LIVE 24-SEVEN


HAP PY NEW YEAR DEAR READER!


Here we are in January 2020 looking back over the most amazing couple of years. As we await Aston Villa's crunch game with Wolverhampton Wanderers next week to see which one will go top of the Premiership, I thought I would reflect on some of those events over the past 24 months or so which seemed unimaginable back in early 2018.


There was the General Election in March 2018 and the victory of the first totalitarian Marxist regime in UK history. Self- destruction by senior Tory politicians coupled with so many Tory MPs’ refusal to back the agreed Brexit deal hammered out by Theresa May ushered in the Election.


The campaign saw unprecedented levels of harassment of Conservative supporters physically and on social media by Corbynistas (so much for Jeremy’s caring Labour) and serial duplicate voting by students in both their home and university constituencies.


Many mainstream and centre-left Labour Party members voted on an anti-Tory ticket wrongly believing they could have influence over the far-left administration once it was in power and in the mistaken understanding that McDonnell, Abbott, Thornbury and Corbyn would be far less extreme in office than in opposition. There were very few moderate Labour Party candidates left to vote for, after the Stalinist-like purges in constituencies in the couple of years before the Election.


Nationalisation of the railways hasn’t improved levels of service, reliability or cost although the CEO of British Rail, the boss of the Unite Union, has recently welcomed the abolition of any train services that compete with others. The lines previously run by Chiltern and Virgin have been forbidden from competing with each other. Unions immediately slapped on the table a claim for a 25% pay rise and First & Business Class were abolished.


Inward investment is now at an all-time low. No business from overseas will invest in a country where it is illegal to move capital out. Three hours after the result of the General Election was known, the new Chancellor, John McDonnell announced full-blown Exchange Controls to prevent the already-quickening haemorrhaging of capital from the UK. No individual was allowed to take more than £500 out of the country and credit card debt incurred overseas cannot be settled by UK-based sterling. Student gap years overseas have become a thing of the past as have stag weekends in foreign cities. The Secretary of State for Education, doubling up as this year’s President of the National Union of Students, has complained that the abolition of tuition fees has come at a very high price, which was never mentioned during the General Election campaign.


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