Dom and Dumber and their sick disaster movie
Ex-MSPs’ grant to help adjust to new life is a joke
Thousands of Scots have lost their jobs during the Covid crisis.
More than a quarter of firms report the possibility of redundancies over the next three months.
Many of us face an uncertain future.
Yet 43 ex-MSPs, who stood down or lost their seats, are pocketing a total of £ 2.2million taxpayers’ cash in “resettlement grants” to help them adjust to life outside the Scottish Parliament.
Disgraced former finance secretary Derek Mackay’s getting £53,725 despite shamefully sending inappropriate texts to a 16-year-old schoolboy.
This is a scandal and an affront to every worker.
This is what passes for government in the UK: a cross between Dad’s Army and The Thick of It... with dashes of disaster movie Independence Day thrown in.
And because of this farcical performance by a cast of amateurs: “Tens of thousands of people died who did not need to die.”
We could describe Johnson and his cabinet as laughably inept if 128,000 Covid deaths weren’t blinding us with tears of sorrow and loss.
Dominic Cummings’ evidence to the parliamentary select committee confirmed all our worst fears. This country is run by a gaggle of entitled, squabbling posh boys who fight each other for the highest of public office while hiding like cowards from the responsibility that comes with it. All they want is the glory. And the fancy wallpaper. And a future seat in the Lords.
To hell with the rest of us.
These toadies will cower in a cupboard during a crisis, sliding out notes that say “it’s not my fault”.
So when Covid-19 arrived, Downing Street was ready to tackle it with some white boards and felt-tip pens and a room full of people all blaming each other for misplacing a mythical “plan”.
Plan? What plan? A seating plan? A dinner plan? A pandemic response plan? Nope. No plans. We had no plans whatsoever. Remember how we didn’t have a Brexit plan? It was just like that.
Bojo was sneering at the significance of “Kung-Flu” and wanted to have himself injected with the virus, live on TV, to prove there was nothing to fear.
Advisers suggested the spiffing idea of “chicken pox”’ parties, like we used to have in the 70s, to generate herd immunity.
Panicking Health Minister Matt Hancock seemed to have a breakdown and answered “yes” to questions when he clearly meant “no”. Questions like “have we got enough PPE?” and “are you ready to start mass testing?” and “could you even run a bath, never mind a government department?”
There was a further distraction from the crucial “should we lockdown now?” head-scratching when the PM’s pregnant girlfriend, Carrie Symonds, went “crackers” at a newspaper report about her rescue dog and demanded the No10 press office swing into action on behalf of mutt Dilyn.
A bad comedy with an end-of-the-world plot.
Forget about the poor folk who were about to lose their lives through official ineptitude.
Forget that the NHS was facing collapse, thereby abandoning those who survived Covid to the ravages of other illnesses.
Forget that not a single person in charge knew what to do. They’d have struggled to respond to an outbreak of nits at the local primary.
Now Cummings is certainly a disgruntled narcissist hell-bent on bringing down his one-time pal.
And his explanation of his Barnard Castle excursion gets no more plausible with the telling.
So why should we believe him? Because this time he can back it up. He gathers evidence when it suits him.
He was scrupulous in keeping detailed notes, messages and even photos during this time at No10; a clever dung beetle busily hoarding poop so he could throw it at the fan later.
And it was the detail which made his testimony so compelling: the dates, the times, the names, the vivid images of Bojo “cannoning around”, “changing his mind 10 times a day”, of a shocked civil servant bursting in to declare “we’re absolutely f*****”.
We’re left with one abiding question: what on earth does Johnson have to do to get thrown out on his woefully inept but remarkably robust backside?
It’s just three weeks since this unfit PM and his shower of right-wing incompetents swept to victory in the English local elections, conquering heroes with a reinforced mandate to govern.
That other populace clown, Donald Trump, once boasted he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose voters.
Johnson has presided over the needless deaths of thousands. His closest, most trusted adviser admits “when the public needed us most, the government failed”. What will it take to bring this terrible B-movie government to an end? Please. Someone. A plan.