• FOR months cabinet minister after cabinet minister lined up debasing themselves by defending their prime minister, a proven serial liar, cheat, and a narcissist.

Tarnished by association, this week the very same ministers are all engaged in a beauty contest, seemingly desperate to take the moral high ground and rewriting the Conservative Party manifesto.

So far it seems the “small state – low tax” argument is winning the day. Without explaining who will pay for the tax cuts and who will benefit, that will almost certainly mean another decade of austerity, on top of the eye-watering cost of inflation and fuel prices yet to come.

Remember that infamous lie? “We’re all in it together”. Hard-working people are being taken for fools again. Trust and integrity seem to be two words cheapened these days.

So while France has a state-owned energy company to protect its citizens, on this side of the Channel we can look forward to energy costs equivalent to a mortgage.

The Tory answer, it seems, is another decade of crippling funding cuts to public services, and to councils, to pay for their obsession with having a small state.

The social infrastructure we will so desperately need will be decimated beyond repair, leaving us powerless to tackle the ensuing poverty, hunger, crime, ill-health, climate change, and lack of safe, warm and dry council homes.

Finally to those who have been lining up to sacrifice their souls for the prime minister for “getting Brexit done”, determined to perish in the trenches with him, I say no he did not get Brexit done. Northern Ireland and Brexit are a contradiction, they cannot coexist.

These most right-wing and incompetent bunch of beauty contestants seem comfortable with risking the fragile Good Friday Agreement that’s existed since the turn of the century.

And while the Conservative party is sidetracked with electing their beauty contestant, we are forced to wait as the disgraced PM, squatting in Number 10, is presumably busy taking down the wallpaper. A right old Eton mess if there ever was one.

CLLR MERIC APAK
Cabinet Member for Better Homes