Everywhere, we found a sense of common belonging diminished, with fewer meeting places, playing fields sold off, museums and libraries closed. As the public realm shrank, so did social capital, found the ONS, with less trust and neighbours not talking to one another. Pub closures – premises were down from 52,500 in 2001 to 38,000 by 2020 – were another loss of sociability. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

In Tory Truss’s latest twittery encapsulated: The Week In Tory

The decision to ban smoking for young people came down to a belief that no parent wants their child to grow up to be a smoker, Rishi Sunak said this morning. However, while my notes and highlights are filled with "lol" or even "lol lol lol" I often had to qualify this with "sad lol" or "angry lol" because to read this catalogue of conservative iniquity is to be enraged at what the bastards have got away with - and continue to get away with. One of humour's powers is how it lowers the traditional barriers of established thinking (like lowering the shields on the Enterprise) and gives a brief opportunity for the photon torpedo of truth to get through (I may have overworked that analogy), so it might be tempting to give copies to any right leaning people in your circle?! In no way to change the topic, the govt launched Operation Red Meat, a dazzlingly successful exercise in limited and specific failure, which I present to you in the following sub-thread. Not solve them, you’ll notice: just stop them from happening – but she didn’t tell them how or give them any more resources In a further effort to wipe from our minds the endless squalor and scandal of the Johnson years, her new Chief of Staff features in an FBI bribery investigation, is employed by a lobbying firm and only “seconded” to Number 10, and seems to be using tax-avoiding measuresnarcissistic, bullshitting nincompoop who went on Have I Got News For You and was unable to correctly answer the In The Decade in Tory, Jones gives us a magnificent tour of misconduct in public office and venal malfeasance on a scale the country should have a collective nightmare about. As Jones points out It's absolutely fine to scream occasionally whole reading this book. In 2020 the United Kingdom reached a bewildering milestone: ten successive years of Conservative rule. In that decade there were three prime ministers, each in turn described as the worst leader we ever had; ministerial resignations by the hundred; and an unrelenting stream of ineffectual, divisive bum-slurry oozing from 10 Downing Street. In the run-up to the 2010 election, this country was in a mess. GDP, both absolute and in per capita terms, had fallen in the wake of the financial crisis. Average wages, too, had taken a hit. Outside the realm of dry economic statistics, in what politicians like to refer to as the “real economy”, an unnerving number of crises were looming into view: an underfunded social care system, in which people could lose everything they had and still end up without good care in old age; a slight but definite decline in the rate of home ownership, as a growing number of people found themselves priced out; the near collapse in decent pension provision. If you are just pissed off with successive Tory incarnations claiming that they will 'fix Britain' while denying that it was tories that broke it, then this book is for you.

The Decade in Tory by Russell Jones: Unbound

Buy it for relatives who read the Daily Mail. It might work as an antidote’ Jemma Forte, broadcaster and writer Recently, even here in Scotland, I've heard people espousing sympathetic views towards the Conservative government as a result of the unprecedented hurdles they faced due to Covid. However, Russell Jones' The Decade In Tory argues that Conservative rule has been a shambles since 2010, long before Covid, and really, the government didn't need the pandemic as an excuse to showcase its incompetence. And if there was anything wrong or unjust in how Jones describes his many Tory targets (over half of Tory MPs who served in the years 2010 to 2020 are named in this litany of failure) I am sure they would come out to refute his claims...Home alone, the statistics showed that many more would arrive in A&E malnourished or dehydrated. That is the constant perversity of austerity; scrimping a bit now to cost more later. Brexit was mainly caused by the partisan austerity created by the shrinking of the public sphere by Conservative governments. To win power, Johnson promised to repair his party’s depredations with eye-catching projects. His Brexit rhetoric has raised expectations, but his commitment to “levelling up” is a deceit unless it reverses all the financial and social forces that have been accelerating poverty since 2010. The last decade has been indistinguishable from a rollercoaster drawn by M. C. Escher, composed entirely of nauseating descents." A Friday night in the control room with Bedfordshire police told the same story of services stretched to breaking point. Mental health and domestic violence dominated the calls. A neighbour reported a man next door banging on his wife’s window, threatening violence. A man called as he chased his son across a dark park, terrified he might harm himself. The chief constable, Jon Boutcher, had just written to his MP recounting a typical night of rapes, stabbings and a lethal traffic accident involving young children. “I run out of officers regularly for 999 calls,” he said. We followed the fortunes of Emma Percy, in Folkestone, Kent. With her husband, Rob, and three children, the family moved from one rented home to another, changing the children’s schools as rents rose, roofs leaked. They were sometimes living without a functioning boiler all winter long. They were the “just about managing”. Theresa May never got round to helping. Emma and Rob did all the striving and aspiring the prime minister had called for, hoping to save for a deposit, but never quite making enough. In the summer, the only holiday they could afford was camping in the grounds of the school where Rob was caretaker. Their parents own homes; they may never.

a decade of politics Boris Johnson and Evgeny Lebedev: a decade of politics

And having howled madly against immigration for years, the govt signalled it plans to allow loads more immigrants The Decade In Tory is a bravura performance. Substantial, meticulous, incredible, depressing, hilarious, rude – and essential reading. The lost decade was a Tory decade and perhaps the next one will be, too. They broke Britain; do they really mean to mend it? Alexander Lebedev holds up the English and Russian editions of his book in Moscow last November. Photograph: Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images It had also been racist. It is possible to be Russian-born and prominent in this country and not a promoter of the Russian state or government. I am one such person and, moreover, I am not my father, whatever dubious allegations you might wish to direct against me via him.”Johnson is understood to have stayed later than most. His late-night presence attests to one of the more unlikely friendships in modern British politics, which culminated over the summer in Johnson’s contentious decision to make Lebedev a member of the House of Lords. Doing small fixes to various things across the north and beyond does seem politically smart. I do wonder what Labour will do - they are trapped now into either saying they’ll do both the new and old project, or look like they’re letting down some.” In 2015, for instance, Johnson and Lebedev camped out together on the streets of London to draw attention to homelessness among army veterans. They made an improbable double act. When Johnson joked that he had fallen in a puddle, Lebedev quipped: “I saved your life”; the two shared a bottle of whisky. Kwarteng might be new to some of you, so an intro: he is the former minister for Brexit, then of Business, Energy and Growth. It was reported chief whip Mark Spencer spends most of his days inventing dazzlingly clever new insults for his colleagues-