Ruislip & Eastcote & Northwood Gazette

Rishi’s mandate from the 2019 manifesto

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LONG reign PM Rishi! He claims to have a mandate from the 2019 manifesto, the ‘Get Brexit Done’ one. I’ll admit, I’m a policy wonk. I read all the manifestos and vote accordingl­y.

For those that don’t, here are the dozen promises on which Rishi claims your votes:

1) Get Brexit done by January 2020. Buyer’s remorse, anyone? Farmers, fishermen, global companies, Irish, inflation on imported food perhaps?

2) 50,000 new nurses: even Piers Morgan saw through that one because 20,000 already worked for the NHS.

3) No income, VAT or NI rises. Let’s play truth or dare; or hokey cokey ...

4) No one to sell their home for care. Hello? Hello? Anyone listening? 2019 oven ready deal got smoked there.

5) Net zero 2050. Government never had to cash this cheque, so they didn’t.

6) Insulate 2.2 million homes. £9.2 billion promised! I’m so glad you were protected from increased energy prices at source because your home is now insulated and warm. Sorry if not, write a strongly worded letter to your MP.

7) Net migration under 100,000. That ship sailed. More accurately, those 1,800 small boats sailed.

8) Continue roll-out of Universal Credit. So, 1.2 million unemployed [ONS]. Hypothetic­al: you, yes you, lose your job. Are you going to take a zero hours contract on minimum wage in the certain knowledge that you can’t both feed your kids and keep the lights on? 14 million using food banks [Trussell Trust]: that’s a quarter of the UK population, think about it. And most of these adults have jobs; or two jobs.

9) Surely the “two million new high-quality jobs in clean growth” will fix this? Three years in so that’s 600,000 jobs already!

10) 250,000 extra childcare places. Please let the Mirror know if you have one.

11) Democracy Commission. Very specific: Boris got upset because the highest court in the UK ruled his proroguing of parliament illegal.

What’s *not* in there is AUSTERITY. In summary, from the Conservati­ve 2019 manifesto we got none of the good stuff, and now we’re getting austerity to bail out Trussenomi­cs.

And in case you think I’m a lefty liberal, I voted for Maggie. Once. When the riots started, looked at the state of the UK and decided, ‘I’ve had enough. This must change.’ The UK voted differentl­y. And it did. Mike Garrard

by email

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