Boris Johnson
Johnson’s NHS promises are phoney and offer absolutely nothing for Devon.
- Nothing to help waiting times for cancer referrals, cancer treatments and elective surgery in our hospitals.
- Nothing to speed up waiting times in A&E.
- Nothing to bring more services to our community hospitals and give them a solid future.
- Nothing to address the chronic shortages of staff – indeed Johnson’s Brexit policy is driving away European doctors and nurses.
We – local people protesting with petitions and placards – managed to stop the CCG closing our community hospitals, as it was threatening to do two years ago after it removed half of the beds across Devon.
Who was on our side? Not the Tories – it was their funding cuts and national plans to sell off hospital buildings which pushed the CCG to bring forward their proposals in the first place.
No – the politicians who really supported local communities were grassroots campaigners like Claire Wright. Indeed her persistent challenge to Hugo Swire in East Devon was what frightened the Tories into dropping their drive to sell off the hospitals.
While Johnson peddles broadband pie-in-the-sky, Devon Conservatives’ delivery plans have exploded – and his Chancellor failed to confirm that £18m funding is still available to pick up the pieces!
Viewed from Devon, the most laughable of all Boris Johnson’s election wheezes is his promise to get ‘full-fibre ultrafast broadband’ into all homes by 2025.
“Without any detail it is just a pledge,” says Andrew Ferguson, editor-in-chief of broadband comparison site ThinkBroadband. “The key to getting excited is dependent on what the pledge means in terms of help for commercial roll-outs and extra funding to ensure that areas unlikely to see commercial roll-out for a number of years can be moved forward.”
No one will be getting excited in rural Devon. The County Council Scrutiny committee on which I sit has been following a long saga of failure by Connecting Devon and Somerset, the quango supported by the two Tory-controlled counties to deliver to a large swathe of difficult-to-reach properties.
We found out on Thursday, after questioning from myself and other councillors (watch the webcast), that
- Contracts given to Gigaclear, supposed to have been completed in December 2019 but cancelled in July after many months of fruitless re-negotiations with the company (with only 1 out of 5 contracts completed), will not be put out to tender again until 2020.
- There will need to be a 12-month tender process to find a new contractor.
- The earliest a new contractor will start will be later in 2021.
- Although CDS has asked for the £18.7m funding to be renewed until 2023, Johnson’s chancellor, Sajid Javid, didn’t mention it in his recent funding statement which in any case – because it was designed purely to showcase election gimmicks – only covered the next financial year.
- So CDS cancelled the Gigaclear contracts without even knowing that they would have the money to replace them.
- Even if the funding is restored, officers agreed that the 2023 target is likely to prove unrealistic for a new contractor.
So we are looking (at best) at something like a 5-year overshoot, and even if it is completed, the CDS programme would still leave thousands of homes in Devon and Somerset without ‘full-fibre ultra-fast broadband’ which Johnson promises, as it was never designed to reach every household.
And while Johnson promises pie-in-the-sky, his government’s election-boosting funding statement has just caused a further delay to the botched programme, making the job of picking up the pieces in Devon even harder.
Months ago, the Cabinet member responsible, Rufus Gilbert – who was conveniently absent on Thursday – described Devon’s broadband crisis as a ‘mini-Brexit’. If the Tories can’t get local broadband right, hold your breath as they hurl us towards the national cliff-edge.
Do you, or a member of your family, rely on medicines to live safely? Sunday Times publishes Government papers which show Johnson is taking us to disaster. We must stop this – spread the word.
Do you, or a member of your family, rely on medicines to live safely? Does your job or business depend on fuel supplies working smoothly? Could you survive the recession which a No Deal will bring? Are you or a member of your family an EU citizen, or a UK citizen who lives in another EU country?
If the answer to any of these questions is YES, tell your family and friends NOW about the disaster that Boris Johnson is prepared to inflict on us all. Tell our MP Neil Parish, who is supporting this lunacy, exactly what you think about it.
Boris Johnson’s senior advisor said “People think, and by the way I think most people are right: ‘The Tory party is run by people who basically don’t care about people like me.’”
Voters are right to think Tory MPs largely do not care about poorer people or the NHS, according to Dominic Cummings in comments that have emerged from two years ago.
Boris Johnson’s new senior adviser and a key architect of Brexit gave his damning view on Conservative MPs at a conference in 2017, where he said: “People think, and by the way I think most people are right: ‘The Tory party is run by people who basically don’t care about people like me.’ (View article here)
‘This situation is not of our making’, Tory DCC Cabinet member says at the Council meeting. I remind him that many Tory councillors voted for Johnson – and some for the Brexit Party in the European elections. You helped to create the ‘No Deal’ threat. Now own it, I tell them.
You can watch my speech here
Local Tory councillor backs Johnson for PM – let’s not forget that Tiverton was the first place that he was booed after his deceitful, racist campaign in 2016
The Sidmouth Herald reports that Conservative Councillor Stuart Hughes, who was recently elected as Chair of East Devon District Council with ‘Independent’ support, has backed Boris Johnson to lead the Conservative Party and be the next PM. It seems the right moment to remind ourselves that Johnson visited Tiverton on 1 July 2016, eight days after the EU referendum, he was booed and branded a ‘liar’ by protestors. Watch the Daily Telegraph video to the end, where a man asks Johnson to apologise to a friend who had suffered racial abuse due to the Leave campaign, and another calls him ‘a massive child’. Those people in Tiverton three years ago still speak for many of us as the Tories prepare to impose Johnson on the country.
Seaton & Colyton MATTERS 