What Do You Think Today?

[I'm Murrin]

200-300 people a day in the UK are dying from Covid. Bit more than the common cold.

[peter]

200-300 people a day in the UK are dying from Covid. Bit more than the common cold.

Not suggesting it isn't Murrin. Just observing we are now in a position, two years down the line, such that sufficient data is available for us to make a study of the policies we held, and ensure that any mistakes we made, if mistakes there were, are not repeated. Seems reasonable enough to me.

[peter]

So Boris Johnson has promised a hundred million pounds to the Ukraine in support of their ongoing struggle against Russian aggression in their country.

Oddly enough, it's exactly the same figure he promised to Cornwall when he visited the county during the brexit campaign, and said he would match pound for pound that figure (which had previously been earmarked for the region by the EU as part of their ongoing regional development program).

Let's hope he does a better job with the Ukrainians. To date Cornwall has received only three million pounds with seemingly no prospect of the rest coming any time soon.


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


Can I just put some context around the daily death figures from Covid quoted above. From Office of National Statistics figures, the February 2022 death tally for England was 43,081 - 7.2 percent lower (or 3,338 deaths fewer) than the "February five year average (2016 - 2019, and 2021)"


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


Yesterday the Daily Star ran a front page headline Ohh-Arr-Ya in response to a report that a spacecraft of some description was to be launched from Newquay airport (Newquay is in Cornwall, just in case this is read by anyone not familiar with the area) with the purpose of "combatting pirates" or something.

There has been talk of Newquay being used for such launches for a while, and I imagine that this has to do with some kind of satellite tracking system or something (I did not see the story inside the paper - only the front page).

The picture alongside the headline was a sort of cartoon Johnny Depp complete with rocket and sabre and a bubble that read "Perhaps they've got pasties and cream teas".

Now I'm aware that this humour is gentle in intent - there is no malice behind it - but still I'm afraid, it grates on me a bit. I'm not exactly Cornish - I was born here, but my parents were both outsiders from different regions of the country. To be genuinely Cornish you should be of Celtic origin with a good Cornish name (ideally beginning with Tre-, or Ben-, or Nance-) but absent that, at least have a few generations of Cornish born ancestors under your belt. But nevertheless, this is my home region and I have great love and respect for it. The Cornish people themselves are a hardy breed, canny and resourceful: they would stack up against any people on earth (except perhaps the Nepalese, who are just something else).

But reading the headline yesterday, I was reminded of a time, back in my college days in London in the seventies, when in a pub full of Londoners, I was asked by the locals where I was from (I have no accent), and on my reply I was greeted with a chorus of the same "Ohh-arr, Ohh-Arr"s as was on the paper. It was funny and caused me no distress, but since then, whenever I've encountered this type of reaction (and it has been often) or when I've heard people like the pop-group The Wurzels or Jethro the comedian making a caricature of their nationality ('I've got a brand new combine harvester' and all that kind of stuff) I've been mildly irritated. It is ever so slightly demeaning - just a tiny bit of a put down included in the humour, as it were.

But yesterday's headline brings for me, something into focus that it's time we started giving some consideration to.

I'm not a fan of nationalism - but I'm even less of a fan of excessive collectivism. I think the latter is deeply dangerous, giving way too much power to too few people and leading inevitably to dictatorship the larger the collective gets. The administration problems of a given area increase exponentially with its size, and the inherent failings of the democratic system soon cause any large scale area to fragment unless governance becomes more authoritarian in order to combat this. Hence the reason why a country on the scale of China can never function as a true democracy - the area is too large, the difference between its ethnic groups too great, for democracy to work.

But this is by-the by.

Over the past two years of the pandemic, I've seen how a centralised and unaccountable state authority can destabilise a country, bring it to ruin, and abuse the power it has vested within itself, to the detriment of the freedom and independence of the people to go about their daily lives without let or hindrance. And I've come to hate it. And for this reason (and you must by now, see where this is going) I've come to a view that I never in a million years thought I would - that perhaps Cornwall would be better served by becoming an independent, autonomous region, allied to Great Britain in the same way that Scotland and Wales are.

Now this is not as crazy as it seems. There is significant precedent for regarding Cornwall as a separate nation to the rest of England - as far back as Elizabethan times a French diplomat referred to the nations of England, Wales, Cornwall and Scotland in an official report on his recent visit. There was a separate Cornish parliament (the Stannery Parliament) that had statutory authority to override laws from Westminster that effected the region, and a disproportionately large number of MPs from the region sat in the House, in recognition of its different status in comparison with other English counties.

There remains to this day a significant amount of Cornish pride amongst the people themselves, and while the political attempts to break away from the rest of England have been minimal in their effect, a Cornish Nationalist party (called Mebyon Kernow) is stubbornly persistent and refuses to go away. At present, their aspirations go no further than for the setting up of a devolved parliament (in the manner of the devolved parliaments of Scotland and Wales), but one assumes that as with the nationalist parties of those regions, having achieved this their fight would then be towards ultimate separation and the formation of an independent state.

Now this is cloud cuckoo stuff, I'm well aware, but nevertheless, headlines such as the one in the Star do highlight the very real difference between the Cornish people and their English cousins. Now however, as the belt tightens and the carnage is revealed, as the folly of what has been done to this country becomes increasingly manifest, I think the time is ripe to consider our position. To ask ourselves perhaps, if in the future, we the Cornish might not be better served by a more locally based administration - one not remote or unanswerable to our needs or for their own actions, one composed of people who we know, people who we trust, people who's hearts are in the same region as our own. People who have to look us in the eye as they make the decisions that effect our lives and answer to our displeasure if they get it wrong. Who knows - perhaps we could even rejoin the EU and get that hundred million pounds that Johnson has so singularly failed to deliver!

[peter]

Correct me if I'm wrong - but isn't another name for a gender neutral toilet just (wait for it).....a toilet.

I mean, why make a big thing of it?

I saw a toilet sign the other day with a sort of composite figure on it, composed of one straight legged male half and the other half, a beskirted figure (now there's a bit of stereotyping for you) with a protruding leg, under which the words "GENDER NEUTRAL TOILET" were written as if it were not obvious anyway (do ordinary male and female toilet signs have MALE and FEMALE written under them? - I think not).

Now I know it's a small thing, but is there any other way to read this additional belabouring of the point that anyone who needs to 'spend a penny' can use these services, other than as a kind of 'virtue signalling' without which the world would far quicker just get to a point of getting on with its business (sorry) and forgetting the obsession we have with parceling people into groups.

A toilet, is a toilet, is a toilet.

The notices on male and female toilets are notices of exclusion. They say "this toilet is for women, not for you men", or vice versa. The disabled sticker says "this toilet is reserved for the use of people with disabilities, not for able bodied individuals." By this rationale there is no reason why a non-gender toilet should be indicated as anything other than a toilet. Who is being excluded from it?

There are really difficult issues that affect the trans community - the recent problems being thrown up in sports of gender reassigned males competing in female sports, being just one of them. These are real areas where we have yet to work out how the right of trans people to participate in the gender based activities of their chosen gender can be accommodated, without transgressing simultaneously on the hard won rights of women (in particular - but not exclusively) at the same time.

So I think that the introduction of complication into the issue of 'who's toilet is this' by the use of such signs is just that - an unnecessary and unhelpful introduction.

Let a toilet remain what it is, like a can-opener or a tube of toothpaste - a gender neutral thing ( ).

[Avatar]

Just because you were born there...

--A

[peter]

I've visited a number of former communist countries of the Eastern bloc over the years and amongst the commonalities you find in all of them is a noticeable lack of colored faces among the population. There are few Black or Eurasian people to be found and not many Chinese Asian either. In two weeks in Russia the only coloured face I saw in the entire time was (I kid you not) a black man dressed in a 'Buttons outfit' (complete with pillbox hat) outside a chocolate shop in St Petersburg.

I'm not sure if this is simply because non-caucasian people have just never chosen to go there (or stay there if they happen to fetch up there as a result of the slave trade or whatever - did the terrible slave business of earlier times stretch as far east as this?), but I do know that the levels of racism in these countries is much more pronounced than we in the west would be used to, or indeed tolerate. (In my researches prior to going to the Czech Republic, I remember that the rather unpleasant prevalence of racism was noted in the guide book I bought, and certainly again there were few people of colour to be seen on the streets.)

Now in the current wave of sympathy for the Ukrainian people (as shallow in my opinion as the 'clapping for nurses' and 'hearts for key-workers' campaigns of the pandemic), these may be unpopular observations, but my guess is that they might very soon be sharply brought home to people who have elected to bring strangers of whom they know and understand nothing, into their houses in response to the government refugee sheltering scheme.

In this scheme, individuals who have made an agreement to stand as guarantors of the housing of Ukrainian refugees, will receive help with the costs of housing them, to the tune of three hundred and fifty pounds a month. This is all well and good and I'm sure that the majority of people who are stepping up to the plate with offerings such accomodation are doing so with the best of intentions. But when the people arrive......it might be at this point that this shortfall in understanding could come to the fore and become problematic. The refugees will suddenly find themselves thrust into a situation in which they are as surprised and shell-shocked at what they find, as we would be were our situations reversed. Suddenly you would find yourself amongst a people hardened by lifetimes of hardship and oppression, where sympathy for those less fortunate was a commodity pretty thin on the ground (and made so by the demand to look to the survival of you and your own before the worrying about the wellbeing of others could be afforded). A society where racism and homophobia were not seen as intolerable defects of character, but as the normal everyday state of mind of most people you would meet and mix with. A society where anti-Semitism and far right ideology did not carry the same stigma that makes it almost unthinkable to us in the 'softer' west.

Because in truth, this is far more reflective of the eastern bloc outlook on life, where such unpalatable views are not the cause of such shock and outrage as they would elicit in our countries; where if they are not held by an individual, they are also not seen as strange or in any way untoward or out on a limb........ and this includes the Ukrainian people just as much as the rest.

So these will be the people who those offering succour to the fleeing refugees will find suddenly in their midst. They will not be bad people - they will simply be a product of their own society, their own (alas, often brutal) history. And how well will they fit in to the closeted and cosseted middle-class households who can afford the space and means to accommodate them? How well will these generous donors take it, when their children are listening to the nascent views of the children of the refugees that they are suddenly exposed to? A harder view, formed in a harder place? Do they expect the people they welcome into their homes to be suddenly exactly like them? To forget who they are, where they have come from, what they have been through (historically as well as immediately)?

These are the things I think of when I see the yellow and blue flags flying from the houses as I drive through my county. Don't get me wrong - there is kindness and benevolent generosity in their countries just as much as in ours (quite possibly of more depth when it is manifest) - but there is also a hardness which we in the West find difficult when we encounter it. I hope that the people who are offering refuge to the unfortunate families of the crisis we see unfolding before our eyes understand this, and are prepared to accommodate it.

[peter]

Well, I suppose I've got to be the first to get in here on this, but in case you haven't heard yet, the PM has reported that he and his wife Carrie and Chancellor Sunak have been fined by the police for attending an unlawful gathering in No 10 Downing Street during the lockdown.

It's going to make a big splash in the next day or two, but I've got to be honest, I can hardly be bothered to talk about it. Reason....... because it's all bullshit.

Johnson and Sunak are not going to resign over this, no matter how much squealing and cod outrage you hear from the opposition. No matter how much the media appears to be on their case over it - wait for the screaming headlines tomorrow, Clive Myrie using his vocal tone to milk it for all it's worth - the response will be exactly the planned one, the one that exactly suits Johnson's playbook.

Because he knows, and the media understands (and is on-side in respect of it) that nothing about this fine can force him to resign. The Tory backbenchers have already let it be known that they are not up for a leadership fight at present (they're using the Ukraine situation as a cover for their actual unpreparedness to take on Johnson and his large majority, but the fact remains). Johnson can take the hit over this - certainly it will be rough for a few days, but it isn't existential - and emerge from it on the other side.

But the Sue Gray report is something completely different, and hence the reason for the smoke and mirrors show of today's announcement. It's a deflection, pure and simple. If people see Johnson recieving his fine, rocking on his heels, see him emerge and then get back to his Churchillian mime-show (that's what the Kiev visit was all about if you hadn't guessed it already), they will forget that they haven't actually seen the report in which all the really juicy stuff is contained. Because if one person in that report has given evidence that the PM knew about the parties, the illegality of them, then he's finished. Lying to parliament and having it proved that he has done so is the one and only thing that could nail him - and it's only in the Sue Gray report that the evidence of that is likely to be found.

So what we have today is a distraction - part of a plan for Johnson to survive all of this. As such it's a bore to me; I'm interested in the stuff that can bring him down, not the self-serving stuff that can't.

[peter]

As the details emerge about the fines that Sunak and Johnson received yesterday emerge, you realise that the police might as well have slapped their wrists with a lettuce leaf for all the punative effects they will have.

In a purely token gesture, the PM and Chancellor were fined fifty quid apiece for a ten minute attendance of the PM's impromptu 'birthday party' to which poor old Sunak had not even been invited, but was merely passing through on his way to another meeting room with his boss.

If, of the myriad parties that seem to have been going on in Downing Street at around this time, this was the most egregious instance of rule breaking by our Champagne Charlie PM, then I'm a Dutchman. But the metropolitan police have somehow managed to dig up this putridly sweet confection of a misdemeanor, worthy of the front of an issue of My Little Pony to clobber him with. It makes a nonsense of the whole thing and serves multiple purposes, not least that of getting the chief perpetrator off the hook,by presenting a case in which we can all relate to, squeeze him hand and pat him o the back, while nodding our heads and thinking to ourselves, "that could be me; let he who has never sinned cast the first stone." It's utter crap, and cooked up behind the scenes to do exactly the job it is doing.

As predicted yesterday, the media and the backbenchers are fulfilling their part of the deal as well, running exactly true to form, shouts of faux outrage on the surface balanced with the million and one justifications and ameliorations inside.

Well here's an idea. The PM has said that he's now more interested in getting on with the job of doing what the public want. Well given that in a poll taken yesterday sixty six percent of people said that they wanted him to resign, how about delivering on that one. No - I didn't think so. The truth is Johnson doesn't give a flying fuck about what the people want. He couldn't care less about the people who obeyed the rules he set out; who missed being with their loved ones as they passed (including, heartbreakingly, an eleven year old boy who died in absence of his mother), who couldn't go to funerals and weddings, or see their families for weeks on end. That stuff is as nothing to him, because he's cut from different cloth. He's of the group of society to whom the rules simply don't apply. As for the fifty pounds fine - it's no more than the notes that he and his Bullingdon Club mates purportedly used to burn in front of the homeless people in London where they were out on one of their much famed 'jags' in the capital.

There are men of honour in the Tory Party. Steve Baker from the right of the party, with whom I would share very little political common ground. Rory Stewart, a real gentleman from the moderate side (how great a loss to the Party was his departure). These are just two examples, and I have no doubt that there are many more. For god's sake Tories - see the damage that all of this is doing to our country, to our parliamentary system, to democracy in this country itself. These incremental losses of respect caused by a continual and overt displaying of contempt for the rules of the game, for the very public themselves are damaging in the extreme, and in ways that could spin out in reactions both undesirable and unpredictable. For god's sake, shake off this bunch of scheming shysters who have corralled the reins of power in this country - throw them out and put some decent above the line politicians in their place. Their boots will not be hard to fill, I promise!

[peter]

Justice Minister Lord Wolfson has quit the government over what he says is irreconcilable differences between the 'official position' in respect to the fines and the partygate situation and the rule of law. He is also critical of the PM's personal response to the fine he has received.

Wolfson's position is one I absolutely concur with. The rule of law is the cornerstone upon which the entire edifice of our system rests. To publicly undermine it, to undermine the public perception of the moral 'rightness' of our parliament, is to exact a damage that cannot be easily quantified, easily seen or expressed, but is insidious and unpredictable in its effect.

There have been a couple of other notable exceptions to the overall Tory silence, deafening in its volume, in particular those of MPs Nigel Mills and Craig Whittaker (named here out of respect), who have called Johnson out in respect of his position. These are (hopefully) the first to understand the importance of what is happening here. That the people at large are looking at this, are judging the actions of their leaders, and to date, are finding them wanting.

News also being dribbled out that it is possible that Johnson may yet face more fines (two more is the figure being cited) - an eventuality that would of course seriously undermine his excuse that it was all a mistake - he really didn't understand that he was breaking the rules.

Now while it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that because this is being dealt with via fixed penalties (as opposed to an appearance within the courts), that it must be seen as a trivial offence. This is not so. The government were keen to stress at the time that Covid regulation breaking should be seen as a serious misdemeanor, by virtue of its ability to put other people's lives at risk. Home secretary Patel even spoke on the subject from the Downing Street rostrum. (As an aside, it is being reported also that any Ministers involved in the law side of government, such as Patel herself, are being advised not to vocalise their support for the PM, by virtue of it undermining their position as upholders of that law itself.)

But to date Johnson is riding out the storm and looking like he will get through it. This could change as more and more Tory MPs realize that their own integrity is also under the spotlight in terms of their response to the fines (and the situation more generally). As their inboxes fill up with emails from genuinely outraged members of their constituencies, people who have made sacrifices on a scale that Johnson will never understand as long as he has a hole in his arse, it might be that the realisation could begin to sink in that not speaking out, not calling the PM out for the egregious wrongness of his position, will not be an omission they will soon be forgiven for.

There are people out there who have given so much, suffered so greatly in order to follow the instructions as given out by our leadership, that nothing short of the removal of that leadership, now found to be so shallow, so vacuous, will give their sacrifice meaning.

[peter]

Can't believe that the Russians are going to be anything but mightily pissed off by the sinking of the warship Moskova as it limped home following as explosion of as yet unestablished origin on Wednesday.

The Russian claim that it followed an onboard fire setting off an arms cache seems a bit farfetched, and while the Ukrainians are probably capable of launching missile strikes of the nature that they (for their part) are claiming struck the ship, there seems to be some ...... diffidence is perhaps the right word......in the western media in actually crediting them with the attack.

The Moskova was the flagship of the Black Sea fleet and was in control of around thirty other vessels at the time of sinking. This makes it a clearly very important loss for the Russians, a significant blow to their abilities to coordinate and utilise their naval power in pursuit of their Ukrainian aims, and as such will be welcomed by NATO and the West in the spirit of a "Gotcha" moment from former times.

So much for the good, we might think, but I wonder how long it will be before the Russians start to question the origins of the mysterious explosion that ultimately sunk the ship. How long before Russian eyes will be turned toward the West and NATO, and their capacity to operate such actions in covert aid of the Ukrainians in their struggles.

This sinking, when such thoughts do begin to percolate through the Russian thinking (and I'm sure that they have already) will not bring about a more speedy end to the unfolding tragedy of the Ukraine - it will likely result in a significant increase in the risk of escalation into all out war - war in which we may suddenly find that we are no longer watching on our television screens, reading about in our papers, but are seeing through the windows of our houses and in the suitcases of our loved ones as we send them off to die.

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

Boris Johnson may think that he has pulled off a blinder, a dead-cat bounce of extraordinary skill in his "Immigrants to Rwanda" announcement just as the partygate fines (and potential to wreck his career) are coming in, but he should think again.

Besides there being something inherently 'grubby' about the whole idea of simply scooping up immigrants as they arrive in your country and exporting them wholesale to third world countries (from whence they can be radicalised further, fed into the sex-trafficking markets or simply left to rot in concentration camp style conditions until they die) under financial incentives and bribes, it simply won't work.

Yes today, the focus is on other things - the Russian ship sinking, the said Rwanda policy, Harry and Meghan visiting the Queen - but behind the scenes, Johnson's back bench MPs are at home in their constituencies, absorbing the effects of the partygate fines on the voters upon which their continued political careers depend...... and those effects will not be good. There is a significant level of disgust out there amongst the people that is not going to go away anytime soon. This will be made all the more plain to the MPs upon whose continued support Johnson's future (in turn) depends, and far from returning from the Easter recess in emollient mood, it is likely that they will be the more fidgety and nervous from the results of their experiences.

And when the additional fines start hitting the doormats, the situation will be fit to blow. And if I may say, it couldn't happen to a 'nicer' bloke!

(And back to the Rwanda announcement, do the Tories really believe that this is going to make them look good to the public - even to their core voters who will normally swallow just about anything? Jesus, how badly can you misjudge the people who you are supposed to be governing over? This has an inhumane quality about it only made the worse by the smug smiles of Priti Patel plastered across every television screen in the country as she signed the agreement written in asylum seeker blood in Rwanda yesterday. That is one cruel lady if ever I saw one. What did she do to celebrate her triumphant policy coup yesterday evening - boil up a few Dalmatian puppies for dinner?

With this policy our government, our reputation in the eyes of the world, must have shrunk to a new low. And Johnson the fool, will actually be waking up at Chequers this morning thinking (as he surveys the headlines) that he has pulled it off: What a complete ***t!)


[Edit; And Boris Johnson even had the gall to say that without Brexit, it - the Rwandan thing - could not have been done. If this doesn't say it all (on multiple fronts) then I don't know what.]

[peter]

It seems that I am not the only one who is incandescent that our leadership should stoop to such a low level as to outsource its immigration problem to a third world country with a dubious record on human rights at best.

A report in this morning's Telegraph reads "Patel faces staff mutiny over Rwanda plan" and details how the Home Secretary has had to issue a ministerial directive (only the second one issued in the past thirty years) in order to get her staff to sign off on the plan.

Writing in the Guardian a United Nations assistant high commissioner said that the plan was illegal and discriminatory - besides which it wouldn't work.

Certainly this was found to be the case when Israel tried the same trick a few years ago: they abandoned it shortly after trials began because of reports of trafficking and human rights abuses to the deported refugees, in addition to which it was found that they simply absconded and continued to head back to their chosen destination anyway.

And as for Boris Johnson crowing about it being only possible because of brexit - the man actually had the gall to suggest that he was doing this out of concern for the refugee's safety - out of humanitarian motivation.

What absolute bollocks. The people who he was addressing his comments to don't give a flying frick about where the refugees end up as long as it isn't here. It could be the South Pole as far as they (or Johnson) care. That brexit will enabled us to perpetrate this immoral and despicable policy is hardly a feather in its cap; quite the contrary, it shows exactly why leaders of countries should be constrained by cooperative agreements on human rights and minimum levels of treatment. That Johnson should actually revel in his ability to now utilise such base tactics to pander to the worst instincts of his voter base says it all, both about him and them.

Meanwhile he continues on his ongoing project to turn us into a pariah in the eyes of every decent humanitarian motivated country in the world. In this at least his success cannot be denied; in respect of everything else, everywhere else you look, the country has gone to shit. And ain't that the truth. Put that in the n next Tory manifesto.

[Forestal]

Moskva is actually very interesting:
The Ukrainians claim that they sunk it with bayraktar assisted Nepture anti-ship missiles (most likely at this juncture).
The Russian officials claim that a fire just happened in the magazine (quite likely, but what caused the fire?).
The Russian media claim that there was a fire on board and that because of an act of fire, World War 3 has started, because Ukraine clearly is responsible for unrelated fires (wut?).

I actually emailed my MP yesterday, for the first time in my life. She's a Tory and I expect to be ignored, but never the less I have leveled my democratic right to speak my piece to my representative. I wrote about a few topics, which I later realised were not nearly enough topics, but included my demands that she present a vote of no confidence in Boris, that all who received fines relating to "partygate" be forced to resign and that the UK step up additional aid for Ukraine both towards refugees and with humanitarian and lethal aid.

As I am a "none" voter (ballot spoiler), I expect that my message shall swiftly go into the recycle bin, but I am preparing to become a "not you" voter, come the next election.

[peter]

That's excellent Forestal!

It's essential that sitting Conservative MPs be made to understand that they must step up to the plate to deliver the judgement of their constituents on Johnson and Co themselves, or be held accountable for their failure to do so at the next election. Too long have this administration been allowed to operate with neither probity nor rectitude, in a manner that is demeaning and damaging to our entire democratic system from top to bottom.

I absolutely applaud your decision and encourage you to suggest the same course to ten of your acquaintances. With no mechanism available to us to actually bring about a vote of no confidence in our government ourselves, writing to our MPs remains the only option (short of protesting on the streets) by which we can demand that a government be held to account with immediate effect.

Tory MPs must be galvanized by a groundswell movement to understand that their silence on this situation will not come without cost. That only three MPs (plus one Lord) out of hundreds has actually had the courage to say publicly that which must be said, beggars belief.

Again, I salute you.

[Lefdmae Deemalr Effaeldm]

Moskva is actually very interesting:
The Ukrainians claim that they sunk it with bayraktar assisted Nepture anti-ship missiles (most likely at this juncture).
The Russian officials claim that a fire just happened in the magazine (quite likely, but what caused the fire?).
The Russian media claim that there was a fire on board and that because of an act of fire, World War 3 has started, because Ukraine clearly is responsible for unrelated fires (wut?).

To add insult to injury, Neptune rockets are Ukrainian, so much for their claim that they're really fighting USA.

that the UK step up additional aid for Ukraine both towards refugees and with humanitarian and lethal aid.

Thank you so much!
I think resisting the Russian regime should definitely be outside of any fights between parties, and glad to see many people agree.

[peter]

I watched a very interesting extended interview with Len McCluskey the other day in which he spoke damningly of the manner in which he had been treated by Kier Stamer (Leader of the Labour Party and an ex-Corbyn ally who stood by his side while simultaneously stabbing him in the back).

McCluskey, ex leader of one of the largest UK trade unions Unite and the biggest donor to the Labour Party, claimed that from the moment of his election to the role of Labour leader, Stamer consistently said to him (McCluskey) that he would do one thing before then going ahead and doing the exact opposite. It got to a point where his colleagues were saying to him that Stamer was taking him for a ride - that he had no intention of bringing in a left leaning policy of radical socialism (as he was claiming), but was in reality a product entirely of the Blairite New Labour vision, in which progressive worker orientated policies had no place.

The situation came to a head with the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from the party (for refusing to accept the findings of the internal report on anti-Semitism within the Party, if I remember correctly) in which, Stamer agreed a particular set of words with McCluskey and Corbyn that would allow the ex-Leader to remain within the Party, but then immediately went ahead and withdrew the whip from him despite the agreement. This outright lying followed by turncoat behaviour on Stamer's part ended the relationship between the two men who have never spoken again to this day.

At the culmination of the interview, McCluskey made the damning accusation against Stamer that he genuinely believed that something sinister was afoot within the Labour Party - that movements were behind the scenes underway, to remove all socialist elements from the party doctrine altogether. The Party would become, according to this vision, a sort of mirror-image of the American Democratic Party to the Tory's Republicans. We would thus be restricted to Tory, or Tory-lite as our voting choices going forward into perpetuity.

This is a very dangerous situation for our polity if correct. The British political system is very exceptional in that a huge amount of power resides in a Prime Minister who holds a big majority in the House of Commons - far more than an American President could even dream of. The American polity, with its system of primaries, is designed to limit the power of a ruling leader yet further, but without such a system in the UK this (for some reason I'm not entirely clear on, I confess) is not the case. Both McCluskey and his interviewer agreed that the mirroring of our system to that which pertains in the US (as seems to be the unstated goal - the behind the scenes conspiracy if you like) represented a dangerous shift in terms of our democratic status, our current constitution simply not being designed to accommodate such a move.

Now I don't understand this nearly as well as I should, but suffice to say that I did get the impression listening to McCluskey for an hour and a quater (and that's a long time for anyone to maintain a front that is not a genuine one) that he knew what he was talking about - that his suspicions as to what was the unstated goal of the right wing of the Party who had so effectively ground down the left wing challenge of Cobynism, were not so far off the mark. Stamer has again and again shown that he is of the Blair mold of socialism - the Guardian reading style that will do anything to promote and support the rights of the working class - until they start to promote and support them themselves.

I've said many times in these pages that neither of our two political parties are fit for purpose at this current time, and the Len McCluskey interview I've just been talking about seems to confirm it.

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

Just a brief foray into Partygate: this morning's press is running a story that claims it was Johnson himself who organised (or at least instigated) one of the party's in Downing Street - namely the one in which the leaving of a colleague was marked. "A Downing Street insider" has apparently claimed that it was not a party until the PM arrived, but that it was he who pulled everyone around, poured the wine and told them to "let their hair down". There are, it is claimed, pictures to support this.

Coming on top of news that the PM will likely be fined for a second party attendance this week, the story - featured in a couple of papers, but most prominently (and interestingly) the Telegraph - will not go down well in the Johnson camp. Rumors of discontent amongst the ranks are surfacing and in a week that voting will be carried out as to whether the House thinks that Johnson misled them, this story does nothing to help his case at all.

But the Telegraph? Why the Telegraph? There are strange manoeuvrings afoot when the most influential Conservative organ out there starts running stories to the detriment of the Tory leader. Is this the hidden hand of Gove and Cummings operating behind the scenes. Gove has been a little bit too quiet of late - the cunning bastard is up to something or I'm a Dutchman! Still - interesting stuff at the beginning of what could be an interesting week.

[peter]

Johnson will today face the House for the first time since his recieving and payment of a fixed penalty notice for his illegal attendance of the birthday party in the cabinet room of Number 10 Downing Street.

There remain a number of questions yet to be answered about this event, not least why his wife and their interior decorator were able to enter the said room - one of the most secure locations in the entire country and supposed to be off-limits to all but a very small number of individuals with strictly applied high level security clearance. It should be noted that the Johnsons do not live at 10 Downing Street - they actually live at No 11, which is totally separate and not connected in any close sense, with the government working space at Number 10. No way should Johnson's wife, let alone his flat decorator, have been able to access the central hub of governmental workspace in this clear breach of security.

But, be that as it may, the concern of MPs in the House today will be on other aspects - namely why a party that contravened the lockdown regulations in place at the time was being held at all, what Johnson (who made those regulations) was doing there, and why (most importantly) had he told the House that no such gatherings had taken place.

His apologies are expected to be fulsome and lachrymal - and completely insincere. He is expected to stop short of commenting on the party for departing civil servant Lee Cain, which he himself is said to have instigated (and which, if so, should attract a ten grand fine) and thrown himself into with gusto. He hasn't been fined as yet for this particular bash, but that could change any day. But he won't talk about it today because it would undermine his whole strategy of the day, which will be to maintain that the birthday event was an unplanned part of his working day that he didn't consider to be (and still doesn't) a party (or indeed in contravention to the regulations). That the metropolitan police have decided otherwise is a matter that like the idle wind, he "regardeth not".

But try as he will to draw a line under the thing, it isn't going to be that easy. Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the House (the man who gets to say what goes) has agreed to allow MPs to vote on whether they believe that the PM has misled the House and also whether the PM should be investigated by the parliamentary standards committee - censuring by which could actually lead to his being suspended from the House.

Neither of these votes will pass it should be understood - the Conservative majority in the House is simply too great - but that is not the point. In failure to support either motion, the Tory MPs will be nailing their colours to the mast. They will no longer be able to return to their constituencies and claim to be outraged by what has been going on within the seat of the government that they (as winners of the last election) put in place. Having voted against the PM being questioned about his behaviour, they will not then be able to hide behind a shield of faux anger at what has been going on. This knowledge may give numbers of them pause for thinking about how they actually vote on these issues. Like Forestal above, I've also written to my MP on this matter and have no doubt that our letters are two of many. The cumulative effect of these letters will give our MPs cause to think very carefully about how they present themselves in public vote and the dynamic of this opposition (ie that of supporting the PM versus that of not appearing to condone what he has done to the people who vote them in) will be interesting to see in terms of how it plays out.

Don't get me wrong however; I think Johnson will survive this. But he will be damaged - and to be a damaged political leader in this country is a dangerous place to be in. The Tories in particular are ruthless in cutting down their leadership when it has outgrown its usefulness and make no mistake, eyes greedy for power will be watching Johnson - waiting and watching for the time to strike. There will be more revelations, more fines, and yet more revelations again. There will be simply too much stored ammunition for this to go away, and the parties behind the drip-drip of its release will be patient in their utilisation of it.

Johnson will survive today and tomorrow - but the writing is on the wall for him and he won't be getting to enjoy that eight hundred and fifty quid a roll wallpaper for too much longer. That's a safe bet.

[peter]

I come fresh from an hour of listening to out dissembler in chief crawl and bluster his way through his first appearance in the House since recieving his fixed penalty notice in respect of partygate.

His apologies were craven, his words as sincere as the tear that Mrs Gamp shed as she trousered the money for the laying out of a corpse, his excuses as thin as the skin on a day old tapioca pudding left out in the sun. And his backbenchers hoovered it up like a celebrity footballer crouching over lines of coke on a hooker's belly.

Kier Stamer actually gave possibly the most animated performance I have ever seen him give and was surprisingly good, but to no avail against the backdrop of a Tory led House determined to follow the PM's lead in attempting to divert attention towards the Ukraine crisis.

But a nasty little spoke in the Tory Party wheel is coming up in the form of a vote on whether there should be an investigation into the PM's conduct over the whole affair. It is thought that the government will whip MPs on the Tory benches to oppose such an enquiry, which immediately begs the question, what have they got to hide? If they believe (as they keep insisting) that the PM has either done no wrong, or if he has then it is so trivial as to be ignorable (the Northern Ireland Secretary this morning compared it to a speeding ticket), then why would they seek to disallow an investigation that would demonstrate it to be so. The same argument can of course be leveled at individual MPs. Fine to say that you personally believe that the PM has done no significant wrong - but why vote against this being rendered as established fact? Do not the people of the country deserve to have this demonstrated to them.

At least one Tory MP had the courage to stand up and say that the PM was compromised beyond the point where he could be redeemed. MP Mark Harper was unequivocal in saying that Johnson must go, but while there were a few who skated around the middle ground, the bulk of those who spoke did so in support of Johnson. Unsurprisingly the opposite was the case for all speakers who were not Tory.

Johnson has survived this - there was never any doubt he would - but it's early days yet. People are asking for the Gray Report to be made public, but the goal-posts keep changing on this. Initially the met said that it could be released when they'd conducted all of their interviews; now that they have done, suddenly it needs to be held until the complete investigation is finished. Not much MPs can do about this, but they are not happy about it.

Still - let's see what the papers have to say in the morning.

[peter]

Let's look at it.

Boris Johnson told the House that there were no parties in Downing Street during lockdown, yet now we know of at least a dozen which the metropolitan police are investigating, perhaps many more.

Boris Johnson told the House that all the Covid guidance was followed and no rules were broken, yet fifty fixed penalty notices have so far been issued and there are more - many more - expected in the coming days.

Boris Johnson told the House that he was not at any of the parties yet has now been fined himself for being present at at least one of them, is expected to be fined for being present at others, and is credibly reported as having been the instigator of bash given at the leaving of civil servant Lee Cain.

The question that will be put to MPs tomorrow in the form of a vote (following tabling in the House today), is should the Prime Minister be investigated for potentially having deliberately misled the House - an accusation that is being put forward by the Labour Party, and if proven to be the case, would demand Johnson's immediate resignation.

The investigation, should it proceed, will be carried out by the parliamentary privileges committee (headed by Labour's Chris Bryant) of seven sitting MPs of which, as a reflection of the balance in the House, the majority are Tory.

The Prime Minister has instructed all Tory MPs to attend the vote to be held on Thursday, and has had them 'whipped' to vote against the motion to hold the investigation. This means that any that defy the whip and do not do so (ie vote against the motion) will be disciplined by the whips office with penalties that could include actually being expelled from the Conservative Party. Always assuming that the bulk of Tory MPs do indeed follow their instructions and vote against the inquiry being held, then the PM will undoubtedly win the day and no investigation will occur (but no-one can pretend that it looks good).

Today, in proposing the motion, Kier Stamer will have the support of the Lib-Dem Party and he will know that the Speaker will allow the motion to be put to the vote (since he has already said that he will) - but there might be problems even before it gets voted on. Johnson will attempt to mitigate the damage that such an investigation could do to him by having his MPs table amendments that could (to a degree) neutralise any investigation by limiting the parameters within which it can operate. By placing limits on the remit, as it were, the investigation could be made to be conducted over a wider brief that limits its ability to hone in on the Prime Minister's misdemeanours. This would make the holding of the inquiry a moot affair anyway, since its objective (from the Labour perspective of why they are actually proposing it) of demonstrating that Johnson knowingly misled the House, would be neutralised. I'm not sure if it is in Speaker Hoyle's power to veto a vote on such an amendment, or if it has to be voted on if put forward. If the latter is the case, then Johnson will have already thwarted the Labour plan, and the voting tomorrow on the holding or otherwise of the investigation will be of little consequence (since what they would be voting on would be of little danger to the Prime Minister anyway).

So this, in a nutshell is what is happening over the next couple of days. You cannot pretend that any of it has a particularly good smell to it; it's exactly what you would have predicted from the moment that Boris Johnson was elected as the Tory Party leader. He is charismatic, he is effective and a damn good political manoeuverer (is that a word?) - but he's simply too untrustworthy, too dishonest and underhanded as an individual for things to have ever been any different. He's like that politician described in the past, "like a rotten mackerel in the moonlight, he both shines and stinks." You could not describe him better than that!

[peter]

Mmm.......

Interesting sort of a day that began at around eight o'clock last night really, when the Conservative whips office issued a statement that they would be introducing an amendment to the vote in the House today (that there should be an inquiry by the Parliamentary Privileges Committee into whether PM Johnson had deliberately misled the House) that would kick it down the road into the long grass. Tory MPs they said, would be whipped to vote for the amendment (on unspoken threat of punishment if they failed to do so).

This morning, however, they suddenly about faced on the issue and said that they would not be seeking to table the amendment, nor would they be whipping their MPs on how to vote on the original (unamended) motion.

Now this is significant. What exactly brought about this sudden change of direction? Speculation has been that when the whips tried to rally the MPs behind the PM, they discovered that contrary to what they had believed, the MPs were not going to play ball. Voting to delay or stop an investigation into the PM's probity does not exactly suggest you have much faith in it, and in addition cannot be passed of to your constituents (who will be very angry at the PM's dereliction of his responsibility) as your having had faith in him (because if you had you wouldn't be trying to stop his rectitude from being proven or otherwise).

Chris Bryant, the chairman of the above mentioned committee said in interview it looked to him as though the PM was hemorrhaging support, and certainly by the time the gloves-off Commons debate had started there were upwards of fifteen Tory MPs who had come out and said that they would be voting for an investigation. During the debate two more significant members of the Tory backbenches stood up and said that the PM should go, most tellingly the influential Steve Baker who was a key player in the unseating of Theresa May during the brexit negotiations.

And in the final act of the days events, the motion to hold the inquiry was passed without there even being a vote on it. It was simply proposed and carried without any objection that would have required a vote. Why this should be can only be speculated at, but the suggestion is that the government do not want it to be known what the actual scale of the discontent within the parliamentary Tory MPs actually is (which has to suggest it's pretty big). All of which must lend weight to the idea that the Johnson premiership is a chicken that will no longer fight.

Johnson, for his part - and speaking from India where it now looks like it was a poor idea to go - is bluffing it out "getting on with the people's priorities" etc, etc), but this committee could really hurt him. They would have the power to see and make public, all of the photos and interview material of the police and Gray reports, and could suspend Johnson from the House, requiring him to go back to his constituency and reaffirm their desire to see him stand as their MP. In short he'd be screwed if the committee find against him.

So - quite a day really, and not one designed to give Johnson an easy night's sleep.

[peter]

Far right political parties across Europe will be holding their breath today, waiting for the exit polls taken as the French deliver their verdict on who will be their President for the next five years.

Not since Jacque Chirac in 2002 have the French re-elected a sitting President for a second term of office, and if this tendency to change leaders is repeated today, then by tonight the far right will have achieved its first victory in a major European country since........well you know when. (Apologies to any Hungarian readers out there - Orban ......my predictive text changed that to Organ, which might be telling.......was not of far-right stock in the same way as Marine le Pen; his party have moved rightward from a centrist position rather than being formed from a pure stock as it were - hem hem.)

Marine le Pen, whose father formed the Front National or National Rally Party in 1972 has gone to great lengths to soften the image of the party, but is absolutely of the same stock of which her father was formed. She is a master of the sound bite and absolutely knows what to say to make her extreme views seem palatable. A case in point, as an exemple of this would be her stance on the hajib as worn by many Muslim women who live in France. For le Pen, her plan to ban the wearing of the head covering has nothing to do with an attempt to force another culture to abandon its traditions in favour of those of its adoptive country, but rather because "headscarves are a symbol of the oppression of Muslim women and are not a free choice made by their wearers." On the position of repatriation and cessation of immigration - "Our responsibility must be first and foremost toward our French people - we simply cannot allow unfettered access to millions of non-nationals to limited public services such as housing, health and education." You will hear nothing of the right wing belief of the superiority of the white races from le Pen, or their instinctive mistrust of the Jewish people; she is far too savy for that.

And given the deep and widespread dissatisfaction of millions of French people with their current President, Emanuel Macron, there is a real chance that today, le Pen could actually pull it off. This would be a shot in the arm for the BNP's, the AFD's, the Farage's little and large across the whole of Europe. "Our time is upon us, " they will say. Thriving as they always have upon the misery and poverty, the uneducated and simplistic need for scapegoating and blame, the banishing of 'the other', they will feed upon our current travails, upon the economic and social miseries caused by the hyperbolic overreaction of our hapless leaders to the pandemic, and rise to the surface of a continent where, if historical precedent were to have even a grain of influence, instead they should sink without trace like a stone cast into the abysmal depths of the ocean.

If le Pen wins tonight, that will be yet another reason why those who have so favoured what our Governments have done over the past two years, should consider where it is that they have led us.