answer to whether he was for or against austerity.
Ms Godrich is a member of the Trotskyite Socialist Party, successor to what used to be known as the Militant Tendency.
It was in that same hall in Bournemouth that Neil Kinnock launched his campaign to drive Militant members out of the Labour Party. You can say this was Militant’s revenge.
