Originally a comment by Arnaud on 10 beans a day.

I am so angry that I… I don’t know what to say.

Every time this government acts, or fails to act far too often, I swear that they have reached rock bottom; surely they can’t go lower than this? And every time they do.

But in truth I mean, we should have been prepared for this fiasco, after this intervention by a Tory MP a couple of months ago complaining that food vouchers effectively went to crack dens and brothels! This was clearly preparing the ground for later moves!

In the wider scheme of things this is part of a trend to basically assess-strip the UK; the pandemic has given this government what they see as a clean mandate to act as they wish without all those pesky restrictions imposed by parliament and tradition. Hundreds of contracts totalling tens of billions have gone to private companies with links not only to the Tory party but often personally to ministers and influential MPs and party apparatchiks, not only to feed kids but also to provide PPE to the NHS and government agencies and to run testing programs. A lot of this money was just wasted as these companies had no track record and no capacity in the matter. One of those was run by Matt Hancock’s former local pub landlord, for fuck sake!

As Tim Harris says, it is all down to the Tories’ assumption that they are somehow vastly superior to the rest of us, that, even elected by us, whatever they do for the country is akin to a favour and we should be grateful for it. The tossing of bones from the lord’s table. That became obvious during the Brexit debates : every time a Tory grandee was contradicted by a member of the public you could see the outrage and contempt on their faces. It has not changed.

As i said to friends of mine this morning, this Tory government has done far more to radicalise me – and I suspect a lot of people – than anybody ever could. They should put themselves on the list of banned organisations alongside ISIS or the Real IRA!