Wozzon downalong? Teflon Man Derek Thomas, the outgoing Tory MP for St Ives, likes to portray himself as a decent enough chap. However, as the polls continue to spell doom for him, he’s beginning to look ragged and more than a little desperate. In a campaign video he claims that he’s secured investment for local hospitals, made sure people have the ‘houses they can afford’ and been ‘battling’ for well paid jobs and for ‘NHS dentistry’. The problem Derek has is that all his ‘battling’ appears to have had very little visible effect.
For sheer brazen chutzpah he must take the biscuit. His claim to be ’battling for NHS dentistry’ comes when NHS dentistry in Cornwall is revealed to be among the worst in the UK. This means the nearest NHS dentist taking new adult patients is now at Portsmouth, a 500-mile round trip from Penzance. Teflon Man must be either very brave or takes relying on the gullibility of St Ives voters to hitherto unknown heights.
While Derek would prefer it if we concentrated on all the ‘battling’ he’s ‘focussed’ on, his record reveals a more squalid and dangerous reality. For example, we find that these include using local farmers’ disquiet over Natural England to lead a power grab by Defra and the farming lobby to take over the designation of Sites of Special Scientific Interest. Or claiming the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds was making ‘untrue allegations’ in 2022 when it accused government environmental policies of being a ’war on nature’. Let’s see, Derek has voted on biodiversity issues seven times and all seven times he’s been against measures to improve biodiversity. No war on nature there then.
While hidden poverty in Derek’s constituency is at levels as bad as any in the UK, Derek’s ‘record of action’ includes voting against Marcus Rashford’s plea in 2020 for free school meals for poor children. At the time Derek was more concerned that churches should have been allowed to open earlier after the covid lockdown. Incidentally, he was also one of the 38 Tory rebels who voted against the four-week lockdown belatedly introduced in November 2020 to counter a spike in hospitalisations. Something for all those extra medics that Derek had battled for to do, at least.
Tomorrow, find out why St Ives has become odds on for the Liberal Democrats.
Kernowpolitico: notes from the periphery 