Misjudging the crowd

Conservative MPs have spent the weekend trying to defend their position in refusing to pay for school meals for hungry poor children outsie or term times.

A petition has reached 800,000 names and will force a new debate in the Commons, and after the £25,000 food subsidy each MPs gets a year to spend in the subsidised restaurants in Parliament, the mood in the country is nasty.

Thing is, the UK is addicted to charity.

Charity is a good thing, people who have little give some of what they can't afford to help those in even more dire straights. Thing is, we shouldn't have to. UK taxplayers pay more than enough to fund the NHS, free medicines, free schools, dentistry, school books, and on and on and on. Just that MPs choose not to.

In Germany there is little charity and people feel they pay enough in taxes, as do we. Charity lets the Government off the hook in allowing them to divert money to where its needed to paying themselves more or for advisors or think tanks of whatever. And this is just accepted. Maybe because most don't realise it is this way, but a decade after the expense scandal, eyes are turning to the way MPs fund themselves and their lifestyles, and they might force yet another Government u turn.

But it is probably too late, espeically with many stating in mails, interviews or newspaper columns that supporting the poor would make them dependent.

On food.

I mean, food for children, for poor children, who would otherwise go hungry in school holidays because of a global pandemic should not be an issue for debate. And yet for some on the right, it is.

The Sunday papers today reported on the prce paid by the sick and elderly who were shipped out of hospitals last March into care homes to die a slow and lonely death. It might not be that bad this time round, but not by much Those who died did so, so that MPs could say that the NHS was protected and was not overrun. Matt Hancock may as well tied 20,000 OAPs to the west coast mainline and let a train run over them, the slaughter was just the same.

And the point in all this is that the people who made the wrong calls at the wrong time killing tens of thousands are still in post today, and for the most part don't seem to have learned anything. Lockdowns too little too late. The thousands of people who will die of COVID in November already have the disease.

Meanwhile, in Wales, the Welsh assembly have deemed that people can only buy "essential" goods now there is the firebreak lockdown, resulting in whole aisles in supermarkets out of bounds, and people not able to buy such non-essentials as clothes, electrical goods, pens and so on. There is no legally defined list of what is essential, and shops in the same chain in different parts of the country are defining non-essential in dofferent ways. Pens are essential in some, but not in others.

This is done to protect those specialist shops that had to close, so no one can go to a supermarket. But you can buy stuff online of course, and have it delivered, meaning Jeff Bozos makes even more money, and the local branches and local shops both lose out.

And finally, neaws leaked today that the UK Government is preparing 4th tier of restrictions as I predicted only yesterday.

I hate being right.