What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

According to a report on the front page of today's Telegraph, excess deaths as a result of undiagnosed heart and circulatory conditions and cancers during the pandemic response, are running at around a thousand a week. This entirely predictable result (damn it - I predicted it myself at the time and was shot down in flames for doing so) shows no sign of abating any time soon and will rapidly overtake even the worst figures for losses resultant from the virus (ie those using the spurious '28 days from' figures). The terrible statistic is made worse by the failing admissions situation in our hospitals that leaves thousands stacked up in ambulances for hours on end as they wait for beds - beds that are unavailable due to lack of care home places for those fit to leave hospital to be removed to and hospitals still unable to recover from the increased distancing of beds and loss of staff that is at least partially due to the pandemic response.

All in all it's a right royal fuck up and "told you so's" won't cover it. Heads should roll and the BBC should be forced to report these excess death figures with the same 'enthusiasm' that they gave us the supposed Covid death tally.

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I don't understand what all of the fuss is, about the reported drop in 'A' level grades that has supposedly occured this year. They knew it was going to happen - the papers were marked more rigourously than in previous years to deliberately achieve this effect. Why the fuss?

Besides, it's academic. (Sorry about that ) It makes no difference. Universities have the same number of places to distribute to the cohort and the same number of students will be accepted to fill them. In any given year it is accepted that the questions might be slightly easier or harder than in previous years - it has always been this way and is impossible to prevent - but the overall standard of attainment of the cohorts of each year will be much of a muchness. Thus, when marking is carried out and the results graded from A to E, the examination board takes the top mark and the bottom mark of all the received papers and simply divides the range of marks contained therein into five equal bands. The top band receives an A grade, the second a B, etc. If on judgement, the examination questions for the year are considered to be a bit easier or harder than usual, the position of the lines between each geade may be shifted by a mark or two in order to accommodate this, to make the grades more reflective of those applied in previous years - but none of this will have the slightest effect on attainment of university places in the long run. Certainly more stress will be placed upon the clearing system for places (and upon the students who will be thrown into it by virtue of not having the grades to satisfy their offered places) but this will all balance out in the end, with places being found for all.

Or it would.

Were it not for the fact that some twenty percent of university places have this year gone to overseas students who pay larger fees to the universities for the privilege. And this of course limits the number of places available for our own students to take up. And the numbers of overseas students that a university can take are down to the discretion of the university itself, the more it takes, the more money it takes in, and the more money it has for payment of its staff and funding its operations.

Now this I can see is worth making a fuss about. But of course, the moment you start turning the universities into businesses that must support themselves, turn a profit as it were, then you have to give them the freedom to do this. If you are not prepared to fund the education of your own students to the tune of that which can be taken from overseas students, then it is a given that universities will take an ever increasing proportion of these in order to maximize their income. And this will leave thousands of disappointed students each year feeling cheated: that having been led to believe that if they worked hard, if they got their A levels, that a university place would be theirs for the taking, an education upon which to build their future lives. Which turned out to be bollocks, another broken promise, another scam.

Now that would be something to be surprised about. Now that would be something to be pissed about.

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Finally, I've been very interested in the advertisements that have been appearing on TV and YouTube about the new-line development in Saudi Arabia. Don't think I'll be one of the people moving there, unless it is to occupy one of the lowest level units where no doubt the workers that will still be needed to do all the shit jobs will be segregated. But there's a pretty interesting description of the development on YouTube. Check it out.

[Avatar]

Capitalism depends on a pool of unemployed and / or desperate people in order to drive itself.

If it was not possible to effectively immediately and easily replace the people on the bottom rung, then they might have to actually change some of their practises.

--A

[SoulBiter]

Capitalism depends on a pool of unemployed and / or desperate people in order to drive itself.

If it was not possible to effectively immediately and easily replace the people on the bottom rung, then they might have to actually change some of their practises.

--A

I don't agree with that at all. Capitalism depends on a workforce that will do the work necessary to supply a good or service AND produce a profit. You can always argue that the drive to produce profits will drive wages/benefits down, but sometimes the lack of labor drives wages/benefits up.

As we have seen from the last 20 years, when there are more workers than jobs to fill, wages and benefits are held in check. But when you hit times when there are more jobs than people to fill them (also called full employment), wages go up along with offered benefits to draw needed workers.

[peter]

Well it isn't happening in the UK SoulBiter - at least not yet. It's early days, but the exiting of the UK by the previously plentiful supply of European labour has left a big hole in our labour market with unemployment lower than it has been for ages and crippling labour shortages beginning to have effects in multiple areas. Granted, the peculiar circumstances we face as a nation - in particular our poor recovery from the pandemic setback in comparison with other leading economies - is rendering business incapable of perhaps offering the higher remuneration that it would in order to attract workers, were circumstances different. But be that as it may, there seems to be little incentive to increase wages, even in the face of the galloping inflation that is behind the industrial unrest (or partially at least) gripping the nation as we speak.

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Quick observation on a story running in today's press that the NHS is preparing for the winter onslaught already by a public campaign to discourage people from attending a&e departments unless it is absolutely necessary.

Fair comment, but I've got an idea how huge pressure could be taken off our failing health service at very little cost and with almost immediate effect. Not only this, but it is one that is practiced in huge numbers of countries where access to doctors is much more limited than in the western world, and is done so without the world collapsing, indeed with very little negligible effect whatsoever.

I think that huge swaths of the medicines we rely on should be moved from the Prescription Only Medicine (POM) category to that of the Pharmacy (P) or General Sale List (GSL). This would put pharmacists into a position where they could advise and provide medication for a huge range of conditions that currently require people to visit a doctor or, failing that, end up in the waiting rooms of a&e.

The truth is that the medical profession have held on to the right to prescribe tighter than their own dicks, because it represents the entire leverage they have in our societies. With the pharmacists enabled to provide medication directly without the insertion of the middle man, the role of the general practitioner becomes pretty much obsolete. Pharmacists know their drugs and they know what they are prescribed for. So much of primary diagnosis is simply rote stuff, done by the book, that it is virtually common sense. All pharmacists are already being used in a first point of call primary health care role, so give them the means to actually reduce pressure on the higer level health care system by allowing them to sell a much broader range of medicines.

How hard can it be?

But it won't happen, and why - because the doctors will never agree to it. The medical lobby is far too powerful in the UK for such a common sense approach to be even considered, let alone implemented. And so it won't happen and a&e departments will continue, despite the pleadings of NHS information videos, to be stuffed to the gills with people who needn't be there.

[peter]

We are used to food banks in the UK - thousands of households are dependent upon their handouts simply to survive - but heat banks?

Such is the idea of Government as part of its plans to assist with the outrageous increase in household heating costs predicted in the coming winter, which NHS spokespersons warn will claim thousands of lives. A network of heat shelters in public buildings such as libraries and museums is being developed, places where elderly people can go in order to get warm, rather than spend their days in their freezing homes.

Of course its bollocks. For starters, who wants to spend their days in enforced exclusion from their own home. You go to a library or museum when you want to, intermittently, not as a daily exercise and for an extended duration. Secondly, getting there costs money, being there costs money, returning home costs money, raising your house temperature on return costs money. Money that would prove equally hard for anyone on a state pension to find as would that required to stay home in the first place.

And what about those who are too sick to be traipsing out to another venue for the bulk of the day every day? The ones who are most vulnerable to the cold and are likely recipients of the smallest incomes? They will by force of circumstances be the very ones least able to avail themselves of this brilliant response to the forthcoming crisis.

As I say, it's complete bollocks, and those who are proposing it know it. But that doesn't matter. Because in this ridiculous age we now find ourselves living in, this dystopia that is supposed to be getting better and better all the time, any old bollocks will do as long as you're seen to be proposing something, to be offering something.

No - the reality is that when winter comes, we will all be on our own. If you cannot both heat and eat, if you can't find was of both keeping warm and feeding yourself, then you will be pushed quicker forward towards the wide or narrow gate, and with a guarantee it'll be hot on the other side of it. Oh no - you'll feel no cold in there!

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Liz Truss is going to go to war on 'lefty lawyers'. Lefty lawyers. I don't know what kind of lawyers she has been mixing with, but few of the lawyers I've encountered have been very left wing in their thinking. But the Law is a funny thing. The onus on a lawyer is to do the best for his or her client in return for the slab of dough they receive for doing so. It's been said that when people find that their lies are no longer being believed, then they appoint a professional liar to do it for them instead, and yes, no doubt this is often the case. But by and large, lawyers are like doctors. They don't really see their clients as people, more as 'cases'. For them, the courtroom is a gladiatorial circus in which they demonstrate their prowess to each other. The Law is to them a philosophical jousting arena, raised high above the petty individuals who happen to be the subjects of their activities. They are not driven by ideals of morality or conscience. To be so would be seen as almost quaint amongst their colleagues. No doubt there are some peculiarly motivated individuals amongst the whole, but they will be few and far between. No - for the bulk of them, right or left will not come into it. It's all about the Law - the game in which they rise or fall in the eyes of their compatriots, the arena in which fame in their own profession is won or lost. For them it's the Law first, the rest nowhere.

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This seems ridiculous and should be the very first entry in my days submission, but I'm getting old (no fuck it - I am old) and you must forgive me. I watch a lot of YouTube and news posts over the course of a day and I'm sure I heard yesterday that one of the business organizations - possibly the Federation of Small Businesses - had produced a report that said upwards of forty percent of all small to medium sized businesses in the country were at risk of severe financial distress or even closure, over the course of the next year or two.

You'd think that a thing like that would be headline news, being screamed from every front page in the country, but there's not a tittle of it.

But I can believe it, if for no other reason than the fact that the government help packages - thin as they are - for domestic households do not apply to businesses small or large, across the country. And the guy who runs the takeaway across from my shop came in the other day and told me how much his energy costs had risen in recent weeks - way before the real price rises have kicked in - and they were ruinous already. I mean at a level that no business could accommodate. From hundreds up to thousands. If what he told me is true, and I have no reason to doubt him, then when the big rises come in three monthly jumps as the energy cap rises (and every week a new and higher level for the cap seems to be being given - it currently sits at five or six thousand pounds, up from hundreds at the start of the rising energy cost crisis) then tens of thousands of smaller businesses will simply no longer be viable. Their costs will rise to a level where the product they sell, the service they provide, will be unaffordable for the bulk of their clientele. They will be out of business.

Now think on this. How many millions of people will find themselves out of work? How many tens of thousands of homes will suddenly become unaffordable for the people buying them as they loose their income? It is estimated that between a third and half of all the households in this country has less than fifteen hundred pounds of savings at their disposal. This, if true, is a prelude to societal collapse on a scale that none of us has ever seen. You don't deal with that by heating a few libraries, bunging a few hundred quid as sops to the affected public. This is the scale of the problem facing us now, if this report is to be believed (and if I have it right and didn't simply dream this up). If it's true, no wonder that the press and media generally are not covering it. There would be a public uprising.

If this is the scale of the problem facing the new PM, then they'd have to be mad to want the job. And it occurs to me that all of those who were in favour of the lockdowns, of the restrictions to business and society more broadly imposed during the pandemic, may have cause to think that the policies adopted were perhaps, not so wise after all.

I really frikkin' hope that I'm talking out of my arse, because if I'm not then we're all in trouble. Deep, deep trouble.

[peter]

Let's see - what have we got going on here?

Bennifer? Wtf?

Oh, I see - it's an amalgam of Jennifer and Ben, refering to the recent wedding of a couple of celebrities, one a singer, the other an actor cum director.

Apparently the wedding was officiated by a Hindu monk sort of character, born in London, who morphed into a life coach for the stars over in LA.

Reminds me of the time I was in Varanasi, having breakfast in a hotel in that most spiritual of cities. I'd done my trip on the Ganges to watch the sunrise over the ghats, and was spiritually tucking into a plate of bacon and eggs, when in came a white robed guru, young and rather good looking with male model looks and a professionally attired french lady 'assistant' accompanying him.

He took a seat with waiters fawning around him (the rest of us were on self-service from the table) and ordered a few simple rice cakes and a glass of apple juice. His attractive lady partner however, was not so restrained and helped herself to a goodish breakfast of a more substantial nature.

Breakfast continued and facing them across the floor, I could see their conversation concerning their days activities to come (presumably), with her refering to her 'filofax' or whatever it was, as they discussed their plans. Suddenly, and very smoothly done, his hand snaked out and secured one of the sausages off her plate which he proceeded to chow down on without delay. A slice of bacon or two went the same way over the course of the breakfast, none of which seemed to faze his lady companion, and no doubt they complimented the rice cakes very nicely.

One imagines that the achievement of nirvana could only be facilitated by the odd sausage or two, and looking at his pulchritudinous lady friend, I couldn't help but wonder if his nightly regime of abstinence on the bare boards of the hotel floor had not included the occasional break for indulgence with a sausage of a different kind, but perhaps this is unkind.

Anyways, the Bennifer wedding reminded me of this, and to be honest, it's just nice to remember something funny rather than a total concentration on the doom and gloom of current times. Hope you find a little humour in the story as well (assuming that anyone is actually out there. )

[peter]

Okay, after our brief foray into the realm of the ridiculous (for when was the world of celebrity anything but) lets just take stock of the overall situation here in the UK. I warn you in advance, it won't make for pleasant reading.

We are on the verge of a period of sustained industrial unrest as union after union announces its intention to instigate action, mainly in the form of withdrawal of labour, in pursuit of their various wants. Much of these center around the need to keep wages up in order to meet the soaring costs we are experiencing as inflation gathers pace, but also there are deep concerns about terms and conditions of employment, seemingly under sustained attack since employers have been released from the shackles of European law. The race to the bottom that we were assured would never happen.

On inflation it is currently running at around eleven percent (against the Bank of England target of two percent) with predictions that it will run up to eighteen plus percent in the coming year. This against a backdrop of people struggling already to meet their bills, and large swaths of the population already facing stark choices about feeding themselves or paying other necessary bills that are hanging over them. There are more food-banks in the country than McDonald's outlets and the youth of the country is trapped in the rental sector by house prices that they can never hope to meet in terms of raising the capital for mortgages. Those rents are shooting up to unprecedented levels as landlords try to keep pace with increasing costs and mortgage interest rate rises that threaten to bring their own houses of cards tumbling down. Some people are regularly paying up to half of their incomes on rent. Mortgage holders are bracing themselves for their mortgage payments to go beyond their ability to pay as the Bank of England uses increased interest rates to control runaway inflation. It is predicted that house repossessions will rocket in the coming months. A third of the households in the country have less than fifteen hundred pounds of savings in the bank in order to mitigate the increased costs of their mortgages, or indeed the rising costs of bills and foods.

Labour shortages and delivery supply chain issues are affecting the availability of food in the supermarkets and the country faces, for the first time in seventy five years, issues surrounding food security. Our incoming prime minister is threatening to instigate a trade war with the market that supplies forty percent of our food in the coming weeks, and the effects of a poor harvest resulting from the recent heatwave and lack of rainfall are waiting to enter stage-left as the autumn approaches. So for the first time in living memory, people will go into food poverty looking at food that isn't on the shelves and which they wouldn't be able to buy if it were.

Having sold of our utility companies to foreign investors, we watch as they release sewage into the waters around our coasts rather than invest in the means to deal with it via the appropriate plants. Fifty outlets near coastal resorts are under warning that the seas are unfit to swim in, while said foreign owners trouser the profits that should be going back into infrastructure development. It's not their beaches that are being fouled up with sewage so why should they care. It's like us making money dumping shit onto some beach in Africa.

Energy prices are going up to levels that are inconceivable for huge swaths of both households and businesses to meet, and people will soon find themselves unable to heat the homes that they cannot afford to buy with the wages from firms that will shortly no longer exist. Tens of thousands will not survive the post-pandemic 'adjustment'. Millions of people will find themselves unemployed, their future in tatters.

The NHS has been broken and will finally be brought to its knees. It will provide grist to the argument of private business that has long wanted to get its hands on the huge, huge profit that can be rinsed from people when they are sick. Having finally broken the back of our finest achievement since the second world war, private interest will swoop in with arguments for increased or total privatisation, and the fifteen hour waits at hospital entryways in ambulances will be over. Because most of us will not be able to afford the costs of medical insurance and will, as in the US, die in our homes. But today, if you can get to see a doctor you are lucky. And if you have a heart attack or stroke, God help you. You'll be dead in the ambulance before the ICU team gets anywhere near you - that's if you don't die on the floor of your own house before the ambulance gets to you.

Kids are facing calls for them to pay twenty nine thousand pounds for university places (it's currently capped at nine) or watch their places be given away to foreign students who already pay this higher amount. This means that they emerge from university, blinking into the light of understanding, that there are no jobs for the bulk of them that will remotely begin to settle the debt that they have accrued, following the advice that if they work hard, if they study and get their A levels, that the world will be their oyster and that the mana from heaven will flow in.

But back to today, and a strike at the port of Felixstowe, through which millions of pounds worth of goods enters the country every day, begins. The barristers have announced that they will decline to begin any new legal aid cases in short order so that anyone who can't afford stupendous legal costs will simply not be able to access legal representation in the courts. The sewage keeps on coming out - I mean from the mouths of our prospective leaders rather than onto the beaches, but that as well - and the prices keep going up. Upwards of a hundred and fifty thousand have pledged not to pay their energy bills in the autumn and the 'Enough is Enough' campaign marchers carry their banners through the streets and squares of our towns and cities.

And meanwhile what of the Government. What are they doing while Rome burns, while the House of Cards built entirely upon their watch tumbles down before their eyes. Well nothing actually because we haven't actually got a Government. The 'King for a Day' fool that we voted into Westminster has left the building, last seen on holiday with his squeeze of the day - that would be his current wife, but odds on it won't be his last - enjoying some much earned r&r. Having brought a wrecking ball to our nation, half delivered a brexit (the bad half I hasten to add) upon which nothing whatsoever is 'done', played fast and loose with every rule and convention by which public life is supposed to be governed, he's off to pastures new to reap the riches he feels he so rightly deserves. And behind him he leaves chaos - and what else would you expect?

The woman most likely to succeed Boris Johnson is an idiot. And that's being kind to her. (Forget all that optimistic stuff I said about her a few weeks ago - put it down to age, senility whatever. It was drivel.) She is vacuous to the point where she could be set as the unit by which it could be measured. A Truss. The perfect vacuum. A 0.5 Truss. Half way between perfect vacuosity and perfect denseness. (Come to think of it, she satisfies that condition as well.) Her plan for the country is to turbo-charge the economy and unleash business. That's it. There's nothing behind it, nothing to say how this turbocharging and unleashing is to be achieved. She's just going to do it. So it's all going to be alright. I mean this level of denial - and not just from Truss, but from our entire political elite - that we are entering a period of real crisis, of existential severity - this absolute refusal to face the facts of where we are...... Anywhere else in society this would have people phoning for the men in white coats!

So here we are. And I haven't even looked at the fucking papers yet!

[peter]

I have held differing opinions on the issue of the death penalty over the years, but this morning is one of those morning's where reading the papers, I'd happily vote to see it reinstated.

I refer of course to the tragic killing of this nine year old lass, caught up in the cross-fire between two gun toting idiots on the doorstep of her own home.

The tragedy occurred in the city of Liverpool, and appears to be a gang related killing resulting from one gang member being chased by another, from presumably a different gang, running into the child's home as his pursuer fired random shots in his direction. The pursued man was hit in the upper body and members of his own gang took him to a local hospital without delay, while leaving the shot child on the ground in her home.

The wounded man is recovering in hospital and the police, who have not questioned him yet, are issuing appeals for the shooter to turn himself in, or for anyone who knows him to do so without delay.

Well okay. Perhaps the killing was accidental in the sense that the wrong target died, but how much more tragic that it should have been so. I have little concern for the membership of various clans, gangs and posses shooting each other down or otherwise terminating each others existence, but when innocents are caught up in their shenanigans of course the reasons why their cross gang rivalry cannot be tolerated are brought home with a jolt. But yes - given the accidental nature of the child's death perhaps stringing up the stupid bastard wielding the gun would be extreme, but nevertheless........ One can only hope that in the desperation of his realisation of what he has done, he will also realise that there does remain one sensible use he can put his firearm to. Not a very charitable thought perhaps on my part, but the reading of this story does not leave me feeling very charitable.

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On the subject of the death penalty, one is surprised that neither Truss nor Sunak has yet come out in favour of it in their respective campaigns for the Tory Party leadership. It's a no-brainer with the membership who would lap it up, and given the race to the right that the two contestants have been engaged in to date, it is surprising that they have not yet resorted to this particular chestnut.

The latest thing (when not trying to convince us that Truss is away with the birds in her economic proposals) that Sunak has jumped on is benefit fraud. He's going to crack down on it with a vengeance. Never mind the billions that was filched from the Government coffers during the pandemic, by bogus PPE providers, by advisers charging tens of thousands a day, by mates of the current administration who scribbled down plans on the backs of envelopes and waltzed away with wheelbarrows full of cash and gave nothing in return - let all of them go. They don't matter. Sunak is going instead for the little people, the ones at the bottom of the ladder trying to get by and picking up a few quid here and there with a bit of undeclared work. Get them in his sights because this is what the membership wants to hear. (Thanks to Michael Lambert for this bit of the past. Go check out his YouTube vids - they are highly entertaining and bang on the mark.)

If either of these clowns, Truss or Sunak, do half of what they have proposed in their campaigns, we will be in for a Government that will make that of Johnson's look positively centrist in comparison.

Oh, and Michael Gove has thrown his weight behind Sunak (presumably because Johnson wants Truss) and announced that he is unlikely to return to front line politics in the near future. Well, you can say that again Michael. You have slithered your way around various administrations over the last decade plus and have quite a record under your belt.

You are, as someone has pointed out on one of the papers today, probably more responsible for brexit than even Johnson was (having provided Cummings with the platform to organise the Leave campaign from) and have shape-shifted your way across multiple theatres of interest, never failing to do that which most supports the advancement of Michael Gove.

Even your swan-song declaration has a sort of two pronged element to it. Like, "I'm saying I'm going, because I doubt that either of these people are going to have me in their cabinet and I want to get it in there first. But I'm just leaving enough wiggle room so that if they did happen to ask me, then I could magnanimously accept as my 'duty to my country' ".

Good old Gove. Slippery to the last. We'll not see his like again in a hurry (Or until Truss announces her cabinet perhaps?).

[peter]

Every time one of these politicians opens there mouths they manage to say something that makes my blood boil.

Today Boris Johnson is splashed over the papers saying that the price increases in fuel and energy are the cost we must bear to protect freedom, to stand up to Russian aggression. That "we pay in money while the Ukrainian people pay in blood."

How dare he! Trying to justify the ruination that will level the lives of countless millions of people here on the backs of the Ukrainian struggle to remove a foreign aggressor from their soil. Make no mistake Johnson - the price will be paid in blood in this country also. To attempt to make people feel guilty, to make them feel ashamed that not to meekly accept the destruction of their lives and businesses is somehow to approve or support what Putin is doing, to fail to stand side by side with the Ukrainian people in their struggle......... I am speechless (well - nearly). This is as low as you can get in my book. The destruction of our society is not a price we should be prepared to pay for anyone - Putin, Johnson, Zelensky or anyone else. This helps no-one. This fucking pin-headed fool simply doesn't get that we are on the verge of an existential crisis in this country. On the verge of becoming a failed state! If you don't believe me, watch the James O'Brien video post on YouTube yesterday entitled "We are on the verge of becoming a failed state"!

It's not just O'Brien and me. Even the fucking op-ed in the fucking Telegraph a day or so ago said that the country was falling apart and that no-one was bothering to do anything about it. This from the arse-wipe paper that has supported Cameron and May and Johnson, austerity, brexit and the lockdown. Been there for twelve years cheering on the very fuckers that have taken a wrecking ball to our country, and now they tell us the country is falling apart. And now, if we are complaining about it, then we are in some way failing to support the Ukrainians.

Let's be absolutely clear. None of the carnage we see around ourselves is necessary. Nothing was inevitable. We have been led to this place where every aspect of our state is falling apart, from the airports to the abattoirs to the NHS, from the water supplies to the energy companies to the schools, by your party's governance. You don't dare to now put it back on us! That we as a country cannot absorb the energy price fluctuations down to the war in Ukraine without seeing the mass destruction of our lives, our businesses, our very society, is down to you Johnson - you and those who came before you. You have failed and now have the temerity to put it back on us. You idiot!

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Sunak has suddenly discovered that he was against the lockdowns! Suddenly he remembers that his was the lone voice around the cabinet table cautioning about the effects of stopping our economy in its tracks, of taking our kids out of school for a year. He was he tells us, prevented from saying anything at the time, bound by collective responsibility to hold his tongue, but he was definitely against it.

Well Rishi, watch my mouth because you won't find my tongue bound from saying this. Bollocks!

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Okay. It's prediction time. Let's do the math.

Sunak is going to be slaughtered in the forthcoming leadership contest when the results come in, for the reason I gave. He's not white and the people who voted for brexit will simply not buy this. The Tory Party membership are an old, wealthy and conservative bunch who accept all of the stories they read in the Telegraph about black people, being thugs and gangsters and whatnot, and Sunak, while not being black, is still not white enough for them.

And when the results come in an Sunak is duly obliterated, its going to be fucking embarrassing for Tory Central Office because a clearer piece of evidence of the inherent racism of the membership will not be possible to give without stating it in black and white on a great billboard over the roof of the Palace of Westminster.

So what to do?

Clearly the actual result in terms of percentages cannot be released without some serious massaging to make it look like Sunak actually at some point stood a chance. But what figures to put out? Forty eight percent Sunak, fifty two Truss? Too brexity; and it looks like a fix. Sixty percent Truss, forty percent Sunak? Better, but still a bit too much toward Truss and a bit too tidy. Any lower for Sunak and it looks like a rout (and the racist element creeps back in), so it's higher...... Fifty eight Truss, forty two Sunak. Not bad. Close enough that it looks like the result was decided by eight percent above the median. Not too embarrassing for Sunak or the Party. Should work the oracle.

So that's it. Fifty seven/eight percent Truss, forty two/three percent Sunak it is. Job's a good 'un! Pass me the envelope.

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Royal Mail is dealing with its striking workforce by threatening to tear up the agreement they have on terms and conditions if they don't step back into line. Well that's likely to help ease the tensions in the system isn't it?

And finally, if you want a laugh, go and look at this morning's front page of the Daily Star. I'm not even going to tell you what's on it - it's ridiculous in the best traditions of the paper. Go check it out.

[peter]

Covid lockdown policy is now coming under further scrutiny as both Truss and Sunak say that they believe it went "too far" and that the the advisory group SAGE were given too much ear over the two years of the pandemic. Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph has a header saying that "The Lockdown Myth is about to unravel" and the Guardian runs a front page story on how kids from the North of the country have been disproportionately disadvantaged by the policy (as if they needed any additional disadvantage to that which their location already lays upon them) as reflected in their worse GCSE results than those of kids from the South.

I'm of course sorry for the kids, but they can and will recover. The question is what they are going to recover into. With their prospects shattered by the general devastation that lockdown policy has resulted in, by an economy ground into the dirt and state institutions one after the other that are toppling like dominoes, what purpose is this expensive education of increasingly questionable value going to serve them? To leave this shattered realm and make their lives anew in places that offer at least a credible chance of a half decent future for them, must be the only answer. There is no future for them here.

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James O'Brien only half jokingly spoke of a UK trade paper, Business News or some such, that ran a front page headline "Bad News - Pages 1, 2,3,4,5,6,7,8. Good news - Crossrail to open on schedule in October." He then quoted from an op-ed in the French daily, La Monde, which spoke of the NHS warning to the UK Government about the effects of the energy crisis upon the "impoverished British people". O'Brien said that the tone of the article was not gloating, there was no shadenfreude about it. Rather their was almost a confused bewilderment, together with an almost palpable but unspoken question as to whether this could happen also to them? A fear of what damage mismanagement and stubborn avoidance of reality could level upon a country, and how quickly it could be done. He (O'Brien) used the quote, "Oh would the power the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us."

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

There is talk in the press (today's FT is running an article on it) that Truss will, on assuming office, immediately trigger Article 16, the part of the withdrawal agreement with the EU that allows for the suspension of any part of the agreement that is deemed to be causing "serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties". The purpose of this would be presumably to break the current deadlock existing between the EU and UK (a deadlock that has spilled over into legal proceedings against the UK) in respect of the Northern Ireland Protocol and to move the situation forward, either by pushing the EU into agreement or in preparation for the tearing up of the protocol by the introduction of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill.

Most pundits seem to believe that the issuing of Article 16 is pretty much the endgame for the Protocol (and quite possibly the withdrawal agreement as a whole), but I believe that it is not likely that Truss will trigger it. If I have it right (and this is by no means a given), the article is designed for use in reference to specific and limited paragraphs within the protocol: It can't be used to effect what would be essentially a rewriting of the agreement as a whole, and thus its triggering would lead the process down a blind alley from which reversal out would be time consuming and simply pointless. Like calling a plumber out to fix a broken television. Now I might be wrong here, but I believe talk of this by the incoming administration is just a feint, a scare tactic for the EU to chow down on (not that the EU will be scared by it - or even fooled into thinking that its for real). Or even more likely, just a message to send out to the last stragglers amongst the membership who have yet to cast their votes. The dotting of the i's and crossing of the t's as it were, to nail the leadership contest down (not that it needs nailing down for the reasons I've given in previous posts) by suggesting that she (Truss) will see us out of the EU and into the hardest brexit of all - the purest of no-deal brexits which the ultra right membership (and that's all the membership) would love.

So my money is on the non-triggering of Article 16 by Truss. Don't be fooled by all you read in the papers: there are many reasons why stories come out when they do and they are not all immediately apparent from the reading.

(Incidentally, I think that the purpose of the Johnson comments that so angered me yesterday were another example of this kind of manipulation. The purpose being, I'm thinking, to split, divide and conquer the people in respect of their anger over rising fuel and energy costs. There will be those who take Johnson's assertion that we must soak up the increased costs in support of the Ukrainian people, and these will be turned against the rising challenge of the 'don't pay' movement, who will be painted as being unwilling to bear the cost of that support. There is always a motive behind these comments if you look for it.) Didn't someone once say something about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel?

[peter]

Yesterday, I saw somewhere, on the front of one of the daily's I believe, that Truss's pronouncements as to what she will do as PM - effectively a statement of her right wing credentials in fact - are a load of bollocks. The clip, directing the reader to an article inside the paper, claimed that rather than do what she was claiming, she would instead carry out lots of left-wing, border-line socialist acts, completely at odds with any proper Conservative values.

It's probably true. Not that she will want to of course, but the fact is that the Tories have through a combination of mismanagement and bad luck (weighted heavily toward the former) brought us to a place where they have little option but to step in and start bunging in money if they are to prevent almost total social collapse. Such is the place they have landed us in that, aside from the introduction of a brutal coercive regime that uses force to hold the population down in acceptance of penury, the only option remaining is that of the adoption of socialist policies of an extremity that would have made Jeremy Corbyn blush. If they are to prevent huge suffering, people's life savings being wiped out, businesses crashing down like zeppelins, evictions and repossessions on a huge scale, and then following this the unleashing of a public anger that would see mobs out on the streets tearing up the flagstones, then they have little option but to indulge in an intervention of epic scale, in order to prop up the failing system.

But once started, it becomes difficult to see where it stops. Corbyn, in his last failing days during the election, put forward the policy of free internet access to be provided to all households. This wasn't out of benevolence, it was a pragmatic acknowledgement that without large scale universal access to the internet of the public, government would not be able to function. Such is the now two-way dependence of state and populace upon the technology, that without it there would be no effective communication, no keeping of tabs as it were, upon the people from which the state's income is derived. The internet is the two-way window that on the one hand gives, but on the other watches, providing the state with its window into our lives from whence it can decide how to deal with us. If in the forthcoming economic crash, sufficient numbers found that they could no longer meet the demands of payment for the service, make no mistake, a Tory administration would revert to the Corbyn policy just as rapidly as he would have done.

For what would be the alternative? Allow for a two-tier development of society? A governed, regulated and overseen one, sitting atop a second, unregulated and invisible to the eyes of the state? One in which a market of labour, exchange and movement occurred, completely off-radar as it were, out with the control and administrative capabilities of the central authority? Not, I think, going to happen. So yes - in all likelihood Truss will, in office when staring at the books, decide that in order to save the patient, the leg will have to go, and the leg will be the Tory policies that have brought us here over the course of the last twelve years. Once again, as it was in the US following the great depression, it will be a right wing administration that will, wailing and gnashing its teeth, be forced to call in the socialist cavalry in order to save the day and the state will swell to meet the current need. As with the pandemic response (and come to that, the second world war crisis to which it was so often compared), it will only be by massive state intervention that total collapse will be averted. (The pandemic danger was of course imaginary - but it was big imaginary nevertheless). The truth is that it doesn't matter a hoot whether Truss or Sunak wins the top job in the coming weeks (it will be Truss), they would still be forced into exactly the same course of action in order to escape the corner that they have painted themselves into.

(Nb. A post can be simultaneously true and a crock of shit. This one is a good example of it, and I leave it here as an example of such. Sorry. You deserve better.)

[peter]

Let's have a shufty at today's headlines then.

On the Sunday Express we have Boris Johnson telling us that the future is going to be golden. He's not talking about his own as it happens, but rather that of the country, which he sees as not being about to crumble as a result of the energy crisis. In this he seems to be in a minority of one, but never mind that, it's the old Tory policy of promising jam tomorrow as long as we're prepared to eat shit today. They've been doing it now for twelve years and at last it seems to be dawning on people that they're talking crap. The wisdom of hindsight is indeed a wonderful thing.

Laura Kuenssberg is on the front of the Times telling us that she's never been told what to say in her job in the BBC news department. This is of course in response to the 'revelation' by ex BBC journalist and presenter Emily Maitlis that the BBC is a hotbed of incestuous cozying between its top elements and Government, what with its revolving door practices and presence of partisan members on the board of governors. Actually I can believe that - at what point would she needed to have been. Kuenssberg has barely bothered to conceal her political bias and one only had to watch her sickening dim-light interview with Boris Johnson during our exit from the EU (I wonder if she emerged virgo-intactus from *that* one) to know where her sympathies lay. She'd be into a Tory Government advisory position as quick as a jack russel terrier up a drainpipe after a rat, given half the chance. There never would have been the slightest need to tell her what to say - she'd have been saying it before you could make the suggestion anyway.

Lizz Truss is looking to the policies of ex Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown in order to see us through the energy crisis. Suggestions in today's Sunday Telegraph that she is considering a whopping five percent cut to vat in order to dull at least some of the pain of the huge hike in energy costs that threatens to bring us to our knees. It would be temporary and limited, but at least it would be quick and easy to implement. It won't come close to working the oracle for millions of households who, in looking at their finances, will shortly realise that they simply cannot begin to balance the books against a hundreds of percent rise in energy costs, but it is at least something positive that she can do.

Unions working together over strikes (faintly disapproving tone from the Observer, the left wing paper that will shout from the rafters about the rights of workers until they begin to shout for them themselves), Labour to protect BBC independence (too fucking late Kier you numpty) - Observer again, and also why Ozzy Osbourne is coming back to the UK - probably because no fucker else wants or is interested in the creep.

Emma Raducanu has said that she misses her old (pre-fame) life, but will keep this one. I bet she will. She's earned tens of millions in a few short months since she won the US Open (or something), such is the power of celebrity to up ones earnings potential. All I can say is don't knock it girl. Make as much as you can as fast as you can and then run for the hills. Obscurity will find you quickly enough again if you really want it to, but fame is a drug whose addictive profile puts crack-cocaine to shame.

The water companies are telling us that we have to be less squeamish about drinking water recycled from sewage plants. I thought we already were? What about that old story that every time you drank a glass of water in London it had been drunk by five people before you? Still, it makes for a good headline to outrage the uneducated masses with I suppose.

Well that's about it, except to say that I watched a paralytic man vomit over half a dozen shopping trolleys as I walked home last night. They were outside a small Co-op near where I work and some clown will have to clean them up this morning before they can be used again. He'll be bringing home minimum wage and will not be able to heat his home this winter for the privilege. Think on that!

[peter]

It is the job of Government to administer the state such that security of life in the broader sense is maintained. It is most definitely not its job to bring us to the place where tens of thousands of households, of businesses, face economic and existential ruin, where people lie dying in ambulances and everything the state has an interest in, from education to the issuing of passports and driving licences, sits on the brink of administrative collapse with the consequential widespread disruption to normal societal function that that engenders. It is absolutely not the place of Government to bring the country into a state of food insecurity the like of which has not been experienced since the darkest days of World War 2. It is not the function of Government to place the country in such dire straits in terms of energy provision that it has seriously, to consider the possibility that it may have to impose three day weeks of supply in the forthcoming winter.

Yesterday I saw Liz Truss sitting at one of her regular husting events, in interview this time, saying that yes, the Government response to the pandemic had been disproportionate to the threat. "We went too far", she said, before eliding slickly across to the subject of education, "We never should have taken the kids out of school." She finished by saying that under her premiership, we would never be subjected to a lockdown again.

Well that's a good thing at least I suppose, but it will be cold comfort for the thousands of businesses that have never fully recovered from the policy, coming hand in hand with the concurrent brexit damage that they were already gearing up to accommodate. Nor for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions who will shortly face job losses, the swallowing up of their life savings, threats to their housing security and general future wellbeing

Yes, there are other factors at work here - the war in Ukraine, the general price hike in energy costs due to a world restarting itself following a period of inactivity - but only a fool would believe that the pandemic policies we followed have not played their part in bringing us to the pass we find ourselves in.

So if Truss recognises this now, if Sunak also is of the same opinion, if in fact everybody and his mother can now see the consequences of the foolish disproportionality of our pandemic response, my question is this. Why is the question not being shouted from every media outlet from the BBC to the Beano? Why are the mouthpieces that shouted so loudly and shrilly for the policies to be enacted, not now returning to their proper function and demanding answers as to just how much damage these policies have actually done? Why is breathy voiced Clive Myrie not giving a daily tally of the failing of businesses up and down the country, instead of deciding whether he should appear on Strictly Come Dancing? Why are not Chris Whitey and Patrick Valance standing before us explaining what they have done rather than having disappeared back into the undergrowth of the civil service, awaiting no doubt further knighthoods and whatnot for the 'service 'they have performed that has left so many lives and livelihoods in ruins.

This should absolutely be the function of the forthcoming inquiry into the pandemic response to be held by the Government; to establish exactly what proportion of the damage that we are now suffering can be laid at the door of our unwise pandemic overreaction, and more importantly, how best and to what tune those who have suffered ruin to their businesses should be compensated.

But I absolutely guarantee you that this aspect of the affair, the responsibility that sits on Government for the devastating wrecking of people's lives and businesses will not even be considered. Let alone to hope that there should actually be some accountability, some price to be paid by those who brought us here.

In my view Whitey and Valance and Professor Pantsdown (whatever he was called) should be in prison, along with half the membership of Sage and most of the cabinet that forced this devastation upon us. They overstepped their remit to a criminal degree, locking people up in their houses, closing their businesses and stopping them from visiting their dying relatives. What were they thinking? They should pay the price for the criminal damage that they have wreaked upon our society with hefty prison sentences.

But it isn't going to happen. You know it and so do I. The inquiry will be a whitewash of the affair with humble comments about 'lessons to be learned' and other such platitudes. The perpetrators will probably be given public plaudits and the committee's commendations for their selfless service to the country and no question of accountability or redress will ever enter the proceedings. And meanwhile the spiralling damage that their actions - the actions of the most inept, corrupt and existentially damaging administration since that chaired by Nero, who fiddled away after he had torched Rome - will radiate outwards and upwards for decades to come. Lives will be lost (as they are being so at a thousand a week as we speak), both through illness and despair, completely avoidable had more restrained advice been heeded. Homes will be shattered and business shutters be pulled down for the final time, and no-one, no-one, will pay the price, except those who have been the victims of this holocaust.

[peter]

I've been making what small preparations I can for the forthcoming winter, in which the heating of our house in the manner we have to date enjoyed will become impossible due to increased energy costs.

I've bought really warm fleeces for indoor use for Mrs P and myself, bought a couple of convector heaters and a fan for heating individual rooms and to give a temporary blast of warmth when required. Of course the house is well insulated and I'll try to do some research on what are the most heating of foods that you can eat as you metabolize them. This is about the limit of what we can do really, but that we are forced (at our time of life and after a full lifetimes work) to such extremities is a measure of how badly our successive governments have failed us.

Why for example are we as a nation dependant upon imported food and energy? What complete imbecilic failure of forethought could not have foreseen that at some point in the future, it would be a good thing if we were able to supply at least the bulk of our needs in these critical areas ourselves? Has history taught us nothing?

Yet here we are. And we run into these crises with one hand tied behind our backs because in our wisdom we have sold off our essential utilities to the private sector - and more specifically to foreign ownership! What madness was this? It was a telling thing to see the report in the Telegraph yesterday that said that half of all Tory voters thought that the energy companies should be returned to public ownership. Hooray! At last some fucking sense from the fools who bought into the Thatcher dogma of selling off everything that wasn't bolted to the floor.

And let's not forget how the pup was sold to us. Not on the basis that private ownership was good from the point of view of the profits that could be made for the few people who would be lucky enough to own shares in the newly created companies. No. It was because the privatised utilities would be run better. With the profit motive in the driving seat, and competition chasing it from behind, the huge infrastructural bodies would power forward to the best interest of the public and reaching new unthought of levels of efficiency.

Well look at that!

There's shit being pumped into the beaches and estuaries up and down the coastline because no investment has been put into sewage treatment plant. Threatened water rationing because no repair work is carried out on leaking mains. Instead all profits have been trousered by the shareholders in dividend payments that have had them laughing all the way to the bank.

The rail services are at breaking point with track maintenance at an all time low - and incidentally being lowered even further in cost cutting exercises that the unions are currently fighting as part of their ongoing dispute with the ownership.

And don't even get me talking about the energy companies! Suffice to say that for the first time in five decades we face a situation where we are looking at blackouts in the forthcoming winter, where industry will have to undergo the destructive action of shutting down in three day weeks at the very time that it is trying desperately to recover from the brexit/pandemic battering it has been given. Need I say more.

But to talk of nationalisation in Labour circles is still taboo. When half of Tory voters are themselves shouting for a reversion to public ownership, in Sir Kier Stamer's Labour Party you dare not raise the subject for fear of ending up on the arse-end benches of the Commons (where all the independent MPs sit) next to Jeremy Corbyn. The fear of Stamer is that if he were to endorse such a conversation, that he would loose the goodwill of the middle classes that he is so desperately trying to court. He is simply terrified of being seen as a 'red' - so terrified that he won't even flirt with the ideas that even the tory voters themselves are beginning to see as a key start to bringing about a recovery.

And the argument is that it is too expensive to do. It would cost too much to buy back the railways, the energy and water companies, the postal service, into public ownership. Well here's another argument. That it was never the Government's property to sell in the first place! That it belonged to the people of this country whose taxes went into the building of it, and it was an act of theft that put it into the hands of private ownership in the first place. And as such there is no onus on the Government of today to buy it back at anything more than the absolute minimum of payment at all, if even that! We own the infrastructure of this country - we built it! It's ours and we don't have to buy it back any more than a victim of a theft has to pay for his goods back when they are recovered by the police.

So when you head down, on October the 1st, to join the Enough is Enough protests being organised up and down the country - and I sincerely hope that you will, because everyone who can put one foot in front of the other has a responsibility to send a message to our political leaders of all colours, that they must shape up or ship out - when you head down, carry a placard with you saying "IT'S OURS AND WE WANT IT BACK! RENATIONALISE THE UTILITIES".

Do this because what was ours was stolen from us - and we want it back!

[peter]

Like a bloated and uncool version of Bono (not that Bono is cool of course), Boris Johnson is embarking on a 'farewell tour' of the United Kingdom in order to extoll his successes and 'cement his legacy'.

That his legacy is the widespread destruction of the country he was elected to govern does not seem to have percolated through to his perception.

Or has it? It's impossible to tell. Does he, in a sort of fantasy version of reality that he has constructed in his head to stop himself from having to confront the awful reality, really believe that he has done fantastically - that he has left a country poised to step into the great and wonderful future he has promised? Does he really believe that - or is he perfectly cognisant of the carnage he is leaving behind him, like one of the families - his own or others - that he has left devastated and in ruins over the course of his varied career, but he simply doesn't care? His farewell tour is just another extension of the dissembling of his Partygate excuses to parliament. Just barrage through the obvious situation with a full frontal assault of prevarication. A complete and utter refusal to admit to reality even when it sits blatantly exposed before your very eyes. Caught red handed with the smoking gun in his hand and the corpse of the country at his feet, he still claims to the arresting officer that the victim is alive and well and looking forward to a successful day at the races.

Which world is it that he is living in? The unconscious denial of what he has done for self-protective purposes, such that he doesn't have to confront the horror of it.......or the Boris Johnson we have gotten used to over the years - the man who lies and lies - and then when confronted with the incontrovertible truth of his lies (yeah, alright), simply lies some more. If you can answer me this question please feel free to do so, because I'm buggered if I have a clue!

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

It was nice of the Queen to tell of her great sorrow as to the devastation and loss of life (estimated at a thousand plus people) occuring in Pakistan due to the terrible floods. Let's hope she feels similar sorrow in respect of the million who died following the partition in which the country was created, and regret as to the shockingly mishandled division of India in which her uncle the reprehensible Louis Mountbatten played such a notorious role. A thousand such environmental catastrophies could barely equal the devastation that we in the UK levelled upon that country back in the days of the post war readjustment.

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

Remaining with the royal theme, Megan Markle (what is her married surname?) has set the cat among the pigeons again with a long article in an American lifestyle and celebrity magazine 'The Cut' in which she by accounts, compares herself to Nelson Mandela, says that either her or hubby Harry "lost" their father (perhaps both) when they stepped away from the limelight (some stepping!), and finishes by saying that her (and Harry's?) mere existence is an affront to the royal hierarchy.

Well there might be something in all of that, but needless to say the UK media is all over her like a cheap suit. I'm not a royalist and don't hold the queen up as the shining beacon of humanity that the media paints her as, but neither would I want to see her final years blighted by a family rift that, good person or bad, could only bring her pain. Meghan is going to be painted as the black sheep in all of this, Harry as the innocent victim of a manipulative publicity hound, and the queen as the aloof but injured elder stateswoman. It's drama for the masses, soap opera made real in the biggest show on earth. The Truman Show in which the participants play their roles for real.

And the trouble is that the Markle's have nowhere else to go. They have nothing left to sell themselves on but increasingly vitriolic interviews in which they said more and more inflammatory things about the family that spawned them (I mean as an entity). The voracious celebrity media will simply not be satisfied with guarded allusion and innuendo as time goes on. They will want the meat of the dish of which they have so far only tasted the gravy. Nothing short of the real down and dirty is going to satisfy them - who asked about what colour the baby would be, what racist comments were made and by whom, Harry saying that he believes his mother was murdered - this sort of thing.

And every interview, every sleazy detail that emerges, is another nail in the coffin of the institution of the monarchy. So for this I should perhaps be grateful. They, Harry and Meghan between them, are doing for the monarchy as surely as the knife wielder who administers the death by a thousand cuts. But the price that Meghan Markle will pay will be terrible. For the media will destroy her as surely as she will destroy the monarchy. And what will we have to entertain ourselves with then?

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

A peculiarly British type of story to finish on this morning - one that could only come out of our particular stable of industry scuppered by inefficiency - like a Carry On film, found nowhere else in the world.

The Royal Navy's new flagship carrier, HMS Prince of Wales, costing the British taxpayer 3 billion squid, was stalled on its first operational duty heading out to the coast of Africa when it broke down and came to a standstill not far out of port. Someone, it transpired, had forgotten to "grease the propeller shaft" before it was given it's certificate of seaworthiness.

Forgive me for finding this somewhat amusing, but it has exactly the kind of ring to it as the excuses I used to get from my cowboy garage when I was running about in a five hundred quid motor. "Nah there's your problem guv - somebody's forgotten to grease the prop shaft!" Hang on while we get her up onto the ramp."

I imagine that there are going to be some choice words being used in the admiralty this morning - some very choice words indeed!

[Avatar]

As you can imagine, her comments about Nelson Mandela did not go over particularly well here, and nor did some earlier comment about something that supposedly happened while they were visiting SA.

Eh, I'm torn myself...thing is, she, (Meghan) does come across as a slightly unpleasant publicity hound as you put it. And while I wouldn't call myself "royalist" I'm also by no means "republican" when it comes to the Queen.

It's also looking increasingly likely that Charles will keel over and die of shock if he ever becomes King, and sadly, having replaced his father as the "next great hope" of the monarchy, William seems to be looking (for now anyway) like rather more of the same.

Meh. Not that it affects me in any way of course.

--A

[Forestal]

I have always found Meghan to be deeply unlikable and despite her former career as an actress, a totally unbelievable one. Every word that comes out of her mouth I find entirely facetious simply because of the way she delievers it. Do I believe that there is discrimination in the royal family? Absolutely. Do I think she suffered overly because of it? Doubtful. Does she understand what "staying out of the limelight" means? Not at all. I'm certainly no royalist, but her accusations are in no way damaging to the royals, it's all hear-say and the public will forget it faster than they forgot about her career.

Also I'm shocked that the news were talking about the broken down carrier, and even more so pointing out that our only other carrier was in for repairs - thus the entire UK Navy had no aircraft carrier support, at all. How is this information not considered a national security issue? I understand that it's hard to cover up a £3b floating brick off the coast, but at least have a plausible lie, like, I don't know, "We were forced to delay the travel plans due to unusual signals picked up on the ships equipment which required investigation". Don't just tell the fucking world that the two primary powers of our Navy are at this moment in time, sitting ducks. People would have been shot for this during the war.

[peter]

You may be right on the royal damage score Forestal, but I'm not so sure.

The Royal family have survived down through the centuries by their being set on a pedestal. Not always loved for sure, but always removed from Joe Public by that distance. What Meghan Markle is doing is pulling them down off that pedestal, and without that they become just like you and me. At this point the question of their survival becomes much more mundane; put that together with an angry populace ready for fundamental change and who knows where it could end.

Not likely perhaps but certainly not impossible. Some would say the delayed but natural conclusion to what was begun in the American and French revolutions.

[peter]

It's amazing that the papers are still keeping up the pretence that Rishi Sunak could be our next Prime Minister, while simultaneously ignoring virtually everything he has to say on every subject.

I read all of the front pages every day, and in every story about the Tory Party leadership contest (what contest?) there is a detailed breakdown of what Truss has had to say (at the most recent hustings or whatever) followed by a cursory line that might as well read, "Oh - and Rishi Sunak said something as well."

The leadership contest has become a race between the hare and the tortoise that the tortoise is not going to win.

But it says something about the underlying squeamishness of our media when it comes to approaching the issue of race in the country. There is one reason and one reason alone that Sunak is not going to win - was never going to win - and that is because to the people who are voting in the contest, the people who are deciding who will be our next Prime Minister, he is the wrong colour. Yet despite this clearly obvious fact, not one of the papers, television channels or even the YouTube small scale outlets that sit at the fringes of information dissemination in this country, has had the courage to call it.

In exactly the same way as the media and the leavers of the higher demographic groupings refused to acknowledge that the brexit vote was passed on the back of anti-immigrant feeling, the media now plays the commentary game on the leadership contest while simultaneously ignoring the elephant in the room. That Sunak can't win because he's simply not the right colour for the Tory Party membership to vote for.

I was listening to a leadership conversation on LBC radio the other day (and LBC is a leftish leaning channel, not usually reticent in calling out Tory Party failings) when one of the callers, obviously a black gentleman of somewhat advanced years, made the observation that Sunak was not seen as "fully British" by the people who would be voting in the leadership race. The host of the show immediately bridled. "What do you mean, 'not fully British'?", he asked in a suspicious tone. The guy explained that Sunak was of Indian heritage and so was not viewed by the membership of the Tory Party as being fully British and, he added on the subject of the election of a not completely British (in their view) leader, "they are not ready for that." The host of the phone-in show was horrified; he never even got past the first sentence of the mans point. "Let's be clear," he said, "Rishi Sunak is British, British, completely British." The remotest suggestion that Sunak's colour was playing a role in his election chances was something he was not even prepared to have considered on his program, end off! And this even from a station that has no right wing sentiments attached to it in any shape or form. How much more are the mainstream media outlets going to be assiduous in their avoidance of this thorny truth than a fringe channel on the outskirts?

The truth is that despite all of our political correctness, our supposed woke culture, our multicultural inclusivity (all things that prevail far more in the media and state operations of the nation than they do amongst the general population), we are still a deeply conservative society. I don't use the word racist (though I have in the past to be sure) because I don't think that that word covers it. We don't like foreigners, we don't view people with not white skin as being wholly British (I think the man was dead right in this), even if they are born and bred here, and we are far from being ready from the kind of full societal inclusivity that the liberal society would pretend we are, when you look into our grubby underbelly.

The truth is that it is going to take generations for us to change; you can't batter this kind of alteration into people via media pretence and political policy announcements, by posters on walls and statements of intent on work place walls. You have to love, laugh and cry alongside people to consider them your countrymen. You have to suffer and die alongside them too. So let's not hold it against ourselves that we have not reached this place quite yet. There is hope and time for the future. And let's not trust a media that cannot bring itself to turn to the darker corners of who we are and shine an illuminating light on those as well.

[Forestal]

All that may be true but let's be realistic, he's not "British, British". The old man is right, he's not "Fully British". He has/had an American green card, he's basically part American. Race has nothing to do with it really.