What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

I bought a book in a used book shop at a National Trust house last Monday.

I thought it was a fantasy novel, the first in a series that I'd never come across before. It was strikingly presented in a well illustrated jacket, but on opening, it had ever so slightly the look of a self published affair - just not quite the same as 'normal' books if you will - but as it was only a quid to buy, and the first two books were there, I picked them up.

The story turned out to be a dramatisation of Bible story, or perhaps more that of Milton's Paradise Lost, in that it featured the Halls of Heaven, the three angels Michael, Gabriel and Lucifer (with their accompanying dramatis personae) - all richly described, along with the creation story, Eden and the full shebang.

The first book was okay - quite fun actually (the battle in Heaven, the fall of man, the casting out etc) - and only took me a day or two to read. By the end Noah had done his thing and mankind was, much to Michael and Gabriel's consternation, up to his old tricks. Via a story line that involved the nephilim and the 'consorting' of the Watchers and what have you, God decided to send one of his tripartite aspects down to purchase back the immortal souls of mankind from Lucifer (who now had pretty much full sway down on the earthly plane) and so Christ, the second Adam, was born.

By now I'd done a bit of research on the publishing house and had discovered that it was essentially a Christian based affair, specialising in religious productions for theological students etc, and who had publishing the works I held, presumably as a bit of light relief, as dramatic and exciting read for recreational purposes.

At the start of the second book, we had the young Christ, first secreted away in what is now an ancient coptic monastery in Egypt, then, around the age of eight, removed to Nazareth, from whence his sobriquet, the Nazarene, is derived.

Through out all of this the main focus is on the Halls of Heaven, and the Palace's of Hell, meetings between the agents of both and the politics and machinations of the agents therein as the worldly events unfolded. I was beginning to tire of the story by now to be honest. I could see it for what it was, pretty much end of days storytelling, fast paced and not badly done, but designed perhaps more for the adolescent youngsters of (perhaps) American families of a deeply religious bent. Reading it had been an interesting experience, but I'd essentially decided to call it a day shortly after beginning book two, but pretty much as this decision popped into my mind, I happened to read a passage on the youthful Jesus, who at this point happened to be up in the mountains of northern Israel, and looking down on the plains below. I'm going to quote the next passage exactly as it appears in the book.

Finally he stopped, gasping for breath, having reached the summit of the eastern slope, the soft breezez ruffling his long dark curls, his bare feet sinking into the thyme and mountain flowers beneath him. Staring.

Staring at the Great Battlefield of Israel....Esdraelon, the Valley of Jezreel. Armageddon.

Far away in the distance across the fertile valley, stood two imperial figures: Michael and Gabriel.

"He sees the future," Gabriel whispered..."The final war. Armageddon."

Jesus stared at the great plains before him, now filled with a vast multitude, every nation represented in the violent, bloody panorama before them. Chinese, Arab, European, American, African, Australian soldiers, their bloodthirsty cries of battle mingling with the agonising screams of the dying. The Prince of Peace watched, pale and silent, as the Son of Perdition and the great kings of earth gathered with their armies, a great and terrible multitude, two hundred million strong.....waiting.....

Shall we look at some of today's headlines:

The Telegraph. "Israel vows to destroy Lebanon if war spreads."

The Mirror. "Fears of an All Out War."

The 'i'. "US and UK in race to prevent conflict spreading. "

The FT. "US warns Iran not to escalate war into broader conflict."

Last night I heard the Prime Minister of Jordan saying that the chances of preventing such an escalation were slim.

Now I recognise the nature of coincidences, they happen. But the chance reading the above passage, bang on the day that the events I report above were occurring - now that's enough to make you think!

[peter]

I'm supposedly away to Dublin for a few days (storm Babet allowing) and am, to be honest, a bit ambivalent about it. (Does ambivalent mean what I think it does......in two minds sort of thing?)

I mean, it's always nice to have something planned, holidays and that, but I'm getting to the point in my life where I wonder if it's worth the upheaval? Yesterday I took my cats to a cattery. They were miserable about it and such is my empathy for their feelings that it's made me miserable as well. My routine is shot to blazes and I am a serious creature of routine. I battle with health issues, some self-inflicted, some not, and the change in routine that dragging myself away brings about is both physically and psychologically painful to me. I'm not a natural traveller - never was - and it has always put me through a grinder as it were, and as I've gotten older this has in some ways gotten worse (though better in others).

But then there's the thing about seeing something different, getting a new experience under my belt, and often it's this hindsight of memory in which the real benefits of travel lie. At the time, travelling is a discomfort, an assault on the regularity that mind and body require in life (well - my mind and body at least), but back home again it all slips away and only the good bits are left. (Well - usually; I've had exceptions to this.)

But today, as I sit here wondering if the fates will be kind to us, if it'll all go to plan (because you never can tell with air travel in particular), I can't summon up too much excitement about it one way or the other. It'll be what it'll be. I hope to eat some good food, see some good art, have a pint or two of Guinness, but most of all I'm looking forward to picking up my cats. Inshallah.

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Amused to read that veteran MP Peter Bone has been suspended from the House while under investigation for allegedly exposing himself to an aide in a hotel room, and a number of bullying offences. Yet another case (perhaps) of the little head ruling the big head I suppose: not nice for those involved, but fertile ground for puns in respect of Bone's bone for some time to come.

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Topical news program Have I Got News for You must have been in something of a quandary as to how to approach the last week's news.

Let's face it, it hasn't exactly been the kind of stuff that lends itself to their smug kind of superiority and satire ("Oh, I'm so anti-establishment aren't I - but not really, because I'm actually balls deep in it and Tory voting to the core."). and how to present a topical news show without mentioning the only show in town (news-wise) must have been really difficult.

They got over it however, pretty well in fact, by the addition of one serious line from presenter of the week, the ubiquitous Alexander Armstrong (he of the Pointless, Classic FM and general warbler fame), at the point where they say, "And now for the main stories of the week......", the line being, "except the one that is simply too awful to mention....".

In fairness it was well done, if a little bit cowardly.

Too harsh you think? Well, maybe. But these are professional satirists and this is a topical news show. It should surely not have been impossible for them to come up with an angle that sympathetically melded the two? This is their job, for which they are paid huge amounts. The bullshit and propoganda aspects of this should surely have been well within their capabilities and remit to adress. No-one would expect them to make light of the horror or tragedy of the events in Israel or their aftermath in Gaza, but the responses of the Western politicians? I'd have skewered the lot of them! Okay, the show presents itself as unscripted and on the hoof stuff, but we all know that this is only true to a degree. These guys, Hislop and Merton, should have been up to the task of navigating their way through this story, difficult though it is.

[peter]

Too much wine in a Dublin restaurant last night has left me feeling a trifle jaded this morning, but nevertheless I'll get my act together shortly and head down for a swim.

The restaurant, called Delahunt, served up a first class meal of unusual fare, a real treat in these days of ever increasing culinary conformity, in which the 'Michelin goal' can end up being a straitjacket into rote repetition of what everybody else is doing.

Today I'm headed out to see National Art Museum and an archeology museum recommended by the concierge in the hotel. As per usual, the holiday experience is never a cheap one, but hey, we're only here once.

That's all I'm going to say today. News is simply too horrible to comment on. Xi meeting up with Vlad in Beijing won't please Jo or Rishi, but Vlad will be like a dog with two dicks to be back out on the international circuit.

Anyway, that's it for the now.

Chow.

[peter]

Who the fuck ever thought it would be a good idea for Prince William to pose ,arm round the shoulder of some bemused looking elderly coloured guy, alongside the missive, "I'm proud of the Windrush generation," wants their arse kicked.

Talk about patronising bullshit; what the fuck does William know about the Windrush generation?

He is so far removed, both in time and in experience from those people, that any point of connection between them is all but nonexistent. The editors of the Mirror (or Sun - I forget which paper it was on the front page of) must have known how bad it looked, and it's a measure of how out of touch both he and his advisors are that they didn't spot the trap.

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As for Israel-Palestine, who knows who was responsible for blowing up the hospital in Gaza. Biden seems to be adamant that the evidence points towards Hamas, but then like Mandy Rice-Davies in the Profumo affair, "He would say that wouldn't he."

If it was Israel, then for sure, it was accidental. If Hamas, then also so (surely). Certainly the Israeli government would like us to believe that Hamas would do this deliberately in order to stoke up anti-Israeli feeling across the region and wider world, but surely this is an ask too far? It seems excessively cynical a suggestion to me, and I'd prefer to see it as a terrible accidental hit, in which case who fired it is incidental.

But on the situation as a whole, it (as we know) has no solution.

But.....

If the world were to impose a solution on the region, it would have to be a single shared state one, named Israel-Palestine, with a 25 percent Palestinian representation, 25 percent Israeli representation and 50 percent UN representation, enforced by agreement for 50 years (time enough for a new generation shared values living side by side to develop, as there is evidence is occurring in Northern Ireland), before the new nation was handed back for free elections.

There is no solution that doesn't involve both time and a degree of enforcement. Either that or a natural one, seeing as if how, if the climate change bods are correct, in fifteen years time the whole region will be unlivable in anyway.

[peter]

Well, it's goodbye Dublin as I prepare to leave the 'Emerald Isle' and head back to good old Blighty.

It's been an interesting few days, centered around enjoying city's tip-top gastronomic scene (very expensive, but top of the range stuff) and walking from museum to art gallery, taking in the 'vibe' of the place as we went along.

We've not been in London for a while, but from our experience on our last visit, Dublin holds up very well. It's got a good buzz about it, the night life is vibrant and the affluence of the place is clearly holding up post-pandemic. I suspect that post-Brexit London would not campare well, were we to visit it today. As one cab driver put it to me, "you'ze were sold a pup!" I think he's right.

I've overdone the food and wine a bit and am frankly looking forward to a few days of beans on toast and the like: restaurant food is beautiful, but it isn't really designed to keep body and soul together. The forecast is a bit sketchy for the flight home, but fingers crossed we'll miss the worst weather which is headed in for later in the day by accounts. The big thing today is getting back to pick up the cats. They won't like being in the cattery and they won't like travelling home in the car either. But it'll be worth it to have them home again and be there with them (inshallah).

Our hotel has been top notch and the people lovely and attentive. All in all a good place to visit for a few days. (But home is still home if you know what I mean.)

Ps. Why do the politicians keep talking about the "war between Israel and Hamas"? It isn't a war, anymore than the US was at war with Al Quida. Neither are nation states, they are terrorist organisations. Any 'war' against them is only in a rhetorical sense as in the 'war against drugs'.

And aside from this, what's happening in Israel isn't a war - they (the Israeli forces) are preparing a 'raid' into Gaza. There will be resistance for sure, but the disparity of might between the belligerents is such that it could no more be described as a war than an altercation between a five year old and a fully grown man could be described as a fight. This is a response to the atrocity that was inflicted upon Israel, and quite possibly a justified one given the way that their enemies are embedded within the civilian population of Gaza, dug into underground bunkers and tunnel systems etc - but a war it ain't.

Warnings of Western citizens to leave the countries surrounding Israel, and the aggressive rhetoric of the Israeli defence minister as reported this morning, do not make for happy reading. There's a good chance that this thing will blow up into a wider regional conflict, in which case I'm guessing that Putin will take Russia in alongside a united Arab world when the West is forced to support Israel against the same. China, I suppose, will then take its main chance against the US, and Bob's your uncle, what we got is a fully fledged, state of the art con-flee-grachun!

Let's hope someone can start talking some sense into these people.

[peter]

Arrived home safe and sound and, following a short interlude of unpacking and sorting etc, went to collect the cats from the cattery.

They were vocal in their disgruntlement at being loaded into the car, and equally so in their pleasure at being home once again (and being returned to their 'rightful' place as centre of attention of Mrs P and myself).

Okay. Dublin. Well, it's a city much like any other of a similar age. We battled with the weather a bit, just about getting away with it by carrying brollies and dodging the showers. It's not a cheap place, but the standard of living seems to be holding up fairly well. There were down and outs, but fewer per capita than perhaps in my own small town in South West England (certainly less visible anyway). On walking from our hotel in the centre of the city to St Patrick's Cathedral, we passed through a zone of ill-kempt housing - a sort of 'projects' for Dublin - where, judging from some of the protest posters hanging from the balconies, some kind of ongoing argument about housing was in process.

We visited the main museums and galleries of the city, and much of the information contained therein was about the struggle for Irish independence, for which we the Brits are still regarded with much anger (and rightly so). Dreams of a united Ireland still run high in the South, no doubt about it, but in fairness to the people, there was no animosity directed at us personally because of the crimes of our history.

But probably the most poignant thing of the entire visit, and not a subject area that any of the state institutions seemed particularly keen to dwell upon, occured as we walked down a street not far from our hotel, and I noticed, quite by accident, a stone monument over some railings, in the small basement courtyard (for want of a better description) below the street level facade of the row of buildings. Entitled 'The Journey Stone', it called to the memory of the tens of thousands of women and children incarcerated in the slave-labour workhouses of the Magdelaine laundries.

Used as a source of free labour of which the state and many leading businesses partook of their services, the cruelty and inhumanity of the institutions needs no rehearsal here, excepting to say that it still boggles the mind that such an atrocity could have been perpetrated, in a progressive state, and right up virtually to the present day. That the Irish government and Roman Catholic Church still hold the full details of the history of the affair, and decline to allow the necessary access to the records in order that a full and accredited history may be constructed of the shameful episode, beggars belief. On the basis of the less said the better, and that if long enough time is given, the collective memory will fade from history, the history is recognised, but only obliquely so, and not loudly.

Still, on passing the monument, tucked away and unheralded as it was, a profound sadness for the blighted lives, the suffering and cruelty of those places, hidden away behind their locked doors and high walls, came upon one: the understated power of this small memorial, the lives of the people it represents. Ireland's personal 'dissapeared'.

[peter]

I watched Andrew Marr yesterday making a somber plea for people to remain level headed in their response to the Israeli/Palestinian situation.

There was, he said, plenty of middle ground to occupy between flag waving support for Hamas in it's actions against Israel and blinkered support for anything and everything that Israel does in response to the outrage it has suffered.

I absolutely agree and further, support his view that this situation is a dangerous on an existential level for mankind as any we have faced in many a year. The pieces are all in place for this to 'go hot' ,and it is to Joe Biden's credit that on his recent visit to Israel he spent most of his time behind the scenes, convincing Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu that escalatory strikes against Hezbolla in Lebanon and Hamas cells in the West Bank were dangerously inflammatory and should be avoided at all costs.

But it's a shame that beyond this actual theatre of war, his administration is unable to resist from trying to make political capital against its old rival Iran, by implication that they were behind the planning of the Hamas incursion into Israel. It may perhaps be so, but to date no evidence has been provided to support this, and it seems to me that if such an inflammatory comment is to be made then it should perforce be done so alongside the evidence to back it up. Israeli minister of economy Nir Barkat, speaking in today's Mail on Sunday, says that Israel will "strike the head of the snake, Iran" (shouldn't that be "off the snake"?) if "Tehran backed terror group Hezbolla joins the war". He threatens to wipe the ayatollahs off the face of the earth, should they be found to be supporting Hezbolla in any action against Israel. Not exactly mind-settling stuff.

At home our government seems similarly bent on the idea that anything but support for anything Israel does in response, is tantamount to support of Hamas and their actions, which is of course rubbish. The humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza is a separate issue to the atrocities commited by Hamas in Israel and no-one should believe that all those in Gaza would support their administration in their horrific crimes. The people locked in Gaza are essentially still the same refugees that have been trapped there for decades. They have nowhere else to go and if in their desperation they have voted in an ill-judged administration, it is neither to be wondered at, nor believed that they would support everything that said administration would carry out. Unable to resist stirring a bit of fear into the mix, the Express warns us that the protest marches in London in support of the Palestinian cause has been a fruitful recruiting ground for the next generation of terrorists that will be plotting against us on our home turf. What with the numberless arrivals on the small boats as well, it seems that we are in for a rough time.

But Marr is dead right that we stand on the edge of a cataclysm, and that one wrong move by any one of the multiple players involved could have catastrophic consequences. That's why it behoves the people involved to be cautious in what they say, not escalarory.

Shame that they don't seem to get this.

-----0-----

I haven't said much about UK politics of late, the reason being that it has not itself featured much in the media.

But stuff has been happening since Kier Stamer was 'glitter bombed' at his keynote speech at the Labour Party Conference, so perhaps it's time for a quick summary.

The big news was the double win for Labour in two by-election contests, by sufficiently large swings that, were the results translated to a national scale, they would see a Labour government with a stonking majority returned to Westminster.

Stamer was obviously well pleased, but has cautioned against over optimism. There is still a long way to go he told his followers yesterday, and I'm thinking that he is correct. Sunak is apparently the receiver of significant behind the scenes criticism within the Tory ranks as MPs, not quite believing that their eighty seat majority could have been so short time in the lasting, look for a scapegoat to blame. By the hundreds, they see their seats being taken away from them - many will see their careers in politics dissappear forever - and rather than actually looking at what a shit-show they have orchestrated over the past 13 years, they are blaming the man just recently placed at the top. Granted he's a complete waste of time, but still, much of our mess is not really his fault. He only supported our leaving the EU, campaigned for it. Then got behind Boris Johnson and his pig of a withdrawal agreement, then supported him through his lying dissembling parliamentary time in office. Then he gave away wheelbarrows of money in the pandemic period, borrowed even more and printed even more again, ran up the highest debt that the country had ever experienced and laid the groundwork for the current economic straits we now experience. Then of course we have the bounce back loans, the ppe billions scandal, the failure to insure against interest rate rises that has cost the country twelve billion just of itself. No - Sunak cannot be held responsible for all our problems.......just around 95 percent of them.

But the Tories are nothing if not crafty bastards. They want that power and will stop at nothing to get it once again. Already they are doing the calculations as to what tax breaks will give them the biggest shunt in their polling figures for the next election. Raise tax thresholds for the higher rate of income tax - there's 5.8 million votes there. Abolish stamp duty on house purchases - a million or so more there. Then there's the rowing back on net zero. Who knows what the electoral dividends there could be? No - it's by far from game over for the Tories, despite what the Labour pundits might think? Like Neil Kinnock before him, Stamer could yet snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. With so many seats sitting on tiny majorities, small swings in voting numbers could have disproportionate effects on the final results (hence the need for electoral reform - the electoral reform, that would be, that Kier Stamer promised when he canvassed for the Labour leadership, but subsequently abandoned). The tories could yet pull it out of the bag, and then there's going to be a lot of silly looking pundits scratching their heads and asking where it all went wrong around.

But I won't be one of them, because I know how much they, the Tories, want this - and to what depths they will stoop to get it.

[peter]

Dame Maureen Lipman is on the front of this morning's Times complaining about "bleeding heartless liberals" who fail to criticise Hamas atrocities.

I don't know where she is getting her information but I've been watching the media coverage on this situation since day one and I've not yet seen anyone commentating (and I'm referring to the commentary given by prominent figures on western media programming) who has not condemned what occured in Israel on that horrible day. It's become an absolute given, in fact, that you cannot begin any criticism of the Israeli response without first making such a declaration.

And absolutely correctly.

But the collective punishment of all the citizens of Gaza, the acceptance of unacceptable levels of 'collateral damage' in pursuit of the guilty parties within the strip, the withholding of vital medicines, food, fuel and water, the instructions to a million people that they must instantly vacate their homes - irrespective of whether they are capable of doing so or not - or be considered as aiders and abetters of the Hamas terrorists themselves (and this being used as a subsequent justification for indiscriminate bombing of the entire region, as in, "They were given the chance to leave.....if they stayed they must have been colluders")........ All these things are unacceptable and they are a disproportionate response to the initial crime that was committed.

And if you are unable to see this then I suggest that you are looking through blinkered eyes yourself.

And what happened on that horrible day in Israel, the crimes committed by Hamas, crimes which cannot be ever forgotten or forgiven, cannot be seen outside of the context of the broader Palestinian situation. If our discussion on the subject of the Israel attack can not be considered against the background of the cause in which it was perpetrated, then how are we to move forward? The horror of the attack on Israel can only be understood against the backdrop of history of all the people involved, Jew's and Palestinians alike.

Atrocity must be condemned wherever it occurs. If we are to be silenced, disallowed from speaking the truth from both sides of this ongoing tragedy, only to be permitted to condemn the actions of one side, then we are less of a society than we were.

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

Home Secretary Suella Braverman will today question Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley as to why no arrests were made at a peo-Palestinian rally in which the chanting of "Jihad, Jihad, Jihad!" occured in front of attending police officers.

Government minister Robert Jenrick said on yesterday's Sunday morning political slots that the chanting was a clear incitement to terrorism and should have resulted in arrests and charges being brought. The Mets response is that they have studied video footage of the event and concluded that the word in question can have multiple meanings, and that on the grounds of this, they decided it would be inappropriate to bring charges in a case where there was no conclusive evidence that a crime had been committed.

Fair play. The police would not be thanked for brining spurious charges that would not hold up in court, and the wisdom of not intervening in a situation already fraught with high emotion (which could easily have sparked a full scale battle between protesters and police) must be recognised.

Certainly the headlines in today's press that "Braverman will challenge the met over failures to make arrests" will make good reading for the right wing readership of the papers that ran them (and Braverman will know this) but equally she will be aware that the situation that the police found themselves in was not only potentially dangerous, but politically sensitive as well. There are quite simply times when not to inflame situations further is the clever option, and this was clearly one of them.

It is reported that antisemitic acts are seeing a significant rise in the past few days - hardly surprising given the harrowing imagery coming out of Gaza - and I suppose that this is reflective of the low intelligence thinking that equates Judaism with the actions of the Israeli state. The two are completely separate things, no matter how much some would try to convince us otherwise. We are a constitutionally Christian country, but only a fool would frame the actions of our governments in such terms. Similarly the actions of the Israeli government can no more be laid at the feet of the Jewish faith than can ours be leveled as a criticism of Christianity. But there will always be stupid people, or indeed true antisemites that will seek to take advantage of these terrible situations.

But perhaps the most worrying thing (domestically) is how this conflict is serving to drive wedges between communities that must share living space in our own country. The divisive nature of the whole awful situation is spreading far and wide and we will not be immune to it any more than anywhere else.

Sad days with sadder ones (one suspects) yet to come. If, as Neil Oliver said in his weekend posting on YouTube, you are looking on to this whole wretched situation with increasing confusion and incomprehension (in the form of "How have we reached this place? Have we learned nothing from the lessons of history?) then you are not alone. You have millions of onlookers, fazed by their feelings of grief and rising sense of inability to do anything, say anything to alleviate the unfolding horror, standing alongside you.

[peter]

I'm not really sure what has happened to the country I live in. I'm not even sure what has happened to the country I used to live in, for without my moving a foot of distance, they are surely not the same.

It started with the Brexit referendum. Of this I can be fairly sure. Suddenly a divisive wedge was driven between the people of this country, and the rhetoric used, the political language being bandied around seemed to take on a nastier quality than it had hitherto employed. What had developed there continued on throughout the leaving process, the acrimonious division between the nearly equally divided halves of the country never really healing, and suddenly we were in the pandemic. This shook up a country already bruised in a greater way than at any point since the Second World War (and that cataclysmic event had served to pull the people of the country together, rather than drive them apart) like a cocktail in a bar steward's shaker. We were driven even further apart - quite literally if you remember.....2 meter rules and all of that - until we were placed under virtual house arrest and subjected to a battering of fear propoganda and nudging that subdivided us yet further. Covidiot vs compliers, vaccinated vs vaccination deniers, pro vs anti-lockdowners.

It was all getting very nasty indeed.

Bad news heaped onto worse until like a pea in a referee's whistle, at the game's end we finally emerged reeling into the (not) sunlight. We were broken, fragmented beyond repair. Politically, economically, as a society. And meanwhile the ever developing process of grouping into our different identities had continued apace. What group do you identify with? Are you gay, black, Muslim or Jewish? Trans maybe or Old White Male? Or simply a woman downtrodden by a male dominated patriarchy? It didn't matter what - you could guarantee that each day the BBC, Sky ot the papers would find something for you to be angry about: something that applied particularly to your group, to the people that you identified with.

And then we saw the next instalment unfolding seamlessly before our eyes. War in Europe. Suddenly we had a new bogeyman to fear. Russia was on the march and we were on the brink of nuclear war again. The media heaped it on and the Home Secretary of the day approved of people going off randomly to join the fight against Vlad the Dictator. Fear heaped upon fear. Pictures of broken people and bombed out cities. Devastation. It never stopped. Day after propoganda filled day. Ukraine good. Russia bad. Ukraine good. Russia bad. Get your blue and yellow flags here! Take in a Ukrainian family (but spit on one that arrives in a boat). And all the while that self-inflicted pandemic damage is coming home to roost. Hospital waiting lists reaching record highs. Excess deaths going through the roof. Inflation and mortgage costs killing your finances. Getting worse, getting worse. The papers continue to stoke division, pitting this group against that; JK Rowling vs the woke celebrity culture. Feminists vs Trans. Jews vs Labour. Black vs White and everyone vs any poor bastard with the temerity to come here on a boat, to want to escape the particular hell that their own part of the world has descended into. The culture war of all against all.

And now finally, the icing on the cake, the final big high-kicking all singing, all dancing finale, Armageddon in the form of the Israel-Hanas 'war'. Because surely it must seem to those benighted people who face us over breakfast on our papers, in our news reports, the bombed and shell-shocked people of Gaza, that the final conflagration has come (and for them it certainly has).

I mean, do you get the feeling that there's nothing left? That this ever downward spiral of disaster followed by trauma followed by horror has become so fast spinning that the only solution is to seek the eye in the middle of the spinning vortex, to feel nothing? Can the world just take a break for a day? Can those who push each of these terrible events forward, the movers and shakers who shape our lives, who have somehow fashioned this maelstrom from which we seem unable to escape, just take a day off? I genuinely believe - I really do - that people.....ordinary workaday people like me and you...... just want to get on and live their lives. Given the choice, without being told by the media, their leaders or whoever, that they must feel aggrieved (about something - anything - it doesn't really matter what it is), that people will live side by side without problem.

These people who pull the strings, the big players, the politicians and media bosses, at the top of our societies, it's these people who make all the running in this. They are not the ones you see covered in dust in the rubble. I've not see Zelensky or Putin yet emerging from the dust. The economic hits from either Brexit or the pandemic don't seem to have reached their pockets, and they don't seem to be effected by any of the stuff that is ripping our worlds apart. I believe in a free media as much as the next person, but with that freedom comes responsibility and I don't see a fuck load of that being exercised. Man I just wish we could round up the top one percent of this world and stick them on an island to fight it out. To fight out all of the stuff that they seem to think that we should be fighting out, so that they can continue to enjoy the fruits of sitting at the apex of their respective societies and raking it in.

I mean. Do we really need these fucks. Do we really?

[peter]

At last a tangible Brexit benefit has manifested in the news - the only problem is that it only benefits a tiny slice of the population and one that is already doing pretty nicely thank you.

Yesterday the government confirmed that the lifting of the cap on bankers bonuses announced by former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng would go ahead, despite fears of a public backlash against the move in the face of ever tightening financial circumstances under which the vast majority of the population were labouring.

You may remember that following the 2008 banking crash, the EU introduced a cap that limited bonuses in the sector to two times the salary earned by any individual, the intention being to try to limit risky the practices that had led to the recently experienced crisis. This cap has remained in force in the UK, but now, in their pursuit of turning the City of London into the maverick 'Singapore on Thames' and luring in the big talent and investment that is apparently needed to do this, the cap is to be lifted.

Certainly in the City this will be well received, but it makes for poor listening in the rest of the country where people are really struggling in the face of a cost of living crisis which has been none of their own making.

Income and wealth inequality in this country is at the highest it has ever been, with only a tiny slice at the apex of our society enjoying any benefit whatsoever from the economic activity of the masses, and this effective pay rise of epic proportions to those already earning huge salaries while the rest of us are being told to limit our pay claims, amounts to no more than a slap in the face. If this does not demonstrate that this government is interested in the fortunes of only a small segment of the population, against the interests of the many, then I don't know what does. If the need for a progressive tax system in order to prevent such excesses is not instituted then this situation will only ever get worse.

We have entered the late stage capitalism recognised as a danger by even the post war Conservative Party, an understanding they held from their experience of the 1930's, that capitalism had to be controlled, limited in its exercise, or it would morph into something else. That capitalism had this capacity to go very badly wrong with terrible consequences, had just been demonstrated to them in the most extreme of ways. We for our part are now living no longer in a capitalist system, but under a neo-feudalism in which the huge majority of the population labours for the benefit of a tiny slice at the top - a small grouping who run the show, making sure that all legislation serves first and foremost their interest, and that benefits derived therefrom flow almost entirely in their direction. This only ever ends badly and history has demonstrated it time and again. Up until this point the Conservative government has been able to cover up this long term rising inequality by virtue of the general, if slower improvement of the lot of the masses. Since 2008 this has been reversed as real term incomes have failed to keep pace with inflation and austerity cuts have begun to bite. Add the sudden acceleration of this downturn caused by Brexit, the pandemic and then the war in Ukraine, and the effect of the mass of people's finances going into free fall while the topmost income/wealth sector continues to rise becomes brutally apparent.

A case in point.

Last week, a Top Gear presenter called Freddie Flintoff who had been injured in a car accident during the filming of one episode, was awarded a compensatory payment for the loss of a year's salary whilst he recovered. The payment was seven million pounds. This is not a captain of industry, not a world renowned performer or even a top grade film or sports star. It's a middle grade presenter on a moderately popular TV series on the BBC. If the payment he received equates to a years salary for a man at his level, what levels of income per annum are enjoyed by those higher up the scale? And yet part of the Conservative plan for getting reelected is to banish the top rate of tax or at least increase the threshold at which it is payable.

Various tax avoidance schemes, the non-dom status, the salting away of profits in tax-havens, the operating out of far away places of free-for-all tax regulation such as the Cayman Islands, the hiding of companies within companies and the use of loopholes of ever increasing complexity- all of these things serve to ensure that the highest earners in our society keep the vast quantity of what they earn, while the poorest earners are pursued for the smallest amounts without mercy. Tax evaders of epic scale walk away from even being tried, let alone convicted - occasionally a slap on the wrist is administered, but sometimes the excuse of "Sorry - I forgot to pay this 3.5 million I owed (Nadhim Zahawi) is enough to get you off the hook. Failure to pay a TV licence or enough parking tickets will land you in jail, but defraud the Exchequer out of millions and you walk away.

We have entered a stage of rentier capitalism where fortunes are not produced, rather they are acquired - acquired by a class of individuals who take from others rather than producing for the benefit of all......and this leads to no place good.

The question is, how to get people to understand this. Labour, the one major political force in a position to expose the direction of travel we are taking, has no interest in doing so. In acceptance of the money that only business can provide - money without which no political campaign worthy of the name can be mounted - they have placed their neck into the hands of new masters. Without doing so, they would now be being slaughtered on the anvil of the popular press as was Jeremy Corbyn. In beating the enemy they have joined them and can no longer represent the interest of the people they were formed to serve. The maintaining of ideological principle has fallen under the wheels of pursuit of power and it will not rise again. No party in our system can survive at the top unless it holds onto the pursuit of power as its chief aim, and while ever the financing of the operation and the control of the narrative sits in the hands of business, this can never be turned to the service of the people. Unless you dance to the tune of business in this country, you do not dance at all. There is no place for the people in this.

[peter]

Over 6000 people are now dead in Gaza as a result of the Israel reprisals for the Hamas attacks into Israel. I'd like to know what number of these were actually Hamas terrorists?

Clearly from the number of children's bodies coming out of Gaza hospitals, significant numbers of the dead are innocent civilians, men, women and children just going about trying to live their lives the same as you and me. I wonder if any of the people killed were responsible for planning or executing that attack into Israel? But it seems from our leaders point of view that anything Israel now visits upon Gaza is covered under the much used justification of "Israel has the right to defend itself."

Come on; let's be honest. Everyone knows that what has been done in Gaza goes way beyond Israel defending itself. There can be no justification for indiscriminate bombing, or even precision targeted bombing, in built up areas with high population densities, just in order to take out a small number of terrorists hiding therein. Nothing is gained by Israel descending to the same level of savagery as those who invaded her borders a few weekends ago. The Secretary General of the United Nations has called this out and been roundly condemned by Israel for doing so, but we all know he is right.

But the English government cannot even join with its sister in Scotland and call for a ceasefire during which humanitarian aid can be delivered. Scottish MP Marie Black called for this in the House yesterday but Rishi Sunak declined to agree to it. Rather we will "stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel", irrespective of what reprisals, or how widespread or collective they may be, are taken. (On this, it seems that the Sunak government are prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone, Ukrainian, Israeli, be whoever they are except the British people. They show no inclination to stand shoulder to shoulder with them, the exception being the bankers and others of their own gilded ilk, who they stand alongside without any problem.)

But it is what it is. I haven't the energy to continue to bleat on about it. I'm going to read today's front pages and if I can't find anything else of interest to post about I'm going to call it a day.

Let's see.

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

In an earlier post I spoke of the payment of 7 million that Freddie Flintoff had received in compensation for the loss of a year's earnings. Here's details of another high earners income, to illustrate the point I'm making that a small sector of the country is raking in the mullah on the backs of the work put in by the rest of us who are under the cosh.

This time it's Dame Alison Rose, former boss of Nat West Bank. Her package is (or was until she fell from grace) 2.4 million pounds basic salary, 2.9 million in bonus payments, pension contributions and share options worth a further million or so - and now she has had to leave as a result of her own loose tongue, a possible ten million pound severance payment.

"Well," you might say, "she's head of a bank." Yes sure, would be my reply, but these levels of income are not just reasonable remuneration for the services of highly skilled individuals, they represent a level of imbalance that has become seriously destabilising in our society. They reflect a disparity that, in the face of huge numbers in our society going hungry, going without the necessary warmth and security of abode that makes life tolerable, is not acceptable. The figures represent a system out of control and descending into a form of feudal capitalism that ultimately leads to catastrophe.

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

[peter]

Good to see Sir Kier Stamer under the cosh for his failure to call for a cessation of the Gaza bombing campaign being levied by Israel in response to the October 7 attack carried out by Palestinian terrorists belonging to the proscribed group Hamas.

Some are calling for a ceasefire, but wouldn't this imply that the traffic of bombs, tanks and ground troops was two way? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not seeing pictures of whole regions of Israel laid to waste, bombed out schools and hospitals and thousands of traumatised people searching through the rubble of their levelled streets coming from the Israeli side. What I've seen since those horrific acts on the first day of this situation has all been one way. We have been told it is a 'war' to eradicate Hamas, but I'm afraid from my position it's starting to look suspiciously like a retaliatory attack that has morphed into retribution on the whole community within the strip, and threatens to go further into a land-grab, with the initial attack against Israel being used as justification.

Stamer has been so unwilling to tackle the UK government on anything - anything - that it is good to see him finally come up against a situation where his own duplicity and 'craft' cannot at last be ignored by his underlings. So desperate is the man to appear onside with the establishment, that he is incapable of calling out a palpable wrong (and the indiscriminate levelling of Gaza by Israel is a palpable wrong) even when not to do so will clearly cost him dear. My God, even the Daily Express has seen fit to highlight the plight of the people in Gaza, yet Stamer cannot bring himself to call for a ceasefire so that humanitarian aid can be delivered and the population given a chance to decamp to safer regions (if such safer regions exist).

The man is a shape-shifting reptile, not to be trusted under any circumstance with the governance of this country.

(Meanwhile Security Minister Tom Tugendhat said that to call for a ceasefire is to "support Hamas". Don't be so ridiculous. To call for a ceasefire when hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, the majority women and children, are being indiscriminately bombed in pursuit of a limited number of active terrorists hiding amongst them is not to support the terrorists. It's to say that the Israeli state, just as any other state that would claim legitimacy on the world stage, must obey the rules of international law and conduct its activities, even in response to the outrage it has suffered, accordingly.)

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

In other news global singing star Taylor Swift's fortune has now passed the golden benchmark indicating supreme quality as a human being - her wealth, as a result of her recent world tour, has now passed the billion pounds mark.

Excellent. We will now be able to listen with bated breath to her deep and penetrating insights upon subjects as varied as the global climate catastrophe (does that still exist or have the Tories cancelled it in their recent about faces?), meditation based cures for cancer and whether pink and green can be successfully mixed in the same outfit. I can't wait.

In one small notification in the (hold on - I'll just go and check).....the Guardian, we are told that Boris Johnson is to join the growing list of Conservative MPs (well - ex in his case) taking jobs as presenters on GB News. In fairness, they need someone to balance out Carol Vorderman over on LBC, though it's unlikely that Johnson's grasp of figures (excepting of course female ones, of which by repute he's grasped a fair few) will be as good as hers. I suppose job offers must be a bit thin on the ground since his last attempt at mounting a coup on the Sunak leadership went into a tailspin (by accounts, even Nadine Dorries recognised that it was a chicken that wouldn't fight), so a short billet at the right wing radio station (replacing the recently sacked Lawrence Fox, who as leader of the UK political party Reclaim actually had more chance of being the next PM than Johnson) might just fit the bill while he gets his options sorted out. Well okay Boris, fair play - but it's not exactly world shaking stuff on the level of Tony Blair or Bill Clinton is it? I mean, sharing the stage with Nigel Farrage on a regular basis? Anne Widdecombe? (I bet you'd rather get hold of Carol Vorderman's figure than hers?) To think what could have been had you just.....well....not been you. Churchillian greatness. Rows of books and academic exegesis on your multiple achievements. Instead it's a few riskay jokes with Jacob Rees-Mogg, a quick flirt with Camilla Tominey and then off down the pub with Nigel Farage for a packet of crisps and a pint. As you said, "Them's the breaks", eh?

Oh, and one last thing, it seems that in a delicious twist of irony, Nigel Farage is closer to bringing down the Nat West Bank than they are of him, as shares in the the business are reported to be eighteen percent down following the release of the report into the closing down of his account by the solicitors engaged to look into the affair. Although the report does not find the bank guilty of acting against him on the grounds of his political beliefs, it's still pretty damning suff, stating that he was most definitely treated unfairly and that the bank was guilty of releasing private information about him that should not have been made public. Farage is not happy that they didn't go the whole hog (and he has a point - his Brexit activities were mentioned no less than 84 times in private communications between bank staff that he obtained via legal requirements in respect of freedom of information), but he can take solace from the fact that he has delivered them a significant blow to their operations and has hurt them financially big time. Undoubtedly other banks will think carefully before taking similar kinds of action against others in the future, and this can only be a good thing. We are still supposedly a free country, and what views we have politically is in no way within the purview of banks when deciding whether an individual should be able to hold an account. I have little time for Farage, but on this one I'm with him. What was done to him was a disgrace and Nat West deserve all that it has coming to them on this account.

[peter]

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

I don't know, we just don't seem to be able to get 'right side' of anything, as people, as individual nations, as a world.

You'd think that of all people, the Israeli nation would understand the need to exercise humanity in your dealings with others, yet it seems that a toll of seven plus thousand and rising is not yet enough to sate their appetite for blood revenge for the horror that was perpetrated against them on October 7.

To add insult to injury, Sleepy Joe Biden adds fuel to the fire of disinformation swirling around the whole tragic episode by casting doubt on the figures of Palestinian deaths - figures provided by the Palestinian Health Authority, an organisation that yes, is under the control of Hamas, but only in the way that our NHS is under the control of the Conservative government. The figures provided by this organisation in the past have been independently verified and found to be consistent with the facts on the ground, and numbers of recognised international bodies have said that there is no reason to believe that this should not be the case in this instance. Joe Biden himself however, said in a televised speech that he had seen the photographs of beheaded children/babies from the raid on Israel carried out by Hamas, only for his office to have to clarify the following day that actually, he had not personally seen the photographs. It seems that not only did the President lie about this, but that an entirely different standard of verification is applied when it comes to Palestinian claims as opposed to those of Israel. None of this is to say that the Palestinian figures are not being inflated for propoganda purposes (nor indeed the Israeli figures), or that babies were not beheaded - just that we cannot know these things without them being independently verified, simply because it would be nieve not to realise that propoganda is used in conflict situations for the massaging of public opinion, both domestic and international.

And meanwhile the horror in Gaza continues. We keep hearing about the "Israeli aims" in this situation, but above the wide ranging and essentially meaningless rhetoric of "stamping out the evil of Hamas", we are given little concrete detail of what these aims are. Do the Israeli government intend to maintain a presence in Gaza henceforth? There has been suggestions that this might be the case. What will be the ultimate fate of the displaced Palestinians, ordered out of their homes by aerial leaflet in order that they avoid the forthcoming bombardment? Are they to be allowed to return to their former lives and if not, where are they to go? Will our government hold out its arms to them as it did to the Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression? Given that the waving of a Palestinian flag is now seen as a borderline crime in this country it would seem not.

Newspaper reports try to make this conflict out to be a reciprocal one of even balance (the Times I think, today had a desultory couple of lines about rockets being fired into Israel) but in truth everyone knows it is not. The Israeli forces are infinitely more capable than the Hamas ones, better provided with high tech arms and equipment, and the attack is all but completely in one direction. And directed against civilian population in one of the most highly populated regions of the planet. This cannot be right under any circumstances, moral or legal. If it becomes an offence to call out such violations of basic humanity, to annunciate compassion with the victims of these situations, on whatever side of the fence they lie, then we are all made the lesser by virtue of it.

[peter]

Fear has always been a good tool for governments wishing to increase their hold on people, to introduce policies or measures that would otherwise be unpalatable, to generally increase the level of authoritarian grip in which they hold a nation.

It was used to startling effect in the dark days of lockdown when, as ex Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption noted, the British public accepted without demur levels of state interference in their daily lives pretty much unprecedented at least for many hundreds of years. (He was suprised by this acceptance. I was not.)

The pandemic may be over, but pretty much since that point onwards we have been kept on high alert over some existential crisis or other. Less immediate and perhaps less overtly shoved in our faces (no Clive Myrie standing like a ghoul outside hospital morgues), still nevertheless the background - or not so background - pressure has been kept up. Climate crisis, cost of living crisis, war in Ukraine, threat of nuclear war, nuclear meltdown reactor style, war in the Middle East and the potential for spread and latterly AI. In the case of the last, Rishi Sunak in a recent speech hardly even bothered to hide the objective of the exercise, so unsubtle were his words. "Against this looming threat you have no need to fear: we are here to protect you." I mean - could he have been any more obvious. In other words, "Be afraid, be very afraid. And never forget that we are all that stands between you and oblivion."

And it goes without saying that these protections will always include more control. Take the online safety bill as a case in point. While sold on the basis of "protecting the children" (always a good thing to bring in the children if you want to get the public onside with anything), in fact it gives the government/state effective access to virtually any area of online usage, private, personal or otherwise in a way that they have never had before and can only wish for in their dreams. A 'snoopers charter' barely covers it. It's the state security service's wet dream, all their Christmases come at once. Often this kind of thing is dressed up in the "Well, if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about," argument. Bullshit. We've all got things to hide, even if it's just surreptitiously picking your nose as you walk down the street. And having nothing to hide has nothing to do with it anyway. Your private correspondence is exactly that. Private. In any free state you should have a right to keep it just that.

"Ahh - but what about all the danger we face from these rabid terrorists out there, bent on doing us harm? Better that we surrender our private lives so that we can be protected." Or so runs the argument, and all the indicators are that we soak it up. And lockdowns were the ultimate protection policy - alongside of course being the ultimate control policy. Nothing we have experienced since then has of course been as extreme, but it has continued never the less. Rights of protest (always a pain for governments to have the people gathering to rail against something they don't like) have been drawn in - and God knows, people have had stuff to complain about! Areas where the courts may intervene in government activities have been shrunk. And it is no coincidence that these things have been done simultaneously with continuous drip-feed of fear coming out of our media. So much for 'taking back control', later this year, the parliament will pass, with virtually no debate or press/media reference to it, control of the mandating of measures to be taken in a pandemic (the definition of what will constitute, being in their very hands themselves) to the World Health Authority. Given that the destruction of our economic futures, our social fabric, our health and social services (basically our whole bloody lives) that we are experiencing now, is almost exclusively down to the governments of the world's panicked reactions to the hyperbolic predictions of doom the WHO made in respect of the last pandemic, do we really think that this is a good idea?

As things get tougher - and they will get tougher - then expect this use of fear accompanied by an ever tightening of the rules, the degree of authoritarian governance we are subjected to, to rise. As suffering increases in a population, it becomes more fractious - and governments respond to this in the time-honoured fashion, by tightening the screws. We can see it happening almost on a daily basis and it's going to get worse. Almost every thing we are being led to fear in the media will be accompanied by calls for tightening of the rules, and the government will sorrowfully comply. The Israeli situation is a case in point. People are not happy about what is going down in Gaza (they really aren't - I've spoken to many over the shop counter as they buy their papers, and I'll tell you, they don't like it) and some have decided to go onto the streets to let it be known. Because they are mostly Muslims, then the state security services seem to take it that they automatically support the activities of Hamas in their perpetrating atrocities in Israel on October 7. Thus they are low hanging fruit for the likes of Iran to pick up as useful future terrorists for carrying out insurgencies in the UK. Because underneath it all they really hate the UK don't they - these Muslims? This is the subliminal messaging that runs through the media coverage, and so what must the response be - to increase police powers to deal with the protesters, to widen the remit of offences to include certain flag waving, use of certain phrases etc, to make these ordinarily benign things into offences for which you may be pulled from the crowd by baton wielding police officers and hauled before the courts. Already this is the police response to criticisms that they have let such activities go unchallenged. "Well, if no offence has been committed, what are we to do? If you want us to stop this, then change the laws so that waving the (insert particular name here) flag is an offence!" And the government will dutifully comply. And so it goes.

And somewhere, in some future place where things are not as they are now, we ask, "Where did it all go wrong? How did we come to this place?" And the answer is it started here because we let it.

[peter]

I have a degree of sympathy for Boris Johnson.

Following his crash and burn fall from grace and political defenestration, he is fair game for any swipe you want to take at him,which you can do from the safety of knowing that everybody of any significance (ie in the media or establishment more generally, the ones who get to make public comment about such things) will give you a free ride. It's open season as far as Johnson goes.

This is being absolutely demonstrated in the ongoing covid enquiry where everyone and his mother, from the big names like ex Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Valance, to the low minions such as the (effective) Downing Street office boy who gave evidence yesterday, is having a pop at him for his ineffective and chaotic approach to dealing with the virus.

"He changes like the wind." "A weak and ineffectual PM." "His strategy changes from day to day." So run the diary entries and text exchanges pertaining to his conduct. People who stood on the podium beside him at that supposedly crucial time, were, by their current testimony, actually full of scorn for the man they were publicly supporting. The tone of their testimony is very much that Johnson was in a dither, at first refusing to take the virus seriously, and then latterly switching to introduce the (what were to them at the time, and still now as far as the public facade that must be maintained is concerned) correct policies, but too little too late. Questioned about an early episode in which the words "Why destroy the entire economy to save the lives of a few people who are going to die soon anyway" were apparently spoken, the office boy mentioned above said he couldn't remember who said them, but he thought it might have been Johnson.

Well that would be the safe direction to point the finger in certainly, but I'm more interested in the comment itself. Because, despite its callous sounding construction it's basically true. We have destroyed our economies, done irreparable damage to the mental health, the physical health, the education of our children, the very fabric of the society we live in - we have set ourselves back by a generation's worth of progress - for virtually no gain. And the collateral loss of life resulting therefrom as we go forward will be infinitely greater than the quality life hours saved by our disproportionate and ill-advised policies of the time. I said as much as these decisions were being taken and I am proven correct by every statistic, every early death to a cancer not diagnosed, every death above the five year average that occurs day after day, month after month, year after year, as we go forward. We sacrificed the future of our nation to extend the lives of a limited number of individuals who had conditions that would see them off in short order anyway. Johnson is accused of regarding the disease like a bad form of flu at the outset, this is the charge being laid against him, but the irony of the whole thing is that he was absolutely correct in doing so. It is only the absolute necessity of carrying on the charade that the lockdown and public health (as opposed to purely medical) approach taken by the government was the correct one, that makes it so necessary to pretend that Johnson's view at that early point was the wrong one, and that he should be vilified for it.

Better he had had the strength of character to hold that view and to have stuck to it. And to have dragged his cabinet if weak individuals behind him on it,instead of following the rest of the world like a herd of stupid sheep. Perhaps then, like Sweden who had the strength to adopt the correct approach - education and reliance on the public's good sense to carry them through - we would not be in the state that we are now.

(As an interesting aside, I would point out how readily we would - and God forbid, perhaps will - sacrifice our youth on the anvil of a war, should one arise, but assume that the nation's elderly would not be prepared to make the same sacrifice for the future health and prosperity of our nation, in time of a pandemic at which they were the ones pretty much solely at risk. We had far less to loose than young soldiers, but for some reason the future of our nation was sacrificed on the anvil of saving a paltry number of lives, and lives of those already compromised by serious medical conditions.)

But back to the time in question, I referred in an earlier post to the ex Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption, who was a significant voice in crying out against the policies we were following. He said that he was suprised at how easily we cast off the progress of hundreds of years of enlightenment thinking and returned to an almost medieval approach to the virus. Let me amplify on this.

In medieval times, when plagues abounded, it was common policy, on the instruction of the church, to consider the plagues as the judgement of God upon mankind for their ill doings. A common idea was that one had to suffer in order to atone for ones sins, and so during the plagues, people would tramp around the outskirts of their town whipping themselves in a flagelatory attempt to avoid getting the plague by placating God via the suffering they were inflicting upon themselves. In the case of our own plague, Sumption said, it was amazing how the government immediately and without considering anyalternative strategies (and that is the important point) went for a similar kind of 'punishment of the people' strategy. And the public, as they would in the medieval time, immediately followed their instructions and complied with it, without applying the questioning rationale that three hundred years of enlightenment thinking should have brought to bear on the subject.

This is crucial to understand. No consideration was given to voices from the scientific community that were begging for a more considered approach to be taken - in fact these brave individuals were vilified for their opinions - and rather, without a single thought being given towards less socially and economically damaging approaches, the most destructive policy of all that could be levied, was settled upon.

And now we come on to the vaccination scandal.

Heaping insult upon injury, the government forced through, by circumventing the existing safety protocols of testing, the early rollout of essentially untested new products, misleadingly labelled as vaccines, but in effect using new technologies of which no understanding of their long-term side effects, either on the individual or on the public genome as a whole, was known. To this day it remains unknown what the effects of this has or will be. Evidence is now beginning to accumulate that at least some of the products used were neither as safe nor effective as the government promised us they were. The Astra-Zenica product in particular has come under intense scrutiny on this front.

In a sparsely attended House of Commons debate a few days ago - and it's amazing how disinterested our parliament is when it comes to consideration of these questions.....none of the decision makers of the day were present - on the safety of said vaccines, Conservative Party MP Esther McVey asked the following question.

If the Danish government of the day, saw evidence of the possible harmful side effects of the Astra-Zenica vaccine after around 800,000 doses had been administered, such that they stopped using it, first in the 18 to 40 year old age group, and then subsequently altogether, what were these side effects that our health professionals either did not see or chose to ignore, such that 24 million doses of the same vaccine were administered in this country? I confess a personal interest in the answer to this question; I was given two of them.

I am fully aware that there is no appetite to answer these questions. The scandal of what was done to the country, the people, under the collective madness which was the Covid pandemic is simply too big for either the individual perpetrators or indeed the establishment as a whole ever to acknowledge. It would mean the end of people's trust in their ruling classes, the tearing down of the existing order to be replaced by what - anarchy? - for a period, and I don't suppose any of us want that. But behind it all, we all know the truth. That is why I'm the lone voice bleating about it here in these pages. Those individuals who championed the cause of lockdown and the restrictions of 2 meter rules etc have no more to say. The evidence of time has destroyed their position so now they stay silent while the government's that led us down this disastrous path do their utmost to maintain the fictions they would paper over the truth with.

And that means that sacrificial cows like Boris Johnson are needed. Well, okay - we've sacrificed so much already that throwing Johnson on top of the pyre won't amount to much, but hey, next time Boris, do us all a favour. Instead of folding to media and the exaggerated predictions of 'the science', just step back a bit and remember, walking round the walls of your city whipping yourself with a leather thong didn't work much six hundred years ago, so it's unlikely to work very well now either.

[peter]

So Boris Johnson thought that old people should have been prepared to accept their fate during the Covid period? Well I agree and I'm one of them.

There was absolutely no need to destroy our economy, future prospects or societal fabric in response to this relatively (by comparison with other viral pathogens we could have encountered) innocuous virus. The consequence of our ill conceived and medieval approach to the pathogen are reported on a daily basis and will be felt (as well as experienced in the form of elevated death statistics) for years to come.

Absolutely predictably, the current Baroness Hallet led enquiry has descended into soap opera, with mud-slinging and name calling being the chief points of reportage being covered by our media.

Yesterday saw the odious Dominic Cummings in the char, his testimony a gift to the media who could throw their hands up in horror that a man in Downing Street could describe his colleagues as "cunts". So what? I'd been describing them as cunts for months before that. So had everyone else. The media pretend particular shock that he should describe one of the female civil service staff in No.10 with this word. And? Is it supposed to be an insult reserved only for men then?

Again they seem to think it news that the Johnson administration's dealing with the pandemic was chaotic and shambolic at best. At what point would it not have been? This was Boris Johnson we are talking about. Years before Michael Gove had said he wasn't fit to run a piss-up in a brewery let alone be prime minister of this country, and everybody with half an eye on him understood him to be a complete clown (nearly said cunt there). Gove was simply telling the truth and we all knew it (but "Boris was funny" and so we voted him in anyway.)

For months we have heard nothing about what the enquiry has been hearing and now because there is a bit of juicy insulting going on it's all over the front pages.

This is what our media has become. A soap opera for misdirection and entertainment, pulp rubbish for the masses to keep them from asking the real questions. Like why did you fuck up our country for nothing, for a virus that had no-one ever told you was any different you wouldn't have even known it was there. Instead the relatives of victims are wheeled out to maintain the show, to tell us how shocked they are by what they are hearing. Of course they are hurt, are shocked, are grieving. They lost loved ones. But those loved ones would in the main have died anyway. They were the sick and the vulnerable. They by and large would have had a death certificate being written out with their names on it in short order anyway, just with a different cause of death. For the tiny few healthy individuals who were taken, I'm sorry but this happens. With every flu virus in every flu season. This may have been a bit worse than normal, but not markedly so. But what will be markedly different will be the cumulative quality life hours being lost above the expected five year average, because the funds are no longer available for cancer screening, for heart and blood pressure screening, for breast, cervical and prostate screening, for addiction centers, and services to help the mentally ill and services for home visits to the elderly and even to mend the fucking potholes in the road that send some poor cunt spinning into the concrete stanchion that kills him. And the relatives of those people will be shocked and grieving as well. But there won't be a camera to shove into their face, because there won't be a spin to be got out of it. They'll just be the poor ignored victims of the future, not even aware that it is the imaginary pandemic that has killed their loved ones, probably by then even having forgotten that there was such a thing.

We used to talk about the 'new normal'. I hated the expression then and I fucking hate it still. But we surely have seen it come to pass. We now have governments that lie brazenly to the people, that barely bother to hide the subterfuge and manipulatory tactics they use to hoodwink the public. We have definitions that change by the day according to what need they have to meet ('safe and effective', my arse) and in an ever flowing and continuous stream of news coverage, no depth is ever reported to the point where any real understanding can be achieved. (If you don't have time to report the background story behind the Hamas attack on Israel because the news stream is running so fast, then the only explanation you can provide is hate and the human capacity for evil, and this then frames the debate. ) The truth becomes what ever it is expedient for it to be on the day. Nazis who killed the Jews 80 years ago were evil, but today can be saluted in parliament because they were simultaneously killing Russians. Evil yesterday, hero today. When news becomes nothing but what is happening immediately before ones eyes, nothing is understood and anything becomes possible. News speak becoming newspeak before our eyes.

My ability to articulate this stuff is limited by my limited abilities (see what I mean), but it is important. If posterity has the means to read this stuff, even in the badly expressed fashion in which I get it down, then it will be recognised as a significant watershed in the way our society functioned. This is your new normal. An unremitting diet of fear propoganda and manipulation. An Orwellian world in which the truth is whatsoever the holder of power of the day decides that it is. I hope you are satisfied with it.

[peter]

As an aside to my above post of earlier today, I'd like to add the following.

Perhaps the most pertinent thing said on any of this morning's front pages was a small sub-header low down on the 'i' that read "Johnson was more concerned about the economy and the young." Given the previous headlines it seemed an almost unwittingly positive remark in his favour.

Given the fallout from the policies that were ultimately followed I think he was right to be. Both have been severely if not irreparably damaged by the lockdown policy and the shutting down of the economy.

Despite the apparently callous spin being put on his words in respect of 'letting the elderly die', I suspect that the real truth of it was that Johnson knew that the policies being advocated were wrong and ruinous, but was too weak a PM to force his position. I suspect that what is now being presented as dithering on his part, was in fact his futile attempt to get others within the government to see things from his point of view. Johnson was, I think, a weak PM, not a malign one.

But we do not rule by autocracy in this country - we are governed by consensus. So if in cabinet Johnson was unable to convince a majority of his fellow ministers to support his position, he would have been bound by these rules to support theirs. A British Prime Minister is after all not a dictator, but merely 'first among equals'.

But as I said on a previous day's post, Johnson is fair game for copping the blame at the moment. Sunak is certainly not going to do anything to contradict the way the wind is blowing and why would he. His part in the whole episode is not exactly squeaky clean is it.

Anyway, that's it for today. If you haven't read my previous post please do - I thought it was a good one. (Ps. Sorry about the language in it, but if it's okay for Dominic Cummings then I thought it was okay for me as well.

[peter]

Hamas commited an outrageous terrorist attack on Israel in which they murdered and kidnapped men, women and children. And now Israel is taking its revenge by a bombing and ground assault in Gaza, in the course of which it is murdering thousands of men, women and children in return.

And the world is going to stand back and watch this and nothing is going to be done about it.

I use the words murdered and murdering because this is exactly what it is. A war that is so one-sided in terms of military capability ceases to be a war and becomes a turkey shoot. At this point the victims of such a campaign cease to be simply civilian casualties, collateral damage, and become instead something else instead....murder victims.

Murder is defined as being the unlawful and premeditated killing of one human being by another.

The October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas is relatively simple. A rabid horde of mainly men I'd guess, broke through the border fence separating Israel from Gaza and once in Israel, set about killing Israeli citizens by foul and tortuous methods in a clear and premeditated way. Irrespective of Palestinian grievances, the long history of religious and territorial conflict between the two sides, this was unlawful; being premeditated as well it immediately becomes a clear case of mass murder.

The Secretary General has said that the indiscriminate and blanket bombing of Gaza by Israel constitutes collective punishment and as such is illegal. That the bombing is intended to kill people, among which some of the guilty parties from the above raid on Israel will be found, but many of whom will have had nothing to do with it, is also undeniable. The overwhelming evidence is that the majority of the dead in Gaza fall into the latter category (unless the October 7 perpetrators were composed mainly of women and children).

In both cases then, the killing is both premeditated and unlawful.

One human by another though?

Well, I'd argue that humans definitely lie behind the planning on both sides, so that's easy enough, but one human by another? Well, neither the Hamas planners nor the perpetrators can have known the individual victims they would kill, but they had to know that individual people would be killed so in this sense, it does constitute the killing of one human by another, and therfore murder.

The Israeli situation is somewhat different in that the distance between the men ordering the bombing, the men releasing the bombs, firing the missiles etc, is greater, but I'd argue that it still constitutes the killing of one human by another in that the planners know that people will die as a result of what they are planning. Collectively, they are individually responsible for what they have planned, what they are doing. Collectively, each one of those planning the bombing raids,the ground assaults, is responsible for the killing of each one of those victims inside Gaza. And thus does it constitute the killing of one human being by another, and thus do I justify using the terms murdered and murdering.

So here we are. From the different sides of the fence we might sit on, we are come to a place where we sit and watch groups of people murdering each other, and we will do nothing about it. In fact we will go so far in some cases, as to condone it. We'll dress it up in phrases like, "Israel has the right to defend herself," or, "The Palestinian people have lived under brutal occupation for decades," - but behind it all it remains just what it is. Muder carried out under the justification of territorial claim.

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Yesterday it was Helen MacNamara's turn to take the stand in the covid enquiry, and it was a bizarre session to say the least.

MacNamara, who was the woman who Dominic Cummings was talking about when he called her a ***t in a text message to Johnson, was in the thick of the Downing Street machine in the early days of the covid response planning, made it plain that from start to finish, none of the covid rules which we were all being instructed to follow were being adhered to. It's not clear whether she was shocked by this or not, whether she was a believer in the biblical proportions of the threat we faced, or whether she thought it was all bunkum - her testimony seemed to veer between the two opposing positions - but what is clear is that she herself was not to bothered about keeping to the rules.

We know this because she was fined by the metropolitan police for attending a party - indeed she had personally provided the notorious karaoke machine that was used in the basement of Number 10 for the event that went on until 4 am in the morning.

What she has thus far declined to say is that she and none of her Downing Street colleagues were following the rules because they all knew that they were an unnecessary overreaction to what was in effect a minimal threat to anybody other than the already most compromised individuals from a health perspective. Basically they all knew it was crap, but were just running with it anyway.

She appears to have had some kind of 'epiphany', a panic attack or something, at which point she went to PM Johnson and said that they had no plan - they were sleepwalking into disaster. It never happened of course. The only disaster that occurred what they did to the country in pursuit of chasing this phantom.

The session yesterday, and the reportage of it today is a odd mix of 'not quite sure if I believe covid is a threat or not' and 'it was all about male ego's and testosterone'. Of course it was impossible that we'd get through this thing without it turning into a man-hating exercise at some point and today we have it. Women's lives were put at risk by the machismo attitudes of Downing Street we are told. Ms MacNamara was "disappointed" that Boris Johnson let Dominic Cummings get away with calling her a ***t without reprimanding him. The atmosphere of Downing Street was a male orientated testosterone fest, etc, etc.

I'm not being funny but is this woman's thin skin really the issue here? Isn't the idea that we should be inquiring into the effectiveness of the government strategy in dealing with covid? Am I missing something here? Yesterday we had the Dominic Cummings Circus in town, complete with lurid texts and Barnard Castle high jinks. Today it's the 'it's all the fault of men's brigades turn. At what point is this enquiry going to turn serious and get down to the really core questions that need answering?

The answe to this is of course already predictable. Never. Baroness Hallet's report when it finally lands will follow the official narrative. That covid was a threat of biblical proportions that, due to the chaotic response of an ill-prepared administration, resulted in the deaths of thousands of individuals who, had they (Downing Street) been capable of gearing themselves up to deal with in a systematic and efficient way, would otherwise have been spared. Johnson will be singled out as the main culprit with a few notable side actors, Matt Hancock being the main one. Thus will all be seen to be good. The policies advocated will be confirmed as being the correct ones, just ineffectively administered and enforced, and the main villains of the piece established. Johnson will suffer excoriating press, but no criminal or otherwise proceedings will be brought, it being deemed that his incompetence was in large part due to the unknown nature of the threat being dealt with. Thus will the investigation into the biggest crime perpetrated against the people of this country in their history be concluded, and nothing of value whatsoever be learned, be taken away for our future benefit.

So it will end.

[peter]

I'm sure we will all sleep safer in our beds knowing that Rishi Sunak is here to protect us.

The PM repeated his assurance that the government was working to keep the country safe from rogue AI yesterday, but aside from this the 4 day conference at Bletchley Park (I think it was 4 days - around that anyway) in which some of the big names in AI development met with government officials and notably the PM himself, ended with a 'fantasy interview' between entrepreneur Elon Musk and Sunak himself.

I say fantasy, not so much in terms of being like 'fantasy football' or a 'fantasy dinner party' (you know the stuff), but more in terms of what the pair seemed to have been talking about.

Musk was telling us that AI would be able to do simply anything, that people would only work if they wanted to and Sunak seemed not to agree, but said rather that work gave people's lives meaning and that AI should be seen more as an ever present aide, a constant all-knowing advisor sitting by ones side and having input into everything that you do. Musk pressed the need for robots to have "off switches", to safeguard against their going batshit bonkers and chasing you up a tree, but he also said that AI robots would become our 'friends', having much beter knowledge and understanding of us than any human counterpart could ever achieve, and being able to talk with us on any subject we found interesting (presumably at our own level rather than as an ever present university lecturer a million times smarter - I mean, Beavis would need his Butthead wouldn't he.....not fucking Albert Einstein sitting on his shoulder?) Both Sunak and Musk spoke in terms of AI being an adjunct in human productivity, helping to create a world of abundance (yeah, I've heard this one before.....I'll not hold my breath on it) and Musk went so far as to say that we wouldn't see a universal basic income, rather than a universal high income being doled out.

In my experience, the Sunak's and Musk's of this world are not very keen on the idea of everyone else sharing all of the same advantages that they enjoy over and above the hoi-poloi....... Where's the fun in that. As a species we seem hardwired not to want plenty (in the sense of 'an existence of plenty') - although this is always nice - but rather just to visibly have more than our peers, our neighbours. There's little appeal in having ultimate abundance if everyone else around you has it as well. But leaving this aside, there are other problems with this utopian bollocks as well. I mean, what's the point of increasing productivity in a world that is screaming out for productivity to be reduced? It's productivity in excess, throwaway produce, ever wanting new products and just disposal of the old stuff, that's clogging the world up with our discarded refuse. Tell Greta Thunberg that we are on the cusp of a limitless productivity and I think she will beg to differ with the argument that the Earth might have something to say about that.

And what exactly are all of these eight, ten, twenty billion people with no jobs to do going to do with themselves? At least Musk seemed to recognise this as a problem. Finding meaning in our lives will, he said, be the main hurdle that we will face. Yeah, well - not most of us I suspect. I dare say my milieu is somewhat different to Elon Musk's, but I can assure him - I encounter any number of people in any given working day that get along just fine without feeling the need for 'meaning' in their lives. Given the choice between pursuing a Buddha like search for meaning or getting in a few hours on the X Box, alas I know which most of us choose to do (guilty as charged m'lud). And as for Sunak's point about work giving your life meaning.....well that might work for him and his ilk, but I'm not sure how far it cuts if you're stacking shelves in Tesco for a living or working a 7-11. No, I suspect in Musk's world of plenty there'll somehow always be the need for the flunky sweeping the lawn in the morning, or the clown who cleans your shoes at midnight and lives in a single room in the basement. And as for those others, the teeming millions sitting on their arses doing nothing but soaking up the abundance..... Well they will never exist. Because if that AI can do one thing, it can sort out problems, and until we have the means to travel out to the stars, or at least the asteroid belt, then those excess mouths are going to be nothing less than a problem to be sorted out. I don't know how it'll be done, but Musk's utopia will be for the rich and beautiful only. Aside from the few flunkies to provide for the feelgood factor, and maybe a few crammed Blade Runner style cities from which they'll be drawn and to which they'll return, there won't be teeming billions of abundance enjoying couch-potatoes.

It must have been fun for Rishi (700, 000, 000 pounds) Sunak and Elon (a good few billion pounds) Musk to sit there and dream about their futures, but for the rest of us it was nonsense. Because in case you haven't sussed it out yet, when it comes to futures for the bulk of us, the brutal truth is that we haven't got any.

The pair of them sat in their own gilded existence, musing on the future lives of people about whom they understand nothing. Set in Bletchley Park, the place where Alan Turing invented the future (and I really mean this), deliberately chosen as the venue for this gathering by virtue of its symbolic significance, rather than confronting the reality of the lives of the people who are most effected by the decisions they make, they instead chose to indulge themselves in an hour of pontificating pompous bullshit. This summit was the elites of the political world meeting with the elites of the industry that will unleash this technology, to ensure that it is done in a way that their own preferential positions are not threatened, and that the sheep beneath them are farmed in the unsual manner for whatever revenue or advantage that can be sheared away from them. And the public interview was the final showpiece of a meeting in which the true decisions, the ones that will determine our futures, will remain behind closed doors, sealed in the private conversations and secret handshakes about which we will never hear anything.

[peter]

That our state is becoming more authoritarian by the day is a given to anyone who follows the media in anything greater than the most cursory of fashions.

Today alone we have two examples (and counting) of things that the government either plan to stop, or just don't like us doing.

They certainly don't like us marching in protest - about pretty much anything. This morning's press tells us that Rishi Sunak thinks that marching in London in support of the Palestinian people and a ceasefire in Gaza is "against British values".

At what point I ask, is being against the blanket bombardment of 2.5 million people trapped in a compound 35 miles long by a couple miles wide against British values? At what point is finding the decades long occupation Palestinian lands, the forcible eviction of people from their homes, the apartheid conditions levelled against a people treated as pretty much vermin in their own home lands against British values? Well - I suppose, when you put it like that, given our own record of colonial occupation (which some see the State of Israel as being essentially a final remnant of, in its own particular way), I suppose he has a point.

God knows I love my country, but I'm the first to acknowledge that in the past we have done terrible things, got things seriously wrong. I'm not sure that "British values" means the same thing in other parts of the world as it does here.

But going back to the marches, which seem to be becoming a regular weekly feature in London as the situation in Israel-Gaza beds in for the long haul, it's inevitable that in the friable atmosphere of such events that some individuals will take things too far, will shout things that are not in line with the sentiments of the huge majority of marchers. But this is no reason why the marches should be discouraged or the marchers en masse disparaged. The right to protest is fundamental in a functional democracy (I wonder if we still qualify for this 'honorific'?), but our lot definitely don't seem to like it. They recon that around a million people may be joining the march scheduled for Armistice Sunday, and contrary to the Government thinking, I can't think of a better day to hold it. (Ex footballer and now BBC presenter and Government nemesis Gary Lineker seems to agree with me as well, which is a bonus.) This is a day we remember the fallen. Well they are falling in Gaza as we speak, and because they are not wearing uniforms, but rather are the brothers and sisters who, if they lived in our communities, we would embrace as ones of our own (just as we do our Jewish brethren), does not mean that we should be silent about what is being done to them. Nothing we can do will bring back the people murdered by Hamas terrorists in Israel, the wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza under the cloak of destroying Hamas will not avenge it. When our government seems hogtied to the idea that Israel must be supported irrespective of what it does in response, then protest becomes the only means by which a message of opposition can be sent.

-----0-----

In my second example of the state tightening its grip, we have Home Secretary Suella Braverman up to her old tricks (come back Priti Patel, all is forgiven).

This time her attention has been caught by rough sleepers erecting tents for shelter within urban areas. This is obstructive of thoroughfares, causes a nuisance, and has to stop. There might be two possible solutions here; we could tackle the problem of homelessness, of which nearly a third of a million people in this country suffer, or we could ban the use of tents in urban areas outside your own property. Braverman has opted for the latter.

To nip the problem at its source as it were, she also intends to introduce penalties against charities that give out free tents to rough sleepers (of whom there are around 3000 in our cities on any given night. To effect these changes (no doubt amongst a plethora of others not as yet reported), Braverman is introducing a new criminal justice bill, as well as beefing up the existing rough sleeping laws and begging prohibitions, which go back to the 1824 Vagrancy Act.

It's a Tory trick as old as the hills to blame the victims of their own policies for the dire straits they find themselves in, and I suspect Braverman relishes the reputation of being the Whip Wielder General for the Sunak administration. And boy have they given her meat to practice on. Since they have been in power they've done everything possible to increase poverty and destitution at the bottom of our society, not deliberately so much as just an inconsequential side effect of looking after their own class at the top. But as the social consequences of their policies become ever more visible (and homelessness is an absolutely key indicator of the general health of an economy, of the balance of wealth), ever more undermining and damaging, then ever tighter measures are required to hold the general societal anger in check. And this is done via authoritarian legislation designed to tighten up the lid on the pressure. And you don't need me to spell out what happens when this vicious circle of increasing pressure followed by tightening eventually blows but I'm going to anyway. The thing goes off like a bomb.