Full Fact has to keep correcting Labour politicians on their false NHS waiting list claims. This all started on Sunday when Rachel Reeves said on Kuennssberg “7.8 million people are on waiting lists“. Full Fact corrected her at the time, pointing out that there are 7.8 million pathways for treatment waiting to start, and only 6.5 million unique patients – they probably got the misleading figure from an incorrect Guardian article. The fact checkers got in touch with Labour, Reeves, and The Guardian, who ignored them. Angela Eagle then used the same false statistic on Tuesday, as did Starmer at PMQs on Wednesday. These are pretty basic statistics to grasp, Labour is choosing to repeatedly dish out porkies…
A festive finish to the last PMQs of the year courtesy of Angela Eagle:
“…This year the Tory party has given us five education secretaries, four chancellors, three prime ministers, two leadership contests. The partridge has had to sell the pear tree to pay for the gas.”
Ho, ho, ho…
Chapeau to the IEA’s Emily Carver for firing back at Angela Eagle just now on Politics Live. Eagle doesn’t seem to realise the IEA opposed Liz’s energy price cap policy, and Carver herself didn’t support Truss in the first place. Eagle also can’t seem to explain how Labour balance the books differently. “Get your facts right…”
Following Bercow’s ruling against the Government bringing forward another meaningful vote, Angela Eagle, bravely spoke against people being forced to vote “again and again and again on the same thing until it gets it right”, describing opposition to such a tactic as an “important defence of freedom” in relation to the Government’s latest desire to pass a meaningful vote on the new Brexit deal.
In other news, Angela Eagle has written it is “only right” to hold a second Brexit referendum. Do these MPs really hear themselves?…
Angela Eagle and Imran Ahmed’s new book “The New Serfdom“, a 400-page hatchet job on the great liberal thinker Friedrich Hayek, is being lauded with praise in Labour circles, most effusively from Nick Cohen. Guido must come to Hayek’s defence in the face of their rewriting of history.
The New Serfdom is a reminder that, even as the relatively moderate challenger to Corbyn, Eagle is still a liberty-hating socialist who opposes free markets and fundamentally values the state over the freedom of the individual. Even Ed Miliband’s office warned that Ahmed was “dangerously left-wing” when he became a Shadow Cabinet adviser. Their book condemns the “veneration of markets”, the “infiltration of marketisation” into the public sector, capitalism’s promotion of competition, the “toxic culture” of admiring those who succeed, and calls for a Labour government to create an “empowered state… pursuing a reinvigorated democratic socialism”. It wants to sweep back Thatcher’s trade union reforms, regulate the food and drink industry to the hilt and put taxes through the roof. It offers a depressing view of Britain today, talking the country down as “divided and resentful”, dismisses capitalist liberal democracy as a “con”, calls Hayek a “liar” with “extreme views” who inspired Thatcher and her “successor” Trump, and claims Brexit is evidence of “the extreme right on the march”. According to the respected academic Chris Hanretty, Eagle’s Wallasley seat voted 53% to Leave…
The history of the last century comprehensively proved correct Hayek’s central assertion that socialism morphs into totalitarianism. He was proved right when the Keynesian post-war consensus collapsed and Thatcher used his ideas – “this is what we believe” – to turn the economy around. The New Serfdom is an unashamedly socialist critique of the last forty years of British political life, and so is as dangerous and wrong as you would expect. The key question for Eagle and Ahmed: if they truly believe in their socialist vision for Britain, why did they try to stop Corbyn becoming Prime Minister?
Jeremy Corbyn is more popular than ever with Labour members and is set to comfortably retain the leadership, while Angela Eagle and particularly Owen Smith have crashed and burned, according to a new YouGov poll. 54% of Labour members eligible to vote say Jez will be their first preference, way ahead of nearest challenger Eagle, who is second on 21%. Smith, who Tom Watson and the ‘old Right’ Labour establishment want as the sole candidate, has bombed with the membership. A pitiful 15% would back him. In a one v one run-off Corbyn would beat either candidate by over 20 points. If you were Angela or Owen looking at these numbers, would you even want to be on the ballot?
