Local councils have some responsibility for children who have to be taken into care.
Any that end up under the governance of Councillor Andy Osborn, of the Roman Bank and Peckover ward, should be particularly pitied.
Councillor Andy Osborn (Reform UK – Roman Bank and Peckover) told a Cambridgeshire County Council meeting on June 3 that some children in care were “not just naughty children, they can be downright evil”.
He said he had heard of cases where children were “smashing cars up, running away from home, and are on drugs”.
Cllr Osborn said: “It is not just a case of somebody being a bad boy or a bad girl, it is a case of they have learnt from their bad parents not to react correctly.”
His colleagues were unimpressed by this ignorance and callous viewpoint.
Martin Purbrick, Executive Director of Children, Education and Families, explained:
I think it is important to recognise any child in care is a child that has experienced early childhood trauma and it is that trauma, which can often lead to difficult behaviours and emotional responses to challenging situations, which children and young people find it difficult to manage themselves.
Sometimes that can manifest itself in behaviours like you have described, which can be difficult, but I do think it is important that we as a committee also remember that under that behaviour is a child that has experienced something incredibly difficult and something that has really changed the way that they are able to manage their own emotions.
Sam Smith, a Conservative councillor, calls this a “shambolic start”, saying:
Local residents were promised action, change and common sense. Instead, we’ve got silence, confusion and a complete absence of leadership.
Scrapping every key meeting in their first full month in charge is not only reckless — it’s dangerous. This puts public services at risk and shows just how unprepared Reform really are
The Reform members seem unable to answer questions on what are supposed to be their particular areas of responsibility – and even on issues they heavily campaigned on as a party such as solar panels.
In their responses, the Reform cabinet members said they ‘hadn’t been briefed’ on the issues raised — including solar farms and highways programmes — which the opposition have since described as having “no excuse” as they have “full access to senior officers who are available to support them”.
Mr Smith said: “They should be in their offices, speaking to officers, and getting to grips with their jobs. Instead, the car park is empty, and the council is effectively leaderless.“This is what happens when you elect people who had no plan and no idea what the job involved.
…when we asked Oxford University’s Migration Observatory about Mr Tice’s claim, it told us: “We cannot identify any data that support the assertion that the current government has been responsible for the biggest influx of migrants in British history,
Trying to find some way in which it might be true they looked also at the number of migrants crossing the channel even though that quite clearly isn’t what Tice said – and the small boat kind of migrants are a tiny fraction of all migrants. But even that doesn’t seem to be true.
In the view of both Full Fact and the Migration Observatory, statistics from the Office of National Statistics:
…appear to suggest that the “biggest influx” of migrants on record so far took place under the previous Conservative government. The Migration Observatory believes this is the case, telling us: “Data clearly show that the ‘biggest influx of migrants in British history’ took place under the previous administration.”
So far the main result appears to have been to increase costs, given that as well as the extra £17,123 allowance they are paying them another “special responsibility allowance” of around £37,000.
So at the moment, they’ve increased spending on cabinet members, not decreased it. The person who’s supposed to make things more efficient is actually making it cost more
It’s been noted that Reform leader of Kent Council has had their Twitter/X account suspended for violating the rules of the platform. So far we don’t seem to know why – but given the state of X they must really have gone out of their way to post something offensive.
After winning control of Kent County Council, Reform have taken action to do…very little.
Their Liberal Democrat colleagues report that of the first 5 committee meetings scheduled in June they have cancelled at least four of them, and the status of the fifth wasn’t clear at the time.
The cancelled meetings:
Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee
Planning Applications Committee
Governance and Audit Committee
Regulation Committee
Says a Lib Dem councillor:
I thought this administration claimed they wanted to get to work from day one. Funny way to show it: no meetings, no scrutiny, no decisions, no direction. This isn’t Reform. It’s paralysis.
Going forward, the Byline Times notes another couple of cancellations, including some meetings that you are not really allowed to skip:
They include gatherings of legally-required committees such as the Governance and Audit committee which are essential to setting a budget and keeping finances in check.
You would think scrutinising budgets would be exactly the sort of work these DOGE-fans would want to do, but apparently not.
A Labour councillor comments:
…there is a decision free zone within KCC at the moment. They don’t know what they’re doing.
Higham Ferrers was supposed to hold a local election on May 1st, but it got delayed due to the death of a candidate. It’s going ahead soon. And naturally Reform are standing a few candidates for councillor.
At least one of which apparently will not be allowed to serve on the basis that they are breaking the law in even standing for the position. It is not allowed for a single person to stand in multiple different wards during the same election, which is something that wannabe Reform councillor Elisa Perna is in fact doing.
The Electoral Commission have confirmed to the Lib Dems that this rule is in force. So should Perna be one of the election winners, presumably they would have to immediately stand down and yet another costly byelection would be needed.
Higham Ferrers really isn’t having great luck with its Reform candidates. Alan Beswick is another one standing in that council elections. However, in the few weeks since his nomination, he has decided to go and live in China. And even as much as Reform candidates seem to hate living in the places they are supposed to represent, even they agree that governing Higham Ferrer from 5000 miles away is a bit of a non-starter.
Per Reform Councillor Harrison:
He has just had a change of circumstances. He has got a Chinese wife and something has happened and he has got to go over there to China.
If he gets elected we will have to have a by-election.
It’s hard to argue with the Lib Dems when they say:
With one candidate who shouldn’t be on the ballot paper, one candidate sharing a photo of far-right group Britain First, and another candidate who has reportedly moved to China, the only safe route is for the people of Higham Ferrers to not vote for Reform at these elections.
Accepting donations via cryptocurrency is the new hotness for the politically corrupt. Across the Atlantic, President Trump has managed to abuse the office he holds enough to double his personal wealth since his most recent stint at president began, largely via dubious crypto semi-scams that have made almost all its “investors” poorer, except a handful the very rich – but more importantly it provides an untraceable-in-principle way for people who are not allowed to donate vast sums to a foreign country’s political campaign – aka bribes – to break the law, undetected.
Farage naturally likes what he sees there. So, once again jetting off to foreign lands in lieu of representing his constituents, he’s been seen at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas.
After being introduced as a “UK presidential candidate” – note: there is no such thing as a presidential candidate in the UK – he proudly announced that Reform will be the first British party to accept donations in cryptocurrency.
Of course it’s not clear why anyone would want to donate to them in cryptocurrency, as opposed to the much more convenient if boring conventional money = unless, of course, they were up to no good.
Furthermore, he revealed his plans to make tax changes that once favour the rich and powerful who dominate the murky, world of crypto, including a more-than-halving the capital gains tax that would normally be due on the profits of such an investment from 24% to 10%.
Whether this will allow him to secretly funnel the vast sums of basically illegal money Elon Musk was once reputed to be offering him to his coffers awaits to be seen (or not). But even the Telegraph worries that “Farage’s flirtation with Bitcoin will cost him his credibility” here in the UK where they average person has an attitude to crypto somewhere between “don’t care” and “don’t like”. We can but hope.
A few attempts have now been made to model the impact of Reform’s changes to the tax system that Nigel Farage spoke about in his recent speech. They all show it to be tremendously regressive. Most of the giveaway would go to the very highest earners in the UK over the people who struggle with the basic costs of day to day living, as well as the “average worker” they claim to prioritise.
This chart alone, shared by Sky News, reveals the stark truth of who benefits.
In more detail:
There’s one change to the tax system I missed in my previous post. Farage confirmed that the previously-announced Reform policy of raising of the higher tax band such that you would now have to have an income of at least £70,000 to start paying it as opposed to the current value of £50,271.
This was previously estimated to in theory cost the state another £18 billion. This is on top of the incredible cost of the other policies we already covered. And it is extremely regressive especially when added to the effect of the shift in the threshold for the basic rate and the other adjacent policies announced.
The IPPR models that the increase in the higher income tax threshold alone would see 80% of the tax break go to the richest 20% of households. They would see an increase of £2700 in average annual disposable income, compared to an estimated £17 granted to the poorest 20%.
The Independent also demonstrates how the majority of the extra income based on these policies will go to the uber-rich rather than the average working person Reform hypocritically claims to love so much.
They quote Stuart Adam, a senior economist at the IFS.
Stuart Adam, a senior economist at the influential Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), said that the “biggest beneficiaries [would be] the top 10 per cent”. “It mainly benefits the better off,” he told The Independent.
He added: “We are talking about the upper middle [class] being the biggest beneficiaries as a percentage of income, and the best-off being the biggest beneficiaries in cash terms.”
Around a third of UK adults don’t earn enough to pay income tax even under the current rules. These people obviously won’t be helped at all by the changes in thresholds. Adam also noted that some of the “extra” income for people on Universal Credit would anyway be negated by the consequent reduction in those payments.
Mr Farage’s plans to hike the tax-free income allowance would boost the incomes of the bottom tenth of earners by 1.3 per cent.
By contrast, the calculations show that the top 10 per cent of earners would see their incomes boosted by 4.2 per cent under Reform’s plans.
To be in the top 10% of earners in 2022-2023 you’d have had to be earning £91,000 a year already, a figure which will have only gone up since then. The top 80% of income earners started at £66,000 back then.
Sky News published some charts showing this regressive result in action when it comes to disposable income; income that the recipient can actually use. The regressive nature of these changes are even starker.
Again based on IPPR figures, in absolute terms the richer you are the more extra income you will receive based on Reform’s changes. They plot changes in disposable income by existing income decile.
They summarise as:
The top 10% of households, by disposable income, have £3,000 a month to spend after housing costs, council tax and direct taxes. A couple in this category would have £5,290 to spend.
These people would gain almost £5,983 in disposable income each year as a result of the changes.
The bottom 10% of households have less than £693 to spend on things such as heating and food each month. The figure rises to £1,195 for a couple. These households would gain an extra £221 per year.
When challenged about the fairness of this, Farage claimed “that people on lower incomes would benefit more than those on higher incomes when the tax cuts were viewed as a proportion of their total salary”.
However, that is another Farage lie. Even in percentage terms the lowest-income decile of people receive the least in terms of extra disposable income.
In terms of the cost to the state:
The top 10% of households would receive 28p for every £1 spent, while the bottom 10% would receive just 2p.
Dr Jamie O’Hallaran, senior research fellow at IPPR, sums the stupidity of these changes well – especially when done by a party that claims to care about left-behind working-class folk.
“These tax cuts would be both very costly and disproportionately benefit those on the highest incomes.
“At a time when public services and household finances are under such pressure, this would be highly irresponsible. Polls also show this is not what the public want.
“Voters are crying out for public services that work, not tax cuts for the top 10%.”
