Will Devon Conservative MPs get the message on 'reckless' government?

Martin Shaw

There has been a deafening silence from East Devon’s MPs, Neil Parish and Simon Jupp, since Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were given fixed penalty notices.

For the first time in British history, not only the Prime Minister but also the Chancellor of the Exchequer admitted breaking the law. Since both had previously denied the charges in the House of Commons, it was also clear that they had lied to Parliament.

Thousands remember not being able to see their dying loved ones because of the laws that Johnson and Sunak broke.

If a minister in any previous government had been penalised like this, they would have resigned. By letting Johnson and Sunak get away with it, the Conservatives, supposedly the party of law and order, are putting two fingers up to the British constitution.

It is clear that they feel entitled to rule, with impunity from the laws by which ‘little people’ are expected to abide.

The pretext some offer is that we can’t change prime minister during a war. Well we changed in 1940, when Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain, which didn’t do any harm.

In any case, the UK is not at war, British aid to Ukraine will continue to flow regardless of who’s PM, and President Joe Biden, NATO and the EU are more than capable of steering Western support while the Conservatives find a new leader.

It is clear that the Tory leadership is a morality-free zone. It is now clear that Sunak, the man who took £20 a week away from poor families, failed to declare that his wife was a‘ non-dom ’who avoided millions of pounds in UK tax.

In last week’s paper, Simon Jupp offered excuses for Sunak’s failure to follow France’s example and keep heating costs down.

‘France owns EDF’, he said, ‘so have the ruse of making up the difference from taxpayers.’ That sounds to me like a case for nationalising energy firms.

Remember, most of the exorbitant rise in the bills is not because energy has got more expensive to produce - but because high demand is allowing oil and gas producers to make extraordinary profits.

So even without nationalisation, the UK has a glaringly obvious option for making up the difference and subsidise our bills: a windfall tax on firms like Shell and BP.

The Conservatives should listen to money expert Martin Lewis, who has the ear of the hard up and warns of ‘civil unrest’ because people simply can’t afford the rising costs of heating and food.

Official figures show that we have just seen the biggest drop ever recorded in the value of pensions and benefits. Families on Devon’s low wages and those surviving on the state pension are acutely vulnerable.

Boris Johnson’s new medium-term energy policy, which Simon Jupp recommends, offers few answers to the urgent challenges we face. It is basically a pie-in-the-sky programme of new nuclear power stations - the most complicated and costly type of energy investment which will take decades to bring about.

There is a nod to offshore wind generation, but it isn’t long since the Conservatives blocked a project for a wind farm in the Lyme Bay - I will believe it when I see it.

There is no investment at all to insulate the millions of cold and draughty homes, the surest way to keep bills down in the next few years.

There is no new programme of onshore wind farms, the quickest and cheapest way of rolling out renewable energy, because Conservatives backbenchers have taken against them.

So this reckless government of the ultra-privileged is not interested in the urgent help people need, or in sustainable policies for the future, but only in saving its own skins.

It is not a traditional Conservative government, and people who normally support the Conservatives are starting to realise this. I hope our MPs get the message.