BEST
FOR BRITAIN'S
WEEKEND WIRE
Dear John,
The Easter holidays and their many days off work have finally
arrived, which means the brightest minds at the top of Government have
chosen this week to offload all their scandalous material. It makes
for great reading if you’re stuck in a 10-mile traffic jam at the port
of Dover.
GFA turns
25
This Friday marked the 25th Good
Friday since the Good Friday Agreement. As the official anniversary on
Monday approaches, Best for Britain is celebrating the role of
international cooperation in ending the Troubles and bringing lasting
peace to Northern Ireland.
With leaders in the UK, Ireland,
and beyond, including President Joe Biden visiting to commemorate the
anniversary, we’re measuring all the ways that the end to conflict has
brought positive change on both sides of the Irish border and beyond,
as well as a trip down memory lane to the 90s. Make sure you’re
following B4B on Twitter and TikTok so you don’t miss it.
Trapped! At the Dover
border
Brexit has gone from crashing the
economy to imprisoning children on school trips in coaches as delays
checking passports on coaches and for other holidaymakers led to
14-hour backups on the way into ferry and tunnel ports in
Dover last weekend.
Suella Braverman initially urged
the nation not to put two and two together and tried to blame the French. She
categorically denied that Brexit was a factor before Dover officials and Downing
Street sheepishly admitted passport checks were causing significant delays. The chaos
forced Dover officials to stagger coaches, but as of Thursday afternoon, queues were already hours long for a
second consecutive weekend.
Conversely, some Brexiters are
saying the 14-hour border delays were actually a part of the plan all
along, with one explaining that the Dover traffic jams were meant to
provide British motorists ample time to discuss the glories and
sacrifices of the Royal Air Force during the Battle of
Britain.
We actually quite like not
being in economic limbo, report voters
This week, a new poll from Queen’s University
Belfast indicated that
close to 7 in 10 voters in Northern Ireland believe the Windsor
Framework will benefit the economy, while 65% also think it should
lead to the restoration of the Northern Ireland Executive and
Assembly.
Hilary Benn MP, co-convenor of the
UK Trade and Business
Commission, said the poll
highlighted the advantage of a “constructive” approach to working
alongside the EU to sort out the issues surrounding post-Brexit
trade.
Tories and poo: A tale as
old as 2010
Don’t let anyone tell you the
Tories aren’t levelling up the UK’s coastal communities. Just this
week, reports revealed that they’ve made everyone in seaside towns the
grossest kind of millionaire imaginable.
An analysis by The Times showed that raw sewage was released for a
total of one million hours in 2022, which The Mirror equated to every three minutes. However,
outraged local governments, residents, and campaigners can rest easy,
because Environment Secretary Therese Coffey has got the culprit
red-handed: the Industrial Revolution.
As she rubbished the prospect of
fixing the problem in the near future and called those who do not want
human waste in their local waterways “detached from reality”, Coffey claimed getting pollution back
under control would require reversing the Industrial
Revolution.
To be fair, she knows better than
anyone that simple solutions won’t work–she already tried her plan A,
dumping a bottle of black-market antibiotics into every river in the UK.
Project
Infodump
The Government has been trying to
throw off scrutiny of, well everything lately. Last week, in a 48-hour
period right before the Easter recess, over 150 transparency and
disclosure documents were made public.
Included in this data-dump were
reports of hundreds of thousands spent on flights, lavish gifts, and
dinners attended by Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Rupert Murdoch. Deputy
LOTO Angela Rayner criticised the attempt to evade the public
eye.
The strategy of overloading the
narrative with a deluge of admissions of shady behaviour may have
worked in the past, but the Tories, always eager to return to halcyon
days gone by, forgot about Google.
Tory sleaze: Part
∞
Put a fiver on every Tory MP
accepting a position at a fake company before the next election,
because, following up on the Led By Donkeys sting, Scott Benton,
Conservative MP for Blackpool South, has just lost the whip in nearly
identical circumstances.
On Wednesday, an investigative
report by the Times revealed that Benton, a member of the APPG on Gambling, was offered a
role lobbying for a fake gambling company. While he never formally
accepted the fake role, he did appear to offer privileged access to a
parliamentary white paper on gambling and provided examples of PQs
he’d submitted in the past on behalf of business interests. He also
boasted that he had the ear of relevant ministers.
The Prime Minister initially
waffled before finally revoking the whip from Benton late Wednesday night. However,
it’s not all negative for Benton, as being an independent member will
allow him plenty more time to mock his constituents’
weight on
Twitter.
Trump in court (not the
divorce kind)
This week, former US President
Donald Trump pled not guilty to over 30 charges in a New York court
related to hush money payments made to adult film actress Stormy
Daniels. He has now officially become the first US President to be
formally charged with a crime.
After the arraignment went off
without any major hitches (barring a lookalike of the Capitol-storming
‘QAnon Shaman’ taking a tumble off his bike on the streets of New York),
Trump and Co. reacted with predictable fury on his personal internet screaming void,
Truth Social, where he claimed the process was rigged. The
quasi-sentient mound of biomass that is Donald Trump, Jr. elected to
share a photo of the presiding judge’s daughter alongside
threatening statements about her career.
However, the most appropriately
curt reply came from Yusuf Salaam, who was the target of Trump’s
full-page ad in the New York Times calling for his execution over a
crime he didn’t commit in 1989. He released a one-word response: “Karma.”
International aid stuck at
home
The Tories, normally against
redefining anything, have decided that ‘international aid’ can also
mean ‘paying billions to hold people seeking asylum in squalid
detention while you create a years-long processing backlog so they can
be used as a political scapegoat to shore up your faltering electoral
prospects.’
A report this week revealed the Government spends 3 times more aid money right here in the
UK housing people seeking asylum than it does funding development
overseas. The amount of this budget spent on housing people here in
the UK has ballooned from under £600m in 2020 to £3.7bn last
year.
In the same period, aid to
countries in Africa has been cut in half and is projected to fall by
over £500m more in the coming years.
From all of us at Best for Britain,
have a safe, restful holiday. Just don’t go swimming in the sea,
because what you’ll see floating by you is not Easter
chocolate.
Best
wishes,
Tommy Gillespie
Press Officer, Best for Britain
