TORIES AREN’T ON A LEVEL

CHRISTIAN Wakeford, the Conservative MP for Bury South who defected to Labour, says that his decision came as a result of months of agonising over Boris Johnson’s Government blocking Labour (and Marcus Rashford’s) proposal for free school meals for hungry children, cutting Universal Credit while food and energy prices are soaring, tolerating Dominic Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle during lockdown “to test his eyesight”, the cost of living crisis, and now the nine – or is it ten? – parties which were held in Downing Street in defiance of the regulations which had been announced from podiums in a conference room just yards away.

But a particular reason for Wakeford abandoning the Conservatives was being threatened that, if he didn’t vote against free school meals, a town in his constituency which had been without a school for a decade would not get the school which was planned to be built.

So much for the claimed “levelling up” agenda, when the Government is prepared to deprive a town of a local school if its MP doesn’t vote the way they want.

Another Conservative MP for a North

West constituency, William Wragg, has reported similar threats to the Metropolitan Police.

But then no-one looking at the party of David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg could imagine that they care very much about state schools anyway.

Or that a Prime Minister who described the £250,000 he was paid for writing a newspaper column as “chicken feed”, and a party which defended the reported £6 million made by one of its MPs for legal work including defending foreign tax havens which deprive Britain of tax revenue for public services, has much concern about the rest of us at all.

Alex Tate