What Do You Think Today?

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There are on Sunday mornings in the UK, two mainstream news media broadcasts that consider the topical events of the day (used in its broader sense) and have the bulk of the viewing public's attention. These are Sophie Ridge on Sunday (Sky News) and Sophie Raworth who presents the BBC's Sunday Morning show.

In the UK last week, the entire British contingent of the P&O workforce were summarily made redundant, as of the moment they were told it was going to happen by video link at the end of a what had started as a normal working day. They were escorted from the ships, in some cases by handcuff bearing security staff, to be replaced by agency workers, who were waiting in the wings, unaware of the bloodletting going on above their heads. The said agency workers can be employed at a fraction of the wage, with no employment rights, no sickness or holiday entitlement. It need not be said that they represent a considerably more attractive proposition to an employer than a worker who is not so unfortunately placed in terms of their entitlements.

The staff of the P&O ferries are drawn from a selection of the countries out of which they operate, but it was only the UK personnel who were put to the axe. The reason for this is that under European employment law it is illegal to treat workers in this cavalier way, but the UK's relaxed so called 'fire and hire' system it can just about be got away with. (It might actually be illegal - grey areas and whatnot - but as the maximum compensation that a worker can hope for, if he takes the trouble to go to law and wait for the year or so that it will take for his case to be heard, is thirteen weeks wages, it is often more beneficial to the employer to make the move, and garner the savings thereby and to then pay the compensation if it is demanded at a later point.) To round off the story, it is worth mentioning that the newly employed crews (and we're talking from the captain of the vessels down) were expected to familiarise themselves with their new charges and then sail them out into the busiest sea-lane in the world, the English Channel, with a weeks training.

Needless to say, this story was met with howls of rage from everybody with a platform to comment from, and has featured loud and vigorously in the news of the week. Chief amongst the critics of the ship owners who executed the sackings, were Ministers of the government, who expressed outrage to a man about what had been done. Letters were to be sent, questions asked in the House, legal advisors consulted - no stone was to be left unturned in bringing the perpetrators of this callous act to book (if they had transgressed) and seeing fair play resumed.

And then came Sunday..........

And nothing.

Not a single mention of the story on a single front page, and barely a couple of seconds on each of the two main programs cited above. It was as if it had never happened. Ukraine was there, the cost of living crisis (more of which in a moment) - but of the biggest employment scandal to be perpetrated on UK soil (well, waters actually) since the sacking of the newspaper workers by Rupert Murdoch in the eighties, there was nothing.

And the reason for this is that the government, of course, for all of its hot air, its anger and bluster, intends to do absolutely nothing.

One commentator said that it is the job of us, of you and me, to be angry, to be disgusted, to be blow hard about such things - it is the job of the government to do something about it - and that of course, is not going to happen.

Hence the reason why the story suddenly evaporated from our tame roll-over media on Sunday. Because this my friends, is going to be the order of the day from now on. The sooner that these events are forgotten, are consigned to the dustbin of history like the workers who today are wondering if in a month's time they will still have a house, a roof over their heads, the better it will be for the government.

Because of course, they knew it was going to happen and did nothing to stop it or to alert the workers about to be shafted. The department of transport, it turns out, were informed the night before the sackings took place, but did not see fit to intervene. And the last thing that Rishi Sunak wanted to do was to answer that particular question on his Sunday morning appearance on both of the quoted programs. And where was the interviews with Mick Lynch, Secretary of the RMT Union who represents the affected workers. Not on BBC or Sky. If you wanted to get his take on the events you have to trawl YouTube to find them - and very salient they are.

Because he makes the point that this is not about people going abroad with their caravans behind their cars. P&O represent the main artery of carriage of goods in and out of the country; our just in time industries depend upon it, our food security hangs upon its smooth functioning, our export markets are founded upon it doing its job. In short, without it the country rapidly goes into decline in a very serious way. Serious enough, he says, that the government should do what they have seen fit to do in the case of the failing privatised rail lines of the South East, and take it into public ownership.

But is this going to happen? Well don't hold your breath. And that's why you won't see Mick Lynch on any mainstream news programming, you won't here government ministers taken to task over this egregiously immoral treatment of honest and reliable workers - because its part of the bloody plan, and always was. Remember how we were told that Britain, post Brexit, would be a dynamic place modelled upon the eastern tiger economies (rather than the Nordic social democratic style) - well this is it! Gig economy, agency worker, fire and hire. We voted for it and now it is coming to fruition we don't like it. I'll put you a pound to a penny that in five years time (or less) Brexit voters will be like Nazis - you won't be able to find one anywhere, choose how hard you look. Well suck it up suckers - as the man said, "there's one born every minute!".

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One interesting thing that did come out of listening to Sophie Raworth yesterday was to hear TV financial advisor Martin Lewis give his assessment of where we are in the UK economically. It wasn't good.

Let me repeat that. It was - not - good.

Outlining exactly what the fuel price increases were going to mean for the average family when they strike in April and then again in October, he said we are talking in excess of a thousand pounds in the spring, and then as much again come autumn. This is going to cause a rise in absolute poverty in the UK, the like of which we have not experienced in a three quarters of a century. For many people it will no longer be the choice between the gym subscription or Netflix - it will be heat or eat. Food needs will outrun the ability of food banks to meet them. And there will be nothing that people will be able to do about it. Whether it is brexit, or the pandemic, whether the financial crash or the war in Ukraine - none of this matters - it is all of them.

Basically we are so screwed that without government intervention on a huge scale many of us are going to be blitzed back into the middle ages financially, and there will be nothing, no belt-tightening or reworking of our domestic finances, that we can do about it. Soaring inflation, shortages and energy shortage are going to do for us, no matter how fast we run. Lewis said that his message to the Chancellor, Sunak, who was on the show later on was this. "I'm an advisor to people as to how to cope with financial difficulty. I have few if any tricks left to tell people. There's nothing more than I can say, that they can do. Please Chancellor - from now on in it's down to you. You must step in and intervene to help."

Sunak did not refer to this, except to say that it was a false expectation that people had that made them think that government could solve all the problems. Well perhaps so, but let's be clear (as you politicians so love to say). It's you guys that have brought us to this place. Not the Labour Party, they haven't been in power for a decade and a half, not Jeremy Corbyn, he never made it into power at all. No guys - it's down to you. This is your fucking mess and you can't deny it. Brexit is a shambles, the economy is fucked, poverty is coming at levels the people cannot imagine and quite possibly civil disorder very shortly thereafter. Workers are reduced to the level of disposal/expendable commodities and the division between the few that have, and the mass that have not is huge and growing by the day. And Tories - it's down to you.

And where will Johnson and crew be when the shit hits the fan? Not sitting in the House like Theresa May that's for sure. You won't see those ***** for dust the moment that they fall from power. They'll be off in the States or somewhere else. Anywhere other than remain here and face the music, the reality of what they have done.

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Still nothing on the P&O scandal. Like I said - all piss and wind from the government with the intention of covering up the fact that they are going to do nothing.

One interesting thing I forgot to mention yesterday - on the Sunday Morning show (I think) it slipped out that the PM had made a video for the people of Russia in which he said that he fully understands that the war in the Ukraine is not their doing and that he holds Putin alone responsible for it.

The video has apparently been viewed by eight million people in Russia.

I just wondered how our government would respond if Putin did the same thing and made a video for British consumption. Would we even get to see it?

[Lefdmae Deemalr Effaeldm]

PM had made a video for the people of Russia in which he said that he fully understands that the war in the Ukraine is not their doing and that he holds Putin alone responsible for it.

The video has apparently been viewed by eight million people in Russia.

I just wondered how our government would respond if Putin did the same thing and made a video for British consumption. Would we even get to see it?

And why should Putin be bothered?

That statement might even be slightly useful to him, like "Russians don't worry, you can get away with sitting on your hands and giving ~70% support (looks like some of that is even sincere) in polls while your army kills people". "Big guys with large heads decide for us" thinking is too common in Russia as it is. Moreover, it's apparently Putin's worldview that people decide nothing.

• - Now when Litvinenko was trying to give witness against Putin in court he got killed.
  - When Politkovskaya was writing an article on Putin's crimes she got killed.
  - When Estemirova was gathering data on Kadyrov's crimes she got killed.
  - When Nemtsov was writing about war in Ukraine (before it was in the open) he got killed.
  - For Kara-Murza who wrote about neo-Nazis annexing Crimea there were 2 poisoning attempts and Bellingcat noticed FSB tailing him, also the whole site his article was published on got blocked in Russia.

Etc etc.

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Saw a very interesting interview with a recent evacuee from the Ukraine, speaking from Poland, where she had fetched up following her flight from Kharkiv. The interview (need it be said) was not to be found on any of the mainstream channels but on Novara Media's 'TyskieSour' podcast on YouTube. (Incidentally, this is proving to be a very good news opinion podcast in which the most egregious of our Governments misdemeanours are exposed, their feet are held to the fire and the questions that no-one else will ask are asked.)

This girl in her mid twenties was insistent upon dispelling the idea that is being promulgated by our administrations and media that 'this is Putin's war' and that the Russian people and their leader can be seen as somehow separate in this.

Not the case, she said. This is as much the Russian people's doing as it is Putin's she said. It is their fingers on the buttons and triggers, their boots on the ground. She was insistent that in the face of what had been done, there could be no diplomatic solution. A wedge has been driven, she feels, between the Russian and Ukrainian people that can never be healed, that no amount of diplomacy can paper over.

She was, she said, a native Russian speaker who at the age of twenty had turned her back on the language and moved to speaking only Ukrainian. She had done this (and was by no means alone in so doing) because of the way that the speaking of russian had been weaponised by Putin, in the terms of "you people all speak russian - it follows that you must think of yourself as Russian and want to be under the Russian umbrella". She and her friends, she said, were having no part in this kind of thinking, and had thus turned their backs on their native language.

Now these views are somewhat unpalatable to me - I believe absolutely that diplomacy and negotiation will have to be the route out of this - but this girl's words have a right to be heard. She was insistent that the West stopped viewing Putin (in their commentary on the war) as though he had just come to power: he's been there for twenty plus years and the Russian people have made this possible. The two cannot be divorced from each other in what is being done, no matter how much more palatable it would be to do so. It was, she said, only by the defeat of the Russian invasion that the genie of Russian expansionism could be put back into its bottle. (Again, given the Western encroachment of NATO into what were formerly the buffer states between Russia and the West, I find this a little ironic, but again, her words as from one who is on the ground (as it were), have to be heard.)

But anyways, for what it is worth, give the podcast a look-see and see how news should properly be 'done' when it is functioning in its intended manner of speaking truth to power.

(Incidentally, if you wanted to see the above interview head over to YouTube and type in Novara Media. You will see a recent podcast entitled 'Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe speaks out against her captivity' or something similar, and the interview (amongst much other very interesting stuff) is in this podcast.)

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Received a letter from our electricity company yesterday telling me that difficult times could be expected ahead - but I could rely on them to step up to the plate when they arrived. Yes, I thought, rely on them to shunt up their costs to the maximum they would get away with and then funnel the huge profits made thereby into the bank accounts of their shareholders.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak gave his spring statement to the Commons and likewise told us that he'd got our backs - and then promptly trousered the fifty billion quid he could have used to make a difference in order to give pre-election tax cuts to Tory voters before the next general election.

It seems that everybody and his mother wants to help us weather what is predicted to be the biggest fall in living standards in this country since records began in the nineteen-fifties, until it actually comes to doing anything. At this point they suddenly forget all their paper-thin words and start shoveling cash into their barrows with all of the frenzy of miners who've discovered a new seam of gold.

Because the reality is that the words mean nothing. Shit. Zilch. The Tory Party motto could be lifted straight from the Bible and would read, "To those that have, more shall be given. To those that have not, it shall be taken away even that which they have." They are going to do nothing to claw back any of the huge profits that the sudden rise in energy costs throw into the laps of the energy giants like apples falling into Newton's lap. And to complete the second part of the motto, they are actually going to increase the national insurance contributions in a tax hike that will disproportionately effect the lowest paid workers in the country.

I heard the chancellor in the Commons saying that you could now earn "twelve thousand and seventy five pounds - twelve thousand and seventy five pounds! - a year, without paying a single penny of tax." Well that's frikkin' great Rishi. That takes care of about two days of the money you need to keep up a household every week - now what do you suggest we do for other five?

Because the truth of the matter is that the crash that is coming goes beyond the "worst drop in living standards since records began", because since records began every generation has enjoyed rising living standards without exception. This is the first generation for as long as living memory takes us back, who can expect less, whose standards of living will fall, who will see poverty red in tooth and claw staring them in the face. This is where your brexit, and your Covid, and the greed of your bankers have brought you. Everything in short that the Tories, pretty much without exception, have been behind (if you consider Margret Thatcher a Tory, which, though difficult for most conservative voters to get their heads around, she wasn't, even though she sat in the Tory Party.)

And boy what a crash is coming. People have no idea. The chancellor must be quaking in his shoes, must be sick to his stomach, every time he looks at the figures. "We should prepare for the public finances to worsen, perhaps considerably," he is quoted on the front cover of the Financial Times as saying. On the Sunday Morning show he gave another hint: "It would be nice to think that government could protect people from all of the problems that they will face - but it can't." No - but it can certainly create those problems in the first place! Back in the pandemic - I should say the 'so called' pandemic - when I (predicted would be the wrong word..... you don't need to predict what you can see coming as clearly as a bus on an empty road on a summers day) said that the effect of shutting down the economy and borrowing/printing money to throw away paying people to stay at home could only lead to disaster, I was ridiculed. Yet here we are. Yet here we are.

And it will be worse than you can imagine. There will be no health service for the next generation; within years its poor functioning through starvation of funds will be used as justification for its sale to the highest bidder. Health will become the preserve of the rich and longevity will be proportional even more than it is now, to income. People will experience in this country for the first time in living memory real poverty - not relative poverty, but absolute poverty. The kind of poverty where in your shame and your need, and with the tears brimming out on your eyes, you head out for the first time in your life to the food bank. Only to find that there's no food left. The kind where you sell your car, because you can't afford to run it, and the Netflix and mobile devices are just a memory. And the internet - what's that? And the pension that you paid into for your entire working life will barely cover the cost of a days food, let alone the holidays and household improvements you had planned. These are the days when you take your treasured belongings out to the Sunday markets and sell them for pence to put food on the table, and pensioners sell what they can in the streets just in order to survive.

This is coming and Sunak and crew know it. But no-one's going to say this to you because the truth of it is simply too harsh to be said. And because if they did, and if the people actually realised what had been done to them, where their so called politicians have led them (all the while feathering their own nests, making sure that their pot was full) they'd be out in the streets tearing up the flagstones.

And there's every likelihood that when the bullet bites they will........

But by this time Boris Johnson, the man who gave us brexit simply as a matter of political expediency to suit his own plans - by this time, you won't see Johnson for dust. He'll be in America, or New Zealand or anywhere else but facing the music in the country that he screwed. No, it will be some other chancer that will call out the troops, will slap on the curfews and empty the streets and show us just what our Governments are prepared to do when the gloves come off.

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So we have a "fiscal illusionist" as our Chancellor, "We would respond, we would respond!" if the Russians resort to the use of chemical/biological weapons in the Ukraine (red lines, red lines - how we love 'em) and P&O say "Of course what we did in sacking all of our UK staff without warning was illegal - but we'd do it again tomorrow."

Oh, and Chancellor Sunak see's no contradiction in the fact that the UK government is urging all companies to adhere to the sanctions pertaining to trade with Russia or to cease doing business with the country until they withdraw from the Ukraine and stop all hostile actions within it's borders, but that his multi-million dollar owning wife is invested up to the hilt with a company linked to a Moscow bank from which the Russian President directly benefits.

Such are today's news stories - or at least those that make it to the front pages (excepting the last one relating to Sunak's wife. No-one seems to want to talk about that one much - I wonder why? )

So let's put a bit of meat on the bones.

There is currently a bit of a war going on between Sunak and Johnson, and today's broadside against Sunak is probably a manifestation of this. Most papers run the story of how the head of the Institute of Fiscal Studies has labeled him as away with the fairies if he believes that he delivered a "tax cutting budget", and the commonality of its presentation suggests more than a little behind the scenes work from some quater or another. No prizes for guessing who might be behind this little bit of jiggery-pokery. In fairness to Sunak, what the fuck is he supposed to do? The country is bankrupt. We have printed, borrowed and spent our way into fiscal oblivion; well, Sunak has - remember the heady days when he was handing out cash like it had gone out of fashion (and upon which his popularity and Prime Ministerial hopes were built). Well now the piper has to be paid and people - including the PM - don't seem to get it. As a result, Sunak's popularity is sinking like the Titanic, and his chances of being PM along with it.

Biden, questioned about the NATO response if Putin were to resort to 'weapons of mass destruction' was deliberately vague in his response. "We would respond, (repeat), and the nature of the response would depend on the nature of the use of it." It doesn't actually mean anything does it. What could such a response be? A military intervention? More sanctions (are there any left in the box?). A cup of tea and an afternoon snooze? Who knows.

Boris Johnson meanwhile wants to start sending the Ukrainian forces tanks. Can I suggest that they get the tanks before they spring for them (or are they a gift, paid for with the money that Sunak withheld from using to help the poorest people in the UK weather the forthcoming economic crisis). The Iranians entered, if I recall, into an agreement with a previous British administration in respect of some tanks - and ask Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe where that ended up! But irrespective of Biden's remarks that "NATO is more closely aligned than ever before in its history" the French and German contingent are not at all happy with that idea. The possibility that we might actually see this thing spread to a wider European conflict becomes ever greater as the rhetoric about chemical and biological weaponry increases, even though as the American intelligence advisors admit, there is no suggestion that the Russians actually intend to use them. One slightly bizzare comment to come out of the American NATO contingent was that a resort to the use of such weapons by the Russians would result in a "response in kind." ......... But I thought that we didn't have any weapons of this nature - that the work going on at Porton Down and other barb-wire enclosed military establishments was merely defensive? Please tell me it can't be so...........

And of course P&O would do it again tomorrow. Why would they not? They know, they knew, what they were doing was illegal, but they did it anyway because like a millionaire that doesn't give a flying fuck about parking his Lamborghini on double yellow (no parking) lines, they know that the benefits of committing the crime way outweigh the penalties that will be imposed upon them for doing so. And that they know that the Johnson Government, despite its loud protestations (methinks he doth protest too loudly, perhaps) is absolutely on side and will do nothing? Why would they? The Party they spawn from are founded upon the very kind of Gordon Gekko "greed is good" philosophy that holds that the bottom line trumps every other consideration. That if a company slashes its workforce in order to increase profits, it is the company that is to be celebrated, not the workers who should be pitied. To throw in behind the P&O workers in any other than cheap, meaningless words, would be to alienate them from their core voters for whom such workers are an expendable commodity.

And of Sunak? Well - what more need I say. When pulled up on the Sky morning news about his wife's involvement, he was distinctly peeved. "It's nothing to do with me. She's not a politician," he said. Her business then? Nothing to see here? Ah well - remember the great response of the banker to Columbus, when asked how the banks could spring the money for his sea-crossing adventures when the Church had condemned them as against the scriptures. The man smiled gently at Columbus' nativity. "Remember my friend," he said "There's good, there's evil - and there's banking."

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The BBC once again misreporting the conflict in the Ukraine. Twice in the six pm broadcast they reported that the Ukrainian army had forced back the 'larger' army and maid significant advances.

Yes they have in respect of the latter - but in respect of the numbers the Ukrainian forces outnumber the Russians two to one. There are some three hundred thousand Ukrainian troops in the country against around one hundred and fifty thousand Russian soldiers. The Ukrainian forces are better supplied (being on their own territory), better trained (having had years of training under NATO supervision) and have those ever so important factors, high morale and motivation against a Russian army that is disillusioned, far from home and has no heart for the fight it finds itself in. Why then should we be surprised that they are being beaten back.

Today's papers are full of headlines about Putin changing his goals, looking for an exit strategy by shifting emphasis back to securing the eastern region of the country - basically that which was previously held by the Ukrainian sepratist forces - perhaps with the additional goal of securing a land corridor from the Crimea to this region. This was what a number of western experts had thought his invasion tactics would be limited to in the first instance before he went loco and sent forces into the country proper, with never any real hope of securing it or keeping it subdued if he had (against all odds) achieved this.

But let's face it; if he is able to succeed in this and return to his countrymen with the Eastern Ukraine under his belt, he will have won a significant victory. The Ukrainians are getting a taste of what total and ongoing war in their country could mean - years of Syria style bombardment and casualties, millions of people (up to ten some commentators say) displaced from their homes for decades, or most probably permanently. Will this experience 'wash their eyes' into acceptance of agreements (said to be under discussion in Turkey) that they would not formerly have accepted?

Putin, it has been noted, is a man who likes to keep his options open. Yes it would have been great had the Ukrainian government crumbled, had he been able to sweep to victory as he did in the Crimea - but it was not to be. Western commitment to the Ukrainian cause has proven much more substantial than he supposed it to be, and Ukrainian resistance similarly high. While the change of tactics is being presented as a reflection of defeat in our media, to the man himself it will seem no more than a pragmatic move in a bigger game. In his own country he controls the narrative and the securing of the western flank of his country would be no small victory.

But it won't happen. The damage that has been inflicted upon the country is most likely simply too great for the people to accept a negotiated settlement. This at least was the view of the young lady refugee who I saw interviewed the other day and Western leaders seem also to be expressing the opinion that Putin must be beaten rather than accommodated. Zelensky might be considered to be next to Jesus at the moment in the eyes of his people - but if he fails to judge the public mood correctly and moves forward in a way that puts him at odds with it, this will change as quickly as the wind changes direction. Thus the likelihood is that the war will return to its previous chronic condition, concentrated in the east of the country, where it will continue on for years to come. And what will have been gained by all of this destruction and bloodshed, this driving of people from their homes and the slaughter of the innocent - precisely nothing.


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There has been much comment in the media (notably the left wing parts, but more generally as well) of Rishi Sunak having been rumbled in presenting a fake image of himself filling up 'his' car on a garage forecourt on the day of his spring statement, when in fact the car was borrowed from a Sainsbury's worker at the store where the petrol station was situated.

This seems to me to be silly. Everybody and his mother knows that these photo-ops are staged affairs. Nobody with half a brain thinks that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is going to turn up to a visit to a supermarket in a Nissan Micra that he owns himself. It would be akin to thinking that Boris Johnson, when you see him in a JCB with a hard hat and yellow jacket on, is not there as a staged event but is rather earning a few quid with a brief spot of moonlighting.

And another one; there's been reports of potatoes being left on the shelves of food-banks because people cannot afford to boil them at home due to the energy prices going up. This story first emerged in the Guardian if I remember correctly, but is now being cited on left wing platforms across the board.

It's bollocks. I'm sure that potatoes are the last thing to be taken from food-bank shelves - but not because people can't afford to cook them. There are many and varied reasons for this, not least that people who 'shop' in food banks are, like the rest of us, simply more drawn toward convenience foods that require less time and effort to turn into a meal. (No shame in this - time is a valuable commodity these days, no matter how your finances are fixed.) In point of fact, the energy prices have not yet gone up to the point where they are significantly higher than they were say a couple of months ago. They will go up in April - but they have not yet. In time, and as more people are pushed into real poverty, those potatoes will fly off the shelves just as fast as everything else. But we are not there yet, and the left wing media does itself no good by concentrating and then spuriously inflating stories that have no solid foundation. By doing so they damage the greater, and more important cause of truly holding these politicians to task. The concentration should not be on Rishi Sunak's filling up someone else's car with petrol, but on the half a billion quid that his wife has invested in Putin's Russia while he sits in a government that tells the rest of us to boycott Russian goods and places Russian trading under sanctions. The question should not be about giving spurious reasons as to why potatoes are left on food-bank shelves, but rather why millions of people on universal credit received no help whatsoever in dealing with the most severe crisis in income and living standards in living memory. C'mon guys - get your act together!

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Catherine and I are committed to service. For us that's not telling people what to do. It's about serving them and supporting them in whatever they think best, by using the platform we are lucky to have. It is why tours such as this reaffirm our desire to serve the people of the commonwealth and to listen to communities around the world.
Who the Commonwealth chooses to lead it's family in the future is not what is on my mind. What matters to us is the potential the Commonwealth family has to create a better future for the people who form it, and our commitment to serve and support as best we can.

So spoke Prince William as he and his wife boarded the plane which will return them home following a Caribbean tour that has not been without its problems. Over the course of the two or three week visit, including a number of former colonial countries including Belize and Jamaica, there have been a number of protests and other nasty surprises which have overshadowed the intended celebratory purpose of the visit, to pay tribute to the monarch on the event of her platinum jubilee. Such were the demonstrations that the Prince and Princess were forced to change schedule on more than one occasion, and alterations to speeches in order to make recognition of the role of slavery in the history of the region had to be quickly drafted.

The UK press today are pretty unanimous in painting the Prince's words in the best possible light (this is our golden couple after - none of that difficult Harry and Meghan stuff here), presenting them in a magnanimous frame in which the heir-apparent willingly hands back autonomy to the region ending centuries of British involvement.......but I (needless to say) see it differently.

My first question is of course, what the frick were they doing there anyway? Given the much greater acknowledgement of the depredations of our imperial/colonial past, do the royal planners not get that a tour of this nature, where a representative slice of the family is sent out to the colonies for a round of bowing and scraping in order that the Queen may present the seventy odd years of headship as something that is deserving of gratitude, is totally out of kilter with the times? Do they not understand that the day of the British Empire is over and must now be seen for what it was - a thing of shame? Not something that should be 'celebrated' contiguously with the monarch's jubilee with a round of hand-shaking and black tie dinners? It's like Germany sending dignitaries to Poland to celebrate the occupation of the country during the second world war (never mind the inapropriateness of such events in countries where poverty and economic hardship are rife among the people themselves, even if the political classes can live the life of Riley upon their backs).

And just, in the light of this thinking, look at the Prince's words. Are they not rife with the kind of patronising undertones that should make the people of these former holdings sick with nausea. These are not the words of a man acknowledging the crimes of his ancestors, taking the knee in abject sorrow for what was done by those who came before. They are words spoken, replete with paternalism and superiority. The kind of service on offer is not service as we understand it - it is the service of a parent to its children; an "of course I'm here to look after you" (because you are too infantile to look after yourself) kind of service, full of crooning "I'll do whatever you want" resonance. The kind of talk you use to a baby.

If the people of the Caribbean have any sense, they will tell the Queen, Prince William and the rest of the British administration that have done so much to damage their region over the centuries, to pack their bags and be gone for good. Royal tours my arse!


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James O'Brien, the other day considering the rapid fall from grace of our Chancellor Rishi Sunak, observed that his potential for being the most likely person to replace Boris Johnson as leader of the Tories (and by extension, be the next Prime Minister) had evaporated, leaving the foreign secretary Liz Truss as the front runner.

All I can say is God help us.

This is the woman who recently said that she fully supported any British citizen who wanted to up sticks and head to the Ukrainian border in order to join the fight against the Russians, prompting desperate pleas from the head of the armed services, the defence secretary and just about every other member of the cabinet for her advice to be ignored. This is the woman who was so unable to see the implied connotations of her words that she stood in front of an audience and told them that she very much was looking forward to visiting a country in order to investigate its pork markets. This is the woman who flies into a rage at the thought that we import two-thirds of our cheese. But most importantly, this is the woman who has tied herself to the Johnson brand of dissimulation, evasion and self-service; a woman whose principles are as nothing compared to her desire for power (matched only by her absolute unfitness to hold it), a woman who could be trusted only to take us further down the road toward international and economic oblivion, pursuing paths she doesn't understand,and uttering words the meaning and consequences of which she is uncomprehending.


------------------------------0----------------------


Did you ever read Orwell's 1984? In it, if I have it correctly, the administration of the world was broken up into three regions, each of which was directed in a war of attrition with the other two, the entire held in balance and serving mainly as a means for each region to maintain its respective population in a state of tyranny in which the use of fear, disinformation and the perpetual obfuscation and confusion in the dissemination of information were critical tools.

Okay, we're not there yet - but do you ever get the feeling that much of what our media is feeding us is with the purpose of ensuring that we don't spend too much time actually looking back, considering what has actually been done to us over the last few years?

The crises seem to have been coming so thick and fast, be so all consuming of our news and media output, that they demand an absolute attention to the here and now, leaving neither time nor energy for reflection about how we have got here, and by what means we have been shepherded to this place.

We've had the turbulent years of brexit and Trump, of leaving the EU and the odd, strange world of the pandemic. Now we have financial meltdown and the Ukrainian war, the rise of iron curtains, the threat of Armageddon or pan-European war.......

And so it goes on.

But just how much does it have to be this way? Does this immediacy of the demand on one's attention serve a different master? Does it serve to keep us distracted from what has been done? How our world has been knocked off kilter, and why and for what reason was this done? And were such reasons what they appear to be, and justified, and wise..... and have we been led well by our political masters....... and are they now taking us to a place where we would choose to be?

Big questions. And I can't answer them. But absolutely, and without a doubt - without fear of being wrong or of having to eat my words, I can say this. It isn't going to stop. This is where we are and there is no going back in my lifetime. When the Ukrainian situation is ended (or looses its immediacy as a tool of distraction, or fades into a long-term war of attrition, or people simply get bored of it) there will be another, and another, and another. Be it a climate meltdown, or an economic one, or a fiscal one, or a public health one, I don't know...... but I know without fear of contradiction, that I can say that one will be along to replace the one that is departing.

I don't know, but it makes you tired doesn't it?

[peter]

I'd like to make something clear. I like Prince William and his beautiful wife Kate. They are a very becoming couple who have navigated the difficulties of their position in these hard times with sensitivity and grace.

I don't think for a minute that the decision to go on their ill-fated visit to the Caribbean (only 8 days, in fact - not the two weeks I stated above) was anything to do with them. They would take their instructions on a thing like this from the Queen's office and simply do as they were told. There were some howling blunders on the tour - a tour they should never have been asked to go on in my opinion - such as the footage of them 'high-fiving' children through a weld-mesh fence, held back like prisoners in a cage, but this would not have been of their doing. Like his mother before him, the sight of the children would have brought out a desire in him - and Kate as well, it need not be said - to make them happy with some actual contact, and hence the couple headed over toward them and made the best of a bad job.

But I'm of the opinion that the whole thing was a mistake from start to finish. The colonial era is not something my country should be proud of, and I see the commonwealth as little more than a painful reminder of that shameful period of our history when we thought it appropriate to cross the world and subdue any nation that our guns and bayonets could batter into submission, and then force our culture and systems upon them while we n turn brutalized their people and pillaged their wealth. Rather than being called the British Commonwealth, it should, in my opinion be called the British Survivors Commonwealth.

I mean, what is the commonwealth actually for? What does it do that an organisation of the same countries absence any British involvement could not do for itself? Their common legacy of having fallen under the British whip makes it understandable that they feel a bond worthy of commemoration with some kind of recognizory structure - but for the British to be part of it?

So no - I don't think that William and Kate should have been sent on this ill-advised and insensitive tour. And despite my words of criticism about the 'tone' of his departing words (which I doubt he actually composed himself, or if he did, then were done so with the best of intentions) I do actually like the couple and hold them in no way responsible for the awkward situation they found themselves in.

-------------------------------------------0-----------------------------

My spelling is crap. I know it and try as I might there seems to be little I can do about it.

On one occasion two esteemed members of the Watch made fun of it and I, in my churlish weakness, took umbrage and decamped from the site for a few days to lick my wounds (would that I were a stronger person).

But I begin to wonder. I have been an avid reader for the whole of my life and yet it seems still, at the if not latter, then at least the further part of it, I still cannot retain the order of the letters in the words I see and read daily. You have no idea of the pains I sometimes go through in getting a word down on my screen; sometimes I simply seem to loose track of even the phonetic sound of a word throwing my predictive text algorithm into spasms.

But in today's Telegraph, shamed ex-health secretary Matt Hancock is making his bid for political redemption under just this subject. Huge numbers of us are, he says, "undiagnosed dyslexics" who struggle through life labouring under the disability, never knowing that this is what we are 'suffering' from.

Well, this would be me I suppose. Hancock himself, say's that he is a sufferer, but has striven all of his life to hide the fact. Now however, having decided to bare all, he is urging bosses to become more aware of the problem and in turn to seek a "greater neurodiversity in who they hire", arguing that the different way that dyslexics think is "essential in the modern economy". Throwing out your CV because of a "typo" is "out of date", he claims, seemingly unaware that a spelling mistake.......err....... isn't actually a typo (but let that rest - we know what he means). On the back of these concerns, Hancock is trying to push through a private members bill in the House, that would require all school children to be tested for dyslexia during the course of their education.

Fine sentiments no doubt, and despite my mocking tone I do have sympathy with the place he is coming from. But I also wonder if everything really has to be categorised with a name. This is very much the modern practice, such that there is hardly anything that one does, one says or one thinks that doesn't have a label attached to it, but does it really help?

I'm not so sure. It has a certain attraction, to be able to refute the gentle teasing of my friends on the Watch with a title for my affliction. "Look - it isn't my fault! I'm a dyslexia sufferer!" So much the better no doubt, for my bruised ego......but is it? I'm not sure I want to be one of Matt Hancock's neurodiverse individuals. I think I rather prefer to be just a normal person - same as you, or him, or the next bloke in the street - but just one who happens to be bad at fkcuing sleppling!

[peter]

I am in my mid sixties. In my youth I studied biological sciences - more specifically, physiology and biochemistry - to masters degree level. This was during the nineteen-eighties. At no point during my undergraduate or postgraduate studies was the idea that sex and gender were two different things introduced. In fairness, there was no reason why it would have been - for at this point there was certainly no understanding that this might be the case amongst the public more broadly, and my degrees were not to do with the mind and its nebulous workings, but based around the more grounded accumulation of empirically derived knowledge as it pertains to the 'systems' from which life arises and sustains itself.

I have no particular axe to grind on this issue (a man can call himself an ostrich for all I care and I'll be happy to oblige him/her/it - strike out as required), but I do reserve the right to believe what I believe in the same way I accord another the right to believe what they will as well.

This is all fine and presents no problem, but at the level of the state issues can arise. The Office of National Statistics has a web-page devoted to the issue entitled "What is the difference between sex and gender", the opening paragraph of which contains the following words.

This article sets out the interpretation of the words "sex" and"gender", which the..... UK government bodies will be using to assess how the UK is progressing towards the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Later, following an in depth consideration of the subject it gives us the following summary.

Sex and gender are different concepts that are often used interchangeably. The UK government refers to sex as being biologically defined, and gender as a social construct that is an internal sense of self, whether an individual sees themselves as a man or a woman, or another gender identity.

Again, so far so good - one wants government to be sensitive to people's individual circumstances and do all it can in order to accommodate them. But then stories such as the one featured on the front of today's Telegraph arise, and you wonder if these things cannot be taken a tad too far.

Certain NHS trusts are now, it would appear, prioritising gender over sex when it comes to questioning patients prior to potentially risky therapies such as MRI scans and radiotherapy. This results in instances where all patients, male or female, being asked if there is any possibility of their being pregnant prior to the initiation of the therapies. For most people, not a problem I'm sure - and laugh and an answer in the negative would I'm certain, be the response from most men so questioned - but cases are being reported where confusion and distress is caused, say in individuals with dementia or other psychological disturbances, where the result is not so funny.

I understand the difficulty in navigating through a maze of this complexity, and on first reading of a news article such as the one in I refer to, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that the Trust's involved are being too literal in their interpretation of the government advice, being 'silly about it' or attempting to be too 'pc'. But after reflection, I'm not so sure. The difficulties resultant from a government not being prepared to grasp this nettle, the mental anguish resultant from a refusal to recognise that the world is not simple, that even something so simple as whether one is a man or a woman does not fall neatly into the black or the white, would surely be far more wide ranging and destructive? I think that the odd 'funny' question, even if in rare cases it does cause some temporary confusion, is a small price to pay for the benefit of the much larger issue.

[peter]

Remember Partygate? Remember the Sue Gray report?

Well in what seems now a lifetime ago, these were the things that dominated the headlines and almost brought Prime Minister Johnson to his knees.

The metropolitan police, working away behind the scenes on the said Gray report (which we the public have yet to see, and I have my doubts we ever will) and the answers to the questionnaires sent out in consequence of it, have begun to issue their first fixed penalty notices to the miscreants so fingered.

That these are going to the 'low hanging fruit' - the attendees of one or other of the multiple gatherings under investigation, who have actually admitted guilt (as well as being of low political significance) - is not the point. The point is that in issuing the penalties at all the police are crossing the Rubicon of saying that the gatherings were illegal beyond legal question. And these in the very heart of government, at the Prime Ministerial residence, and involving the top officials of state.

The fines so issued are likely to be small in the first instance, a few hundred quid scattered here and there, but will rise in scale and importance as the more senior members of Johnson's staff are hooked into reach. The organizers of the parties - for this is what they were, despite the PM's failure to recognise them as such - will conceivably be issued with the highest level penalties of ten thousand pounds. Given that students who organised parties in the open air have received this level of fine, it would seem inapropriate for these high level officials to escape with lesser penalties for the same crime.

Of the PM himself, little is being heard. He has claimed (via his lawyers it is said) that he was there "in a working capacity", and is thereby exonerated of guilt, but it's a bit weak for a man who first claimed that there was no parties, and then that they weren't parties, and then that he wasn't there, and now finally that he was there, but that he was working.

Now the arrival of this little bit of movement in today's press on the subject might be a bit misleading. It's very low-key and could easily fizzle away to nothing (such will be Johnson's hopes no doubt). But it could possibly be the first small lappings of a tidal wave building in the distance. Now that the illegality of the gatherings has been established, what of the PM's having told the House that there were no such gatherings. Surely somebody on the opposition benches is going to remember that? No, as Boris Johnson sits down to his eggs and kippers this morning, his breakfast might not go down quite as smoothly as he would have wished. The wind-chimes could be stirring in anticipation of bigger things to come - and he will know it!

----------------------------0--------------------------

And finally we get to Will Smith.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Where did it all go wrong?

What should have been a glittering night for him - the apogee of his career as an actor - ended with him slapping compere Chris Rock's mush following an inapropriate joke made about the actors wife.

I won't go into the details of the altercation - they have been so widely reported that you'd have to be walking round with your head up your jacksy not to already know them - but I am minded to say this. There has been an absolute barrage of criticism against Smith from people who simply cannot seem to grasp the idea that this was not a reasoned action on his part. I've heard so many media commentators saying that "violence is not acceptable under any circumstances" that I could spit. Of course it isn't! No-one is suggesting that it is!

What is being suggested is that it is understandable in the true sense of the word; ie that you understand that in human actions, there exists a category that does not fall under the headings 'reasoned' or 'reasonable', but are spontaneous and in consequence of a stimulus that the individual has no capacity to control or overrule. Such 'crimes of passion' do not come under the foolish pontificating of individuals who would talk of what was an acceptable response to the jibes of Rock at the expense of Smith's wife. They occur under the influence of the 'red mist' of some deeper part of the brain - a place where reason and proportionality of response never enters. It was incredible the number of commentators who simply seemed unable to grasp this - no doubt as well, the very ones who would most expect such understanding to be lent to themselves were the tables reversed and it was they, who's actions were falling under the spotlight.

[Lefdmae Deemalr Effaeldm]

The one that really breaks my head is where was this outpouring of support and aid and refugee welcome when it was the Syrians and Yemenis fleeing their own (also Russian involved) conflicts?

I don't find it that surprising, but very regretful. There are even a few reasons I see, in particular that the world veeeeerrrrryyyy slllooowwwlllllyy starts to get just how dangerous the Kremlin regime is. And thus how important it is to do something. Also part of it might be that it's closer to home for some. Part might be alas prejudice, some people are prejudiced against Ukrainians too, but fewer. Part might be media exposure, some of it Ukrainian-driven - smartphones are common, Internet is good even now (including Starlink, thanks to Elon Musk for that), and there's a huge volunteer network (according to a poll I've seen ~80% percent of population doing at least something helpful) that does stuff including recording events and spreading information.
But it would have been so much better if the world figured it out sooner, and better if even earlier than Syria, like when it was Georgia or better yet when it was Chechen Republic Of Ichkeria and Putin was openly calling for physically destroying their media centers - and even now understanding is very incomplete.

Zelensky might be considered to be next to Jesus at the moment in the eyes of his people

Not really, and varies a lot. As per my understanding, he's more a performer than a politician, and that's often not useful or harmful, in particular when he gets out of his way to be liked by everyone, but in this particular case that's actually mostly useful, he knows how to catch attention, how to be liked, and that really helps.

Okay, we're not there yet - but do you ever get the feeling that much of what our media is feeding us is with the purpose of ensuring that we don't spend too much time actually looking back, considering what has actually been done to us over the last few years?

The crises seem to have been coming so thick and fast, be so all consuming of our news and media output, that they demand an absolute attention to the here and now, leaving neither time nor energy for reflection about how we have got here, and by what means we have been shepherded to this place.

We've had the turbulent years of brexit and Trump, of leaving the EU and the odd, strange world of the pandemic. Now we have financial meltdown and the Ukrainian war, the rise of iron curtains, the threat of Armageddon or pan-European war.......

And so it goes on.

But just how much does it have to be this way? Does this immediacy of the demand on one's attention serve a different master? Does it serve to keep us distracted from what has been done? How our world has been knocked off kilter, and why and for what reason was this done? And were such reasons what they appear to be, and justified, and wise..... and have we been led well by our political masters....... and are they now taking us to a place where we would choose to be?

Big questions. And I can't answer them. But absolutely, and without a doubt - without fear of being wrong or of having to eat my words, I can say this. It isn't going to stop. This is where we are and there is no going back in my lifetime. When the Ukrainian situation is ended (or looses its immediacy as a tool of distraction, or fades into a long-term war of attrition, or people simply get bored of it) there will be another, and another, and another. Be it a climate meltdown, or an economic one, or a fiscal one, or a public health one, I don't know...... but I know without fear of contradiction, that I can say that one will be along to replace the one that is departing.

I don't know, but it makes you tired doesn't it?

Heh, can't recall who it was, someone famous said he thought the media were trying to make people dumb, but later figured it was just what sold well.
And oh the many times I've been frustrated by the media who drown out vitally important info, usually by throwing out a ton of newer things and never looking back.
The neverending multi-crisis though might be not a coincidence indeed, but I think for one it's once again how visible everything is now, and perhaps more how the humankind kinda relaxed in the recent calm, paid little attention to prevent problems, elected politicians who have the guts of an eviscerated mouse (and other pleasant features), and now gets the results.
If they wanted a nightmare crisis that could distract from anything, they had one brewing for many, many years, and it's one where a guy with enough nukes to destroy the world took in a guy with "war for the sake of war" ideas as his party's ideologist. Did they write about it? Almost nothing, mostly in blogs few people read.

[peter]

So the metropolitan police have decided that they won't be going to disclose any details about the various individuals who receive fixed penalties and cautions as a result of the partygate enquiries, not because they cannot do so, but because of concerns respecting privacy as raised by the Leveson enquiry into phone hacking.

I wonder if they would make the same decision were the miscreants not members of the upper political elite but were instead individuals like shamed celebrity Katie Price.

Notable, following the issuing of the first tranche of twenty fixed penalties, that Boris Johnson is still maintaining that the events that took place were not necessarily beyond the boundaries of the law, despite the issuing of the fines. I suppose his argument would run, "Just because someone was fined for being in a gathering unnecessarily, does not mean that the gathering was unnecessary in and of itself. Okay - I'll buy that, as far as it goes. But I'm struggling to reconcile the setting off out with suitcases to buy wine for the fridge, the installing of a mobile disco in the Number 10 basement and the breaking of the PM's infant sons swing in the ensuing palaver as coming under the heading of a 'necessary gathering'. Maybe I just don't understand how work is done up at that level?

But despite its low key appearance in the media there are indeed small rumblings that the issue has not been forgotten about in the behind the scenes depths of the parliamentary MPs. Little comments about MPs being ready to take up the fight to remove Johnson once more when the time is ripe are still heard. We shall have to wait and see whether they amount to anything.

--------------------------------------------0-----------------------------------

From the cradle to the grave; that's what they promised us. So at least, said Churchill in a reference to Beveridge's report in which the first ideas for a national insurance support scheme were put forward during the war years, and acted upon ultimately by the post-war administrations of the Atlee government. The scheme was meant to provide a safety net of health care and income, including a period of pension payment following a lifetime's work, which would serve a person from the moment of his birth to the day of his ultimate demise.


This at least was the understanding of the British populace at the time of my early life. It was a given that you would work, pay your taxes, pay your national insurance contributions (which at times would cumulatively amount to as much as a third or more of your earnings), and in return you would receive health care free at the point of service should you require it, a livable income should you have the misfortune of falling out of work, and a pension upon which you could survive following your retirement. The said pension could be of the basic type - not sufficient to make you rich, but guaranteed to provide for the basic requirements of life - or earnings related, which as a result of higher national insurance premiums paid by high wage earners, returned an incrementally larger pension in proportion to the amount of NI contributions you had paid.

Such was the case for the first half of my working life. It was never questioned that a state pension would be insufficient to provide for ones needs upon retirement, and very few people felt it necessary to 'top up' their state pension of the future, by payment into private schemes to run alongside their state contribution. When doubts did begin to surface that the state pension would actually be sufficient to provide of itself for the needs of all pensioners (a steadily rising demographic due to the increasing longevity provided by the working of a universal NHS), the advice of governments was quickly changed, and became that of encouragement for people to take up such private plans, in order to supplement what was by now recognised, would be an insufficient state income.

This was fne if you happened to be fortunate enough just to be starting out on your lifetime of work and could afford a small payment each month that would accumulate over a lifetime into a 'pension pot' (via the prudent investment of your contributions over your lifetime by your pension provider) to be enjoyed upon your retirement - but for individuals who were not fortunate enough to have been employed by companies that paid into a 'work pension' scheme, the size of monthly payment that would be required to return anything but an insignificant return upon retirement, was prohibitive. Nevertheless many did take up the challenge and began to pay considerable proportions of their income into such plans, alongside their ongoing state contributions (unless they had decided to opt out of the latter and go for the entirely private route).

Then came the financial crash of 2008, and now comes the economic tsunami of the pandemic. Throw on the cost of a war in Europe, a burgeoning climate catastrophe and in the case of the UK, the single greatest act of self harm that any nation has decided to enact upon itself in the form of Brexit, and what you have is a situation where inflation is about to skyrocket, the value of investments, pensions and indeed the simple hard cash of personal savings is depreciating by the day and the interest required to service any kind of debt is burgeoning.

In short, all of those plans, all of those contributions, bought and paid for at the expense of living an actual life - of doing the things, at the time, that that money paid into those schemes could have otherwise paid for - all of those are turning by the day into dust. What will remain for the bulk of people, when the fallout from the coming economic collapse has settled, is, if not actual poverty then a thin step above it. All of those things that were planned for retirement, the holidays and the house improvements - none of those will happen. Instead,the lives of today that people sacrificed upon the alter of the life of tomorrow will turn out to have been so much chaff, as they grub from day to day in the state of 'just about managing'.

How pissed should all those people be? How angry at the place that there governments have led them to? At how badly they have been advised, and directed, and led, by people who have looked to their own interest, lost no chance, no opportunity, in the feathering of their own nests while so doing?

Yes. People should be angry. They have every right to be.

[peter]

Today's front pages are almost completely dominated by a damning report on the failings of maternity procedures within the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust that resulted in multiple deaths of babies and mothers, and left other children with brain damage and defects that would affect them for the rest of their (often short) lives.

The report's author has further gone on record as saying that until the recommendations contained therein are addressed, the problems identified (which are systemic across the whole NHS and by no means limited to the above named trust), childbirth "is not safe for women in England."

Powerful words and while this type of news story is not one I normally delve too deeply into (not because I have no interest or don't consider them of vital importance, but rather simply because I have neither the knowledge or the time to do so) the details of this particular case struck my eye.

Because, while the reporting is consistent across the board in giving the statistics in terms of deaths etc across the twenty year period the report covers, very little attention is paid to the nature of the said failings in themselves. About the closest we get to an examination of the nature of these failings is the below quote from the Guardian coverage of this morning.

A combination of an obsession with "natural births" over caesarian sections coupled with a shocking lack of staff, training and oversight of maternity wards led to a toxic culture in which mothers and babies died needlessly for 20 years while "repeated failures" were ignored again and again.

I'm assuming that the inverted commas used in this quote imply that the so enclosed words were those used in the report, or by the author thereof in subsequent statements.

So in short, the identified problems seem to be a failure of training, staffing and oversight, a failure to learn from mistakes and to improve practices in the light of them, a reluctance to listen to mothers, both at the time of their attendance and subsequently, had their been a problem, and finally, a misplaced desire to see natural birth figures for their wards maintained, at the expense of caesarian figures, even in cases where the latter would have been more appropriate. (Reference has also been made to a "systemic problem of sexism within the NHS", but by another commentator rather than in the report itself.)

Well the high handedness of doctors when it comes to their dealings with suggestions from the patient themselves is legendary, as indeed is their refusal ever to acknowledge that mistakes have been made. In the veterinary profession, of which I have considerable experience, the advice given by the governing body for dealing with instances in which complaints are being made is to never accept any culpability, never acknowledge any blame and never apologize for anything you have done. I would have little doubt that the same advice would be given to doctors by their defence advisors.

That the natural birth observation is significant I have no doubt - but the question that is not addressed is why this should be so? Why would a team of maternity staff, or a hospital trust, worry that their birth figures should reflect a leaning toward natural birth over surgical intervention? Surely the decisions as to whether to proceed with a natural birth or resort to surgery should be taken on a case by case basis? I do understand that their is a grey area in any given period of parturition, during which the course of action which should be followed is by no means clear, but any given professional will rapidly come to the decision that suits him or her best and the success or failure of that decision will inevitably effect any similar decision being made in the future. This is the practice of medicine. This is how it is done. Figures to demonstrate a preference for this or that type of birth should have no place in this figuring - the only figure of significance is that of the living breathing neonate, on the mat before his mother. After this happy outcome has been achieved, then the rest of the figuring can begin. If this or that trust has a higher caesarian birth percentage, or a higher natural one, what of it. Who cares about a natural birth if the baby or mother is dead? I simply don't understand why there should be a desire to be demonstrable in your preference toward natural over caesarian birth? Why would this even come into it unless it is simply a question of money (or some kind of throwback to the days of pre-medicine where women died in 'natural' childbirth up and down the country on a daily basis).

And as to training and equipment and oversight - well. It's not rocket science to work out what lies behind deficiencies in these areas and I'm not going to insult your intelligence by going into them. Sufficient to say that when it comes to the next general election, you know which box your tick should go into.

[peter]

Well here it comes. Today is the day that the first of two raisings of the energy price cap (the maximum that the energy companies are allowed to charge households for their electricity and gas), the second coming later in the year at the start of October.

As well as energy price rises (which will hit the average household to something like the tune of a couple of thousand dollars) the cost of council tax, water, national insurance, broadband and stamps all rise in tandem.

Feed costs to the chicken rearing industry are reportedly up by thirty percent which will inevitably be reflected in soaring costs for both eggs and chicken meat - two of the most widely utilised sources of protein in most people's diet in the UK.

All in all a pretty harsh set of conditions to wake up to, and not designed to improve people's impression of the government that is overseeing this debacle.

Meanwhile, a couple of the papers run stories about grubby financial shenanigans in which shamed royal Prince Andrew seems to have become embroiled - something about a Turkish millionairess having been swindled out of forty million pounds, seven hundred and fifty grand of which, somehow found its way into the Prince's bank account as payment for a British passport (or something). The story involves a complex web of different companies (onshore and in various tax havens such as the Cayman Islands), the City of London (suprise, suprise) and a mysterious Turkish swindler called (imaginatively) 'Mr Turk', as well as some Dragons Den style of scheme in which Andrew has involvement called Pitch@Palace (or something.

The whole thing is entirely questionable from start to finish and coming hard upon heels of his recent payment to his accuser in the US of twelve million quid in order to drop her US court charges of sexual assault allegations, it does not look good. The Prince in the last few days has made his first public appearance since the payment, during which he accompanied the queen (to the displeasure apparently of both Charles and William) to a memorial service for Prince Philip. This was seen as being his first steps toward an attempted rehabilitation of his public profile, but the story breaking this morning will certainly scupper that idea for a good while.

The stories are a good juxtaposition of the state of affairs of the lowest versus the highest in our country. At the bottom, people who have nothing are clobbered for 'even that which they have', while at the top, those who already enjoy the best of what life can provide, grub and swindle their way to ever greater riches, be it by scrounging money for free wallpaper, handing their mates contracts running into the billions for ppe that doesn't exist or involving themselves with dubious bankers and scam investors at just sufficient distance that the cash rolls in but direct criminality cannot be proved.

Was this not ever the way however? And why should we complain. We had the opportunity to change this. There was a single moment when we could have broken this system, when a man who had genuinely no part to play in it could have been raised to power - but instead we chose to soak up the lies and disinformation that our establishment led media put out concerning his character and rather voted in a known liar and product of the very clique which is now benefiting while the rest of us shoulder the cost.

But as with brexit, and with Covid, and like the nazi party following the defeat of Germany in 1945, pretty soon, as the true level of the calamity into which he has led us becomes plain, you won't be able to find a single person who supprted him.

Brexit amnesia. Covid amnesia. Soon it will be Johnson amnesia. But those of us who didn't fall for these things - we know. We don't forget.

[peter]

I must be stupid or something.

I can't seem to get my head around what is going on with these energy prices. On the one hand the energy price cap is being raised so as to protect our energy providers against rising costs of energy on the world market - ie the price they have to pay for it before they pass it (the energy, in the form of electric or gas - for some reason oil is not included in this, I believe) on to the consumer. This is being done to protect their profitability.

On the other hand, there are calls, both inside the House of Commons and outside, for there to be a 'windfall tax' on the energy companies whose profits have been soaring due to increased prices.

Meanwhile, the energy cap itself is overseen by the NGO Ofgem, who do not so much as set the level of the price cap but as calculate what it is to be set at on the basis of a rolling average of energy costs paid by the suppliers for the commodity over the previous six months (or something).

I just don't get how all of these things are squared. Either the companies are making shed-loads of profit, or they are not? If they are simply passing their increased costs on to the consumer in this way, and profits are made on the markup price they charge to the consumer, then as the calculated price cap rises, I suppose it makes sense that if the markup is a fixed percentage of the cost price, then the profit will rise as well. Which being the case, cannot Ofgem simply alter the way in which the price cap is calculated, in effect to channel these additional profits back to the consumer?

I suppose Johnson is against this because it flys in the face of his argument that the companies must have maximum monies available to invest back into infrastructure development and research into renewables (in order that he might meet his net zero by 2060 - or is it 50 - pledge).

It's all very difficult for a simpleton like me to grasp, how it all works and whatnot, but I've got a different idea altogether. How about we return to the good old days of the 'mixed economy' (before we sold the 'family silver' as it were) where it was understood that certain utilities, certain basic needs of a society, were simply too important to be left in the hands of the private sector. That when it came to the energy needs of households, the water flowing into our homes (and yes, the transport that carries us to and from work), the capitalist-profit model just simply didn't cut the mustard.

So in the face of a crisis in our energy supply that threatens to blast huge numbers of people back into 1950's levels of existence (because that's what happens - in the face of ever increasing costs and consequential poverty, you are pushed back into earlier forms of living where modern technologies are increasingly denied to you....ie first goes the Netflix, then the Sky, then the internet, then the car ....etc, etc until you are mending old clothes and making a chicken feed you for four days) - in the face of a crisis such as the one we are on the verge of, doesn't it make sense for our government to once again take the helm and instigate a program of nationalisation, such that energy security can be once more secured for all the people of this country........ not just those who are wealthy enough to turn on the lights?

The privatisation of the public utilities, begun under Margret Thatcher and continued thereafter has been coming apart at the seams for many a year. The national rail and bus network is a disgrace, with the government repeatedly having to step in and bail out companies charged with the maintenance of workable services (and who promise repeatedly that they will be able to do so) when they inevitably fail. The provision of clean fresh water to every household gets harder and harder to maintain as companies strip out profits that should go back into infrastructure maintenance and development, rather to give them to their stakeholders as annual dividends instead. Now the energy companies, whose interest has always similarly been directed toward their shareholders rather than the consumer, threaten to reduce huge numbers of the population to penury as they fight to balance the needs of feeding and heating their households. The only remaining member of the big quartet (transport, energy, water and communication) left - that of communication (either direct person to person or via mail services) that seems to be surviving its move to the private sector, is only doing so by virtue of the introduction of technology unthought of at the time of its selling off. And even in the face of the rise of the internet, which has singlehandedly kept the telecommunications sector afloat and profitable, the postal side of the sector is in disarray. The post office is virtually bankrupt and the costs associated with sending a letter (together with its almost redundancy for most people and situations) make it simply unviable.

So thirty years down the line and only the most rose-tinted inclined of fabulist would claim that the Thatcher revolution in privatisation has been a success - and yet any mention of the words 'clause four' will still have the bulk of our self-styled 'socialist' Labour MPs recoiling in horror. Why is this? I'm the first to admit that the original formulation as it was enunciated in 1918 is archaic, has too much of the Marxist sniff about it, to be palatable today. But this doesn't mean that the baby should be thrown out with the bathwater. If the Labour Party had anything about them at all, in the face of the crisis about to descend on the working people of this country, they would reignite the old socialist flame, distance themselves from the Tory-lite lap-dogs to business and elitist interest that they have become, and once again grasp the nettle of doing for our society what governments can do best, while leaving the private sector to concentrate on what they in their turn, can also do best.

A good mixed economy. A sound base of public utilities upon which can rest a pyramid of industry and business in the hands of a thriving private sector. There will be a day, in the near future, when such a system as we enjoyed in the pre-Thatcher years of my life, will seem like a utopia which we would all die for.

[peter]

(Sigh!)

I don't understand it. I know that in order to prosecute a war against another country it requires that you dehumanise your enemy - paint a picture of him as lower than animal, evil at the core and worthy only of destruction. It is only by this means that normal human-minded people can be encouraged to take up arms and to kill their fellow men.

I also understand, that having achieved this state of mind in soldiers sent into the field, once there we expect them then to behave as though operating under the Queensbury rules, and consider it correct that any barbarities commited while in the field of battle are punishable under law, as though no conflict were occuring, as though war were a 'normal' circumstance where people (so indoctrinated) should be expected to behave as though at a normal days work in the office.

But of course it doesn't happen like that. People who have been pre-prepared to view their enemies as alien sub-humans treat them as such. So maybe this accounts for what we are seeing as the Russians depart from the areas that they have (badly) tried to occupy. Perhaps in their frustration and anger the soldiers have run amok amongst their own Ukrainian cousins, raping and murdering, killing en-masse and burying the evidence in mass graves.

Or is this part of the Western propoganda against the Russians. The dehumanising of the Russians in our eyes, so that we in turn will be prepared to take up arms - or watch others do so in our stead - against the devilish menace of the Putin led monster-army. Perhaps the Ukrainian leadership needs such images in order to galvanise resistance against the Russians?

But the pictures would seem to belie this, so taking the stories at their face value, this is where my failure to comprehend lies. Why would people do this? Why would these soldiers, even in the febrile and stretched atmosphere of a war-zone, resort to the random and senseless slaughter of whole groups of noncombatants in this manner. Could the soldiers become so dehumanised themselves, that they see not what they are doing? Or is this (and how depressing a thought) what, at base, it actually is to be human?

That under an eggshell thin veneer of civilization lies a ferocious beast that the slightest trigger will unleash? Because remember these stories, if they are true, are not about Vladimir Putin. They are about me and you and people just like us. Vladimir Putin with his bat-shit craziness, is not behind the finger on ever pulled trigger, behind the hand on every slicing knife. The hands on those things are the hands of men, of women (if they have women in the Russian army) like you - like me.

So how am I supposed to understand this. I can't. And neither can I, nor should I, be expected to. But I won't dehumanise my enemy, I won'tsee him as an animal only fit for extermination - no matter how much our leaders would want me to, or his actions demand that I should. Because even in the theatre of war that I might find myself placed in, albeit against my will - it is in truth my hands on which the blood rests, and no-one else's.

[peter]

The science.

"We are following the science.

Whenever you hear these words used your sceptical-gaugeometer-thingy should immediately click up a notch.

Because there are two things here. There is science. And there is 'the science'.

Science is an incrementally progressive exercise that creeps forward by conjecture and testing, by hypothesising and subjecting to experiment, by making mistakes and backtracking, correcting and going forward. It is never sure, never unquestioned or unquestionable. In it there is no hubris or false certainty.

The science is different. It has moved from the practical into the ideological. It is a tool for ending all argument. For casting into question any who would cast into question. It is a means of corralling public consent, of justifying 'hard choices', of excluding different narratives.

Remember these words. Watch out for the science.


------------------------0--------------------------


Currently;

We are seeing horrors not experienced in Europe since the Nazis ravaged across the landscape three-quarters of a century ago (though everyone seems to have forgotten the Balkan crisis and its innumerable victims). We even briefly thought that fingers were hovering over the notorious red-buttons, ready to send us all to our dooms.

We have reached the doomsday point of no return in respect of the climate, where nothing but the most Draconian and swinging cuts to our carbon emissions (read our lifestyles) will save our sorry asses. ( From the first point, I'm not at all sure they're actually worth saving; seems to me that maybe the world could actually get along quite nicely without us.)

The economic house of cards we have built is about to tumble as the consequences of printing money like there is no tomorrow and borrowing money from other people (also printing it as fast as we can borrow it) come home to roost (in the form of blasting most of us back into the middle ages as our incomes, pensions and savings are reduced to nothing by runaway inflation).

In the wings we are awaiting the emergence of a new (and no doubt more, transmissible, pathogenic, adaptable - insert as is your want) virus, ready to sweep aside all the the work that all of the vaccinations has done, and which will no doubt be combatable only by a new and more rapidly tested vaccine which will need to be rolled out en masse, just as the tail of the last one disappears over the horizon. (I saw a guy on TV yesterday saying how the sweeping away of "red tape" had allowed for the rapid production of the first vaccines. I thought that another word for red tape here could be safety protocols (don't say it - I know).)


It seems to me that the common denominator of these things is fear. We have become addicted to it (just as our leaders - and others who profit from it - knew that we would). Our media has become adept at dispensing it in just the correct dosage so that we keep on doing what we are supposed to (as opposed to throwing our arms up in the air and our towels into the ring and doing whatever it is that people en masse do when they do so), but are constantly wrong footed, always kept just off-kilter enough to not question what is actually going on.

The fear helps to maintain (deliberately or otherwise) the constant flapping of the wings of confusion just at the edges of our perception. Chimera like, we seem to glimpse something that is occurring just over the horizon of our vision - but before it is tangible to our understanding it is gone. How came the world to this, we ask - to this place where we see, but we don't understand. Where our confusion drives us into the arms of the state, like so much as a mother hen ready to shelter her chicks.

Is there order to all of this? Is there someone behind the scenes, pulling all of the strings who knows whence we are headed? Biden uses the words 'new world order' (is he a complete c**t?) and the conspiracy theorists start jumping up and down like frogs on a lilly-pad.

I don't know. Perhaps I too am a conspiracy nut, because in truth I'm starting to feel a bit 'swivel-eyed' with it all as well. There are only so many existential crises I can shoulder in any given day, so - guys in the media - can you arrange them into some kind of order..... like alphabetical, or a rotating rota-system or something. Because fuck me - if it continues on like this, I might just do the unthinkable and start ignoring the fuck out of all of it. And you wouldn't want that now, would you?


[Interlude]


Fear. Fear of pandemic. Fear of war. Fear of catastrophic global climate change. Fear of economic collapse. Fear of rising living costs. Fear of shortages, both energy and food.

Who stands to gain?

Those who would seek to distract you from what they have been up to, what they are doing. Those who would wrong-foot you and keep you disorientated, because befuddled people are easier to manipulate, to lead where you will. Discombobulated people will accept things that they would not ordinarily accept.


Eschew the cult of fear.

[peter]

Just what the world needs. A new weapon of even more capabilities in terms of wreaking death and destruction across our planet.

Or so our leaders believe as agreements are formalised for a joint development of hypersonic missiles between the US, UK and Australia, in response to the putative use of the weapons in the Ukraine by the Russians.

The weapons, which can carry a nuclear warhead, are according to Joe Biden, nearly impossible to stop, travelling as they do above Mach 5 and outrunning even the best missile defence systems available to date.

But the Russians have got them ......... and so we want them too! (Would this be the same Russians who can't string a dozen tanks together and get them from A to B that we were reading about last week?)

What a shame we can't put our combined efforts into something productive like the development of fusion power or traveling to the stars. No of course not. But big guns - now thats the thing!

----------------------------------------------0----------------------------------------


President Zelensky made an impassioned plea to the UN yesterday asking for assistance in saving his country from the devastating invasion it is undergoing at the hands of Putin's forces. What was the point of the organisation dedicated to the preservation of international security, if it could not prevent a country from the aggressive invasion of another country, because the invading country sat on the list of permanent members of the security council (the P5) and had a veto on any resolution that might be passed by the body whole?

He's got a point. The presence of such a system makes a nonsense of the whole idea, designed as it is to ensure that the powerful countries retain the right to do just as they wish, while the poorer nations of the earth have to lump it.

Why it should be that there is this body with a sort of elite membership, with power to exercise control over what the other members can or cannot pronounce judgement upon (and do in respect of those judgements) is beyond me. It's like the big kids in a playground using their might to effectively say, "We can do whatever we decide as a group, as long as it agrees with what we five big guys want to do." This makes the whole thing meaningless and Zelensky is right. Unless this clear and obvious weighting in favour of certain countries is rectified and equal and comparable weighting given to all (as in one country - one vote: end of) then they might as well pack up and go home. And I can't see any of the members of the P5 agreeing to terminate their hegemonic powers anytime soon, so it's all a bit of a waste of time really.


----------------------------------------0-----------------------------------


Rupert Murdoch continues his campaign against Prince Charles today in both the Times and the Sun, with the 'revelation' that the Prince communicated with Devil ......oh no, sorry - Jimmy Saville on matters of palace protocol, back before the beastly man died and was exposed as the chilling monster he was.

That the revelations are in fact drawn from the Netflix docu-film on the man, and can be seen by anyone holding a valid subscription to the channel seems to be neither here nor there. (Perhaps we should spell it out: Here Rupert - watch my mouth. It's on TV on Netflix - get it...... TV....we can all see it. )

But anyway what's the point? So what? Saville was a member of the elite of this country - an extremely powerful figure within the BBC, and one who mixed at the top levels with politicians, the aristocracy and yes, royalty as well. What are we going to do - hold everyone who he ever communicated with to account for simply having done so?

And aside from this, what is the implication of the story: that because Charles took advice from Saville on Palace protocols in dealing with difficult PR situations (and God knows, there have been enough of them), that he is in some way tainted by the monster's crimes. This is bullshit - a non-story and should be called out for exactly what it is. A vindictive bit of character smearing by association, not worth the arse-wipe paper it is torn from.


--------------------------------------0----------------------------------


And finally, the Telegraph reports that police are on standby to "ease airport chaos" at Manchester airport as trouble threatens to break out following long delays at checkout and departures. What, I wonder, can the police do to ease the chaos. Administer valium and lead choruses of Kumbaya? More likely dish out a sound dose of hard-wood baton and pepper spray.

But in fairness to the poor sods waiting in line for hours on end, you've got to have some sympathy for them. If I was stuck in Manchester I'd be fighting to get out of it too!

[peter]

The campaign to nail Chancellor Sunak via his wife continues apace today with revelations in a number of papers concerning her status as a non-dom and the resultant consequences on her supposed tax returns over the past few years.

Having received an estimated twelve million pounds in income from her one percent share in her father's India based tech company, she would under normal tax rules in the UK, be liable for something of the order of five million pounds (such income being taxed at just over thirty eight percent).

As a non-dom however, this liability does not apply, for while she does indeed live in the UK she is considered under UK law for tax purposes, to be domiciled in another country.

Her reasoning for this (some would say excuse) is that India does not allow for people to hold dual-citizenship and so she cannot be registered as both a UK resident and an Indian one simultaneously under their laws. India is her home country and she doesn't care to relinquish her right to citizenship in that country, ergo she must be registered as a non-dom here.

It's a bit thin really - we can all see that - but in fairness, who can blame her. Five million squid is a lot of green to spring to the Exchequer if you don't have to and if the law allows for such an evasion to be utilized then hey - the law is the law.

So the problem here is one of law, not of the cupidity of Rishi Sunak's wife. I suppose that she could gift the money to the inland revenue or something - but fuck, talk about throwing good money after bad! No - I don't blame her for holding on to her mullah; if people don't like it, then don't vote for governments that make this kind of law. You know that this is right out of the Tory playbook and you voted them in so stop whining. That's my take.

Besides which, this isn't actually about her and her money at all. It's about discrediting Sunak and eroding his chances of replacing Johnson before the next election. For sure Johnson will be calling in a few favours from Rupert Murdoch for this service, though I think his concern is misplaced. Sunak's chances were never really high, of reaching the top office in the land - he simply rode a wave of pandemic adoration when he gave away money like there was no tomorrow (at the expense of our debt burden and the real money value in terms of quantitive easing). It was always going to crash and burn the moment the piper had to be paid. Sunak is (for all his surface sheen) a lightweight. When you watch him in interview you realise that he is always quoting from a pre-prepared script. He never deviates from the words that have been put into his mouth.

The other Prime Ministerial hopeful, Liz Truss is essentially the same. She is another who is fine if someone else is preparing her script. The moment she has to offer something of her own she starts talking about pork markets and infuriating cheese. No. The next Tory leader will be neither Truss nor Sunak. Someone, somewhere in the background, will be plotting and scheming (other than Gove that is; it goes without saying that he'll be plotting and scheming - he always is) with greedy eyes on the big prize. The trick is to get the behind the scenes backers on board for your pitch. Without them tweaking the knobs, whispering in the ears, you ain't going nowhere.