Aditya Chakrabortty
@chakrabortty
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I am gainfully employed by a newspaper. Future generations will not be able to say that.
Guardian Towers
Joined March 2009
What my mother’s glorious life taught me about Britain today. My column.
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Whatever side you're on, whatever your ethnicity, this is truly a historic moment. The UK has its first Goldman Sachs Prime Minister.
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If only Number 10 had acted as quickly and forcefully on the pandemic in March as it has to save Dominic Cummings.
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Priti Patel’s own parents left persecution in Uganda to come here. In 1972, Ted Heath agreed to take in 28,000 Ugandan Asians fleeing Idi Amin. 28,000 in one year, despite the protests of Enoch Powell. And the daughter of that generation does them a dishonour.
"We can not accommodate 20,000 people in one go.". Home Secretary @pritipatel tells @KayBurley it is "important" to have a system "that delivers" regarding the new Afghan refugee scheme. Latest: #KayBurley
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Dear students, your A-levels aren’t so important. What matters most is that your parents have a house in London or the south-east in which to put you up during internships and then to use as equity for you to buy your first home. Don’t change your grades! Change your parents.
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Just to clarify: the man who went to Whipps Cross hospital to make a political point and grandstand for cameras was not the father of a sick little girl being treated there. It was the Prime Minister.
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Amazing disease, this covid-19. Seems primarily to target the likes of Prince Charles and Idris Elba, but not nurses, homeless people or carers. I wonder why that is?.
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"Thems the breaks," they say to the 180,000 dead of Covid, the families enduring the biggest benefit cut since WW2, the schoolkids denied catch-up funding. "Thems the breaks." All just a game to these people.
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. @BBCNews shouldn’t euphemise Trump’s hate-speech. Telling people to ‘go back home’ Isn’t. “dog-whistle”, as described by @bbcnickrobinson: everyone can hear it. It’s not “racially-charged”. It’s straight out racist and journalists should call things what they are.
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Incredible to think that the government that dragged its heels for so long over providing £120 million summer meals to hungry kids will happily spend triple that - £500 million - for a gimmick of cutprice Nando's next month. Priorities, eh.
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The BBC website's report on @maitlis 's speech completely omits any mention of Robbie Gibb. As if the Corporation is seeking to confirm her argument about its censorship
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This am @BBCr4today discussed the economy with a private equity investor, a coalition minister and the editor of the Economist. All in happy consensus. Why are people from the same political perspective presented as experts? Why are they the only people who talk on the economy?.
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Priti Patel is at least consistent. She believes No Lives Matter.
BREAKING: Home Secretary Priti Patel says the toppling of a statue of slaver Edward Colston in Bristol is "utterly disgraceful", adding the police should 'follow up' on the incident
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Among the more remarkable things about living in Britain is that one school, Eton, has produced 20 of our prime ministers, yet this is not widely considered a symptom of a very sick democracy.
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Whatever party you support, the biggest story of the night must be that the far-right will now sit in Westminster. It will receive taxpayer money, get airtime.1 in 6 voters support a party whose representatives think Hitler was "brilliant" and call black people 'jungle bunnies'.
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It is quite possible to believe both that Boris Johnson is the most abject blame-shifter and that care homes are often run by Big Finance cowboys that pay staff poverty wages and treat them terribly. Because both are true.
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Just think what she went through to make that speech.
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Of course she's not racist. Some of her best friends are a funny tinge.
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It's just prejudice, mate.
Listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great mediaeval cathedrals. So much nicer than the aggressive-sounding “Allahu Akhbar.” Or is that just my cultural upbringing?
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Ah, Christmas. When we celebrate the birth of a child in Bethlehem on what is today the West Bank, and are supposed to ignore the killing of 10,000 children in Gaza.
Oxford Street, clogged up by an anti-Israel hate march on one of the busiest Christmas shopping days of the year. Don't know about anyone else, but I'm fed up of these perpetual, hateful, disruptive protests.
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The Notre Dame exposes the paradoxes of austerity politics:.Macron preaches cut for French people, yet swears a national effort to restore a cathedral.Billionaires squeal at paying higher taxes, yet can throw millions at this. We haven't moved far from the rich buying indulgences.
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Reason to be cheerful:.Voters humiliated Tommy Robinson, while electing former child refugee Magid Magid to the European Parliament. One guy has a lot of dry cleaning to do; the other will work on replacing our carbon economy. There’s a future for Britain beyond hate.
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Just ran him over, then reversed and ran him over again.
Let’s all take a moment to remember this, that look on Tommy Robinson’s face will never get old, absolutely rinsed him hahahaha
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“I’d rather more people died because they couldn’t get essential drugs than a modest redistribution from top earners.”
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Thus showing what a pernicious fiction NHS debt has been all along.
Blimey. @MattHancock writes off £13.4bn of NHS trusts’ debt, so they are not too financially constrained in tackling this crisis.
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Give him the marr show.
The story of the No. 10 Christmas Party last December. In 4 mins. Produced Michael Cox.
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This issue was edited by our current prime minister.
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Boris Johnson has just thrown away £100m on his fake campaign. For reference, £100m is more than my council gets from the govt each year.
NEW: After a lot of money spent, the government has just confirmed its "Get Ready for Brexit" public information camapign will "pause.".
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Perhaps because broadcasters have lower standards than voters.
No-one in the UK will be able to vote for @Nigel_Farage & no-one voted for him to lead his party but he is, undoubtedly, one of the big players in this election. Funny old world.
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It was never a choice between 'lives' and 'the economy'. It was always a case of choosing to preserve both, by locking down tightly and early; by protecting key workers and care homes'; by developing a decent test and trace system. On each of those issues, Boris Johnson failed.
The worst of both worlds: how the UK suffered the largest recession in the G7 and the highest excess death rate in Europe (graphs by @nicucalcea).
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It must be said: coronavirus has not ruined the UK; it has exposed the systemic ruin already here. My column .
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@edballs No bitterness, Ed. But when people say they're not voting because politicians are all alike and treat their lives as disposable, then a podcast in which two old dance partners chortle over austerity makes their case very neatly.
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Rishi Sunak is clearly a nice man but he is giving Britain a cocktail umbrella to take into a hurricane.
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The bleakness of this moment is that we are back in the grip of austerity and anti-democracy -- when we are in this mess because of austerity and failed democracy. Neither Boris Johnson and esp not Liz Truss were properly scrutinised by their MPs, their party members, the press.
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Much as I respect and admire Laura Kuenssberg, she might look at her water bills and rail fares for evidence that Tory governments have done this to us before.
Big political question about whether any UK govt would ever do a deal that made medicines much more expensive for the NHS, and therefore the taxpayer - would be massively costsly for the govt and likley deeply unpopular.
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This girl doesn't look old enough to have been in Labour's 2019 conference, Sir Keir.
A little girl was injured in an Israeli air strike in the Nusairat refugee camp, central Gaza.
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Bizarre argument. In 2020 the NHS paid £400m a month for the entire capacity of private hospitals, but 2/3rds went unused -- bc private hospitals don't have doctors of their own. They contract NHS medics to work in their spare time.
"Using the private sector to bring down NHS waiting lists is effective, it’s popular with patients, but it comes at a cost," says shadow health secretary Wes Streeting. "We have to spend more taxpayers' money" when resolving NHS backlogs in private care.
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The Tories: They can't begin Brexit talks, they can't do a Queen's Speech. They can't govern. What keeps them in place is self-entitlement.
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In all my life, I have never felt so close to Danny Dyer.
Danny Dyer on the @David_Cameron 'legacy' in 30 seconds #GoodEveningBritain .
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I and others had to deal with exactly this type of idiot throughout the 80s. Now he's back and I'll have to spend the next decade dealing with him all over again.
One of the attitudes that felt so emboldened by #BorisJohnson's #GE2019 win to come out last night and confront anti-racist #NotMyPrimeMinister protestors (Warning: contains offensive and racist language). #AntiRacism #AntiFascism #FarRight
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compare/contrast:
. @campbellclaret accuses Green Party of "nastiness" for publishing a list of MPs who did not vote for a ceasefire and says it is 'intimidating' behaviour and draws comparisons with the killings of Jo Cox and David Amess . #TrevorPhillips 📺 Sky 501
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After centuries of looting India, the British tried to head off independence by a strategy of divide and rule. Over decades, they created the conditions for the bloodshed of Partition. Over 14 million Indians lost their homes, up to 2 million died. Learn history; don't talk balls
India in 1947 had rather less difficulty gaining its independence than we are having in 2017 leaving the Brussels empire. Time for Boris to go the full Gandhi.
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Fuel duty frozen; bus fares up 50%. All hail the green transition!.
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Nigel Farage has been an MEP for over 18 years. He has been campaigning for a seat in Westminster since 1994.
My contempt for career politicians knows no bounds.
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A man says in tears that his mum and family were killed in Gaza, and the local Labour party sits by while the police throw him out of the room like a piece of rubbish.
"I LOST MY FAMILY IN GAZA!" A Palestinian who lost his mother, brother & nieces to Israel's bombing in Gaza confronts Angela Raynor & the Labour Party at a Stockport fundraiser. How can the Labour Party & any party not call for a ceasefire when Israel's genocide has killed 25000
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Sunak suggesting that the UK is heading for a Corona-recession, cleverly defecting from the fact that the economy was already flatlining before this epidemic.
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Ofcom rules it is not unfair and no distortion to refer to the IEA as “a hard-right lobby group” of “questionable provenance, with dubious ideas and validity”. Hats off to .@mrjamesob !
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It never was, really.
Is Brexit even about Brexit any more?.
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If this is true, which is worse: the psychopath who dreamed up this strategy, or the baboons who couldn't see anything wrong in it?.
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Oh my god, they've torn a hole in the space-time continuum
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Alexa, remind me which candidate for the Tory leadership admitted to taking class A drugs.
I really believe that if we don’t open schools we are going to lose a generation. The parks are full of teenagers drinking and smoking weed. It’s the most vulnerable kids who will suffer, risking getting sucked into crime and drugs. Sometimes school is their only chance.
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Quits because of what’s in tomorrow’s papers rather than because of his role in 150,000 deaths, allowing Covid to rip through care homes, nurses wearing binbags, handing contracts to his mate the pub landlord. Shameless.
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How about just ridding it of the private sector leeches?
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My word, @pollytoynbee said everything you'd want to say to him and it was glorious.
“This man has done such harm and damage to this country… your treatment of the poorest people in this country has been despicable”. Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee makes her feelings about George Osborne clear . @pollytoynbee | #newsnight | @EvanHD | @George_Osborne
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@edballs @TheLastLeg As i said, I'm not bitter, although i'm sorry to give offence. As for not chortling over austerity, here's last week lovely tale from your podcast about how George decided the Queen's bagpipes were worth way more than kids living in warm homes
How Queen Elizabeth stopped @George_Osborne from making cuts to the Highland bagpipe school 🏴👸🏼. 🎧 Listen to Political Currency:
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I don't use the term gammon but my goodness hasn't it helped white men realise that they are the true victims of racism.
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The cap will hit £6,616 by April, say Cornwall Insight, and will remain just under £6,000 into Christmas 2023. When a market is unable to deliver an essential commodity at an affordable price it has failed. This is a failed market, yet we still pretend it is fit for purpose.
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I’d say she’s about three weeks and one interview from pegging it all out.
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When Taylor Swift sings on London Boy:."And now I love high tea, stories from Uni/.and the West End.You can find me in the pub/.we are watching rugby with his school friends". Why has no one told her that her boyfriend went to Durham and is an utter prick?.
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Richard Sharp, who "was once Rishi Sunak’s boss at Goldman Sachs. and has made donations to the Conservative party". HOW NICE!.
Former Goldman Sachs banker Richard Sharp to be next BBC chairman
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So why isn't the government forcing pubs and restaurants to shut?.
“The mixing in pubs and restaurants… needs to stop.”. Sir Patrick Vallance says that unless everyone - young and old - start social distancing, “it doesn’t have the effect.” Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty warns that healthy young people are also susceptible to the illness.
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Same magazine, three weeks ago: "She has a streak of radicalism that matches the seriousness of the problems Britain faces. She is impatient with the orthodoxies of the Treasury and in lockstep with Kwasi Kwarteng. And Ms Truss has a useful habit of surprising on the upside".
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So the country marches toward massive unemployment next year and the chancellor is considering cutting Universal Credit. Right.
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Dear @susannareid100 , what @ross_greer says is provocative, but i don't find it as shocking as Churchill's willingness to starve Indians. Some 3 million people died in the famine of 1943.
‘Churchill was a white supremacist mass murderer’ - @Ross_Greer, Green Party MSP. In a fiery debate, @piersmorgan and @susannareid100 discuss Ross Greer’s controversial comments about Winston Churchill. #GMB
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So much for Labour’s rights for workers. A decision pending for over a year, an investigation that finished months ago, and finally this, just before the final deadline. A party leader who proclaims his socialism while hugging Poison Elphicke close and treating Abbott like muck.
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Both feted and gilded, Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak are two sides of the same rotten politics.My column.
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Ridiculous treatment of @KateOsamor.
Labour MP Kate Osamor has had the whip suspended following her Holocaust Memorial Day post
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Keir Starmer is entitled to his own views on a British Indian PM, but why is he censoring those of a British Indian woman? . There is a word for that, and it's not nice.
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The press has spent months investigating anti-semitism on the left. The Tory Home Secretary spits a stream of xenophobia and they applaud.
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I went through the evidence for how Driscoll was barred by Labour: it was bureaucratic bullying, made worse by a campaign of smears and insinuation - eagerly repeated by journalists who didn’t check basic facts. As he says here, voters everywhere deserve better.
I’ve decided to resign from @UKLabour and serve as an Independent Mayor. People are tired of being controlled by Westminster and Party HQs. They want someone to stand up for them. Let the people decide. £25k by end of Aug & I’ll stand as North East Mayor👉
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Ken Loach out, Trevor Philips in. What a state of affairs.
'Labour HQ finally decided I'm not fit to be a member of their party, as I will not disown those already expelled. Well. ' KL.
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This are blatantly racist remarks. Lee Anderson should lose the whip and removed from GB News.
Tory MP Lee Anderson discussing Sadiq Khan on GB News:. “He’s given our capital city away to his mates”:. “I don’t actually believe that the Islamists have got control of our country, but what I do believe is they’ve got control of Khan, and they’ve got control of London."
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A Filipino-origin nurse administering a vaccine developed by two children of Turkish migrants. Brexit Britain has a lot for which to thank migrants.
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The most important political event of today isn't Boris Johnson's speech; it's that short-term gas prices have shot up 40% in one day. And it's not even cold yet.
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Your regular reminder that this is only the Withdrawal Agreement. Over the next decade, Britain will burn through Prime Ministers like a start up gets through dollars.
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Sixty-five thousand Britons are dead, and the UK is now a cautionary tale in how not to handle a pandemic. Yet this man still gets to make the headlines on non-stories, while his government whips up hatred against asylum-seekers. Conman politics.
"I think it's time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history" says @BorisJohnson on Rule Britannia! row at BBC proms
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No, strip them of their pretend-charity status and use the increased tax to fund education for the other 93% of children.
Education Minister Nadhim Zahawi says private schools should open their doors to more looked-after children to preserve their charitable status @nicholaswatt | #newsnight | @nadhimzahawi
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Congratulations to the brave and tireless @carolecadwalla.
Congratulations to @carolecadwalla who has just received the 2018 @stieglarssonpri.ze, awarded annually to a writer working in the spirit of the great Stieg Larsson, for her exposure of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. 🙌
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When this debacle is all over, books will be written on how the ageing greybacks of Remain spent three years sobbing on TV sofas about leaving the EU yet seemingly not a moment on planning how to stop it. The fundamental unseriousness and mega ego of these people drives me mad.
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A good man, treated abysmally.
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Nothing in Liz Truss's political career became her like the leaving of it. Late to her own declaration. Getting slow-handclapped. Not speaking from the stage to thank her own volunteers and staff. Graceless, charmless, cowardly.
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Thanks for all the follows and mentions after last night's #bbcqt. The Tory cllr who failed to shout me down should look at the facts about disabled people and the benefits system. But he was a rare ignoramus in a clued-up audience.
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More private sector consultants work for Dido Harding’s Test and Trace operation than civil servants in the Treasury at a cost of £375 million. Astounding from @BylineTimes.
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Watch the bit from 3'30". Honestly, this government oversee such savagery.
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Strange times when the imposition of a lockdown feels like it’s come too late, but Johnson has been lethally complacent throughout this crisis. A decade of cuts means there aren’t the police to enforce this and there isn’t the NHS capacity to handle the human fallout.
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I remember hearing about common sense from another senior Conservative, Jacob Rees-Mogg on the people who died in the Grenfell fire.
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Personally, I wish more people would talk about the ethnic divisions of Brexit politics
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The problem isn’t over-population; it’s over-consumption.
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Got to applaud the grown up government of leaking national lockdown to newspapers on Friday night, holding a press conference on Monday afternoon then bringing it in. on Wednesday?.
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Apart from anything else, the leader of the opposition has just scored what any journalist would recognise as a massive scoop.
Jeremy Corbyn is giving out a 100-plus page unredacted document marked "OFFICIAL - SENSITIVE (UK eyes only)" to journalists. Civil Servants will have marked it like this for a reason. And he wants to be Prime Minister in just over a fortnight's time. #GE2019.
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The way these guys say Saj, like he's their only Asian friend.
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Lest we forget: Dido Harding, who launched test and trace in England, is ex-McKinsey. The consultants were liasing directly with her. Cosy.
Consultants at McKinsey were paid £19k *a day* at the peak of the pandemic to advise the UK government on the "vision and narrative" of its chaotic test and trace programme .
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Fascinating to see Jo Swinson turn the LibDems into David Cameron’s Tory party, only without the polish and fiscal bribery. A segment of Britons will back a socially-liberal, economically-conservative party, but that is the same failed policy mix that helped produce Brexit.
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Kent a giant lorry park.Families unable to see each other at Christmas .The pound in a nosedive.Schools in chaos. You know if this were a Labour government they’d be calling this the winter of discontent.
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