Crowd Pleaser Government with unpleasant policies .

> Crowd Pleaser Government with unpleasant policies .
> Tories spend millions on polls – activists could block toxic policies .

Prof Mike Galsworthy, a popular political blogger, was on line June 21st 11:17 PM discussing ways the public can try to mitigate toxic Tory policies.

This article summarises the points raised in his talk.
The papers say that Boris Johnson is spending millions on various different polling agencies, gathering data 6 or 7 times a week. Add to this that there’s a lot of flipping and flopping by government on issues, in order to try and be crowd-pleasers: Such as NHS foreign workers bereavement scheme, the schools opening issue and the school meals campaign. These the government backed down on; They seem now to have stopped following the science and following what the public are comfortable with; e.g. in terms of coming out of lock down as counter-posed to their own free-market drive.
Continuing on this theme , let’s look atThe UK-EU trade deal issue: A good 80% of the time they would go with a UK-EU deal rather than a UK-US, that’s true even in the ‘red wall’ seats . It was announced by Shanker Singham ( aka ‘Brexit Brains’ ) the government actually wants to rush through a UK-US trade deal before the US elections in November because they know that Joe Biden is not going to alter it.
People do not want chlorinated chicken. They don’t want hormone injected beef or cereal grown with pesticides that are banned in the EU. So it’s quite bizarre then that this government should continue to pursue keeping such items open. You’ve got the national Farmers Union petition now passed a million: the gov are caught between the Marcus Rashford approach and the Dominic Cummings one .
It’s been estimated by the government itself that it would only add-on 0.07 -0.16% of GDP over 15-years, so it’s quite trivial economically but it’s big politically because it locks us into US deregulated systems and it locks out trading relationships with the EU. Conservatives are prepared to take massive damage in order to do it. This is where I think those of us that care about UK-EU economic solidarity can act : Prosecutions that have been launched against Dominic Cummings, it still continues to needle MPs (what happened around Barnard Castle) ;Tory MP’s are still talking about it. According to one source Dominic Cummings thinks that “media and MPs are all ***kers” ; that he much prefers acting on his own data. Those MPs are going to start getting mad at him for locking them out. Together they will start making moves in the house – which is why I think what we all need to do is keep writing to our MP’s . Write about :

-The test and trace fail; no one trusts it because of Dominic Cummings cavalier behaviour. Ask: why is the British public being ignored?
-The trade deals with EU vs US; food standards and animal welfare.
-How we handled Coronavirus; lockdown delay and Care Home debacle, the early relaxing of restrictions and the 1meter social distancing controversy. –How we handled school opening.

If you don’t have a Conservative MP, you can write to your local Conservative association. Also there is the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation, you can find the website contact form – because they’ve got Carrie Symonds and Stanley Johnson who voted against the government on the issue of chlorinated chicken. Saying that it should still be banned as per the conservative manifesto. They were booted off the Intelligence Committee for doing that. Other bodies of influence exist ; well worth writing to your local press or writing to local associations associated with animal welfare, we have to keep nudging everyone.There’s tons of polling going on at the moment; I bet you in 2024 when we have the next general election that it will be an “AI election” : based on insane amounts of polls, simulated population models and message testing. All updated by AI algorithms and machine learning.
We must realise there exists an ‘echo chamber problem ‘ . Groups talking to ourselves and other people talking to themselves in their bubbles. One needs to be able to crack into other people’s bubbles and have ‘that conversation’. It is going to be interesting to see if we can get some people talk about these matters – : So share those contact forms and where you have had success in your activism. That’s what I would do in the present situation.