Wannabe Mayor of London Shaun Bailey makes a berk of himself discussing drug use by the poor; he neglected to mention wealthy coked-up Conservative sorts
In spite of Sadiq Khan having proven himself an utterly incompetent Mayor of London, the Tories are still running in third place behind the frankly Frankenstein-esque whack job Brian Rose.
Now, following on from Shaun Bailey having been reported to the CPS over some dodgy leaflets he’d produced and blundered over giving out burglar alarms for free and forcing homeless people to find £5,000 deposits for housing, this batshit bonkers Conservative candidate has turned his blimp of a brain to drugs.
Featured this morning in the Guardian, speaking before the London Assembly’s economy committee about universal basic income (UBI) yesterday, Bailey bizarrely told those gathered:
“I know some people would absolutely fly if you gave them a lump sum to deal with every week. I know some people who would buy lots of drugs. So where is the care in this, where is the care for the person? How do you get past just universally giving people money?”
Responding to this “extraordinary” baloney, Simon Duffy of the Centre for Welfare Reform thinktank remarked:
“I’m sure the people spending most of the money are not the poor – they’re the well-off. It’s your City traders and their cocaine habits. Where’s the love for them?”
“There is a trope or a myth that ordinary people don’t know how to spend money, and that people who are poor are, in some way, incompetent at spending money. And therefore, what the state needs to do is control them or their spending in some way. This is utterly false.”
“It’s not just false, it’s clearly unproven. It’s clearly the opposite of any evidence we have about the world.”
Previously last August, Bailey was slammed by associate professor of addiction at the University of York Ian Hamilton for calling for random drug testing of all employees in companies employing more than 250 staff.
Writing in the Independent of a policy pledge that would actually just “punish big businesses” primarily, Hamilton commented:
“Bailey’s pledge to introduce workplace drug testing does nothing for his credibility. He knows, or should know, there is no evidence to support this policy. As with legal markets, the drug market is diverse: those dealing and using cocaine are not the same as those using and dealing crack cocaine and heroin. The latter is associated with violence whereas the former is not. So if the justification for invading employees’ privacy is to make a dent in knife crime, all the evidence suggests it will be a failure.”
“But I suspect that isn’t the point of this announcement. It’s a blatant attempt to capitalise on people’s fears and win their votes.”
Elsewhere, in slightly better news for the brazen bozo, Bailey’s odds of actually winning have moved from 45/1 in January to 37/1 on Oddschecker. Still, however, his chances of becoming the next Mayor of London look as likely as that of seeing Madeleine McCann ride into town on Shergar the racehorse.
