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More potential Tory sleaze

Covid has helped make Jenrick one of the longest serving housing ministers of the modern age. He’s approaching 12 months in the job, and we’ve been averaging about one a year for well over a decade. No wonder the nation‘s housing policy is a shambles.
 
Covid has helped make Jenrick one of the longest serving housing ministers of the modern age. He’s approaching 12 months in the job, and we’ve been averaging about one a year for well over a decade. No wonder the nation‘s housing policy is a shambles.

Housing policy?
 
Jenrick in the Commons- a case of the lady doth protest too much. Johnson is backing him as he did Cummings. Smell the corruption.
 
Watching Zadawi being grilled by Charlie Stait on Breakfast this morning was a joy. It's revealing that the only thing the Tories try to attack Starmer on is the schools. Distraction politics doesn't seem to be working as well as it used to
 
So to recap: a paltry £12k bung straight into the Tory Party’s back-pocket can deny the much-depleted public purse £40m in potential revenue.

In the words of the similarly discredited Rolf Harris: “Can you tell what it is yet?!”.
 
It’s not even really about the money. It’s just their conception of how government does and should work. They don’t see a problem with it, any more than they see a problem with a favoured spad ignoring rules, or the old and the sick dying en masse for business:

https://twitter.com/robdothutton/status/1276053182779731968?s=21

It’s just classic conservatism, which is purely about defending privilege, plus Thatcherite entrepreneurialism. Show a bit of initiative! Spot the opportunities! Find the gaps in the brown envelope market!
 
It’s just classic conservatism, which is purely about defending privilege, plus Thatcherite entrepreneurialism. Show a bit of initiative! Spot the opportunities! Find the gaps in the brown envelope market!

I think it is entirely unfair to smear entrepreneurialism. Vast numbers of perfectly decent businesses exist, pay their taxes and provide great employment opportunities etc. I’d certainly run miles from anywhere where the means of production was state owned. I do however firmly believe in fair taxation and contributing to high quality state infrastructure and services, as do huge numbers of businesses big and small. For me that’s not just getting the homeless off the street, making the NHS work properly etc, I mean top-tier museums, art galleries, cycle lanes etc etc. Take pride, do it right, and tax appropriately. I’m obviously a small business owner, as are many of my friends, and we all detest the Tory penny-pinching, corruption and sleaze. Don’t tar us all with that brush!
 
I think it is entirely unfair to smear entrepreneurialism. Vast numbers of perfectly decent businesses exist, pay their taxes and provide great employment opportunities etc. I’d certainly run miles from anywhere where the means of production was state owned. I do however firmly believe in fair taxation and contributing to high quality state infrastructure and services, as do huge numbers of businesses big and small. For me that’s not just getting the homeless off the street, making the NHS work properly etc, I mean top-tier museums, art galleries, cycle lanes etc etc. Take pride, do it right, and tax appropriately. I’m obviously a small business owner, as are many of my friends, and we all detest the Tory penny-pinching, corruption and sleaze. Don’t tar us all with that brush!
I'm not smearing entrepreneurialism, but the fact is it's been used to justify all kinds of ___ery over the years. Take it out of a larger moral framework, as modern Toryism does, and this is what you get. "Just get out there and work your connections my boy!"

IMO it's still better than building a moral framework around it, as New Labour did ("social entrepreneurship", yuck). But that's probably just me.
 
I'm not smearing entrepreneurialism, but the fact is it's been used to justify all kinds of ___ery over the years. Take it out of a larger moral framework, as modern Toryism does, and this is what you get. "Just get out there and work your connections my boy!"

IMO it's still better than building a moral framework around it, as New Labour did ("social entrepreneurship", yuck). But that's probably just me.

Again I just see something entirely different. For me entrepreneurialism just means forming a band, a record label, building a recording studio, setting yourself up as a games developer, a craft brewery, a baker, plumber or whatever you fancy. The 1980s Thatcher ‘Enterprise Allowance Scheme’ remains (along with the BBC Micro and computer teaching initiative), the only Conservative policy I wholeheartedly support. It needs a proper reboot. We collectively need to help people through the initial stages of doing their own thing.

Now, more than ever in the days of mass automation and the increasing obsolescence of mass labour, small craft/artisan businesses are the way forward. Any credible government should be all over this and not remain shackled to the mill owner vs. unionised mill-worker mindset of the past. Kill the two-headed beast!

PS FWIW by supporting a ‘universal basic income’ the Lib Dems (assuming Layla Moran gets the job) are way, way ahead of Labour on this.
 
Again I just see something entirely different. For me entrepreneurialism just means forming a band, a record label, building a recording studio, setting yourself up as a games developer, a craft brewery, a baker, plumber or whatever you fancy. The 1980s Thatcher ‘Enterprise Allowance Scheme’ remains (along with the BBC Micro and computer teaching initiative), the only Conservative policy I wholeheartedly support. It needs a proper reboot. We collectively need to help people through the initial stages of doing their own thing.

Now, more than ever in the days of mass automation and the increasing obsolescence of mass labour, small craft/artisan businesses are the way forward. Any credible government should be all over this and not remain shackled to the mill owner vs. unionised mill-worker mindset of the past. Kill the two-headed beast!

PS FWIW by supporting a ‘universal basic income’ the Lib Dems (assuming Layla Moran gets the job) are way, way ahead of Labour on this.

Sure, that's what it means to you. How it gets used in wider society - and how people use it to justify things you might not approve of - that's something else, and has little to do with your preferred meaning or mine. Generally speaking it's used to load individuals with responsibility for things that are completely out of their control, such as structural unemployment, and to stand in for proper democratic governance. Norman Tebbit's Get on Your Bike: that's Tory entrepreneurialism '80s style. Zahawi's Get Out There and Bribe the Right People: Tory entrepreneurialism 2020.

Universal basic income was in Labour's 2019 manifesto, along with a load of other stuff that would clearly benefit genuine entrepreneurialism, such as free high speed broadband for every part of the UK. Lib Dems had skills wallets or some such. Labour/Lib Dems 2020 I couldn't give a crap about, and I don't know why you would either, as a confirmed non-tribalist.
 


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