Their Chosen Ground

We are only too well aware that the Conservative Party contains some very uncharitable people, and Team Starmer has today, alas! been forced to defend itself against a particularly ill-mannered example. The shadow Minister for Wog Disposal squealed that the Government was not being beastly enough to refugees; from which we may at least draw the consolation that modern Conservatism still has a few scruples about over-hasty changes in rhetoric if not in party leaders. Some Team Starmer anonymoids bolstered their CEO's patriotic image by blaming the weather; while the Home Secretary pointed out that the previous administration had spent more than seven hundred million on the Rwanda transportation scheme and had barely managed to be beastly to anyone at all.

Marketable Compassion

Supporters and opponents of the assisted dying bill have raised concerns that people may be pushed into seeing death as the only option, and have called for better palliative care as a safeguard. The chair of the health and social care committee, whose party's record on maintaining palliative care is identical with that of the Bullingdon Club, threw down the gauntlet to Wideboy Wesley Streeting, who has opposed the assisted dying bill on the grounds that palliative care isn't good enough. As a mere Secretary of State on behalf of the private sector, Wesley naturally has neither the power nor the desire to repair the situation, as witness his pragmatically nonexistent policy announcements on the subject. The likelihood that greater profits can be made from prolonging pain than from ending it is no doubt purely coincidental.