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Saturday 31 October 2015

Philip Davies’ Unreported Hypocrisy

The propensity of the right-wing press to ignore inconvenient features of Parliamentary life was on view earlier this week, when Young Dave’s latest skirmish with Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs turned out not necessarily to the Tories’ advantage. On this occasion, Corbyn’s besting of the PM was mainly ignored. Even the appalling Quentin Letts (let’s not) did not pretend that Dave had won, instead choosing to snipe at Tim Farron.
Or even "against carers", it seems

And so it went yesterday, as most of the Tories’ cheerleaders managed to miss one of the worst exhibitions of rank, stinking hypocrisy that The Blue Team has mustered for, oh, a week or so, despite every non-partisan or left-leaning paper covering it. The occasion was a debate on proposals to give carers - many of whom are not exactly well-off - free car parking at hospitals. The measure was talked out.

In the vanguard of this shameless filibustering was Tory MP Philip Davies, who represents the unfortunate voters in the West Yorkshire town of Shipley. Davies’ own website proclaimed back in June thatPhilip Davies MP today pledged his support to carers across the Shipley Constituency as part of the national Carers Week 2015 awareness campaign, which runs from 8-14th June”. There was a suitably self-promoting quote, too.

Carers make a hugely valuable contribution to society and they need support to carry on the work they do. That is why I am supporting this initiative to encourage services in my community to think about the needs of carers and reach out to carers across the Shipley constituency and help ensure they don’t miss out on support”. His “support” clearly did not extend to allowing them to park for free at hospitals.

This slice of hypocrisy was immediately picked up on by the Labour supporting Mirror: “A shameless Tory MP has blocked a law to give carers free hospital parking by droning on for 90 minutes … Philip Davies drained valuable Commons time today in a cynical bid to oust a Labour backbencher's campaign”. The Guardian had the photo from Davies’ website. The Independent also carried the story.

But what of those champions of our free and fearless press that explicitly back Davies and all the other variously unsavoury right-wingers? Ah well. Somehow, the Times, Telegraph, Express, and Daily Star did not seem interested in his antics. And the Mail has relegated the story to an item in Mail Online (which may have been sanctioned because of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre’s dislike of Young Dave).

The Sun has an item on SunNation, but Davies gets away with just a mention, and more prominence is given to Labour’s Khalid Mahmood because he help up a Sun front page during the debate. The impression is given that the Tories’ supporters would rather their readers did not know that the party they are backing takes such a signally callous approach to helping the less well-off.

As Wilde might have put it, to lose track of one Commons event may be regarded as a misfortune - to lose track of two looks like carelessness.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just another example of neocon propaganda clerks lying by omission.

Christ knows what those gobshites think they see in the mirror each morning.

Fortunately the last few years has seen the beginning of the demise of monopoly-owned far right print media. Which is why they are getting more and more desperate and hysterical.

Democracy looms. Whether it will be enough to recover decency is another matter, since the Bullingdon gang haven't the slightest intention of listening to anybody except their gangster paymasters and money launderers in Canary Wharf and Wall Street.

Hence the Davies hypocrisy and betrayal of the carers. All for measly car park fees profits. It's standard tory procedure to mouth bullshit platitudes and then do quite the opposite. They know the price and profit of everything and the value of nothing.

Truly disgusting people, them and their corrupt media.

A. said...

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/philip_davies_mps_correspondence#incoming-195609

aidan said...

Hello there Tim. I'm glad you've covered this.

It would be interesting to know whether any of the gambling firms he has previously lobbied for in parliament are linked to any hospital car parking operators. This could be by sharing the same parent company. A decent journalist at any of the newspapers mentioned would be on to this.

I believe this is my first comment. I've been reading daily since early 2010.

Keep on keeping on...

DBC said...

One of the companies heavily involved in hospital parking is Parking Eye who are owned by one the Government's favourite outsourcers C(r)apita.

rob said...

The Sun would also possibly keep silent as Mr Davies was a willing ally in the Mensch, now a Sun columnist, bid to derail the House of Common's Select Committee report into the conduct of the Murdoch's.

rob said...

He is also being reported in The Mirror as claiming back his own parking fees as expenses. One would have thought if he was that serious about cutting public expenditure he could have afforded to finance them himself or get his sponsors to do it?