Our Poor Country
What do Amber Rudd, Liz Truss, Lisa Nandy, Kerry McCarthy, have in common? Well they are all females, members of the UK parliament, and government ministers or shadow (opposition) ministers of two departments DECC (department of energy and climate change) and DEFRA (department of environment, food and rural affairs) where key decisions are needed affecting the United Kingdom’s ability to function as a modern country.
With no noticeable past knowledge of, or even interest in, the areas covered by the above departments and without even a science A-level between them[1], the first two of these women are set to spend billions of pounds of public money on the Hinkley Point nuclear power station project, and supposedly to sort out the billions of pounds at stake for farmers in the EU controlled rural payments scheme. The other two are supposedly holding them to account. They are at best, mouthpieces of their civil servants in the House of Commons.
The department of Business, Industry and Skills (BIS) is shadowed by yet another female, completely unqualified for the task of encouraging the department in its vital role of supporting British manufacturing firms to export more and import less. BIS’s response to the flood of Chinese steel which has led to the closure of the giant Redcar steel works this week, is the usual politicians’ cure-all – to arrange a summit conference and grants for retraining for non-existent jobs there.
This is the real scandal of British political affairs, not expenses fiddling, but the appointment to hugely important offices of state of literally incompetent people who know absolutely nothing about them. The only sine qua non qualification that counts in Britain under the two political leaders, Cameron and Corbyn, is that they should be female[2].
End Notes
[1] With cattle production in crisis, the shadow minister of Agriculture is a declared “vegan”, bitterly hostile to meat-eating and referring to it as “dangerous”.
[2] The head of nuclear energy in DECC is a woman with no nuclear or even engineering knowledge, who is currently on maternity leave. Foreigners, e.g. French, German, Chinese, American know this and run rings round our British ministers and officials as a result.
