What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

At least Africa has a future Av!

As if it were necessary to drive home the point (one has merely to open your mail in the morning, go to the shops, see the increasing presence of lost individuals and increasing dilapidation of the buildings the whole shabby appearance of the place) with a post, let's look at this morning's front pages one by one - and I'll record the key points of each as they come up.

The Express; telling about the Green peace protesters who found their way onto the PM's Yorkshire home roof and unfurled black banners down the sides of the building in protest at his opening up of the UK North Sea oil reserves to drilling once more. Needless to say the extreme right rag is more concerned about the "outrage" of the protesters getting onto Sunak's roof than of his opportunistic disregard for the environment as long as there is a few votes to be garnered.

The Telegraph tells us with masturbatory glee that the NHS will be privatised in order to deal with the 7 million long waiting list. What it means is effectively following in the Blair instigated policy of outsourcing work traditionally performed in house by the NHS itself, to the private sector. Where normally medical treatments and testing etc are carried out by NHS doctors and labs, the thrust here will be to utilise private clinics and hospitals to take on a proportion of the backlog. All well and good as long as the free at the point of care principle is adhered to, but if the NHS is not maintained by adequate funding to a point where it can cover such needs, then what chance of this principle being kept. Once the population has been shifted toward the private sector in this way, it will be but a short step towards saying that there is no money to refinance the NHS proper and it would be better for people to take out private health insurance for a move toward decreased reliance on the state service. It's simply deconstruction of the NHS by stealth and exactly what the Telegraph has wanted since day one. It's been achieved with the dental service and now it's being done to the NHS proper. No wonder they shut down the hospitals during the pandemic in what to any sane person seemed like an act of madness. The NHS waiting list, well under control at the time (under a million people) shot up to over seven million, thereby doing more to undermine the NHS's future in a few short months than years of Tory underfunding could have ever achieved. Method in their madness or what!

(God, I'm so angry about this alone I can barely bring myself to go on, but I've started so.....)

In the same paper we are told that the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt tells us "The era of cheap food is over." Yes, well, his policy of tackling inflation by interest rate rises is clearly failing, while adding to the misery of mortgage holders and anyone else, business or private, with any kind of debt burden, so I suppose that's a given. At least I suppose they have pushed back the deadline for introduction of checks on EU foodstuffs entering the UK which, had they gone ahead with the intended October date would have added yet further inflationary pressure on ever dwindling food supplies. Small comfort though to families already struggling to find the money to feed themselves, particularly as the bulk of price increases falls on basic home brands which have smaller profit margins anyway with which to absorb increased costs of production. So most pressure piled on those already struggling. No change there. (And the government are adamant that the EU food checks are coming in, albeit at a later date, so be prepared for further inflationary hits to food prices down the line.)

Next, the 'i' tells us of "Three years of mortgage pain as six million face interest hikes." The bank base rate has recently undergone its 14th hike in a row, rising to 5.25 percent as the Bank of England struggles to get inflation down to its 2 percent target. It's not happening though; there are to many different factors driving inflation in our ailing economy for these rises to be having their normal (and desired) effect, and so things get from bad to worse as we struggle with both high inflation and high interest rates simultaneously. Good work BofE. Good work Jeremy.

The Mirror tells us of advice given by Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride to struggling over-50's: get on your bike and take on extra work for gig-economy companies like 'Deliveroo' (you know - those guys you see cycling around with great backpacks full of pizzas). Fair do's Mel; what about broken down old fucks like me who can barely get out of bed for the pain they are suffering? It may surprise you, but some people have not spent their working lives sat in offices and knocking off at lunch time on Friday for a long weekend on flexitime. Some have done backbreaking work on building sites and farms, down mines and on factory floors. And these will be the ones not enjoying their index linked pensions and early retirement. Most of these are like knackered old horses, gasping their remaining years away in run down tenements and council estates. They aren't the ones you see on bank websites with their cotton shirts and still beautiful wives enjoying their second, post-retirement lives in some sun-kissed Mediterranean vista, so save your patronising advice for something you might actually understand a little about will you.

The Metro and The Mail both go with the Sunak house "outrage", while Sunak himself is off in California - soon to be his new home anyway - enjoying a fun-filled family holiday with his wife and kids. You enjoy it Rishi; don't worry about the people you've screwed over with your disastrous covid giveaway policy, your pathetic pandering to the right wing of your party by refusing to acknowledge what is patently obvious - that the Brexit you all championed is a fucking disaster and must be reversed, at least to the tune of getting back into the single market and customs union, if we are to stand any chance - any chance - of not descending into effective third-world poverty in the decades to come.

Then on to The Times who tell us that according to Chancellor Hunt, the economy is caught in a trap and that interest rates will not fall before the next election. Because that's all it's about isn't it? Winning the next election? Screw the suffering people; screw the ones who will loose their homes, the kids failed by the education system that was closed down in the pandemic, blighting their futures for the rest of their lives. Screw the businesses going to the wall in their tens of thousands and the millions of people who's jobs and futures will vanish with them. Because it's all about the election, about keeping the merry-go-round going, the troughs open and the noses shoved deep into the swill. Government of the people, by the people, for the people? Fuck that! This is Conservative Britain and we'll have none of that here!

And so it goes on. Family business Wilko going into receivership,12,000 jobs likely to go. Recession more likely as inflation becomes embedded into UK economy, millions to pay thousands more per year for their housing. An endless litany of the failure of our country in the face of sustained and successive bad decision making by the Conservative governments in post war Britain. When will the people of this country learn? It is only under Labour governments that the people themselves actually benefit from their administrations. Atlee and his building of the welfare state. Even Blair with his mixed economy approach (a million miles away from the Stamer Tory-lite version that the current Labour leadership propose) left the country in good shape and which issued in the devolved governance of Wales and Scotland. What have the tories given us? They kept us out of the EU single currency and then burned the economy trying to shadow the euro. They ripped us out of the EU in which we had seen our standard of living rise consistently over three generations. They sacrificed the working people with their austerity in order to prop up the banking system from which only their own class benefitted, and then further destroyed it with Brexit and a disastrous policy of borrowing and printing of money during the pandemic.

The entirety of this mess, this train wreck of a day's news lies entirely at their feet, and I bet that the people of this country will vote them in again.

People get the governments they deserve. Never was a truer word spoken.

[peter]

The other evening I did something I'd wanted to for a long time - I went down to a shop cum gamers cafe in my local town centre and joined a single session Dungeons and Dragons game, designed specifically to introduce new prospective players to the game.

It was good fun and I had a good time (though felt a bit out of place due to the young age of the other atendees) - but this is not what I'm actually posting about.

The cafe is situated behind a central main shopping hub in the town - a sort of space between two streets and has wide steps leading up to the doorway, which faces out onto an area of access and car parking and a small central roundabout. On the steps as I entered, around 6pm, there were a group of four drunks, effing and blinding at each other and clearly members of the towns now numerous homeless brigade. They were loud and slightly disconcerting to pass, but in fairness paid no attention to me as I walked past them and into the establishment.

I played for a couple of hours until the session ended and then left, going outside to my wife, who was waiting in the car having driven down from our home to pick me up. The drunks were still there, and as we drove down the access road to this small backspace within the town proper, we passed a group of young kids, around fifteen in number and aged, I'd guess, about the same. They were gathered in a fairly tight bunch around an access alleyway leading to a main shopping street, some sitting on a small wall, others standing, and some perched higher up on the wall and metal external staircase of a building siding the alleyway. Their appearance and attitude was one of feral unaproachability. This was not a group that one would want to tangle with, unless one had serious backup in the form of uniformed officers to hand.

There is actually a local council sponsored youth center near the site where this gathering was happening, so I'd guess that there was some connection, but to be honest, the whole picture - drunks and youths - was enough to make me happy that I rarely ever go into town at even this relatively early time of night. It was downmarket and grim. A soulless experience of touching life's grimmer side in 2020's Britain. Lost kids in alleyways leading to lost lives lying drunken on steps. Conservative Britain 2023 style.

I don't know what the solution to this is, what is to blame or what has gone wrong - but there is something adrift somewhere. Certainly youth has always seemed adrift to age - nothing new in that - but there is something different in this. It's exemplified by another story from my town, an occurence that happened last year and has recently reached a culmination in the jailing of the youths involved. Our town is small by city standards, a few tens of thousands, and we were somewhat shocked when a group of youngsters set about a homeless man in a carpark, beating and kicking him while all the while filming what they were doing and laughing at his distress and fear while they were doing it. They posted their attack online, were apprehended and charged. The man sustained significant injuries sufficient for his hospitalisation.

Now we were bad as youngsters, drinking smoking and whatnot - but it never went as far as this. What has gone wrong here? Is it social media, the delayed effects of the pandemic and its breakdown of educational influence. Is it something that is passed on to the kids by their parents - themselves in many instances a waste of space in terms of their societal contribution. This may seem harsh, but I come in contact with this underclass (for that is what they have become) on a daily basis in my workplace (well - on days I'm at work now). Not being funny, but I understand more about these people than your 'Guardianista's', your Owen Jonses and Lisa Nandy's could in a month of Sundays. There exists a class of individuals in our society who are given precious little by it and give even less back themselves. They take what they can in social benefits which were designed as a safety net for those who could not work, not those who would not work, and they are content with it. If it provides for a phone an internet connection and a roof, then they will grub along with that and produce children that the society is forced to provide for. And these kids I saw the other night, these kids who beat that down and out, they are the products of these dysfunctional families with no idea of social responsibility - parents who do not do what they do out of conscious thought, but who never even think that maybe they should actually put something into the society that provides for them. And their children - well these are just a consequence of what they do, and they give no more thought to how they in turn will live their lives, than to how they live their own.

And those kids in that group are the consequence. Wild and with no concept of social responsibility, they have little or no future, because their minds have not been furnished with the idea that they could actually do anything other. The only route to riches they see (because they do see riches, in the cheap lives of the social media influencers they follow., in the bling hanging around the necks of the rap artists whose lives of drug and gangsta culture they envy) is via the same ones as they see on TV reality shows, or Britain's Got Talent.

So what to do about it?

National service? Get them away from the environment that breeds this indifference to responsibility, to striving for success, for understanding that life can offer more,? Education? Will that do it (if you can even get them to attend)? Damned if I know. But we have produced a lost generation and be in no doubt about it. And there will be a price to pay in future, and the beating of tramps will be the least of it.

[peter]

Last week, the FT on one of its inside pages, ran an article that told us that we in the UK have more millionaires and billionaires than any other country in Europe.

The same article told us that a recent study found that our average standard of living was now lower than that of the Eastern European countries, Poland, Hungary, Romania and the like, and in the case of our lower demographic some twenty percent so.

To put some flesh on the bones of the income inequality in this country, taken on average income, the top ten percent of the country enjoys a monthly income twelve times that of the lower and in terms of asset ownership, the top ten percent hold over forty percent of the nation's cumulative wealth - more than the bottom fifty percent. This income and wealth gap has been steadily increasing for years and is accelerating as time progresses.

One only has to look around to get a sense of how we are doing as a nation - the health service is underfunded and suffering from low morale, with higher desertion rates and waiting lists than at any time in its history. The nation's transport systems are run down and dysfunctional, the education service failing children en masse with hundreds of thousands simply lost to the system. Defence is one area that is perhaps still receiving the necessary funding to maintain its standards, but I'm not sure the Chiefs of Staff would agree with that.

On the basis of the indicators our economic prospects are in worse shape than any comparable country in the western world: trade is down, inward investment figures are truly dire and gdp down while borrowing at an all time high. We remain an economically powerful country, but we are rapidly failing to keep pace with our contemporaries with no sign of a turnaround in our fortunes occurring any time soon. Certainly circumstances beyond our control have played a part in our parlous condition, but so to must our government take its share of the blame in our declining fortunes, our plummeting living standards. The process of arriving at Brexit, and the adjustments we have had to make in preparation and consequence of our departure, have sucked up and swallowed all of our political effort for half a decade (it was predicted that it would, even before the referendum was announced, when questions of our leaving the EU were raised). There has been little time and energy left to deal with other significant and important areas of our administration, our economy and how it is made up, our society more broadly. Throw on a world pandemic and latterly a destabilising war in Eastern Europe and the scene is set for a decline in our fortunes than threatens to become permanent and irreversible.

Okay. Let's leave the politics out of this for once and concentrate simply on what might be done - no - what must be done to set things to rights.

The first and absolute thing that must be achieved is the restoration of political stability. We have had no less than five Prime Ministers in the last seven years, and seven Chancellor's of the Exchequer. Imagine five American Presidents in the same period! How can it be hoped for political stability to pertain, when there is no continuity at the very pinnacle of our governance? Every one of those Prime Ministers has had a different agenda, a different set of priorities and thus we have seen policy tossed from pillar to post as each follows his or her own road. Exactly the same applies to the various Chancellors. These are equally, if not more important, in terms of economic policy and ensuring the fiscal stability of the nation: one only has to look at our economic situation to see the devastating effects of this lack of continuity at the head of our treasury department.

So that's number 1. Restoration of political stability.

Number 2. The mistakes of Brexit must be acknowledged and steps taken to mitigate them. Growth in the economy is centered around trade and inward investment - and Brexit has significantly damaged both. This is the one area where we can relatively simply make some significant impact on our future prospects. Reentry into the single market and customs union would at one sweep, settle many of our labour and skill shortages, would give our exports a boost and go a large way toward putting the downward pressure on inflation that our economy so desperately needs. As I say, this will require some honest acknowledgement of the mistakes we made in exiting the EU - not necessarily that the whole project was a mistake, just that we fluffed it in its execution. Have we the courage to admit this to ourselves, because until we do so we can never begin to reverse our decline.

Number 3. The widening income inequality I began with must be adressed. There is no prospect for economic growth, for financial prosperity in a country where the bulk of the citizenry has no disposal income to put into circulation. This requires wages to be high enough for people to spend at least a portion of what they earn out in their communities. And this can never happen when public sector wages are stagnant or decreasing in real terms. A progressive tax system to redress the balance of income, to increase receipts into the Exchequer which can then be recirculated out in the form of public spending on wages and infrastructure, will begin this levelling up process and get the wheels of our economy moving. The Chancellor must be granted money to spend - real money, neither printed nor borrowed, in order to kick-start a fiscal stimulus to get the economy moving. This can't happen while so significant a proportion of the nation's wealth is concentrated in the hands of so few individuals, that they can find nothing better to do with it than stash it away in numbered accounts in the Caymen Islands. Time, I'm afraid for the fortunate beneficiaries of what generated wealth there has been in the last decade and a half, to stump up for the good of the nation that has supported them. A bit of taxation at the top, a bit of spending in the middle, and bit of extra cash at the bottom.

Number 4. Diversification of the economy. Going way back to the Thatcher era, the concentration of our economy into the service sector at the expense of the manufacturing has been the order of the day. That this has been a mistake of huge proportion has been brought home with a bang in recent times when the pandemic delivered a crushing blow to the service industry right across Europe. The UK, so heavily dependant upon this side of our economy, has been floored to a greater extent than any other country by virtue of this. The financial service industry, particularly centered around the City of London, has assumed a far greater role in generating the wealth of the nation, to the expense of jobs and incomes derived from other areas. This must change. A new, more balanced approach, must be developed, one in which manufacturing and technology play a significant role. Clearly shifts such as this cannot be achieved overnight, but even the starting of the rebalancing process will in itself serve as a boost to the economy, and once achieved the benefits of the process will run into the treasury year on year.

No doubt there are many other things that could be done to reverse our fortunes, but keeping it simple, those listed above would in concert go a large part of the way toward doing the job. They are not in a sense political, in so far as with a bit of flexibility they could be introduced by any (or either, should I say) of our main parties. They are pragmatic suggestions that serve to bring about the turnaround our economy needs in order to regain its direction. There is not one, absent with, that the job can be achieved. It seems to me that our politicians have become mired in a quagmire of internecine factionalism, too blinded by either their pursuit of power or their desperate attempts to hold onto it to see clearly that which must be done. This is fatal to our future, if those who must make the changes are unwilling or unable to do so because of narrow party political considerations.

They....we.....have made a right mess of it. Time to put it right.

[peter]

Most people seem to think that Rishi Sunak will hold on to the last minute before calling a general election, which could mean that we don't see it until the latter part of 2024 or even January 2025.

Certainly there will be no December or January election - the elderly Conservative voters who the Tories rely on are far more likely to give voting a miss in the cold winter months, and the Tories will very much want to avoid this. So that pulls it forward to the autumn of 2024, which would probably be the thinking of most commentators on the subject.

I'm not so sure.

There are a number of reasons why an early 'snap' election might be the better option, not least because the PM himself no longer wants the job he is doing. You can see it in his body-language, in his very demeanor which is tetchy and resentful in interview, disinterested and impatient in committee.

Last week in an interview with a Scottish radio presenter, prior to a visit to the devolved nation pertaining to environmental issues, he was asked by what means he would be making the journey. He spun into a clearly irritated response in which he said, of course it would be by plane and if the questioner had thought that dealing with environmental issues meant people giving up their holidays then he was barking up the wrong tree because it didn't mean that at all. This ended the interview on a sour note, which is the way that most Sunak interviews tend to finish these days. He hates to be questioned - he clearly is not used to it - and becomes defensive and surly when it happens. All in all the PM gig is turning out to be far more onerous than expected with things going from bad to worse, and frankly it isn't doing anything to move him closer to his long term goal of achieving financial parity with his wife, who we know has wealth that outstrips his by tenfold. He has no real loyalty to this country and would certainly now rather be in California where the weather is better, the business opportunities better, and the prospects for lucrative employment/dealings better. He already has his house set up over there, his kids education set up over there and his next life-moves set up over there. The sooner he can unhitch himself from this thankless task he has landed himself with, leave this broken down and miserable grey country, and fly to his new life stateside, the better. (And anyone who thinks his recent trip over there was just a "holiday" is naive in the extreme.)

So much for Sunak's reasons for wanting to call as early an election as possible: what about the rest of the Party, the backroom boys of the 1922 committee and the Party officials?

Well they will be casting a nervous eye on what is going on, both in the country as a whole and in terms of what they are managing to actually get done in the House, and they will not like what they see.

It's been a bad week for brexit, just for starters. The mass dumping of EU laws from our statute books ha had to be trimmed right back and a UK stamp of quality, planned to replace the EU one we still currently use, has had to be shelved because no-one else in the world is prepared to accept it. And most significantly, they've had to postpone the instigation of the post brexit border checks on goods coming in from the EU for (what is it?) the fifth time. These checks are a legal requirement of the withdrawal agreement and not to implement them is, aside from this, a contravention of WTO rules that could land us in court as a separate issue in itself. But we simply cannot bring them into operation. To do so would be to push up food costs in a manner that would make what inflation we have seen in the sector thus far as nothing. EU food importers would simply stop coming - the drivers wouldn't want to because of the additional time it would take, the haulers would not want to because of the time their lorries would be sitting idle waiting for cargo and documentation checks, and the importers themselves would not want to because of the increased administration costs - costs that could be avoided by simply selling their goods elsewhere in the EU.

So there would be no milage in importing food to the UK following instigation of post brexit border checks and they would simply stop coming. And the forty percent of our food that comes over from the continent would slow down to a trickle. Food shortages and sky rocketing prices would result...... and a real threat to our food security that would be visible not just in a reduction of product range, but of actual quantity of food in the shops. For the first time in most people's living memory, the worry of whether they would be able to get enough food to eat (never mind whether they have enough money to actually buy it if it were there) will become a reality. This is a mighty problem that this government might be well advised to sidestep by calling an early spring election, dumping the problem into Kier Stamer's lap, and then blaming him for failing in sorting it out. He'd last one term maximum and then the Tories could sweep back in, invigorated and renewed, to take up the reins again. This will be the consideration running through the minds of the ones behind the scenes, the movers and shakers of the Party.

Because let's face it. Things are not exactly going to get better just because they hold on for a few extra months. The increasingly felt effects of the Truss mini-budget mortgage detonation will only get worse: better to be out and away before the worst of that kicks in as well. All in all, the clever money is for the calling of a quick spring election (or even later this year, if they could get away with it, though I'm not sure how the fixed term parliament act - which can, it should be noted, always be got around - impacts on this). Time, most of the men in grey suits will be thinking, to get the f*** out of Dodge, unload Sunak and sit out the crap that is to come. There will be no or little thought as to what is good for the country in this. The plight of the people, crushed by rising housing and food costs, facing job insecurity and housing insecurity in one fell swoop, will be of little consideration. It'll be all about the Tories: about what long term strategy serves their own best interests most advantageously.

But let's face it - when has it ever been any different.

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Can you think of a more contradiction in terms than the phrase so beloved by the right wing media, of "lefty lawyers?

Lefty lawyers?

Have you ever met a lawyer who is left wing in his thinking in your entire fucking life? Lawyers are amongst the highest earning groups in the country; they are Conservative voters almost by default. Tony Blair, a famous Labour leader who was a lawyer in his earlier life before entering politics did more to pull the Labour cause to the right than any man who ever lived. Without Blair, we would not have Stamer now, apeing the Tory Party and promising that nothing will change under Labour. (As an aside, shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves said last week in interview that "Labour were no longer the party of the working people". Tell me something I didn't know Rachel.)

The legal profession is as entrenched a bastion of Conservative values and thinking as you will find anywhere in the country. To bo to a lawyers black tie dinner and profess to having socialist leanings would be to commit professional suicide. Every bit of the social prestige and the financial strangle hold that they posess is down to the Conservatism that is their innate ideology.

What the papers are of course referring to is not so much that the lawyers are left wing, but that in the pursuit of the money they earn, they will defend anyone, take up any cause that has a legal element to it, no matter how seemingly unwholesome or guilty the defendant seems to be. And it is of course right that they should do so. Their arena is the Law. Our society holds as one of its central tenets that all people are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and as such all are equally entitled to legal representation that will do everything in its power, without prejudice or favour irrespective of how guilty or otherwise they may seem, irrespective of how attractive or despicable the person they are defending would seem to be, to secure a winning verdict in the forum of the court chamber. The papers like for whatever reason to portray the lawyers as left wing themselves, as though within the legal community exists a circle within a circle of left wing ideology, a suddenly philanthropic and socially minded grouping that would see the advantages of social prestige and financial remuneration that the profession enjoys, in some way whittled down. Rubbish. They do it firstly because there is money in it and secondly because it is part of their ethos that where the Law is involved, both sides of an argument must be equally represented. The game is the thing, the court the field upon which it is played. No quater will be asked or given by either side and the biggest of the contests go down in history as events of great significance. This is why they make such fine entertainment for the film and theatrical profession to portray.

So lefty lawyers - don't waste your time looking for any. You won't find them. Just particular lawyers who have carved a niche out for themselves in their own arena, a niche that pays handsomely and holds as much respect as any other within the tight community of the profession, just as much as those who defend murderers and rapists and do their level best to see that their charges remain free and out on the streets if they can engineer it. The lawyers are the players in the game, the judges the umpires. It isn't a case of left or right in the court area. It's a case of Law.

[peter]

Yesterday there was a big thing in the news that Suella Braverman's Home Office had issued a warning to migrants who had declined to take up their offer of accommodation on the accommodation barge (some say prison ship) Bibby Stockholm, that unless they were prepared to board said vessel, they would be effectively turned out with no accommodation whatsoever, to survive on their own devices.

Does it not occur to them - the Home Office - that this makes a nonsense of ever having bothere to pick them up in the first place?

If they simply now turn them loose to dissappear into the invisible economy of illegal employment and under the radar living, are they not simply bringing about exactly the situation that the migrant boat people would have faced had they never been intercepted in the first place? The situation they must have hoped for when first boarding the small boats to slip across the Channel in the first place. So all the trouble of bothering to search and capture them has been wasted effort, merely putting off briefly what in the end the migrants would have experienced anyway.

I mean, can you think of a better way of ensuring that these individuals go off grid, than turning them loose with no accommodation?

Do we live in a nation administered by morons?

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

Speaking of which, what kind of idiot goes around worrying about the number of steps they have taken in a day?

I see in an article in one of today's papers that scientists have said, "Don't worry if you don't hit your 10,000 steps today. Put your feet up after 5000 because the health benefits kick in after that anyway.

I'm assuming that this all has to do with these stupid watches that everyone seems to be wearing these days; watches that monitor everything from your heart rate to the rate your nails are growing in order to pre-warn you that you are about to die.

Let me save you the effort of keeping looking at this ugly little viper on your wrist and set it out plainly for you. You are going to die. If not today, tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then some day in the future beyond that. And looking at this techno-tyrant on your wrist that would admonish you for failing to take the number of fucking steps it tells you to ain't gonna make the slightest difference to that.

Because if you are so out of touch with your own body that you need a frikkin watch to tell you if you need more exercise or not, then I'm sorry, but in my opinion you're an idiot. Or a child that is so bound up in saucer-eyed adulation of every stupid little gadget that the ad men have decided that they can con you into buying, that you barely constitute having a mind of your own any more anyway.

And let me explain it to you. Stuffing your maw with 2000 calories of chocolate a day or a dozen greasy burgers a week is not going to be offset by stepping 10,000 steps a day to assuage your guilt, no matter how much you wish it could be, or the researchers who tell you it will be, or the manufacturers of the watches that do the counting (and are you really not clever enough to see the connection between the last two) wish it would be.

And the truth of it is ,is that all the worrying about living for ever (and given the lives that the bulk of us have to look forward to, who would want to) is going to take more off your lifespan than any amount of step counting can put back on.

So do yourself a favour. Unclip that tedious bit of 'smart' crap from your wrist and chuck it in the bin where it belongs. Because if you don't buy into this smart tech idea, then half of the damn steps you are being told you have to take will be done without you even thinking about them, via the simple act of getting off your arse to go and turn on the lights, or walking to the kitchen to turn on the kettle, or getting out of your car to open your own garage door. And stop worrying about living for ever and start just simply living. And strangely enough, you might find that you actually start enjoying it and that it's actually better than worrying about it.

[peter]

Let's talk about Lee Anderson.

Yesterday it was reported that Anderson, Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party had made a comment (not sure where - sorry - but it was widely spoken of and even responded to by a Conservative Party bigwig, so one can assume he did make it) that if migrants were not happy with the accommodation being provided for them on the Bibby Stockholm (the barge now sitting in Portsmouth docks ready to take a further 480 migrants, who are understandably reticent to board it following the Fire Safety inspectorates's assessment that it is unsafe - a fire tragedy waiting to happen or some such they said) then they should "Fuck off back to France".

This caused the predictable outcry just as Anderson, who loves his rough Northern down to earth image and is a consumate 'player to the crowds', knew it would.

Anderson is one of those individuals for who there is only one thing worse than being talked about - not being talked about. He relishes his alternative moniker, Thirty P Lee, referring to his useful advice to struggling families that you can cook a meal for as little as 30p (again, an acknowledgement of just how bad the Tories have made things by one of its own membership - a fact that none of the outraged media seemed to cotton on to preferring to rip into what they saw as the inaccuracy of the comment itself) and is ever on the lookout for new controversial things to say in order to raise the hackles of the liberal left.

But this comment is different. It really does, as was pointed out by Owen Jones and other commentators, trawl the depths of parties like the National Front and the BNP, and to hear it coming from the Deputy Leader of our governing party is reflective of just how far our politics has fallen in the last decade or so.

Anderson is one of the new Red Wall Tories, voted in during the Johnson 2019 'Get Brexit Done' election, all of whom sit on the far right of the parliamentary party, and revel in presenting themselves as an alternative to the Oxbridge Tories of the South East - hard Conservatives of the Suella Braverman stamp, who are not afraid to call a spade a spade.

In years gone by Anderson would have been immediately suspended and placed under disciplinary for such a comment; yesterday he was defended for the comment's being "understandable" by no less than the justice secretary Alex Chalk, and even found backing within Number 10 itself. "Salty", was how he was described, "Down to earth". I call him a fucking racist, being supported by a party that is racist to its core. And that applies to the Southern element just as much as the new Northern one.

There have been horrified reactions from some MPs - but on the effects of his comments driving away potential or floating voters in the next election rather than on the racist content of his comment. In a separate issue, ex government minister Zack Goldsmith had said that he was considering supporting Labour in the next election, and presumably this sudden and vicious lurch to the right on the stance in respect of migrants will help him further in his decision. The real scandal of what Anderson said is not that the idiot said it, but that he is being supported (if obliquely) by Downing St. When asked if the justice secretary's position (that the Anderson comments were understandable) was reflective of that of the government, the reply was that it was. This is the real horror of this story. One could perfectly well expect a fucking idiot like Anderson to be making inflammatory comments like this. One could not expect the government to be supportive of them.

We are in very dangerous waters with the games this government is playing in pursuit of remaining in power. This is playing to the most base instincts of the human psyche. It is the path taken before every single act of atrocity performed by one group of humans on another. The dehumanisation of the target group, the continuous drip drip effect of contemptuous comments such as this, the callous and casual cruelty of painting over murals, the othering of a target group upon whose backs the blame and dissatisfaction for the current condition we are in can be heaped. These are the ploys we are seeing, and they are ploys that have a rich history in the annals of the worst atrocities we as a species have perpetrated.

Read your history Anderson. Read your history Sunak. You are playing with fire.

[peter]

In typical boorish fashion, Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party Lee Anderson has refused to apologise for saying that migrants unhappy with the offered accommodation on the floating barge Bibby Stockholm should "Fuck off back to France".

And why would he? Because the truth of the matter is that his constituents who voted for him, alongside most other members of that curious group, the working class Tories, love him for it.

But let's just unpack the thing a bit. We all know that when he said Paris, this isn't what he really means. What he's really saying, though he's too slippery not to realise that even he couldn't get away with this, is "Fuck off back to Africa" (or the Middle East, or Asia, or wherever it was you originally came from). He's just saying what all of the fools who have bought into the divisive policy of stoking up hatred against 'the other ' (serving the Tories so well as a wedge issue to split working class opinion and thus the potential Labour vote, and as a distraction issue to deflect attention from the almighty fuck-up they have made of everything) are thinking, but just in a toned down way that he knows he can get away with.

So given this, and given the tacit support, if not actual approval, that has come out of Number 10 - remember....he's just a 'salty' individual.....you can understand his frustration and yes, the support given by justice secretary Alex Chalk is a reflection of the government's position - can we assume the following.

Can we assume, for example, that the same applies to the Windrush generation, some of whom have complained at the treatment they have received in the UK? Should they also "Fuck off back to Jamaica"? Or indeed those people from the Asian community who have not always been well received by the communities they have - what was Suella Braverman's term.....ah yes, "invaded", and have spoken out about it? Should they "Fuck off back to India"? Is this general Conservative policy across the board for anyone not immediately descended from native British islanders, who might be unhappy with this issue or that, about the island they have chosen to live in?

Just so we fully comprehend what we will be voting for in the next election, you understand.

Because let's just reiterate what we are talking about here. This was not a comment from some newly elected Northern-wall MP, an obscure backbencher over exited and fresh from the Brexit cum Boris Johnson victory. This was a comment made by the Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. I'll repeat that. The Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party! This is a man from whom all other Conservative Party members are expected to take their lead. He sets the tone for the discussion, both within Westminster, and in the wider country, on any subject he comments upon. And this is his input. "Fuck off back to France". Do I really need to say more?

So moving on to think about that worst kind of Tory, the working class Conservative, let's just consider the thing.

It's an odd fact, but ever since the beginning, there has always been a rump of the working class that has been prepared to vote against their own best interest and place their X in the Conservative Party box. It's always been a bit of a conundrum why this should be and I'm not going to attempt to answer it here - but I do contend that this is the most undesirable type of Conservatism because it leans so far to the right - much more so than the centre ground Toryism of the middle classes.

This to me represents the brute Toryism of the football terraces, the Toryism that overlaps imperceptibly in a continuum with the far-right proper, the far-right of the BNP, the National Front and the UK Defence League. And the terrible truth is that this is gradually, imperceptibly and without banging of table-tops or spittle-spraying speeches, becoming the dominant force within the Conservative Party both outside and within Westminster itself. The shift of our ruling party to the right is reflected first of all in the policies of our Home Secretaries Patel and then Braverman, the clamping down on public gatherings and protest etc. Then on the use of othering, the demonisation of a group of people who cannot fight back, accompanied by a rolling back of the welfare safety net of the Attlee reforms. And finally manifested in the tacit acceptance and even approval of the verbal bullying tactics of the likes of Anderson, seething with unexpressed nationalism just below the surface.

And this rightwards shift is accompanied by another within the Labour Party, itself dragged into the center ground previously held by the Tories, and further right in itself than the post-war Conservative Party which was to all intents and purposes social democratic in policy formation if not in underlying ideology. That was a time when Conservatism meant supporting the newly formed welfare state and nationalised industries and overlaying them with a business orientated policy programme that rested upon a base of state supported national infrastructure. The kind of Conservatism that this country now desperately needs and will, I believe, never see again.

I suppose I'm at heart just a boring old social democrat, and as things stand I don't seem to have a political home in any of the mainstream parties. But I'd rather share a home with the occupants of the Bibby Stockholm than share one in the same party with the likes of Lee Anderson and ain't that a fact. I expect his response to me would be, "Well if you don't like it, fuck off back to the soft-south, or Cornwall, or wherever the fuck it is that you are from!"

Nice one Lee. The country is really better as a result of your input into the discussion, isn't it?

[peter]

Nobody in his right mind would not want Britain's immigration problems sorted out. Six dead people in the Channel yesterday is proof positive that it isn't.

Priti Patel stood on the podium after the successful Brexit negotiations and said, looking like a cat that had got the cream, that we had "Taken back control of our borders!"

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Tory policy of shutting down all of the legal routes of migration into the country has driven up the illegal traffic to unprecedented levels and the tragedies we are seeing in the coastal waters of our nation with depressing regularity are the result. Yet now the Tories are making a show of being the ones taking the tough stance in dealing with the very problem that they themselves have caused.

Of course we need to control immigration. There is a finite limit to what our services can provide to incoming migrants and given the swinging cuts to public services we have seen over the past fourteen years this limit is ever decreasing. But what ia absolutely needed is a fit for purpose system providing legal routes of access to asylum seekers and an efficient system of dealing quickly and effectively with applications for residency permits in a timely fashion. In addition, the nonsense of preventing those with ongoing residency applications from working while their claims are considered must be ended. We are desperate for labour in this country with the hospitality and care sectors screaming out for workers that, thanks to Brexit, cannot be found. The pool of potential labour denied to the workforce by preventing these individuals from working is doubly damaging, firstly via the loss of the service these people could provide and secondly because of the cost and problems encountered in keeping and housing them which are unnecessarily incurred thereby. The huge bulk of these individuals would be self supporting within a very short period of time given the opportunity to take up work; for them not to be able to do so is ridiculous.

And just flipping over to Brexit, while there is a general understanding that it has been a disaster for the country (even Sunak himself looked embarrassed and sounded unconvinced when he weakly tried to say that Brexit was a success in an interview the other day) there still remains a rump of dead from the neck up, or simply just exhibiting a mule like level of stubbornness, individuals who support it. The counters they use to explain what the figures are baldly showing are threefold. Either "Brexit never happened." Or it's "EU revenge for our leaving." Or "The remainers have deliberately messed it up".

In the first case, watch my mouth. We...are...out...of...the...EU. Brexit happened. We are no longer in it. What you are trying to say is that the landing zone that the very brexiteers you hung on every word of, have negotiated for you is shite. Well don't blame anyone else other than Johnson, Davis or that ***t Frost for that. They slubbered up the deal we are saddled with, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement under which we deal with our biggest and closest trading partners. And while we're about it, go back and look at some of those interviews given by prominent leavers during the referendum. Jacob Rees-Mogg telling us that food and clothing would be twenty percent cheaper. David Davis telling us that moving in and out of the country would be a simple formality. The Lord High King of Brexit himself, Nigel Farage saying that under no circumstances would we leave the single market incur all of the trading barriers that we now see.

And EU revenge? We're now a third country, just like the thousands other third countries that deal with the EU. Of course we have to cross the same barriers as the rest of them, endure the same hurdles to travel and trade as every other non EU country does. Yet this is presented as the EU exacting revenge for our leaving! No, numb-nuts.....this is Brexit. This is what it was always going to be like.

And remainers have deliberately fluffed it up? Sorry - at what point have remainers had any say in it? Was Johnson, the PM behind the withdrawal agreement, a remainer? Frost, who negotiated it? Sunak, the PM who took over from Johnson - he was a remainer was he? It isn't parliament that has declined to implement the post brexit border checks on imported foods from the EU. It isn't parliament that has decided that huge swathes of EU law can simply be torn up as was promised. It is the government that has decided these things, and for the reason that they were nonsensical in the first place. Clearly thousands of laws cannot be simply binned with nothing in their place to fall back on - it was ridiculous to think that they could. And food imports. As soon as the reality hit, that millions of people were dependent upon those food imports and that a huge increase in time, costs and administration would simply result in the European traders and hauliers diverting their activities elsewhere, there was no choice but to step back from implementation of withdrawal agreement (with all of the legal implications in respect of WTO rule breaches that this brings). So it isn't remainers who have screwed Brexit - it's the brain-dead fools who negotiated it, who decided upon the rotten landing ground we finished up on who have fucked it up. And that's the brexiteers themselves.

So spare us your ridiculous excuses and futile anger, you idiots who still refuse to acknowledge the truth when it is slapping you round the chops with a dead fish. The dream is over. Time to wake up and smell the coffee ,or should I say the shit. Because that's where you've landed us - and until we get some real truth telling by our political leaders about the mess we have fetched up in we can never - never - do anything about setting it to rights.

[peter]

There can be few things more reflective of how people are actually doing out in a country (as opposed to say, the usual economic indicators or even the stats of the charity groups such as the Rowntree Foundation) than in the figures of pawnbroker usage.

No surprise then that the Financial Times reports this morning that the figures of money out on loan from these short term lenders, the go-to places to secure a couple of hundred quid to see you through until payday, is up from 85 million this time last year to 115 million now. This increase is reflective not only of increasing hardship out in our communities as people struggle to meet the short term demands of day to day living, but also of the reducing availability of alternative options for short term, fast repayment credit of small sums elsewhere. The jump of 30 million pounds is probably somewhat deceptive in that as conditions for finding such loans tighten, and the risk of payment default increases, the credit given for a given value of deposit will shrink.

Concurrent with this increase in the use of pawnbrokers will of course be the increase in people turning to 'off grid' sources of credit such as loan sharks or, where possible other family members or friends etc.

And hardly necessary to say that the increase in this 'downmarket' type of borrowing is reflective of the people who are being hit hardest - who are always hit hardest - by increasing living costs..... those at the bottom end of the income scale with least ability to bear the burden.

Nothing changes except the colour of our landscape, which moves ever closer towards a sort of 1950's grey as the months and years go by.

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

But bully-boy Tory Lee Anderson is sick of the "woke cabal" lecturing us, or so tells us the Daily Express. No, actually - let's get that right. We're all sick of the woke cabal lecturing us, says Lee Anderson, somehow in his deluded and sluggish mind equating the rest of us, or even the rest of working class Tories as a group, with his own particular brute outlook on the world.

Or is that just a "salty" outlook? One "perfectly understandable" and to be supported by Number 10 and the government in the same manner as their support for his "Fuck off back to France" comment of last week?

Of which, as it happens, I've been thinking. Wouldn't that comment have been a criminal one, to have been made publicly like that? Was that not, in its own way, inciting racial hatred? Or what happens today if, in the course of my activities, I have an disagreement with a foreign person - they don't like something in the shop or whatever - and I say, "Well if you don't like it, fuck off back to whatever country you come from "..... Is that now okay? In the eyes of the police, who have to decide whether this is a racially motivated comment, which, I'd imagine, is not acceptable in this day and age? Can I now use the 'Lee Anderson defence' if I find myself in court?

Just wondering?

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

And the Times tells us that the introduction of 'cigarette cards' with a warning message is being considered (sort of like the football or car model cards of old, but with warnings of the effects of smoking on them), in the hope that it would stop (and I quote) 30,000 people smoking and save the NHS 1.6 billion pounds.

Well, leaving aside that this is nearly 54 thousand pounds per patient (possible I suppose, given the profiteering of the drug companies and the high salaries of consultants and executives in the NHS) it isn't really saving that much money anyway is it. Because firstly you have to take out the total tax that those 30,000 people have paid over the course of their smoking life (say around 100 million) and the fact that even if they die ten or fifteen years later at say 80 instead of 65, they will die of essentially the same diseases and will cost the NHS just the same amount of money at this later point (except having drawn 4.8 billion in pensions that would otherwise not have been paid)......

So let's please have this straight. Smokers are in effect performing a public service - and paying a very heavy cost for having done so to boot. So let's have none of this "Smokers cost the NHS money" nonsense if you don't mind. Certainly our families pay a heavy cost in loosing us earlier than they should. But this is where it begins and ends in terms of cost.

And the government knows it to boot and has no desire - none whatsoever - for us to stop. Just another area of bullshit that we have to put up with.

[peter]

One day last week, a TikTok flash mob of teenagers, egged on by pictures and posts on the social media site, conducted a mass raid on the Oxford Street branch of JB Sports, drawing huge crowds of onlookers and batton welding policemen in their dozens in an attempt to apprehend and control them.

Today we read of a ridiculous 'challenge' that youngsters in Southampton took part in over the weekend, to see who could be held in hospital the longest following excessive ingestion of paracetamol tablets. Again it was social media inspired, with dares and challenges being exchanged between youngsters over the sites they use, becoming more and more extreme the more exited they grew.

I have contended that with the exception of use for educational purposes, and only within the strictly controlled environment of the classroom, should youngsters under the age of 18 ever be allowed access to the Internet. In accordance with this, the mobile phones they use should not be other than those which are limited to call and texting functions only (and certainly no photographic or sending of images capabilities).

Can anyone reading the above stories argue that the internet is anything other than a minefield for youngsters - one in which the massive majority of them are ill equipped to deal with and representing a danger to which they should not be exposed until they have developed the adult faculties in order to be able to cope with it (and heaven knows, enough adults struggle with it as well!).

There would be additional benefits to such a proscription as well. Kids would socialise much better in face to face mixing rather than via screen interface, and far greater control over who and under what conditions this was occurring, could be maintained by parents. This might seem or sound wrong to our 'freedom' orientated (I was going to say obsessed, but realised that this had a wrong feel to it) world - but the control element of child rearing has always been present, and despite what youngsters might think does not end when a kid hits the age when they are old enough to own a mobile phone.

The internet and uninvigilated social media is such that this kind of thing will only get worse as time goes on (now once having started). Working in retail, I've experienced first hand the ridiculous Prime drink craze in which youngsters in a frenzy of excitement ran from shop to shop, often with their infantilized parents in tow, carting them around and getting equally excited and worked up, in search of the limited supply beverage. The marketeers have already cottoned on to the potential of this strategy, and are now employing 'influencer' YouTube celebrities to promote this kind of crap for all they are worth. This time it's 'Beast Bars' - overpriced bars of what is essentially cooking chocolate in a snazzy package, which the kids are snapping up, or getting their overindulgent parents to spring for, while in the store buying other items. This kind of mob obsession has taken the youngsters in its grip in this case, with calculating marketing minds behind it. The kind of feverish over excitement you witness here which includes the parents, is the same as that of the TikTok flash mobs and challenges, but in the latter without even the minimal guidance or restraining influence of parental involvement. How many lives will be ruined, or God forbid even lost (and numbers have been already as we witness with the terrible stories of youngster suicides following social media bullying or even egging on), before what I say is understood by the society at large.

But it is what it is.

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

I've been vocal in my criticism of Kier Stamer, and I've slammed the Labour leader both for what has been done to former leader Jeremy Corbyn and Stamer's drawing of the Party ever closer to the Tories, in terms of policies and outlook.

So it was with the guilty foot-shuffling of a carpeted schoolboy that I listened to the angry haranguing from a young lady poster, who dished out in plain and indisputable terms, just why I was wrong.

Stop harking back about what was done to the last leader, she said, it does no good - it's done, in the past. And stop with this saying that there is no difference between Labour and the Tories - you've seen what the Tories have done, not what Labour will do. You have no idea what a Stamer government will do or not do! There hasn't been a Stamer government!

And in fairness the girl had it right. Guilty as charged.

And despite there being little difference between the Tories as they stand and what Stamer has to date proposed, there are differences. Stamer, as Zack Goldsmith pointed out on this week's edition of Hard Talk, has stuck with the net zero and environmental policies needed to adress our current global problems in this area, in a way not even approached by Sunak. Granted, he's wavered a bit following the Ulez result in Uxbridge, but not in any sense to the degree that Sunak has backed up on his commitments. And I absolutely conceed that a Stamer government would in all cases be preferable to a Sunak (or other right wing Tory demagogue) government. At least there would be a chance of him rediscovering his radical roots in the face of holding real political power. Sunak and his lot are simply what they are. They lie and conceal their real intentions from the public as a necessary part of what they do. Aneurin Bevan said as much back in 1944 and it remains absolutely true today. Lying to those who they would have vote for them, concealing their true intentions which are centered around personal advancement, be it financially or in terms of political power, is a central necessity of their presentation. It can be no other. Stamer is doing his share of lying as well, but at least it might be in support of an actual policy agenda that has the benefit of the country as its intent. Make no mistake he's further to the right than the Cameron government were, truly sitting in what was Conservative territory of old - but he's not Sunak and he's not Braverman. And as such, he must be preferable.

I'll never forgive him for his part in The Big Lie, for his expulsion and exclusion of the left from the Party - but I conceed that his election would be a significantly preferable thing to another Tory government.

[peter]

Y'see, I was thinking about that Tory lying thing - about how Bevan said (back in the 1940's) that it was a central and essential strategy of the Conservatives.

Let's just unpack this a bit.

Back before the Tories came into politics, you had the Whig Party who represented essentially the interests of the aristocracy in parliament and that was that. There was no other party and so no one else other than the aristocracy had any representation.

Then, with the industrial revolution and whatnot, you had the development of a separate monied class, a business class, and they naturally enough, wanted their voices to be heard as well, and thus the Tory Party was born.

And so it went on, very nicely, until the working people of the country started to realise that they too had an interest in how the country was governed and then the Labour Party was born and you had three parties. One representative of the aristocracy - the Whigs or Liberals as they became (who by now incidentally were in decline as the relative wealth of the aristocracy went into decline as well). One representing the business class, the bosses if you like - the Tory Party. One representing the working people, born of the trade unions - the Labour Party. Three separate classes or groups of society, each with their own political party.

As the Whigs or Liberals went into decline, that left two parties vying for power, one representing the employers and one the employees. (The aristocracy, as they shifted into business from land, and as they married into business wealth, shifted toward the Tories anyway and over time the Liberals reinvented themselves as the balancing party of the centre (albeit much diminished) - no longer true, since they are now the most leftwards of the three main political parties in the UK. )

Now simple counting tells you that the employees of the country outnumber the employers to a huge degree; by factors of tens or hundreds, so in a straightforward vote where employees or workers vote for their party, and employers or bosses vote for theirs, it's a no contest. So the only way that the party of the bosses, the business party, can stand any hope of winning - ever - is to convince the working people that it is they and not the Labour Party, that better represents their interests.

But it isn't true, and it never has been. The Tories or Conservative Party as it became, was formed with the specific remit of serving the interests of the business community and nothing has changed. The clue's in the name. Conservative. Conservatism. It means to keep things as they are. They do not and cannot represent the interests of the bulk of the people, the working masses of the country, and never will be able to. And this is thus, the lie that they must perforce propogate. This is the lie central to their political survival that they must maintain at all costs. And hence did Aneurin Bevan call it out back then, and I call it out today, because if the mass of people ever see through it, see that they do not, cannot and will not represent their interests, then they are finished.

Edit; I should add, since this is essentially a historical post, that there was a period of time, brief though it was, following the second world war, when the tories did Rory a while become a 'one nation party' as they called it. But this was essentially out of necessity. They saw the way the wind was blowing following the sacrifice that had been asked of the people during the previous three decades, and new that unless something was given back in return, then there was a real risk of a popular shift away from the centre that would see them out of power for good. The country could even go the whole hog and go communist. So the increase in living standards and wages, the creation of the welfare state, was allowed by the ruling establishment, while being constructed by the Labour Party in power. It was in many Conservative minds, never intended to be long-term and they knew that by playing the long game, over time they could reel it all back in. This they have successfully been doing essentially since Thatcher took up the reins. I'm not saying that there were never Tories who actually believed in the one nation approach - just that they were in a minority and never really influenced the central ideologies of Conservatism, such as they are (ie the getting and holding of wealth by the strongest and to the devil with the rest of us).

[peter]

The other day I was in the churchyard of a small Cornish church, quite beautiful in its peaceful and overgrown way, and my eyes alighted upon the grave of a certain Charles Cock who, his gravestone informed us, had died in 1868.

Mr Cock was evidently a man of measurable wealth in the poor levels of the day - assumable from the relatively high quality of his gravestone, and (consumed as I had been by the political events of the day as Mrs P and I drove out from home) what, I wondered, were the things that he would have been exercised about, as he scanned his morning papers or learned of the news over the course of his day?

Because what to us is history would of course to him have been politics - news. He'd have agreed with this thing, been enraged by that, just as I was on my journey down to his resting place. (Incidentally, my wife and I were driving down the coast, a leisurely run to go food shopping in a favourite store some miles from where we live. We'd stopped in the churchyard because I knew they often sold a small selection of second hand books in the church vestibule and was having a quick look see at the titles.)

I realised that I knew absolutely nothing concrete about the world Mr Cock would have woken up to (or not as the case may be) in 1868. What were the issues of the day? What might he have cared about? He was after all, not exactly in the heart of the metropolis, the humming centre of affairs. His was an essentially rural existence with some industry in the form of mining and mining services going on around him. The area was divided between two wealthy families, the Bassett's and the Godolphin's, land and mine owners who maintained a not always easy relationship with each other as they inevitably interacted at the borders of their estates. (As an example, if a man from one's land wanted to marry a woman the other's, permission had to be sought from both owners. They would come to an agreement that either a balancing swap of movement in the opposite direction would be expected, or that the progeny of the union would go to work for the 'loosing' land owner in terms of who the woman {always the woman} moved away from. )

But back to 1868.

What was going on? Was Napoleon still doing his thing? No - surely not.....He'd been a bit earlier hadn't he? No - I genuinely knew nothing of that fateful year for Charles Cock, of what were the issues of the day.

First, to fix some markers, it turns out that the Battle of Trafalgar had been fought back in 1805 (21 October to be precise).....1812 had been the defeat of Napoleon in some battle by the Russians (should have guessed this - Tchaikovsky wrote the music, didn't he?)......and the Battle of Waterloo had been fought in 1814 or something (quick check; 18 June 1815).

So all of the big stuff seems to have happened earlier in the century and 1868 seems to be a pretty quiet period in British history (or politics and current events).....except that it wasn't.

Because Charles Cock would have seen 3 Prime Ministers over the course of that year, he'd have witnessd and discussed (or his contemporaries would have) the final end to public executions and the instigation of hanging within prisons. (What would he have thought of that; the last woman had been publicly executed in April and the last man in May.) He'd also have seen penal transportation to Australia end - my, the Home Secretary must have been busy that year - and discussed the British Expedition to Abyssinia led by Robert Napier to free British British officials and missionaries imprisoned in Ethiopia. (No doubt there would have been much tub-thumping over that one.)

Halfway through the year he'd have read of a strange thing up in Manchester: workers gathering into something they called a 'trade union', a 'congress' of which had, for the first (and last as far as he knew) time been gathered in that city. What was that all about? Then there had been a bloody awful train disaster in Abergele, with 32 killed and a fireman. A meat market had been opened at Smithfield in London (wonder if our beef will find its way up there?) and some new chemical or something, called helium had been isolated. A new book with all of the cricket scores from every bloody match the length and breath of the country had been published - Whittakers Almanac they call it - as if people didn't have more important stuff to think about that a load of toffs prancing about in white costumes and throwing balls around!

What else have we got in this year that never quite makes it into the history books but in which Charles would have found much to think on? In November (if he was still extant) he'd have seen the Liberal Party win the general election and in December (why the delay?) Gladstone come to power. Something called traffic lights had been erected for the first time in Parliament Square and we had snapped up some land in Busutoland which had become a protectorate. (This old empire thing goes from strength to strength. Victoria must be like the cat that got the cream!) Some girl called Eliza Lynn Linton has written an article entitled 'The Girl of the Period' in the Saturday Review. In it she suggests that women are, or seem to be, going off on the wrong track. Becoming too engaged in looking good and having a good time, Linton thinks that they should rather dress with modesty and decorum, be subservient and a capable and modest helpmate to her husband. This, I must say, is right thinking. I must recommend this article to Mrs P/C for her valuable instruction forthwith. For my part I'll settle down with the newly published installment of TheMoonstone. This Wilkie Collins has got something about him. Of course he'll never stand the test of time; you might as well write about a boy wizard with a stick in his hand fighting a demon, for all the recognition it'll get you. No - Gibbon's Decline and Fall will be the staple reading matter of choice of the youth of this great nation for many a year to come. Not that we need fear any decline of course. No, our star is on the way up and nothing is going to change that! (Unless of course the Tories get back in: then we might be in trouble!)

[peter]

On the face of it, Kier Stamer should have a clear run into Downing Street to head the next government of our country, which will convene sometime between now and January 2025.

Given the Tories' absolute meltdown in terms of running the country, the economic skip-fire they are presiding over, the total collapse of the Brexit project, the chaos that pertains irrespective of whatever service area you are looking at, it really should be a no-brainer. The core vote within the Tory heartland should be falling away in droves, and straight into the hands of a slick and stylishly presented Labour leader who is right of most Tory leaders since the second world war, given an almost free pass in the media and, above all things, white. The business of Lee Anderson with his "Fuck off back to France" antics will have repelled them and Stamer will be looking more like the man they want by the day.

But there is a serious problem with this.

The Tories have identified two wedge issues with which to attack the opposition vote, namely the net zero undertaking and the ongoing issues with immigration and the small boats, and they are using them to absolutely devastating effect to rebalance the odds against them.

Even with the worst record on just about everything of any government in well, living memory (and I'm pretty old), using these issues, they could still work the oracle and pip it back into Number 10.

And that's why it beggars belief to me that the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are not preparing for this as we speak.

In my constituency, which is currently Conservative held, but with a small majority and the Lib-Dems close on their heels, why are the latter not already out campaigning for the election that they know will shortly be upon them? They should be out there making their case already, putting their own face into the public mind and making the other two parties have to work to shift it. Every house in the constituency should have received a visit and a couple of policy leaflets before the next election is even called. But instead there is nothing. Silence.

And the Labour Party.

Kier Stamer has made an absolute thing of denouncing the idea of any kind of post-electoral agreement with anyone in order to gain a hold on power. We all know it's bollocks - that like every other political leader we've had in the last three quarters of a century, he'll jump into bed with whoever offers him a hand proffering the keys to Downing Street.......so why not acknowledge it. Celebrate it. Make this the 'ABC' election - Anything But Conservative. Make unseating the current incumbents the number one priority of this election at any price, and make the public understand this. Seal the deal with the Lib-Dems in advance with a pre-election agreement not to contest seats like mine, where one or the other opposition parties is essentially a no hoper candidate, not to oppose each other in those seats, and thereby consolidate the anti-Conservative vote. This policy would achieve the much desired end of effectively barring the Conservatives from power in the next election. It must be explained in simple terms to the public, that the country can simply not stand another term of Conservative office, and that their removal must be the priority focus, eclipsing all others, at the next election. Once this has been achieved, the business of how the country is to move forward, how the multiple problems we face are to be adressed, can be begun. Like emergency treatment on a car accident victim, the immediate and life threatening problem must be dealt with first at which point the rest can be adressed. Remove the Tories, then fix the problems. The public are capable of responding to such single issue messages, indeed they quite like them. The last election was found the slogan of Get Brexit Done. Let this one be fought on the ABC one - Anything But Conservative!

And carefully done, those wedge issues are not so difficult to counter. On net zero: Anyone who thinks about it realises that something must be done to clean up our act in terms of environmental care and carbon emissions, but it must be absolutely understood that it cannot be the ordinary people of this country who are left to shoulder the burden of dealing with it, but that any steps taken to adress the climate issue must be taken by all. There cannot be a select group of individuals, based on wealth or whatever criteria, who get to avoid the consequences of the changes that must be made. And those changes must be proportionate and fairly introduced to minimise impact.

On immigration: The immigration problems of this country are long-standing and the Tories have had fourteen years in which they have done nothing to address them which has not made the problems worse. Simply look at the figures. The small boats crisis is one entirely of their own making by virtue of their having closed down all of the normal routes via which asylum and immigration claims may be made. So consumed by the very measures that have created this situation has our government been, that they have had no time to develop an effective and fit for purpose immigration policy, be it points based or other, that would have mitigated the effects of what we are now experiencing.

Come on - how hard can it be? An A Level student with half a grasp of the English language could cobble up a response to these wedge issues!

[peter]

Corruption and grift is the order of the day almost wherever you look these days.

I'm absolutely not surprised to read in this morning's Financial Times, that Jonathan Van Tam, Deputy Chief Medical Officer during the Covid period, has been awarded a plum job by Moderna, one of the very companies whose products he was pushing to millions of us on a daily basis in those bleak times. The FT muses on the so called 'revolving door' in which government ministers have a habit of going pretty much straight into the industries whose brief they were covering while in office, saying that the potential for 'conflict of interest' is clearly there, but not choosing to go any further than this.

Van Tam was always presented to us as the 'Mr Reliable' of the vaccination drive. The scientist whose trustworthy objectivity we could bank on when making our decisions whether this stuff we were being encouraged to shove into our arms was safe, and now it turns out that, while we can't say he had any greasy fingers in the pie at the time, his eye could well have been on the long game even back then.

How do we see this appointment then? A thank you for services rendered? A quid pro quo of the you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours (a bit later on) kind. Van Tam certainly didn't waste any time leaving his governmental post - I remember thinking that at the time, but thought perhaps that he was beginning to realise that he'd actually been pushing out bad advice as a government influencer, the nudger-in-cheif as it were, as the evidence for adverse vaccination reactions started to mount. I still believe that the mass use of essentially untested and experimental gene technologies on the world population will come, in future times, to be seen as one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed. The side effects of what they have done will be decades in the working out, will be seen statistically over the years in such things as excess death figures and incidence of various kinds of pathologies etc. They will show only in the consideration of people in their millions, but show they will. Van Tam will take his place in history as a part of this.

Or we could take the view of the appointment as no doubt the man would himself: an appropriate position for one with expertise such as himself, with knowledge of public health issues and expertise in the area of policy in regards of vaccination programme planning. But the fact that he no doubt holds information that could be of use to his new employers (even if it is only in terms of contacts of who to speak to when influence of government planning and policy is desired) goes without saying. This is recognised in so far as it has been made public that he will do no lobbying for the company until at least March 2024......all of six months away. That he will have insider knowledge of how decisions are made and how best to apply pressure to influence those decisions is a no-brainer. That a proportion of that knowledge would be classified is also likely, and will he compromise himself by taking up this position.....well, the man he was presented as being during the pandemic would not do so (but then, he probably wouldn't have thrown in the towel and gone off to work for Moderna either).

But the corruption thing is it seems, almost endemic. You had all of those government ministers and parliamentarians, Matt Hancock, Priti Patel, Baroness Moyne and the like, sending money in wheelbarrows to their mates, Zahawi forgetting to pay his taxes, Robert Jenrick and his dodgy connections to property tycoon Richard Desmond, and where would one even start with Boris Johnson? And ex Labour leader Tony Blair with his Tony Blair Institute for Global Cange - what's that all about? Millions of pounds of donations and payments, possibly for consultation work, possibly for other things....who can say? Time was when an ex Prime Minister saw it as de rigeur to return to the back benches to continue with their service to the public who had elected them. Not now. Since Blair it has been a case of fly the coop as quickly as possible and get out there raking in the bunce. Not exactly corruption, but not exactly kosher either. And maybe the people don't want to live in a world built to the specs of unelected private individuals who exercise massive power and influence without any accountability to balance against it? And make no mistake, the Blair Institute is exerting power and influence. It provides consultancy services to governments of every stamp (and some of them pretty nasty) all over the world. Fingers in pies. Fingers in pies. The recent Tony Blair Institute soiree in London was attended by celebrities and politicians of note from this and other countries, Stamer was their, joining himself to Blair by the hip and one commentator was saying that it was like every political party's dream conference would be if they had unlimited money for presentation, unbounded possibility for glitz and glamour. Even President Macron of France sent in a video message (and you won't see that at the Labour conference). And Blair himself maintains a Chequers style residence in the country and a swish London town house in the most exclusive area. And he doesn't even draw a salary. Just saying.

But this is how it works these days. Maybe it always did, but just that our noses were not so badly rubbed into it? Never mind. I'm off to work out whether I'll be able to afford to put any heating on when winter comes. Like the rest of the clowns, I'm under no illusion about my importance in the minds of these movers and shakers. I'm a unit, a commodity, one of the great unwashed. I matter nothing, unless it be as an object to be manipulated and cajoled, nudged and bullied, until I do what I'm meant to when I'm meant to.

I'm not sure how long this can go on, but as people struggle ever harder to maintain their standard of living against a backdrop of economic decline and rising poverty, a breaking point will certainly come. The government of the day will have to exert ever tightening control of the population to maintain public order against an increasingly obvious wealth disparity, and with evidence of grift and backhanders, of friends with benefits, of undeclared conflicts of interests and mutual back-scratching being laid before people on a daily basis, this is going to get increasingly difficult.

There isn't any point in lamenting the loss of rectitude and responsibility in public service - it is what it is. But sooner or later the worm will turn, and when it does the results are likely to be frightening.

[peter]

Today's Sunday Times has an interesting front page article headlined, Charles 'to be caretakermonarch' for William .

The article explains that King Charles is resigned to accepting his role as essentially a bridge between the old Queen, and a new, vibrant younger monarch who will act as 'change-maker to a degree that is simply not possible for him. He feels, the article explains, that the situation in the UK has been (and indeed still is) too febrile, too unsettled as a result of Brexit and he pandemic and its consequences, for him to be anything other than a steadying influence of continuity and stability. It must thus fall to William, who will succeed to the throne at a much earlier age than his father, to spearhead the changes that the monarchy must make, if it is to remain relevant in a fast changing and modern era.

This article, which presumably comes out with backing from the Palace itself, is interesting insofar as it must make for saddening reading for the King, who was young himself once, and equally full of ideas for change as no doubt his son is today. Alas for him his short reign falls at a difficult time for the country (I don't believe people have much idea how difficult it is going to be yet) and it neither time nor circumstances allow for him to really be anything other than that which the article implies he acknowledges.

It's a bitter pill for any man to swallow, to see his dreams turn to ashes on the back of hard circumstance, but there it is. Charles is not the first who will have had to swallow his disappointment in this way, nor will he be the last. But more revealing in some way is the clue it gives on how the monarchy thinks, on how it sees itself in relation to the country, the people, it presides over.

I suppose to a degree, the thinking and outlook of the monarch does in some way influence the people - almost by 'trickle down' effect (aside: would that some of their vast wealth would trickle down alongside it) - and that it could be said that a country with a young and vibrant monarchy will in itself feel more young and vibrant, more open to change and new ideas, but this bt the very nature of our constitutional monarchy must be limited in scope.

It is most assuredly not the place of the monarchy in this country to effect change in this country (though in the current circumstances and given the truly hopeless nature of the governance we have experienced of late, one might wish it was). Our monarchy is purely titular in nature - entirely constitutional and in no way supposed to do other than observe and perhaps occasionally advise, and this was a thing well understood by the late Queen, if perhaps less so by her son. So one must assume that when King Charles speaks of William being the change-maker, it is in respect of the role in which monarchy plays, how this is presented, within our society, rather than to the society itself. To be thinking otherwise would be to misunderstand the agreement between people and monarch, and we in the country have enough problems of this nature, what with our polity and leadership having apparently misunderstood the purpose for which they were elected and the responsibilities of service and sacrifice incumbent upon the roles they perform.

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

I'm not a football fan, but it would be churlish not to wish the England women's national football team good luck in their match against Spain this morning. So in the spirit of the day, I give you a resounding,

"GO THE GIRLS!"

-------0-------
There is talk, following the news that convicted child killer nurse Lucy Letby will not appear in court to hear her sentence being delivered, of making such appearance mandatory and giving the officers in charge of convicted felons powers to enforce their appearance.

This suggestion was first raised a few months ago following the conviction of the killer of Olivia Pratt-Korbel, when the gang member who had shot the 9 year old during a failed attempt to kill a rival drug dealer, had similarly refused to attend the sentencing hearing.

I understand the desire to see these people standing in the dock, receiving their dues, but am unclear how it could be reasonably achieved.

Currently, judges have no power to enforce attendance upon a convicted felon if they choose not to appear. It doesn't materially affect the outcome and so is of no real significance other than for public gratification. There are certainly circumstances in which a convicted individual cannot be expected to take the stand to hear their sentencing, nor which it would be desirable for them to do so. If they are a gibbering lunatic or sick to the point of recumbency, it would be neither fair nor reasonable for them to do so. But the problem is that the refusal to appear has a sort of defiance about it, a refusal to accept the supremity of the court, a contempt which both the public and the state find difficult to swallow. But hate it as they might, it's not something that is within their power, the power of the Law, to control. Choose what penalty is dished out, even to the point of execution, contempt for the court is not within the purview of the court to decide. Certainly it can punish it, it can demand that it is hidden, but it cannot contrit. It remains, and absent totally unreasonable methods of coercion or mind control, will remain so, outside of the contol of the individual sitting in judgement. The courts do not like this to be displayed, even to the slightest degree, and a defendant exhibiting disrespect of the court will rapidly be 'taken down' so that their defiance is not witnessed to any greater degree than it already has been. The court sees such displays as undermining of its authority, its rightfully held position of respect and being deferred to, and up with it, it will not put!

But short of gagging and hancuffing, of carrying a recumbent individual in on a stretcher, how do you coerce them into appearing if they choose not to?

Difficult.

[peter]

Interesting.

Today's press have taken up the story of convicted killer Lucy Letby's being forced to attend her sentencing hearing which takes place later today.

A government spokesperson has said that she can be compelled to do so, but this would not appear to be the position of the judge hearing the case who has said that he has no power to order her to be brought to the court against her will. Confusingly, the government mouthpiece, having said that she could be compelled to attend, then went on to say that if she continued to refuse, it would spur the government on to draw up legislation to give new powers to judges to command the appearance.

The article in the Telegraph does go on to say that guards are reticent to go down this route because of the risk of physical confrontation overstepping the mark and leaving them open to legal reprisals themselves. I absolutely see their point. As the deaths of numbers of individuals who were attempting to be restrained or physically coerced into doing something by enforcement officers illustrate, it is no easy thing to force someone to do something that they have set there mind against doing. In the case of a recumbent individual, at the least it would require them to be carried, Just-Stop-Oil road-protester like, into the court, and then physically held up in the dock. Hardly very dignified and with a small woman like Letby in particular, putting the State at risk of appearing to be the callous bully in the whole affair. I remember seeing once a grainy black and white picture of a pretty young girl on a cobbled street in Jersey, standing looking frightened in front of a bespectacled hard looking man sitting at a desk. She was surrounded by a hostile crowd watching the proceedings, some pointing at her and clearly expressing their venom. You immediately felt great sympathy for her and when the blurb told you she was a nazi colluder and informer it didn't change your natural empathy for someone clearly under the hammer. How much worse could this be if under the full spotlight of the public gaze, an individual is dragged to the dock and physically held, by the jaw and face, toward the dock. What will we do if they have the temerity to close their eyes? Hold them open with those wire things? Bits of sticking tape to their eyebrows?

And what about if they cause a disturbance? Start shouting and refuse to stop? Bind and gag them? In front of the court? Or just order them to be quiet or face a higher sentence - on top of the full life one they are getting already? Or just send them back to the cell - which is where they were wanting to remain in the first place?

One former judge, speaking on GB News (and that choice of station tells you a lot in itself) said that a video link with sound should be set up in the holding cell, via which the court proceedings could be relayed. This, he said, should include the sentencing and the families of the victims statements, thus, he said, denying the guilty the option of avoiding looking the results of their actions in the eye. The Telegraph report said that this refusal of defendants to attend sentencing was becoming increasingly prevalent as prisoners demonstrated increased levels of defiance against the process that had seen them where they were. Well that's up to them. From my perspective, I wonder what it says about us, our society, that we are having this conversation.

In my opinion (for what it's worth) once a defendant is found guilty, their part in the proceeding is over. The state (or Law, to be exact) then decides what is to be administered in the form of punishment, a process in which they have no say, and it matters not a thing whether they elect to attend or not. But I wonder at this shift to the idea that it is appropriate to force their attendance. Is it not reflective of a harder, more cruel and vindictive society? It isn't enough, it seems, to find someone guilty, to imprison them without hope of release - we have to increase the punishment by removal of their right to not partake in the process. We, it seems, must exercise total control over them, and must see, for no other reason than prurience and public gratification, this force being applied. For what other purpose is served by this? Will this really have an increase deterrence effect in the mind of the individual as they actually commit the crimes for which they will be arraigned? I somehow doubt this, and neither do I believe that those calling for this believe it either. And I don't want my state, my government to be either the source, or indeed to simply be the respondent to, if this is the case (and I believe it to be the former) this increasing level of prurient vindictiveness.

In fact, I believe that it is the influence of the right, the Priti Patel's, the Suella Braverman's, the Farage's and the Lee Anderson's that are having this effect. As the polity are moving further to the right, the public are following. And where does it end? Forcing a convicted felon to attend their sentencing today, filming the whole thing for public gratification tomorrow. Increasing the hardness of the state, of government, in the way in which it sees, it treats, the people......hardening of the people to cruelty themselves. Increasing poverty, increasing indifference to the suffering of others. A meaner society led by a meaner polity. The acceptable expression of a view that "the small boats should simply not be allowed to land even though lives would be lost" (I kid you not - a woman said this on a radio phone-in the other day)........this is all part of the same phenomenon. We are shifting to the right, in terms of our world view, our politics, our decreasing empathy toward the difficulties and sufferings of others. It's more authoritarian, harder and more indifferent. A coarsening and brutalising of our society and I don't like it.

[peter]

Buried away deep in the Sky News website was an article, the content of which suprised me, not least because it seemed very significant, but had not made its way onto any broadcast media outlet, Sky or otherwise.

The article outlined (without giving any specific details) concerns that were circulating amongst Western administrations about the almost negligible advances that had been made by Ukrainian forces, despite having been engaged in a concerted offensive with the specific intention of clawing back territory from the Russia occupiers and pushing them back.

Previous offensives, which are very costly both in terms of men and equipment (the latter of which equates to Western dollars in frightening quantities) had, the article told us, seen ground recaptured in huge areas, running into the thousands of square kilometres. Not so this time. Despite the huge push on the part of the Ukrainians, the Russian forces remained bedded in, stubbornly holding on to the territory they occupied and refusing to draw back.

The Russians, we were told, had learned from previous errors, and had used the time which they had had wisely. They have built a three tier defensive line (the article did give the name, but I forget it) along their front, solid and near unreachable, in a well recognised form from the military college play-book. And in consequence, the Ukrainian offensive, savage though it has been, has broken upon this barrier like waves upon a breakwater. The minds on the Western side who spend their days considering such matters had, the article said, been forced to consider the possibility of a war that had ground down to a stalemate, that would go on indefinitely, sucking in money like a bottomless pit of quicksand but never achieving any solid result. This was not the idea that they had formed of how Western involvement in the conflict would go, and suddenly the prospect of having to enter into a negotiated settlement in which Ukraine would have to, by necessity, concede some territory, became one that they would have to consider.

Now this seemed to me a pretty stunning bit of news, highly significant and very important, but there it was buried away in a backwater of the Sky news site, a whisper rather than a shout, and neither picked up or so much as referred to in our main daily bulletins.

Now let's assume that there is something of fact in it, and consider where we are.

It was almost a given that Western politicians would expect to see some bang for their buck, and the moment they saw money draining away with no tangible results, they would start to question the validity of the exercise. The generals of Nato on the other hand, will be adamant that the pressure must be kept on, that Ukraine must be supplied in whatever way necessary, in order to secure victory in this conflict. (Perhaps this is behind the recent Biden announcement that fighter jets will be supplied to Ukraine - a bid to break the stalemate, though it would be hard to see such planes being operationally ready any time soon.) For Nato to see their advance to the very border of Russia checked, the 'defensive' ring of steel (as it were - really of missiles pointed bang at the heart of Russia from every Nato country that can be brought into the alliance) broken by a Russian advance into new territory, does not play into the policy they have followed essentially since the fall of the Soviet Union. They are not easily going to swallow this now. There are, we can be sure, some very difficult meetings going on behind closed doors in Western corridors of power on both sides of the Atlantic. Which side will win, gererals or politicians, will slowly become apparent over the coming months, but it might well be that suddenly the promises of our leaders to "stick with Ukraine until victory is achieved" will start to look a bit hollow.

How to manage this?

Well, the media are passed masters at moving on. And the public has a notoriously short attention span. Long before the blue and yellow flags have rotted away, forgotten and unthought about by a public, bored with loving Ukraine and all things Ukrainian (never mind the fact that they had barely even heard of the country before the conflict began and the media whipped them up into a fervour), Ukraine will for them, have ceased to exist. No problem there then. What is required is a diversion.

Enter Niger. Another pantomime villain found in the arse-end of nowhere who at least, unlike Russia, doesn't have the fifth largest army in the world to contend with. And this guy has the temerity to tell the French that they can go to hell and that the people of Niger are not to be bossed around by some Western power only interested in grasping hold of the uranium deposits upon which their nuclear arsenal is dependent. This guy should be about perfect to take up the news schedule while we work out where we are with Ukraine. At least he's beatable: with only a tiny army at his disposal - one of the world's smallest - he should be swattable away in the way that we prefer, if it becomes necessary.

Smoke and mirrors my friends. In the inimitable words of the great Governor of Texas (of Best Little Whorehouse fame) "Oohh, I like to dance a little sidestep!" Look over here, now over there, now back here! Misdirection baby! That's my business!

I don't know - maybe I'm all wrong about this, time will tell, but for sure when news stories of this significance are sneaked out in this manner you can be sure that something is afoot.

[peter]

Bit of a naff day news wise today. I'll do a quick scan of the headlines seeing what comes out of that, but don't expect miracles. I'll try my best to make a silk purse out of a sows ear, but hey - even my inventive powers have their limits.

Thing is, it's the summer recess in parliament when all of the MPs are in their constituencies and while government is obviously still going on, it tends to be more low key than usual. One thing that has been getting to me a little of late (and I do see mentioned this morning) is the fuss that everyone has been making about the downgrading of A level grades this year - a move toward combating the grade inflation that has been occurring which ultimately, if left to run its course, erodes the value of the grading system altogether as a means of separating out students on the basis of their relative academic abilities in any given subject.

Why does grade inflation occur? Good question, and I'm not sure I really know the answer. Probably a combination of easier examination questions, lower criteria being applied for marking and awarding of points, and possibly simple fact that kids are being better educated in schools, though I would hesitate to believe that this is in any way true. My experience of the educational standards of our school leavers via work is that they are pretty dismally educated in comparison with the cohorts of yesteryear, which makes the grade inflation all the more puzzling. But there it is - it happens and it's not a helpful thing. If left unchecked, the grading system becomes useless for separating kids out in respect of winning much coveted places in universities, where it is desirable that the best minds are put to the most suitable courses from them at the best universities. Only in this way are the academic disciplines upon which human advancement depends be optimised, by having access to the best quality material (as it were) to drive forward their progress. The streaming of kids by academic ability is a fundamental feature of this, and a functional grading system in the examination process is key to the process.

The irrationality with which the news of a grade pull-back has been met however, astounds me. Screams that thousands of kids will be denied the places they deserve, chaos in the clearing system, and all manner of doomsday scenarios have been posited. And all nonsense. Early on in my academic career (such as it was) it was explained (by our A level Biology teacher iirc) that in exam grading, it was taken as a given that any years cohort would be pretty much equal to the previous years in academic ability (taken as a whole). It was unlikely that any huge difference between year cohorts would pertain, and this was likely to be far more of a fixed standard (as it were) than the difficulty of any different examination drawn up for a given year. (ie, very difficult to ensure that each subject examination for a given year was exactly the same in terms of difficulty as the last - far more likely that the cohorts taking them would be of equal overall standard.) Thus, in the allotting of grades, the best way to ensure parity across the years was to simply take the top mark achieved in any year, and the bottom, and divide the intervening range of marks into five bands of equal width, with A being the highest and E the lowest. Each paper would then fall into a particular grade category according to its mark, and if a marker felt that any particular candidates paper was deserving of adjustment, he could shift the grade up or down, subject to the approval of another examiner, once the paper was returned with its grade.

So okay, it may be that kids that last year who would have gotten an A will be this year given a B, but it won't make the slightest difference to the university that they attend, or indeed any subsequent career that they pursue. Because in the first instance, exactly the same universities will have exactly the same number of places to fill on the same courses. The grades of the students selected will make not the slightest difference. What last year might have needed an AAB set of grades, will this year be allocated to a BBC set. And the same student that last year would have had that first set, will this year have the latter. Certainly if universities have not adjusted their offers to take into account the deflation of grades that is proposed for the year, then the clearing system will be harder pressed than normal - but it will function, and the same students will find their same places in the universities of their choice in all but the most unfortunate of cases. Because those places are still there, and they still have to be filled.

In terms of the cohort members who do not go on to universities, their grades will place them in the main against competitors from the same year cohort when applying for jobs soit won'tmakeanydifference. And at this level, it will not be the difference between a D grade and an E at A Level that secures them the job or otherwise anyway, so again it's academic (sorry about that ).

So when I read of the squeals of anguish about the proposed grade deflation I'm not moved in the slightest. It's necessary to get the system back from a point where any substandard little oik who can barely multiply two and two together can get an A grade in physics to one which really reflects a given student's abilities, and this is the only way to do it.

Much, as they say, ado about nothing!

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

One more thing that I see today.

The Express leads with a headline telling us that "Landmark Deal Proves that Brexit 'Voices of Doom' are Wrong". Kemi Badenock is apparently telling us that "global Britain is thriving" as she finalises a trade pact with India.

In fact it isn't quite that simple. Today's FT refers to the work that Badenoch is doing, but is slightly less exited about her progress. There are apparently "big barriers" that are yet to be overcome before Sunak and Modi can meet in Dheli next month to seal the deal, and the Trade Secretary is by accounts stepping up the pace of negotiations in order to achieve this.

Interestingly the same paper refers to pressure that the Chancellor is coming under to cut taxes - pressure from exactly the same right wing backbenchers that were pushing for Brexit all those years ago, and effectively bounced the country (quite deliberately) into the hard Brexit we finished up with, rather than the softer version that Theresa May had envisaged and that indeed, Leave campaigners had said virtually to a man, that we would be having. It makes for salutary viewing to watch all those individuals opining that only a fool would ever see us leaving the single market and breaking trading ties with our nearest neighbour, before behind the scenes organising that very scenario to come about.

It makes one view the statements of our Trade and Industry secretary in India with a degree of scepticism, and I'm thinking that only a mug would believe that anything we can do with India would come even close to what we have lost in our hard breaking with the European Union. But hey- they managed to convince us that black was white once before so why wouldn't they try the same thing again.

Jacob Rees-Mogg has our interests at heart. I believe it. Brexit is a success. I believe it. We're not going down the pipes faster than greased shit off a shovel. I believe it. The world owes its existence to the flying spaghetti monster. I believe it.

What more is there to say?

[peter]

I mean, just how many times can we be sold the same old flim-flam before we start getting wise to it.

At least on this evening's news they are being a bit more realistic about the chance of getting anything approaching a reasonable trade deal with India than the Express were this morning. The BBC at least acknowledged that a deal being put together in time for the Sunak visit was becoming more and more unlikely, because of the sudden appearance of hitherto unrealised problems. I think we can read from that, that the Indian negotiators are playing hardball and the Kemi Badenock team does not like it.

Because you see, like every country we have done a deal with since leaving the EU, the Indians know we are desperate. And that does not make for a good bargaining position. Like the Australians, and the Kiwis, and the Japanese before them, the Indians know we have lost a huge swathe of our trade and will agree to just about anything to recover a bit of it. Kemi Badenock has been tasked with going to India to prove that brexit is working, that all of those promises of foreign trade deals were not just cloud cuckoo land stuff. And like the negotiators before her, she will, when the chips are down, accept just about anything in order to secure the deal. And against a backdrop like that, all the Indians have to do is wait and they know she will crumble. They will tell her what the terms of the deal will be, and she will sign it.

Now think about that. Not being a supremacist or racist or anything, but can you imagine what a previous generation to mine would have thought, if you'd told them that we would, one day in the future, go cap in hand to India for a trade deal. And they would dictate to us what the terms of the deal would be, and that we would buy it? They'd have thought you were mad! And yet here we are.

And so this is what will happen. In a week or two's time, Kemi Badenock will emerge clutching a piece of paper and claiming to have secured the deal of the century. The PM will make his journey to India and the Express will fall to the floor in a spasm of ejaculatory ecstasy over the thought of a signed trade deal. And then someone will do the sums and like Eustace before, will quietly say, "Actually, that deal is really worth next to nothing." Or it'll be worth 0.005 percent of a GDP point in fifteen years time (about a thousandth or something of what we have lost).

You know it and so do I. Like the falling of that Russian mercenary guy Prighozin, or whatever his name was, out of a plane tonight (I predicted that one as well, if you look back), it ain't rocket science. You wait.

[peter]

Live by the sword - die by the sword.

It's a hackneyed aphorism and true enough in itself, but it's certainly difficult to feel much sympathy about the passing of Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin in an 'aviation accident' yesterday. Certainly he didn't strike one as being a particularly nice kind of person. He was famed for his foul mouthed rants against the way that the war in Ukraine was being prosecuted, about the inefficiency and general incompetence that was he said, causing his fighters to die in unnecessary numbers. That his forces were recruited from the blackest pits of the Russian prison system, individuals who had little to loose by signing up for what were essentially cannon-fodder placements in which their lives would be considered expendable, goes without saying, but such as they were, he was their protector.

Up like the rocket, down like the stick, was another phrase I considered using to start this post. Prigozhin's rise from Putin's chef to mercenary warlord was spectacular and rapid, thanks largely to the pivotal role his group played in the Ukraine (having first cut its teeth in support of Assad's forces in the bloodbath that was Syria) where it succeed in making advances (largely due to the cannon-fodder nature in which they were used) that the dispirited Russian state forces could not.

But Prigozhin became simply too vocal a critic of Putin for any other endpoint than yesterday's crash to be possible. He'd made Putin look weak in front of the Russian people when he'd turned his group of misfits and psychopaths on Moscow itself, and there was always going to be a price to pay. Yesterday Putin collected, and did so in an obvious and barely hidden manner. Today, the Russian people will respect him the more for it. Big boys games: big boys rules.

But before we start moralising and getting on our high horse about the brutality of the way Russia conducts itself, it would not do too much harm for us to take a quick look at ourselves.

The operation of mercenary forces out this country, how they work, where, and who runs them, is shrouded in mist. They come under the coding of 'security' in the businesses register, a designation that covers everything from companies that supply bouncers to nightclub doorways, sleepy guards in supermarkets, to specialist units of ex special forces soldiers, capable of entering any theatre in the world and working at the same level as conventional fo4ces in the area. Similarly, the areas, countries, they work in are nearly impossible to identify. Websites for these organisations, and there are hundreds of them, are sketchy on details if they even exist. Of the thousands of companies carrying the security business code, around 250 are considered to be at the top end of deployable military trained units, and no small number of these are based in Herefordshire, not far from the special forces training bases of our regular forces. Indeed it is this bleeding across between the two sides, state and private, that allows the groups to seemingly self-regulate under a cloak of respectability and responsibility (by no means always justified as a number of recent questionable events involving atrocities commited against civilians will attest) which no-one seems disposed to question too deeply. Often indeed, in the theatres of operations themselves, there is a less than clear division between who is operating privately and who under state sanction. In short, the whole area is shrouded in secrecy and deliberate blind-eye turning. There could be a dozen Prigozhin like characters operating out of this country and we would never know. Our political masters would never want to know. Would our state be prepared to kill one that was seen to be getting out of line, becoming an embarrassment or even a threat? You'd like to think not, but then you wonder and your mind recalls the body of Dr David Kelly, found stretched out in the woods after having given evidence against the government in the 'dodgy dossier' inquiry on the legality of our involvement in the second Gulf War. Okay - not a spectacular plane crash, but a damn useful suicide nevertheless.