What Do You Think Today?

[Savor Dam]

QFT

if you ever find yourself at Kings Cross Station in London and have an odd desire to walk into a wall between platforms 9 and 10, take my advice.....don't!

There are hidden doors, albeit not necessarily magical.
Whatever; if you don't know how to work it (and get out of it!), don't mess with it.

[peter]

As an aside to the comments I was making on the Times article extolling the results of trials utilising facial recognition technology in town centers (up to this point normally only used for mass surveillance at large scale events such as football finals, where terrorist threat may be heightened), I'd point out the irony of the fact that when such tech was described previously as being routinely used in China, it was presented as a totalitarian style of overreach by an authoritarian regime, bent on wholesale invasion into the lives of its subjects. Suddenly however, now that our own security and law enforcement services are warming to the idea of a more general rollout of its use, its 'positive' virtues are being pushed to the fore; it seems that the identical technology, when used by us, must be considered in a more benign light, since our state bodies would never in a million years be tempted to use such for the same pernicious ends as the Chinese state. Now would they?

(That incidentally, was I thought, probably one of the most important subjects I'd adressed in a long time, especially so insofar as I take a slant on it not usually adressed - ie what happens when you mix the widespread use of such mass surveillance technology with the current advances in AI in terms of its almost preternatural predictive abilities.......seems that you really are getting close to that MinorityReport style scenario, but in a far more dangerous way than the film recognises). If you haven't read it, I'd urge you to go back and do so - not for vanity reasons because I think it so good or anything, but because it is so damn important to start thinking about the direction our leaderships are taking on this score. Do we really trust them that much to let changes of this nature be introduced without so much as a by-your-leave or any kind of public acquiesce, let alone consultation or debate having occurred.)

-----0-----

It's long been rumoured that Home Secretary James Cleverly is not the sharpest pencil in the box (despite his name), and this morning's report on the front page of the Sunday Mirror would seem to confirm it.

Cleverly, not in the least bit cleverly, apparently made a joke at a Number 10 reception, about spiking his wife's drink with, "Only a little bit," of the date-rape drug Rohypnol. "That would be okay, wouldn't it?", he continued, clearly not noticing that the jaws of the people he was talking to were resting on their shoes. His failure to get that jokes like this were absolutely not okay was made all the worse by the fact that he had only shortly beforehand, mentioned the drug in a speech he had given (which, in fairness, was probably where he learned the name of the drug for the first time).

I'm not being funny but..... This is our Home Secretary! We rely on this man's judgment for countless things that really effect our day to day lives - and now it seems that he hasn't got any! The Sunday morning political slots would eat him for breakfast if they were up and doing, but I suspect that they're off on their Christmas break by now. He might therefore get lucky and get away with this, but it'll be close. If I was a gambling man I'd take a punt that this will cost him his job.

The complete twat!

-----0-----
Chancellor Hunt is on the front of this morning's Sunday Express telling us not to listen to the "Scrooges" who talk Britain down. The country has now "turned a corner" and we can look forward to a "brighter year ahead".

I mean - what frikkin' cloud is this man on? Perhaps James Cleverly has gotten a bit too close to his Christmas champers, because he's clearly seeing a different economic picture to the rest of us.

Now Jeremy - watch my mouth.

Inflation is not under control......you fiddled the figures to make it look like it was better than it was. American inflation is under control - it's down at two percent (less actually). Ours is not. With mortgage costs and food included it's way higher than the Bank of England's two percent target, and food inflation itself is still running at nine percent. And that's before the additional costs of the forthcoming trade tarrif rules with the EU kick in. And there's the effect of the Israel-Hamas conflict yet to make itself felt. Come on - you know this. Stop with that gormless smile and inane posturing and get real for a minute.

Economic growth is flatlining (or perhaps you missed recent ONS report on our GDP which revised it down) and we're teetering on the brink of a recession. Our trade with our closest (and biggest) trading partner is shot to shit and the best deal we have secured in the last twelve months replaces approximately one hundredth - one hundredth - of what we have lost by leaving the EU. In fifteen years time. If everything goes to plan. Every public service in the country is down on its knees and there isn't so much as a pot to piss in when it comes to funding their revival. No - the only money you will be able to find will be given away in pre-election tax breaks that will do not one thing in terms of fixing these services.

But bribery of the electorate isn't going to cut it this time mate! The truth is you've blown it, you and your self-interested mates who've screwed this country into the ground for your own personal gain. The game's up and probably the only ****'s in the country stupid enough to believe your mugging up to the cameras, your bald flights of fantasy into economic cloud-cuckoo land, are the ones stupid enough to be buying the shit-sheet you are speaking in in the first place. But even they must be twigging by now. Counting on their fingers with their neanderthal brows furrowed in concentration, even they must be getting that the figures don't add up.

I'm normally of the belief that most politicians are doing what they do in the belief that they are working in the best interests of the country. Misguided they may be, but in the past I do believe that things have been done with at least the best of intentions. But for this lot I'd make an exception. What they have done in the past 14 years to this country is so egregiosly bad, so beyond the pale in terms of its consequences, both present and future that I'd make an exception in their case. You should be ashamed of yourself and your party Mr Hunt. You will not soon be forgotten nor forgiven.

[peter]

As Christmas day dawns and people (and no doubt excited children) up and down the country begin to stir and make preparations for the festivities they have planned, I think it apposite to remember what is proceeding apace in the desolation that is Gaza.

But more specifically today, I'd mention what isn't happening in the place where Christ was actually born, many many miles away in Bethlehem.

Because Christmas festivities have been cancelled in the very place where Christ first drew breath, in grief and remembrance of the twenty thousand plus inhabitants of Gaza that have been killed by the Netanyahu mediated response to the October 7 atrocity.

Situated south of Jerusalem in the West Bank, Bethlehem is home to the Church of the Nativity, where this year, rather than the usual 'manger scene' that is displayed, a new installation has been put together, in which a child instead of nestling on a bed of hay, lies covered in dust on a bed of concrete. News reports from the town speak to disconsolate small shop owners who stand outside empty premises in deserted streets - streets that would normally be thronging with celebrants coming to the home of Christianity to experience the wonder of their faith's most important day. But not this year. Rather instead, the horror of what is unfolding in their neighboring Palestinian territory hangs over them,and they have no heart to follow their usual tradition of celebrating Christmas (either as Christians, or as Muslims who are caught up in the joy of the day) in the face of such suffering.

I've said above, I'm not given to run with the spirit of Christmas overmuch in normal circumstances (most of the spirit I encounter in the period runs out of the bottles I spend my days selling) and I find the banal orgy of consumerism that surrounds it not to my tast. But this year I stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Betlehem in grief for what is transpiring in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and somehow Christmas has become the more important to me in consideration of it.

So today, as I cook and do the best I can to provide for those around me (in support of my indefatigable wife who puts me to shame in every respect) I hope to concentrate on the plight of those people half a world away, whose world will be raining down around them with bombs and bullets and bloodshed, as we speak.

-----0-----

I finished work at 8pm last night, an hour earlier than usual, and as the last customer, who I refused entry because it was one minute to 8 and he was paralytic drunk, weaved his way up the street, I reflected on my situation.

If you were a waiter in a restaurant, you put yourself out for a table of guests and did your best to make their evening special, what would your thoughts be if they proceeded to tip you fifty pence or half a dollar? Would you find it borderline insulting, and perhaps feel that it might have been better had they not actually bothered at all?

You might perhaps think that they were sending you a message that they thought you'd done a really poor job, but if you knew that you'd really done your best, then perhaps you'd feel that this was unfair.

But let's say that these obviously affluent people had genuinely believed that the fifty pence tip was a good thing to leave, as opposed to say, just paying the bill and leaving without tipping at all, how would you look at this? With contempt? Bemusement? Would you even find it perhaps, funny?

Imagine my response then, when my assistant manager came towards me one day earlier in the month to give me a Christmas bonus, and I opened the envelope to find a ten pound voucher inside, which is marginally less than an hours wage In my shop. Ten pounds. That's less than 10 pence a day worked. The voucher had to be spent within the shop itself, but in fairness I could avail myself of the standard ten percent staff discount in doing so.

I was tempted to send a card to head office thanking them, but didn't want to spring for the card and stamp and thereby loose a third of the sum I'd received. (I'm not sure, but I don't believe there are any tax implications associated with my ex gratia payment, but perhaps I'd better look into it to be on the safe side; I don't want the tax people down on my back.) But anyways, I spent the voucher last night on a stuffed tiger, the reason behind my purchase of which is a story in its own right (and one which, if popular demand reahes a sufficient level of clamour, perhaps I can be persuaded to relate).

But I digress. Still unsure of what my reaction should be to receiving a ten pound shop voucher for my Christmas bonus - before the paint was dry as it were - the effect of the bonus was somewhat mitigated by the announcement that we'd be closing an hour earlier on Christmas eve anyway - and so I'd actually loose more in wages than the value I'd gained from the voucher anyway! Now don't get me wrong, it's nice to get home a bit early for sure - but the difference between 8 o'clock and 9 on a Christmas eve doesn't exactly amount to much and frankly, I'd rather have had the money.

So as I drew in the shutters for the night, fended away that last drunken oaf who'd thought it a good idea to stagger into a shop a minute before closing on Christmas eve, I wondered if perhaps I was in the wrong job? The shop I work in has large quantities of cash and goods in it. It has to be carefully closed up and alarms set etc, before it is left for the Christmas day break in trading. It's a position of some responsibility and I'd think that ten pounds an hour payment to the person charged with that responsibility was pretty good value for money. Perhaps he or she might even have been worth more than a ten quid voucher, given that that responsibility is executed week in and week out for 52 weeks per year? But then, I sighed, it is what it is. No doubt I'm lucky to have a job at all at my age. It's not like I'd rather be putting up my feet and enjoying a well earned retirement or anything. Enjoying the lowest state pension in Europe next to Armenia or somewhere, doesn't exactly provide for much of that!

And all of this got me to thinking about the country I live in. Wealth inequality isn't quite as high as it was in Victorian times.....but it's a damn close thing. 0.1 percent of the population hold ten percent of the entire wealth of the country, an equivalent amount to that held by the bottom fifty percent. The top ten percent of holders have forty percent of the pot. And things are only getting worse. As someone said in an economic breakdown of the country's woes I was listening to the other day, none of this is going to change while the people do not demand that it does. Why would it? The recipients of the country's income and wealth, the movers and shakers as it were, have no incentive to change things while ever things just progress that way without the complaint of the people. Indifference to this situation will prevail in the people, until the rising levels of poverty intrudes through their tech absorbed attention, until they suddenly find that they cannot both continue to pour over Facebook and tiktok (or whatever it is called where they exchange their banalities) and eat. At this point a startled realisation of their situation will hit them, that while they've been diverted with crap, wealth has been siphoned away upwards, and what happens then is anyone's guess.

But in the meantime I'll just keep closing up the doors and turning off the lights. But when it comes to the vouchers next year, do me a favour - change it on the system so that at least I can get the discount on a packet of tabs. At least then my annual bonus will cover them.

[peter]

King Charles, echoing the words of the indefatigable Governor of the State of Texas (see Best LittleWhorehouseinTexas) - if not literally then certainly in spirit - says that it behoves the Jews and the Arabs to sit down and settle their differences in a Christian manner; Prince Louis steals the show at the Sandringham Christmas Day church service, walking in alongside his family with a look on his face that tells you that at five years old he is already absolutely aware that he is better than every person lining the approach to the Church who has turned out to see them: At last it seems that a few of the countries leading economists might have cottoned on to the fact that the closure of the Red-Sea to international shipping mighthave an effect on inflation in the coming year, despite the Chancellor's assertion that we have "turned the corner". (Perhaps they belatedly got around to reading my posts over what, the last ten days or so.) These are the things we see in the press this morning, following yesterday's Christmas Day break in the publishing.

What else have we got. Kier Stamer is gearing himself up for a sprinting start into campaigning mode, in preparation for this year's almost certain general election. He's cobbling up an alternative plan to the government's Rwanda deal (one that might involve Tanzania or somewhere, but will not include any proscription of any individual shipped there from ever applying to reside in the UK) in order to demonstrate that he is not 'soft on immigration'. Knife crime is rampant amongst drug gangs in London - not surprising really because the only immigrants that have avoided being sent to prison hulks like the Bibby Stockholm (or other "not grim enough" detention centers - see Robert Jenrick stories from earlier in the year) are Armenian drug lords who now wander the streets with impunity and in complete freedom to ply their chosen profession. Richard Tice's Reform UK Party is increasing its polling in the country, in direct threat to the Tories, from whose ranks most of their prospective voters will be drawn. They are now running at nine percent in the polls, in contrast to the five percent they began the year with. It might not seem much, but with the mortally wounded Tories hemorrhaging votes on two fronts as their normally steadfast voters register in disgust what has become of their dearly loved party, their prospects do not look good.

And finally right wing Tories from the 'Trussonomics' school of economic thought are pressing the Governor of the Bank of England to immediately reduce interest rates in order to give the flagging economy a boost (prior, no doubt in their private thinking, to the general election). That this would be in direct contradiction of everything that the Bank has been trying to achieve on the inflation reduction front over the past twelve plus months does not seem to have occurred to them. That any progress on inflation reduction over this period could be undone overnight is a consideration that, like the idle wind, they regardeth not! Conservative stalwarts such as ex Chairman Jake Berry, arch Brexiteer John Redwood and needless to say honorary (not actually) toff-in-residence, Jacob Rees-Mogg have all approached Governor Andrew Bailey to tell him he's been "asleep at the wheel" and that his mixed approach to the monetary policy and interest controls has pushed us into an unnecessary recession and generally fucked things up. They are backed in this by the (so the Express tells us) "highly respected" Center for Economics and Business Research: that would be the lot that, if my memory serves me, gave birth to the Truss policy of borrowing shit-loads of cash to give it away in wheelbarrowfulls to the richest people in the country by slashing taxes - a policy that took a wrecking ball to the UK gilt markets and damn near train-crashed the entire world economy.

So Andrew, if you happen to be reading my post this morning (as I'm sure you are wont to do) take rather my advice to put Motorhead on your headphones and turn the volume up to full at the first sign of any one of these klutz's walking up your path. Under no circumstances allow any one of them to utter a single word before you stuff your three-day worn underpants straight into their gaping mugholes!

[peter]

It's a pretty slow day for news today.

Another terrible 24 hours in Gaza with upwards of 240 people killed and the usual reports of chaos in hospitals, bombings of refugee centers....... pretty much the kind of stuff we are getting used to in terms of how this - whatever it is now (because it certainly isn't a war in the conventional sense).

Israeli defence minister Yolav Gallant has said that Israel is fighting a war on seven different fronts now and he named them, but he didn't go so far as to include the streets and squares of in which Israel continues to level the buildings around the civilian population of Gaza. There may or may not remain to be Palestinians in the strip when this is all over, but it's an absolute given that there will be no infrastructure left for it to occupy if there is. Does this constitute an ethnic cleansing? I don't know: you tell me.

On the broader front, more internationally, things get more dangerous by the day. Spats between Iran and America threaten to grow into a bigger conflict and feed into the already parlous situation between Israel and her neighbours. Red sea problems threaten to spill out into the Indian Ocean with at least one merchant ship damaged and forced to return to port for repairs. One gets the impression that this whole thing is sort of teetering in the balance - that whatever God of fate or whatever that decides these things, hasn't quite made up its mind yet if this is going to be the big one, the game changer.

Domestically the Guardian has run I think the most important and sensible story, reporting on a comment by ex GCHQ chief David Omand, that this business of running the government of the country by WhatsApp messenger is a nonsense.

WhatsApp may be fine for carrying on the background chatter of communication between ministers and government employees, civil servants etc, but as a tool for involvement in key decision making processes, its wholly inappropriate. It simply doesn't allow for the nuance of expression and meaning that face to face meetings allow for, and while it may have had some useful function during the height of the lockdown period when movement was restricted, as an instrument for use on a general basis it should be wholly avoided. Keep it for the purpose for which it is suited - chatter - he said.

The additional problems of its use, when it comes to investigation of governmental decisions, at a later stage, has recently been given example of course by the covid enquiry. WhatsApp messages of key decision makers at critical times during the pandemic have been found to be missing or otherwise unavailable, hampering the quality of the investigation that can be carried out and casting a pall of opacity over the critical time periods in question. Key ministers, not least the Prime Minister, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Chief Cabinet Secretary have all somehow managed to loose their messages for the time period covering these major decisions. Convenient perhaps in terms of sparing their embarrassment, but not exactly conducive to good governance or the principal of democracy.

There's the usual pictures of the hunts going off to kill something on the front of the Telegraph. They as usual report that "Hunt sabateurs were foiled", allowing the hunts to set off as normal. They seem to love rubbing the noses of people who are against hunting in it: they take a particular relish in doing so every year. I've got to admit, I'm somewhat confused about the whole thing as I thought that fox hunting had been made illegal some years ago? I thought that only dragging was allowed (ie, getting the dogs to follow a pre-laid scent along a particular path through the countryside), but either this ban has been overturned or the police are simply not enforcing it. (Watch them not enforce a ban on cock fighting or hare running eh?)

Must check up on this. But I have to confess that I don't really get it. How is it that the Countryside Alliance (the guys who claim to understand and cherish the countryside above everybody else) can only express this love by killing things?

Fox hunting, grouse and pheasant shooting, salmon fishing....... there's nothing that doesn't involve something else dying unnecessarily. In a recent back episode of The Crown I watched, the young Queen Elizabeth was taken out into the Scottish Highlands with a gamekeeper who tracked, and then oversaw her first kill of a majestic stag on the windswept hills. Having shot the magnificent beast her face was daubed with blood in the traditional 'blooding' rite, as kept up in these rarified traditions.

I never yet see any of these killed animals that are not a quarter as damaging to the environment, nor four times as attractive the people who kill them but profess to loving them as they do so. And they take pleasure while doing it and if the one of us questions or criticises them for what they are doing.......then we just don't understand - we're not country people so we just don't get it.

No I'm not if that's what it means...... though I've spent more time in the country and on farms than any of them will in ten lifetimes. And I don't want to 'get it' either. Anything that means I get the killing of beautiful and majestic animals for pleasure I have no desire to get or understand in any shape or form. And if I had anything to do with it, it'd stop tomorrow.

[peter]

Lord Morse, Chairman of the Office for Local Government, assures us that most councils that are in special measures (ie having been decided to have fallen short as a public body in terms of their remit) are so, not because of a shortage of funds but because they have simply managed their finances badly.

Well I suppose he would say that wouldn't he.

After all, if you're Jeremy Hunt and you desperately need to find ways to bribe the voters to spring their votes for you in a forthcoming election, but you are are also desperately short of money as a result of your own poor fiscal record, then you have to say anything that you can (or as in this case, get a pet mouthpiece to say it for you) in order to deflect attention from yourself and simultaneously justify the tax breaks you are about to begin dishing out - tax breaks that at this time will simply impoverish the nation's shrinking coffers (and thereby the dwindling public services) even further.

Like for example cutting inheritance tax in half - a tax that effects only the richest four percent of households in the country and although raising a limited amount of money each year (around 7 billion pounds), is still not an insignificant help in providing cash for much needed services). The thresholds at which inheritance tax are set are generous (between 350 thousand and half a million pounds) and most inheritance beneficiaries are more than happy with the monies they receive in what is effectively unearned income. In an age of increasing disparity between the poles of society, when we are really in danger of becoming a two-tier society of wealthy haves, sitting by degrees above a struggling lower income/wealth group (with few occupying the middle territory in between, then such a change becomes even harder to justify.

So thank goodness for the likes of Lord Morse who can at least cobble up some justification for such giveaways.

-----0-----

What is happening in Gaza now is becoming so obvious that even the Netanyahu administration has effectively stopped trying to hide it.

The plan to drive the Palestinian population out of Gaza was always at the back of Netanyahu's thinking - words said by the man some twenty years ago attest to the fact, and clearly nothing has changed - and the October 7 massacre commited by Hamas must have seen like too good an opportunity to miss in furtherance of this territorial aim.

I have little doubt that Netanyahu does want to see Hamas destroyed - wiped out of existence - but the action he has taken (with full support of the Likud government and regretfully it has to be said, a large proportion of the population of Israel) is evidence of his broader policy being put into action.

Let's put the bald facts of it down, nail as it were, the colours to the mast.

The policy is to drive the 2.3 million people of Gaza further and further south down the strip, where conditions for survival of these forcibly displaced people will become ever more and more unviable, until for humanitarian reasons if for none other, the crossing into the Egyptian Sinai is opened allowed the desperate people to flow across, most probably never to return. Already there is talk, both in Israel and outside of how international cooperation can be raised in order to effect a "humanitarian resettlement" of Palestinians from Gaza to other countries. This is anathema to the Palestinian people themselves because they know that once displaced from their land they will never be allowed to return.

But let's face it - they won't be able to anyway because of the scorched earth policy of rendering the entire territory uninhabitable being followed by the Israeli government. That's what all of the bombing and the talk of flooding in of the tunnels with seawater is about. Once there remains no buildings standing, no homes to return to, no domestic infrastructure that can operate, then the territory is effectively uninhabitable anyway. Netanyahu speaks openly to his party about how finding other countries to take the displaced Palestinian people is key to the operation, and that the government is working on this. They promote this increasingly on the world stage as a humanitarian necessity (articles in the American media to this effect have been written by Likud government members) and even go so far as talking about the necessity of complete clearance of the population of the Gaza strip in order for it to be rebuilt. No one living in the real world has any illusions about the likelihood of a Palestinian return to the territory once it has been displaced to other parts of the globe while this reconstruction is carried out.

This corralling of the population into a tiny area, this rendering of the living conditions to a level insufficient for the maintenance of survival, this levelling and wanton destruction of the vacated areas from which they have been displaced, this encouragement of the international community to step up and provide alternative living space for the displaced people (on humanitarian grounds of course - a need brought about by Israel "defending itself") ........ Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't all of this have a suspicious look of a designed policy to you? Doesn't it have the sound of something coming suspiciously close to (dare I say it) ethnic cleansing?

And these policies, this forced displacement of people, this rendering of their land uninhabitable, this collective punishment (for who can realistically deny by now, that this is not what it is)..... all of this is against international law and renders the perpetrators as war criminals.

And yet, on the cusp of 2024, in a society that considers itself run according to the principle of the rule of law, our leaderships stand back and allow this atrocity to be perpetrated in front of the eyes of the world. Knowingly and with minimal interference, they stand aside and allow Israel to commit this crime against humanity, and even support them in their endeavour.

Have we really learned nothing! Shame on them. Shame on us. For fucks sake UN, USA, UK, EU do something! Get your arses into gear and put a stop to this! If Western civilisation is not up to calling out this atrocity for what it is then it is unworthy of the position it holds as the dominant player in world politics. Step aside and let more right thinking cultures take up the reins.

[peter]

Speculation on the liklihood of a spring election has reached feverpitch in the media and according to Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornbury, is the worst kept secret in Westminster.

It follows the announcement that the budget will be held on March 6, the earliest that a major fiscal event has been held for 13 years.

Senior Tories are pooh-poohing the idea, saying that more time would be needed for any tax cuts handed out in the budget to work through into material benefits in people's pockets, and this would demand an autumn election at the earliest, but this only works if the government actually believes that things (as they say) could only get better.

If on the other hand, they believe that despite any handouts by the Chancellor, we are sitting on a small toboggan on the lip of a vertiginous drop, then the clever money is to make the giveaway, and then trade on this to get the best result in an election that they can, before the economic shit hits the fan. I saw a piece in the FT that predicted at least 30,000 businesses large and small will go to the wall next year as energy and inflationary costs bite: they simply will not be able to viably continue against a backdrop like this, and when they go under those people who work for them will suddenly find that the Chancellor's economic blue-sky (or should it be cloud cuckoo land) thinking on the subject is just that. Hot air and wind. Put this together with the millions who are going to see their mortgage costs, rental costs and living costs stretch their incomes until they sing like guitar strings stretched to breaking points, and you have a potential electoral disaster in the making that can only get worse the longer you leave it.

So no. Despite the claims of senior tories that speculation of an early election is bunkum, I'd bet that there is a good liklihood that this is exactly what we'll see. So let's try to pin it down. It's going to be a Thursday in May, which leaves the 2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd and 30th as options. Rule out the 2nd - too early. 30th also - too late. 9th, 16th, 23rd......hmm. There's not much happening that I can see on any of these days and so I'll go in the middle for the 16th od May. Don't put your shirt on it, but remember that I said so when it happens.

[peter]

I'm not a massive Donald Trump fan, but can't help raising my eyebrows at the mounting campaign to have him removed from the ballot which is ongoing in at least 18 States as I post.

It hinges on an obscure law that says that any officer of the state who engages in "insurrection or rebellion" should be barred from standing for the office of President of the United States of America.

Okay, but has Donald Trump actually engaged in such activity? I thought that he was pretty much cleared of this (or are there cases to prove this still ongoing?).

Either way, it seems that like it or not, this is a pretty blatant Democrat inspired attempt to derail his presidential run, particularly given that it seemed (despite his legal travails) to be going pretty well. He was clearly front-runner in the race for the Republican nomination, sitting at 61 percent-some fifty percent ahead of his closest rival Ron DeSantis, but if too many States remove him from the ballot paper then clearly his chance of securing the presidency is severely damaged (always assuming he still held the nomination against this backdrop).

Forgive me for saying so, but isn't all of this somewhat......anti-democratic? And more pertinently perhaps, will his army of supporters wear it?

I mean, they were clearly pissed at what they saw as a blatant stealing of the last election away from him (and I think that the insurrection we saw following this - whether you believed it or not - shocked the American people.......in terms of just how close they had come to seeing full scale political, perhaps even societal, breakdown occurring in their country) and I just wonder whether they will actually wear it (as they will see it) happening again?

It's probably a bit different (but maybe then again, perhaps not) in the UK, but we have our own example of a similar situation.

The establishment had clearly decided that under no circumstances was Jeremy Corbyn ever going to be Prime Minister of the UK, and spared no effort in making sure that this did not happen. He had come damn close in 2017, and all sides of the establishment, Labour, Conservative and media, not to mention the 'celebrity' and cultural elements, business (and probably even royalty) combined in a coordinated effort to ensure that this would never happen again. (A leading army officer even said that had Corbyn defied all of the efforts to ensure his 2019 attempt failed, then they would have stepped in to bring about his removal.)

Is this where you are in the States now. Is it so important to the establishment that Trump under no circumstances is allowed to re-enter the White House, that they are prepared to subvert democracy in order to prevent this?

I don't know but it seems to me that they are playing with fire here. The American people are not, I'm thinking, as compliant as those of the UK; not as deferential to their polity. The forceful removal from office of any administration that oversteps the mark in terms of its governance has always seemed almost built in to the American system (what with its rights to bear arms and whatnot), and I can't help but wonder how people are going to react to what they might see as a serious incursion into their democratic rights.

Seems to me that it might be time to button down the hatches and prepare for a storm!

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

And speaking of the establishment, it's that time of year again when the members of the country's elite rewards its own (with a few nominal inclusions from the lower ranks thrown in for good measure) with gongs and awards of merit, and by and large heaping accolades on people for what they have already been hugely remunerated for, and when they were really just doing their jobs anyway.

Ahh, life is good at the top level of our system; never have the words 'to those that have, more shall be given' been more apposite.

This time we, the proles, have an even bigger pill to swallow, with the slipping out of Liz '40 Day' Truss's resignation honours list - as you'd expect, a rogue's gallery of Tory donors, people who've smoothed the way for the Trussmeister over her 'up like the rocket - down like the stick' career, individuals whose influence has kept the Tory flag flying over their disastrous fourteen year asset-stripping exercise of governing the nation.

Well at least this year might see an end to their abuse of governance in this country. Never in the history of political endeavour has so much damage been done by so few individuals in so short a period of time, and at the pinnacle of this dubious achievement sits the brazen and shameless Liz Truss, restarting her political career as we speak.

I can't begin to predict what this year is going to bring. The tories might fall - but they might not. Sunak might depart off to California (that's a fairly safe one - his kids will need to be in their new school by September). Kier Stamer might just secure his majority or equally possibly, might find himself cobbling up an alliance with the Lib-dems in the event of a hung parliament. Despite both Stamer and the Lib-dems Ed Something or other having sworn hand on hearts that "no coalition's will be entered into!", we all know that both men would lick each other's ball-sacks if that's what it would take for them to secure a seat in the power-room of running the country (sorry for the gross imagery but hardly more gross than imagining a Stamer/Davey joint top team). To be honest, anything might happen. Hell, perhaps everything will work out fine - we'll secure a great big fuck-off deal with the United States and Putin will make a cap-twisting visit to 10 Downing Street to be carpeted for being "A Very Naughty Boy!", and Megan Markle and Princess Kate (is she a princess.....I loose track) will make it up and celebrate by staging a charity mud-wrestling bout with celebrity ex politician (now celebrated TV compere) Matt Hancock providing the commentary.

Yes, I can feel it in my bones. 2024 is going to be a good year. A very good year. With an honours list in which Liz Truss has had a hand to kick it off, how, I ask, could it be otherwise?

-----0-----

There's a few other things that get on my pip this morning however, not least the Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride's juvenile ideas about getting the nation's sick and disabled off the benefits list and out into work.

He's putting forward plans for a 'WorkWell' scheme in which doctors, employers and benefits officers can put people forward for running, exercise and gardening therapy and even singing groups, in order to cut the numbers needing to be signed off work at any given time, and generally encourage them either to stay working or return to work (whichever the case may be) rather than relying on benefits and time off work in order to return to full health.

I mean, what a crock of shit. The last thing people who are struggling with either their physical or mental health need, is to be denied the time to recuperate that they need in order to fulfil some kind of box-ticking exercise for the work and pensions secretary. Doctors do not need to be pressured not to sign people off who need to be signed off. The decision on this is their's to make, not Mel Stride's.

Just because the government has fucked up on the availability of labour what with Brexit and pandemic and all (scared half the country too shitless to want to return to work, and made the other half too idle to) there's no need to punish the genuinely sick and disabled because of it. It's up to the doctors to sort out the malingerers who would trade on the sickness benefit system, not for Stride to pressure them to keep people working who they would ordinarily deem should not be.

And then there's actor luvvie Gary Oldman.

He's in one of the papers condescendingly saying that he's "never read the Harry Potter books." He doesn't apparently consider them good writing. To add to this, he doesn't consider his role in the films as one of his finest, going so far as to say that they are roles he'd put into the burner if he could.

Well Gary, those books might not qualify in your world as 'good writing', but they've brought millions of children into the world of reading and Rowling deserves every bit of credit she gets on that score alone. She's brought pleasure to millions more via the film adaptations, as have you in your role - the role you despise so much.

But let's be clear; if you are ever remembered by future generations at all, which is doubtful I have to say, it will be because of JK Rowling and nothing else you have ever done. And that's a fact.

[Savor Dam]

Peter, this is part of the follow-up to the rather heated disagreement between our States in the 1860s. Our Constitution was amended to disqualify anyone previously taking an oath of office who subsequently engaged in or supported an insurrection. Having done so, they no longer were eligible for any sworn office. In the US, oaths of office are remarkably similar from the lowest Leftenant to the highest office of President. They are to preserve and protect the Constitution (not any particular leader or ideology) against all enemies, foreign or domestic.

Our unbroken tradition was to have a drama-free transition of power. Even in contentious elections on several occasions over the last two-and-a-half centuries (most recently in 2000 with Gore and Bush), when the time to hand off the reins came, it was done smoothly and amicably.

In 2020, not so much. A fact-free Big Lie was deployed to whip up emotionally vulnerable folk. Shady dealings took place to try to suborn electoral officials at multiple levels. Meritless legal cases were filed...and uniformly rejected. When none of the manipulations yielded progress on official fronts, the whipped-up and not-too-discerning base was encouraged to come to DC for a wild time...disrupting the legislative branch affirming the national election. This gambit narrowly failed.

Would y'all let Guy Falkes (or Catesby, et al) stand for election after the Gunpowder Plot? Not bloody likely!

Thus, this 19th century amendment is being tried to enable states to say those who tried to overturn the 2020 election (and continue to question it without any substantiation) are no longer eligible to run for and serve in sworn US offices. Servicepeople have been discharged for 1/6 activities, albeit without publicity. A local official in New Mexico has lost his position for the same reasons. Multiple states are in the process of blocking Trump...and there may well be some Congressional candidates (incumbent and aspiring) who may run afoul of this provision.

[peter]

Thanks SD. Useful to get an 'inside take' on a situation that is reported only intermittently (and not well covered when it is).

The US elections this year are really significant (far more significant in the UK than even our own forthcoming election really) and it's incredibly important that it goes well and without a hitch.

I suppose that the big question is - your observations noted and notwithstanding - will the Trump supporters in their millions take this lying down. It may be constitutionally correct that they do so.......but inflamed and emotional people are not given to bothering too much about that. It would be terrible to see in the US, a continuation of the upheaval that occurred at the end of the last election, as a prelude to the beginning of the next!

[peter]

Not much of note in the Sunday press this morning. A bit of stuff about how Stamer, for all his leading Sunak as the preferred leader in just about every constituency in the country, has no real political direction; no overarching vision that would make him a standout leader in Labour history. The Guardian tells us that having cut himself off from the traditional roots (if you like) of socialist belief upon which the Labour movement was founded, he finds himself adrift with nothing to fall back on other than the one advantage that he does have - that he isn't Rishi Sunak.

Sunak for his part we are told elsewhere, wants to frame his electoral campaign on the much vaunted (but precious little in evidence) superiority of the Conservative Party in handling the economy. He wants, we are told, to focus on presenting Labour as the party of increasing debt. He has the 28 billion pounds net-zero pledge from Labour in his sights, and will focus ruthlessly on Labour's inability to raise this cash in any way that doesn't involve huge increases in borrowing. This may not prove sufficient to buck the still convincing lead that Labour has in the polls when it comes to the next election, but there is hope for the Tories in that the party leader survey referred to above, whilst coming out with Stamer as clearly the most popular choice, dos show sufficient 'undecideds' for Sunak to still have a chance of bucking the trend.

Elsewhere we read that Sunak held secret talks with Johnson arch nemesis Dominic Cummings earlier in the year, taking advice on the forthcoming election strategy and on how to raise Sunak's approval ratings from the doldrums they seemed to be held in. Cummings in typical arrogant form, suggested that restarting his project of overhauling Whitehall was a key plank, along with focusing on getting NHS waiting lists down. Sunak seems to have taken on board the latter, but not moved on the first suggestion, and Cummings being what he is, the talks effectively came to nothing thereby. Revelations on this little story have evidently come from Cummings himself, but Downing Street has done nothing to deny them, so it appears that there is probably some substance to the report.

Evidence seems to be building against the embattled Baroness Moyne, who is under investigation in respect of the 200 million pounds PPE contract she secured for her husband's company during the pandemic. Moyne's claims that she in no way benefited from the deal have slowly broken down, firstly with the overturning of her claims (long held) that she had nothing to do with the company who she had lobbied for receiving the loan, secondly with the revelation that the profits from the deal were in the order of 60 million pounds (of which her husband appears to have been the chief beneficiary). Now it appears that he might have paid 3 million quid directly into her personal account, which she has said rather weakly is their "own private business" and has nothing to do with the profits from the PPE deal. The National Crime Agency seem to think differently however and are in the process of investigating whether any connection between the money made on the PPE contract, and the money paid into Moyne's personal account can be made. If it can, then clearly her argument that she made no personal gain from the contract is left in tatters (if indeed it isn't already). Not sure where all of this will lead: can't see them 'clapping the darbies on her' anytime soon, but her reputation is clearly ruined and her cachet reduced to something akin to a dog-turd stuck on the bottom of your shoe. Michael Gove is keeping his head down while all this is going on, because his role in getting her the contract is a bit on the sketchy side as well. No suggestion that he benefited financially from it, but it was definitely a bit too close to home in terms of looking after your own team-mates, if you know what I mean. During that period it seems that the money was on the table and all you had to do was walk in and grab yourself a slice of the pie (if you were in the know, of course).

And finally, the government are to carry out a poll on 175,000 people asking what they think of the royal family. Stuff like what purpose do they serve, should they be tax payer funded etc, will be asked and the results given directly to the monarchy for their perusal. God forbid that the family are seen to come out as superfluous to requirements, because if they do then their days are numbered as sure as the Pope is a Catholic. The Tories are not (contrary to belief) ideologically bound to the idea of a monarchy and in many respects are less supportive of the institution than the Labour Party. The ties between the monarchy and the working class have ever been the strongest ones going right back into history. The monarchy always stood itself next to the people and often in opposition to the aristocracy, with whom it was often at odds, and this goes right back to the time of the signing of the Magna Carta. Queen Elizabeth the First was hugely popular with the people, and relied upon their support often to the annoyance of her ministers who would seek to thwart her wishes. Nothing much has really changed on this score and to some extent our political parties reflect this. Certainly the Whig party of old would have been the aristocracy natural stronghold, but in the absence of them in modern times the Tories have taken their place.

Why exactly they are carrying out this survey, we are not told, but it won't be simply for the benefit of King Charles and his family, and that's a fact! Certainly they will be given advance copy of the survey so they can prepare themselves, and yes, it'll be presented as a thing being done for the purpose of helping the monarchy to decide upon its strategy and priorities for the future. Underneath though, I think is a warning - and specifically I think a warning to King Charles. It says, "Stay the fuck away from our business! If you want to enjoy our 'support', then limit yourself to commenting on the non-political. Politics is our arena, not yours!"

-----0-----

One topic that isn't featuring much in our media radar, but will come to dominance I the days ahead, are the mid-january elections in Taiwan, the results upon which (and this is no exaggeration) the very future of the world might depend.

The vote will be shared among three main parties, one of which, the current ruling party, is very independently minded and would possibly at some future date, look to establish a complete break with China - an endpoint which China, considering Taiwan as a natural part of its own territory, is almost pathologically against. The other two parties are much more pro increased ties with China, and would see a greater assimilation into what they see as their parent country. The people seem to be pretty independently minded, but most of all they fear invasion by the Chinese. American intelligence has said that President Xi of China wants to be "ready for an invasion" by 2027, but will bring this date forward circumstances demand it.

How America would respond to such an invasion remains the big unknowable in this situation, and given that there is an American election as well, later in the year, the situation becomes very difficult to judge. Would either Biden or Trump go to war in support of Taiwan? Biden has said yes (but he would, wouldn't he) and Trump is noncommittal. I prefer noncommittal myself, rather than boxing yourself into a corner where you either have to stand by what you say, or look the smaller for not doing so, but that's just me.

Either ways, these are very important elections, and single false moves or unanticipated results could have very unpredictable effects. We're all very pro democracy of course - but do we want to die in defence of it? I'm increasingly of the belief that most of our elections are a sham anyways (I see little in the way of true democracy in the UK right now, even looking at it in the most positive light) - vested interest and power brokering in support thereof has leached away much that was of significant benefit to the mass of the people in such systems, and in truth I no longer see much difference between the Chinese polity and our own. I know that their system is more repressive and authoritarian (at least our media goes to great lengths to tell us that it is) - but I've seen what our own system is capable of in recent years, and our media. I no longer know who to trust, who to believe on all of this and as such, do I want to see the world plunged into war over a small island on the other side of the world?

Big questions that I'm not too proud to say that I don't have the answers to.

[peter]

Happy New Year guys!

Here's hoping that 2024 really does see us turn a corner in our histories, and begin to get things back onto a more secure footing for moving forward into a more prosperous future.

Here, as I say, is hoping.

The other day I watched a podcast in which two ex political players, one a Labour man of high profile as an advisor to the Blair government, and one who served as a minister under Theresa May if I have it correctly, talked about what they'd been up to and what they expected from the year ahead. Listening to them as they joked about their times in the front line, the lives they were living and generally gave a sense of who they were, I found that I could barely relate to them in any meaningful way at all. Their book recommendations were all highbrow 'literary' choices by modern authors of whom I knew, but had no real affinity with their work, their films were all stuff that would have me falling asleep in the first ten minutes (and in fact they struggled to name films, both having spent more time in theatres in which they were more easily able to come up with recommendations). But when it came to travel, it was then that the true differences began to really hit home. One said how lucky he'd been to go on an extended visit to Japan, naming regions off the beaten track, and of incredible beauty and calm. The other also spoke of exotic locations beyond the reach of the bulk of the population, struggling as they are to meet their daily costs.

Similarly yesterday, I caught the beginning of the BBC Travel Show, a special from Azerbaijan, but a program that these days only a small segment of the population needs to bother watching, for all of the viability to most of us, of the exotic locations it visits.

Watching these shows it came home to me the absolutely real degree to which our society has split into two distinct groups which crudely fall under the names of the haves, and the have notes. This one group lives in an ethereal world of high culture and opportunity for experiencing life in its full richness, the other (by far the larger) lives in a world circumscribed by its limitations. In other words what can be done with the limited resources available, and from which place it is generally better not to even see or think too much about what is out there, what is being and will continue to be denied to one, by the simple limits of income versus costs.

Okay, its always been with us for sure, this societal division based on wealth - indeed in the historic past its arguably been much worse - but things had looked for many of us to be generally improving. Income and wealth inequality had not seemed such a brute distinction in our lives, while we at least could enjoy something like the freedoms of experience in our own lives, experiences that had formerly been the province of only a very selective few. But the pandemic changed much of this.

I watched a YouTube presentation by a young economics commentator who put it into simple terms. In the UK, he said, during the pandemic something like 750 billion pounds of money, was transferred from the Exchequer (that is effectively the government) to the richest people in the country. 750 billion pounds. The only possible way for that transfer to be paid for was by rising interest rates and a concurrent fall in the living standards of the general population. This is why economists speak of the pandemic having been a hugely profitable time for a tiny segment of our society, who saw their wealth go through the roof, and a disastrous knock back for the rest of us.(Nb. It should be noted that In the USA the transfer of government money to the wealthiest sector was simply eye-watering, reaching into the trillions.) This is now being experienced as a tangible drop in our living standards, as we rebudget our inomes against our expenditures, and see what is left (if anything) for spending on those leisure activities that the BBC and the podcast speakers dangle before us. For the huge majority of us nothing will be left that will even allow us to dip a toe into those particular waters, and our horizons will have shrunk to a wet and grey vista, mirrored to almost insulting perfection by the grim January weather we are seeing outside our windows.

And the truth is that nothing much is set to change. Gary Stevenson, of YouTube channel Gary's Economics, gives a convincing description of where we are economically, explaining how this huge transfer of wealth, at first spent on property and investment and causing the increasing property values we saw at the outset of the pandemic, and now being horded by virtue of the higher interest rates paid on savings, has resulted in conditions that are now pushing our already lowered living standards even lower (for the bulk of us that is). But against this seemingly bleak backdrop he explains, hope can actually be found. Because when the cause of the problem is so easily identifiable, so then is the solution. So much of the way things progress in our economy, and by extension our society, is defined by the political narrative that is spun around what is going on. The key problem (and I do see this, despite my tearing down Jeremy Hunt for his cloud cuckoo land thinking) is that our alternative political narratives are not being built around a positive plan for dealing with the source of this central fact - that while ever this huge disparity in wealth and income is allowed to persist, even encouraged, our problems cannot begin to be solved. A positive narrative must be built around a rebalancing of the distribution of wealth in this country. Until this is achieved, while ever our alternative narratives speak simply of doubling down on the policies that have brought us to this condition in the first place, then no hope can be found. But happily the solution is not so difficult, the message not so hard to understand. That with a proper and equitable system of progressive taxation of wealth, the situation if not brought about by the pandemic then certainly exacerbated thereby, can be easily reversed and some balance be reintroduced into our society. The forces against getting this message out there will be significant: those who have benefited by these changes of the past few years will not readily see their gains taken from them, and they by and large control the narratives that we are fed by the media. But the possibility for change does exist and the revisions needed to bring it about are not difficult.

After all, its not hard to grasp that no country can be said to be thriving when the larger bulk of its population cannot afford nothing other than bare subsistence living. Money needs to be brought back from the private holdings whence it flowed during the pandemic, back into the coffers of the state from where it can be fed out into a rebuilding of our devastated services, and can circulate once more in the hands of the people who actually make an economy turn over, the average people of the country.

[peter]

Anybody who doubts that Israeli policy in Gaza has gone way beyond its stated intentions of wiping out Hamas, can only be shown the surgical precision with which it struck at the Hamas leadership in Lebanon yesterday, to have any remaining doubts swept aside.

The strike which killed the second in command of the political wing of the organisation along with 5 or so other Hamas members, was apparently "held back" until a degree of certainty had been established that "only Hamas members remained in the room".

If the Israeli security forces (for who can reasonably doubt it was they behind the strike, despite no confirmation from the Israeli government itself) can target with such pinpoint accuracy, such that they can talk about the occupants of a single room - then why are around 22,000 Palestinian civilians lying dead in the ground as I post? If any proof were needed that the Israeli defence forces would have been perfectly capable of mounting similarly targeted strikes within the Strip itself, then this is it. But they haven't.

Instead they've chosen to collectively punish the entire Palestinian population with indiscriminate bombing and generalised slaughter.

They have, and continue to do so, herded the population into an ever smaller area in the south of the territory, with safe spaces therein becoming smaller and less viable as places of refuge by the day. In these now hugely overcrowded spaces disease threatens to do what bombs and bullets have not. The choice left to the forcibly displaced Palestinian population is to attempt to leave Gaza altogether, most probably never to be able to return, or to remain and die. Israel behind the scenes, looks to find places for these Palestinians to be 'relocated' to. The terms 'voluntary rehabilitation' and 'humanitarian relocation' will become phrases often heard in the months ahead, as the complicit West allows what is no less than an obvious ethnic cleansing to proceed apace, while it stands back and does nothing.

As it has for the last decade and a half since Gaza was placed under blockade.

Because, as Professor Norman Finkelstein explained to Russell Brand in an extended interview on YouTube, the events of October 7 are not, as they are commonly presented in our media, the beginning of the current phase of the Israeli project in Gaza, they are rather the end of a "chapter in the region's history that began in 2008 with the initiation of the blockade following the victory of Hamas in the 2007 elections. From this point onwards, Finkelstein tells us, no-one could enter or leave Gaza but for the express permission of the Israeli officials administering the blockade. The calorific needs of the population of Gaza were calculated down to the last individual, and sufficient food allowed in on a "starvation plus" basis that kept the inhabitants in an almost constant state of want. Youth unemployment in what our own illustrious foreign secretary David Cameron once called "the largest open air prison in the world", runs at seventy plus percent and half of the Gazan population are children. These children and young people have known nothing but imprisonment and impoverishment in the entirety of their lives.

With, that is, the exception of the dozen or so times that Israeli forces have entered the Strip in planned operations to 'mow the lawn'. Finkelstein had Brand read out a dozen or so accounts given by IDF soldiers who had partaken of these exercises, in which they spoke with wonder at the sheer scale of the devastation they had seen unleashed. These,it should be noted, were not 'peaceniks' - not soldiers who were distressed by their participation in such horrors. On the contrary they described the carnage in terms rather of awe, and even of pleasure. One said how "cool" it was to effectively play in a first person shooter video game, but for real!

So this was the backdrop against which those young men of Strip, leading hopeless lives in desperate surroundings, broke out on October 7 and committed horrible atrocities which any person of rational judgment would rightly condemn. This, as Finkelstein said, was not the beginning, it was the horrific end of the chapter that began in 2008. And a terrible chapter it's been, as worthy of condemnation as anything that happened on October 7. Except that it hasn't been. The world has been silent on this score. With notable exceptions such as Jeremy Corbyn (who was branded a terrorist sympathiser in our media for his pains) the plight of the Palestinians has been ignored, or worse looked on with indifference, as Israel commited acts for which any other country in the world would have been condemned in the harshest terms for.

In our indifference to the fate of the people held in that largest open air prison in the world, we become complicit in the crimes commited against them, and we all bear the guilt for allowing that which our leaderships have virtually to a man refused to condemn, to continue without the scrutiny and denouncement it deserved.

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

With a bit of luck, the ITV production of Mr Bates vs The Post Office will push the plight of the sub-postmasters so shockingly wronged by their employers to the fore, and result in some movement towards redressing the sickening torment they have been subjected to.

To cut a long story short, the sub-postmasters (of which there are tens of thousands up and down the country, running small post office counters) were given a computer system that due to programming issues, produced figures showing shortfalls in their daily cash declarations. The program manufacturers 'helpline' declined to tell people that they were not alone in experiencing problems, but rather said to each individual that the fault must be theirs,since nobody else was having any problems. Post Office for their part, insisted that the franchised sub-postmasters adhere to terms of their contracts, and make good any shortfalls in declared cash. Sometimes this ran into tens of thousands of pounds. Postmasters in their hundreds lost fortunes, saw their houses remortgaged or even sold to make up the losses, and all completely unaware that they were not alone in their tribulations. In the worst instances, The Post Office brought criminal charges against the accused, and actually saw custodial sentences meted out against them. At least two individuals died as a direct consequence of the stress they were placed under in this scandal.

But it was only as a result of the said Mr Bates, that gradually the scale of the issue was brought to light. He was convinced that he couldn't be alone in experiencing the problems - and he was confident enough in his own abilities to be sure that what he had experienced was not due to error on his part, but was rather down to systematic error on the part of the computer program they had been given. Slowly he gathered sufficient information about other people who were in the same boat, and pulled together a case that demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a miscarriage of justice had occurred, and that not only had the Post Office been in the wrong, that the computer system they had given their sub-postmasters was at fault, but that they had known it! They had deliberately withheld the information about the widescale nature of the problem, and had aggressively pursued recompense for losses that were never really occurring beyond the errors that the system was introducing due to its failings.

Slowly but slowly, the Post Office has been forced into an admission of its wrongdoing. It has only reluctantly agreed that the system was at fault and indeed the people it hounded were probably in large part innocent. One problem has been that in order to keep trading (as excessive discrepancies would have meant the closure and investigation of their counters) sub-postmasters sometimes falsified their accounting in order to be able to keep open for business. They assumed that once the issues were fixed, or the errors that they must have been making (as they thought) that were resulting in the discrepancies were identified, the figures could be put right retrospectively. How wrong they were. It was this very false accounting that resulted in numbers of them receiving prison sentences, rather than the thefts that they were being accused of.

To this day the sub-postmasters have not received their compensation that the courts decreed them to be entitled to some years ago. They have in the main been exonerated of their crimes, but it has been an uphill struggle with the Post Office never fully accepting that it was in the wrong. Their public perception as a respectable and reliable institution has protected them in large part from the normal levels of disapproval that society would level against organisations involved in such miscarriages of justice. This and the fact that the Post Office has for decades been able to bring its own criminal proceedings to court, not needing to rely on recourse through the police in order to do so.

This alone must surely now be changed? And we should all take note of this saga, not least so that the suffering that was inflicted upon those poor individuals should be officially recognised and apologised for, but also that we temper our own judgement of our state and its seeming infallibility (as it presents itself) as well. Our states are not always right. They like to pretend they are. They will go to extreme lengths to prevent any suggestion that they are not infallible. But the truth is, they are human institutions and as prone to failings as any other complex human fabrication, be it mechanical, electrical, computational or societal. Like everything else, now and again they get things wrong.

This tragedy was brought about by one arm of the state (the Courts) assuming the infallibility of another arm of the state (the Post Office). They wrongly assumed that any prosecutions brought before them by the latter had to be sound, and proceeded to convict on this assumption. The sub-postmasters paid the terrible cost of this wrong assumption; they are still paying it to this day.

[peter]

The junior doctors are out on the longest unbroken strike period in their history, not restarting work at their normal rota's until Tuesday of next week.

It's causing havoc in the NHS with appointments being cancelled, routine treatments being put on hold and who knows what level of actual suffering being experienced by those affected by these actions.

Waiting lists running into the millions (nearly eight at the last count) are predicted to take a decade plus to get back to the levels that the Conservatives inherited from Labour fourteen years ago.

Outside my hospital, doctors line the approach road with placards reading "14 pounds an hour is not enough for a junior doctor!" Now why this shouldn't be enough for a doctor when it's considered that thirty percent less is enough for huge numbers of other people working minimum wage is a question perhaps best left for another day (do doctors consider that their higher education level means that they have different/higher survival needs than other mortals for example) but the truth is that we all know that this figure, while it might reflect the absolute base figure a junior doctor earns on day one out of college, is not actually what they take home in reality. By the time a various set of generous enhancements (weekend rates/unsociable hours rates/overtime rates etc) are factored in, the junior doctor hourly rate comes in at very considerably more than this.

In fact, I'd put a pound to a penny that the number of doctors working what would qualify as full time hours in a hospital that took away less than eighty grand a year, you could count on the fingers of one hand.

Now I'm all in favour of doctors getting a good screw - nothing wrong with that...... they're highly qualified in a difficult job and have worked hard to get where they are - but honesty in their approach for more money than the considerable pot they already enjoy is really important (and don't forget - few doctors remain as junior doctors for any length of time, and those that do get length of service enhancements as well as all the rest). Al in all a doctor's earnings potential on a scale of one to ten in our society is up at the top end already - okay, perhaps not on day one - but very shortly thereafter.

I get fed up of hearing the whine cum threat that they can earn more money abroad. Okay, so we pay to train you, we pay to give you a fat living in the end, we provide the hospital's for you to work in, and for this you think it's okay to take it, then just up and off to Australia or wherever to earn the big bucks with a cushier lifestyle, and forget that we the public paid so that you can do it?

Well I've got an idea.

You want thirty five percent increase to bring you back to where you were all those years ago that your Union cites is when your income started falling. Okay, you get it. But you loose the enhancements. Put that offer up to twenty quid an hour, but that's it. See how many of you want to accept that deal? Not very many I'd guess, because it'd be worse than what you get now in toto. But at least we'd have an honest base to understand what it is that you actually get now, not this massaged down figure on the billboards you guys are holding.

Truth is you're on a good screw already, but you want more. Inflation has hit you the same as the rest of us, and you want to claw back some of the ground you've lost and then some. Because it's not about providing the service, the clapping on our doorsteps adulation stuff that we did or didn't buy into - same as the rest of us, it's about the money. So spare me the angels and saviours stuff and call it for what it is. At least then we'd know where we stand instead of being expected to soak up this violin playing bullshit from one of the best looked after groups in our whole society.

-----0-----

Shame that 16 year old Luke Littler didn't quite make it to the top spot in last night's World Darts Final, but hey - boy gave it a cracking good shot and coming second at his age, who can doubt that one day he'll take the crown himself anyway.

But what amazed me when I first saw him was how...... well..... not sixteen (to put it bluntly) he looked.

Like if his mother had made a mistake on his birth certificate and he was actually 30 instead. Like one of those films where an adult is suddenly transported back to school and has to sit in a class full of kids that look like kids, sticking out like a sore thumb.

Hell - the guys got a better beard at 16 than I could grow at 40! And the beer belly! For someone who's not even old enough to draw a pint he doesn't look like he's missed out on a few. I've seen worse beer gut's on guys who've been propping up bars for twenty years!

But my, doesn't he fit the part for a champion darts player. Jocky Wilson will be wiping a tear from his eye on the great ochey in the sky I'm thinking.

But more power to your elbow Luke, and all the best for the future. You've hit the big time early and it's all to play for now. A man who knows what his right arm's for I'm thinking. Ten out of ten, back of the net! (Or should I say, "One huuundred and Eiighhttyy!")

-----0-----

This morning's 'i' newspaper tells us of warnings given by some of our top UK defence analysts of the consequences in terms of our security, should Donald Trump win a second term of office.

Pulling out of NATO, throwing Ukraine under a bus, Middle East and China concerns - they say we need to be planning a provisionary security strategy should this unpalatable possibility become reality later this year.

The truth is, from my perspective at least, that the world might actually be a whole lot safer if Trump does win a second term in office. He's certainly less likely to go head to head with Putin, and anything that brings the pointless war between Russia and Ukraine to an end has to be good. Trump at least want's to do this, as opposed to the hawks in NATO who sing the tune of the military-industrial complex and the arms producing industry all the way to the bank. Choose who 'wins the war' the people of Ukraine have already lost it. They lost it when their homes were reduced to rubble, their sons and daughters killed in order to satisfy the whims of one leader versus another, and which ever of whom they fetched up with, it wouldn't have made a hill of beans of a difference to their daily lives.

But I suspect we are being softened up for the endgame. I think that the West knows that the Ukraine actually winning this war and driving Putin back is no longer a chicken that will fight. What they are faced with is a gruelling and costly conflict in a state of stalemate. It's sucking the life out of our defence budgets and we haven't the production capacity to meet both the Ukrainian demand for weaponry and to meet other potential needs (like a flare up of the growing conflict in the Middle East).

So I think our guys actually want out. But they don't want to be seen to loose face. So in actual fact, a Trump win in some ways is not so bad: we get out of this sticky jam we find ourselves in and Trump carries the blame. In fact I'd put money that Zelensky won't last the year. There's no way that this conflict can end with him in the driving seat and so he'll have to go. Without Western armaments flooding into Ukraine, they simply cannot carry on, and if they are forced to the table for negotiation on the terms of peace, then Zelensky cannot be part of this process. He's simply invested too much of himself (at the West's prompting) into winning the conflict. The little country standing up to the great Russian bear and all that. He's yesterday's man as far as the future of Ukraine goes and the West will drop him like a discarded crisp packet if it suits them (and alas for Zelensky, it will).

But in fairness, there could be another angle to all of this.

I saw a general in interview with Andrew Marr the other day, and he was pushing hard - very hard - for the instigation of an effective war economy at the earliest possible time. In other words, he believed that it was essential that our government switched our industry into arms production mode at speed and with high priority. Now as a man of the military-industrial complex, you'd expect him to say that - there's shed-loads profit to be made here for the industry, and general's are not above being influenced by the offer of a bit of it - so it could be that this front page in the 'i' is just a follow up to that. Another little push to get arms production pushed up the agenda by a NATO/military who are hawkish in their desire to confront Russia head on, and an industry who stands to make a mint out of it if they do.

Don't know really. Could be either scenario really, and only time will tell. Perhaps our leadership's want out of the Ukrainian conflict and this stuff in the paper and on the radio is designed to push them in the opposite direction? This has a ring of truth about it.

You decide.

[peter]

I'm trying out a new dish in the kitchen later on today; it's called 'Chicken Sunak' and here's how it goes.

Take a plump young Sunak, preferably oiled to the hilt following a long period of basting in a seven hundred million quid sauce, and tan for a few weeks under a Californian sun. Prep your accompaniments with places in the most prestigious educational establishments and prepare a pad for your Sunak to reside in when finally chucked out of the Number Tendoori oven.

Return the turkey to the hothouse and spice up the action by dropping in a sachet of early budget. You want the effects of this to come through and so it'll need at least a month or two for it to work its voter magic. This'll fuel speculation to the hilt that you are going for a fast cook and napkins can be tucked into collars around May o'clock, but steady on here - you don't want to spoil the element of suprise by telegraphing an early withdrawal (it's long been held that the early withdrawal method is unreliable at best, so if you are going for it, it's got to be managed with skill).

Now at this point you have a choice. You can either go for an early May o'clock bun-fight (your preferred option, given your California prep), but caution might make you want to hold off for a midafternoon soiree around August or September. This gives more time for the tax flavours of the pre-election budget backhander to work their oracle.......but say that they don't? Then you'll finish up with a different dish altogether (see the recipe given in earlier posts for 'Shit Pie'; it's a dish that takes a long time to prepare - around fourteen years - but boy is it a stinker!). No: the clever money here is to perhaps remove some of the spice from the dish and hint that the longer course is what you always intended. It's a working assumption, you'll say, that around mid September, a fully prepared (and only slightly fecal tainted) dish will be set before the public.

Congratulations Chef. You have mastered the fabled Chicken Sunak (traditionally followed of course, by a case of the galloping squits, but that'll have to wait for another recession.)

[peter]

Damn, that was a good post. I hope someone somewhere in the world got that!

[peter]

I was watching a YouTube post the other day in which two academics, both professors in leading American universities, discussed whether humanity was or was not 'progressing' as time passed.

Harvard Professor Stephen Pinker was all for saying that since the enlightenment, humanity had progressed in leaps and bounds and that as a result of enlightenment thinking we were progressively more rational, more empathetic, had more humanitarian views, and were getting steadily better as a species.

University of Chicago's Professor of international relations, John Mearsheimer disagreed, saying that in terms of the fundamental principles, there was very little evidence that we had progressed very far as a species at all.

I suppose that as a realist of sorts myself, or perhaps some would say just a pessimist, I tend towards the latter view. Certainly we have advanced in terms of our achievements in the technology field, and we have to a degree thrown off the supernatural shackles that bound the thinking of earlier times - but are we (and at the end of the day, isn't this the only really important thing) actually any better as humans? Are we any more good?

I watch what is happening in our world today, on the news, on the streets of my own home town, in the faces and the words of the people I meet, in the media (printed and visual) and I find nothing to support this idea that we are improving. We are as sectarian as we ever were - just as tribal and avaricious, except that now rather than face each other with bamboo spears and bows and arrows across jungle clearings, we now do it across national borders and with bombs and missiles. And when the chips are down we revert to the same mindless brutalities as we ever did (and you need look no further than the current conflict in Gaza for evidence of that).

I'd like to be wrong. I'd really like to be wrong. But the truth of it is, I'm not sure that we are one inch closer to being better human beings, than we were 100,000 years ago when we emerged blinking (and thinking) into the light.

-----0-----

But hey, enough of the waxing philosophical, let's have a look at the news.

The Times is running with the finally prominent story of the Post Office Horizon scandal, where it says that the Metropolitan police are looking at whether there are grounds for bringing fraud charges, either against individuals or collectively on a corporate basis, in relation to the case.

The scandal which saw hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly convicted of defrauding the Post Office out of funds, devastated lives on a huge scale saw at least four people take their own lives as a result, has been unresolved now for twenty plus years. Thanks to the ITV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the story is at last getting the attention it deserves, and when the final sorry tale is finished, the drama will rightly be remembered for its key role in bringing the miscarriage of justice to the fore.

It's a tale in which the central corruption of our state is laid bare, in which the complacency of our judicial system when it comes to cases bearing the title 'the state vs' is thrown into harsh light, and in which the savage lengths our supposedly respectable bodies will go to in order to protect their own interest is laid before us, for any with even half open eyes to see.

But leaving the important story aside, I'd like to just mention that while I was watching one episode of the drama the other night - one in which a government select committe hearing was portrayed - I was surprised to see none other than former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nadhim Zahawi playing a role, actually as himself, sat on the questioning committee.

Zahawi you will remember, had to resign from the government when it was disclosed that he'd ''forgotten'' to pay a few million quid of tax (as you do) into the Exchequer which he was now in charge of. Embarrassing to say the least, but always a slick performer in front of a camera (and a reliable stalwart to wheel out in any crisis, to spin black as white in the government interest), Zahawi was no less impressive in his dramatic role in the series.

He portrayed himself putting the Post Office executives under the hammer (whether it actually happened or not I couldn't say) to devastating effect. It was exactly like seeing him 'perform' when he was actually doing it for real - not a jot of difference - which is telling in itself.

But if any of you haven't seen the drama, I urge you to do so. That you'll never look upon our state institutions in the same complacent way again I will promise you. When it comes to the state, and its executive arm the government, less is more, and ain't that a fact!

-----0-----

Nat West Chairman Sir Howard Davies (income 746,000 pounds per year) opened his mouth and stuck his great size nine straight into it by saying in interview that he didn't think it was "that difficult" to buy a house in today's market. All you had to do, he told us, was save some money for a deposit, and bingo - job done.

With by far the greater proportion of today's young people neither in a position to save the money for said deposit (often paying exorbitant rental fees to simply pay the buy-to-let mortgage for some other more fortunate individual), nor in receipt of a monthly salary sufficiently large to service the mortgage costs currently charged for even the most modest of properties (house prices being now multiple times higher than average income than they were historically), that his comment was insensitive to say the least, is an understatement.

Realising his mistake, he quickly (or at least later in the day) backpeddled on his words, saying that he did understand the problems that people were facing, and that he had simply framed what he wanted to say badly.

Given the recent business with Dame Alison Rose and the Nigel Farage banking farrago, I'm not sure that his Board of Directors are going to be too pleased with him. Nat West cachet is not riding particularly high at the moment and this little failure of judgment on the part of the Chairman isn't going to help. Keep your eyes peeled on the Situations Vacant columns in the papers if you're looking for a new billet; I've got a feeling that one could be coming up in the near future that might be of interest. Always assuming that you have the sensibility of a lump-hammer and the innate ability to say something stupid whenever in the hearing of unfriendly journalists or on national radio being broadcast to millions that is.

[peter]

Just want to say one more thing about this Post Office business.

There is one group, briefly alluded to in about one line of dialogue in the Mr Bates series, that will have suffered, but will receive no compensation, nor recognition of the injustice levelled against them. No television programmes or newspaper headlines will be made over them, and they will dissappear into the ether as though they never existed.

I refer of course to the tens of thousands working in shops which ran post office franchises, upon whom suspicion of responsibility for the shortfalls in declared cash (thrown up by errors in Horizon, but unrecognised as such at the time) will initially have fallen.

It will only be after they had been driven out of their jobs by the atmosphere of suspicion and bad-feelings brought about when cash 'goes missing' in a retail business, that the sub-postmasters will have realised that there was a problem with the system. Their first suspicion would have naturally fallen on the staff handling the cash, and you can bet that the atmosphere in these businesses at the time would have been turgid.

So spare a thought for these guys, the forgotten victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal.

-----0-----

Persistent absenteeism from schools is now at its worst level ever, having doubled since the start of the 'pandemic', and with (according to a Sunday Times report today) a quarter of parents having no problem with their kids skipping days at school.

This is one of these areas where it has to be a case of carrot and stick. All parents must be sent a circular explaining the importance of regular school attendance and offering some incentive for ensuring that their child does not fall short in this regard. They must also be told that details of any child deemed persistently absent (missing one in ten lessons over an extended period) will by law have to be passed to the social services who will arrange an interview to try to establish the cause of the absenteeism.

It's a heavy handed approach, but in our day and age,when more and more parents are failing to reach the high bar of responsibility that even simply adequate parenting involves (Michael Gove once said that a third of all parents were not fit to have the children they had - my experience in the shop would back this up), it is an absolute necessity to get this problem under wraps.

The education of the upcoming generation is of critical importance to the future of this country: it is too important to leave it in the hands of a dumbed-down population. And if you think I'm too harsh in my assessment of my countrymen, then just think about those figures in today's Times.

(Another achievement we can chalk up to the disproportionate covid response incidentally; the so-called 'lost generation' of kids who will never achieve their full potential, never have the 'smarts' to pull our country out of the ditch it has fallen into. )

-----0-----

Wooaah!
The Sunday Telegraph has come up with a good one! "Sunak; I'll cut taxes by curbing welfare!", screams the headline. The Telegraph readership will love that one.

They will all be of the mind that our society should be all about everyone for themselves. Personal responsibility, they will say - we each look after our own and take no responsibility for the support or failures of others in our society.

I watched the brilliant BBC production of J B Priestley's An Inspector Calls yesterday, in which this philosophy is put under the microscope to see what it actually means in real life. The emerging picture, it must be said, was not a pretty one.

The play demonstrates how in a society living by such rules we not only become less than our best selves, we fail at being human, but also that in doing so we contribute to the destruction of other, often less fortunate, people around us. In addition, in our self-centered and myopic world-view, we fail to nurture the very conditions that, by raising up others around us, also brings about the raising of ourselves.

It's a beautiful piece of drama, and would that the Sunday Telegraph would give away a free copy of the script to every purchaser of its paper, in order to mitigate the harm done by the propagation of the nonsense implied by such ridiculous headlines.

As an aside, in the article underneath the headline, Sunak, we are told, if he wins the next election, will cut benefits and government spending in order to cut taxes. "Make no mistake," he tells us, "Cutting taxes is my priority!"

But I thought you had those other five priorities Rishi? You know - the ones that you repeated endlessly in answer to every question put to you for weeks on end. The ones which you've completely failed to deliver, except by the good fortune in two cases where the minimal improvements seen have been nothing to do with anything you have actually done at all, and all down to external factors.

(Incidentally, the same paper runs a top of the page heading, "Nutritionist to the Royals tells us why 'Dirty Wellness' is the new trend for 2024." Yes well..... I imagine that Prince Andrew knows a thing or two about that.)

-----0-----

Senior Tories are apparently concerned about the UAE backed takeover bid for the Telegraph that is currently under investigation by Ofcom.

Lucy Frazer the Culture Secretary is being urged to step in and block the takeover. Names of those who oppose the bid include Ian Duncan-Smith and Jacob Rees-Mogg, which immediately inclines me to believe it might be a good thing.

MPs are worried about the editorial independence of the paper, an area in which the Emirates does not have a stellar record. Given the quality of most of the journalism that finds its way onto the front pages, it seems to me that a bit of rational interference might be all to the better.

-----0---

[peter]

Rishi Sunak has said that he is "looking into what can be done" to overturn the convictions of hundreds of sub-postmasters, found guilty in cases brought by the Post Office, in which evidence against the convicted rested upon data obtained from the now discredited Horizon system.

The current system sees potential victims having to apply themselves, for their cases to be re-heard, a lengthy process that woud take years to see the hundreds of cases involved completed.

But come on - how hard can it be. Take a look at all cases brought by the Post Office in the period concerned. Select any that involved stealing of cash. Of these, select the ones involving data collected from the Horizon system and overturn them en masse as being obtained using unreliable evidence. This at least would cover the vast bulk of cases, leaving time to deal with any remaining cases where questions remained on an individual case by case basis.

Why does the state always have to make things so difficult? They brought in legislation to clip our wings fast enough during the 'pandemic'; tell me they can't do the same to overturn this obvious miscarriage of justice?

I repeat, how hard can it be?

And on the same subject, calls for punishment of the executives and ministers involved in the scandal are rising by the day. There is an online petition signed by nearly a million people demanding that Paula Venables, CEO of the Post Office during the period in question be stripped of her CBE. A number of Fujitsu employees have already faced criminal prosecution for their part in the affair. But most interestingly, it is toward the Liberal-Democrat leader Ed Davey, that the media is turning its sights.

Davey was postal affairs minister during his time as a member of the David Cameron coalition government, and one of the victims of the scandal, speaking in this morning's Times, says that as the minister in charge, rather than simply "fobbing off" postmasters who contacted him, he should have acted by asking questions as to what was going on. For this dereliction of his duty, she says, he should "look closely in the mirror" and consider his position.

The Times for its part, tells us that Davey has called for the resignation of 31 people on his X account over the last few years (Boris Johnson, Cressida Dick, Matt Hancock and BBC chief executive Richard Sharp to name but a few) and it's time the paper says, that he took a leaf out of his own book.

There is of course political motivation behind this, and if Davey did indeed ignore the pleas of individuals to look into what was going on in departments under his care then he should resign - but I don't actually think that this would be a bad thing.

Davey is an electoral liability. He's boring, tainted with the pong of his time in the Cameron coalition with the Tories (upping university tuition fees, despite absolute promises not to, and all of that) and has missed every single opportunity given him to take the fight to the Tories when they are at their absolute weakest that they have been in years.

Even their own MPs are recognising that they have screwed up big time - that the country is worse off and in more of a shambles than it was when they took over 14 years ago (see Tory MP Danny Kruger's words, as recounted in this morning's Guardian) and yet Ed Davey has done nothing to drive up Liberal-Democrat polling at all. Sure, they've won a few by-elections, but this is down to ill-feeling against the Tories - it has nothing to do with a positive Liberal-Democrat message getting through. Davey is yesterday's man - and a bad one at that. Even at this late stage in the game, a change of leadership could only improve the Liberal-Democrat standing. Above this, it would thrust them to the top of the news agenda for a few days which could only serve to remind people that they are out there (which given their current almost invisibility, would have to be a good thing). They have a really good alternative leader in Layla Moran. She's clever, younger, and more in tune with the modern voter. The Times and 'i', in calling for Davey to go, and thinking that by doing so they are damaging the Liberal-Democrat chances in the next election, are making a miscalculation. In fact they are helping them!

By shifting Davey, brining about the election of a new and vibrant leader, and pushing them up into the news agenda, they could be doing for the Lib-Dems just what the doctor ordered. And as usual, I'm the only one who spots it!

Contrary to what they are probably thinking this morning, this is not a disaster for the Liberal-Democrats - it is a God-sent opportunity (and probably the last one they are going to get). They should seize it with both hands and run with it. They have an opportunity to really change things in British politics: the tory voting public are really disheartened with their party and the Lib-dems can absolutely capitalise on this in the forthcoming election if they play their cards right. Let's hope to God's that someone in their party realises it.

[peter]

If the Post Office scandal shows us anything, it shows us that when the chips are down our state is just as capable of bulldozing over us and crushing our lives out of existence as any other in the world - including those traditionally held up as examples of the worst that human polities and hierarchies can throw up.

We have hitherto regarded our Western culture as the superior model, our liberal democracies as being the apogee of human development, but as the Horizon scandal demonstrates, this is a flawed belief at best. Whatever is the perfect organisational structure for humans to live in, the one that promotes their health, happiness and freedom to the best level that can be obtained, our capitalist liberal democracies is not it.

It should not be believed that because I say this, I believe that there are better organisational models available. I read an article yesterday about a woman who moved with her husband to Iceland (as an example). She said that despite its being a fantastic travel destination, the living reality was a different animal altogether. The society was governed in an authoritarian manner which, coming from the West (as traditionally considered) she was entirely unused to. The licencing laws in particular (no alcohol sales from supermarkets, no sales outside specific designated times from even the designated outlets) she found onerous. There was, she said, a narrowness about the culture which, while not apparent to the Icelandic people, was immediately a grating constraint to someone brought up in more libertarian type society.

But the debate as to how best to live, what organisational systems society should be ordered under, is not going away any time soon. And it can throw up the oddest of bedfellows.

A particularly interesting juxtaposition that occurred in my viewing of YouTube the other day, was as follows.

First, I watched a discussion between two of the most unlikely of individuals who one would expect to find agreement, Neil Oliver and George Galloway.

Oliver was once the darling of the establishment, the poster-boy historian of the BBC, with his Scottish accent and pop-star looks. He could be found delivering his programmes from one week to the next, coat to coast, and was even for a time a leading figure in that most traditionally Conservative od organisations, the National Trust. This all ended when he drew the line at what was being done to us during the pandemic. He was an outspoken critic of lockdown and the establishment narrative, he didn't buy that it was the biblical plague that was being sold as the official line, and was highly suspicious about the 'vaccination' technology that was being rushed into production to be shoved into our arms at the state's instruction. This failure to tow the official line was the end of his 'establishment' role:persona non grata he is now never mentioned in polite company, his name struck out from the hallowed register of who may be seen on (and benefit from the state provided slush fund of) the BBC.

George Galloway on the other hand was for three decades an outspokenly left-wing Labour MP. Grouped with the likes of Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and latterly Jeremy Corbyn, Galloway was always highly critical of the Tory government, but equally so of the centrist Labour leadership of Blair, which he saw as abandoning the true socialist roots on which the Labour Party was formed, the Labour movement from which it was born and drew its strength. Always an embarrassment to his party leadership, Galloway made a particular spectacle of himself in a series of Celebrity Big Brother, in which at the encouragement of a busty model (or some such) he 'role-played a kitten, while actually lapping at a bowl of milk at her feet. Not exactly stuff designed to maintain the dignity of the Palace of Westminster, he added insult to establishment injury by visiting Colonel Muamar Gaddafi in his tented Palace, while all of the received western wisdom said that you didn't go within a mile of him.

Actually - thinking about it, it might have been Saddam Hussain, but either or, I can't be bothered to check because the result was the same. Galloway, like Oliver, was out! No respectable mainstrean media outlet would touch them anymore. And so it was that Oliver found his billet with the right leaning GB News, the only place he could now find a camera to look into, and who would let him say what he now seemed to believe. This being that our liberal democracies had been taken over by a woke obsessed borderline conspiracy minded elite; that our freedoms were being slowly but inexorably withdrawn from us and that where they still existed, they were being neutered and distorted into a parody of what they were meant to be. Under the traditional governing structures that the legacy media reported (part of the conspiracy themselves) an effective 'one world government', non-elected and all-powerful, was being organised. Comprising the supranational entities of the WHO, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the big players of Davos and corporate finance/business these players now exert such a grip on our governing polities, that we are effectively living under a totalitarian regime already, without almost being aware of it.

And speaking together, it was clear that Galloway agreed with everything Oliver was saying. Galloway pointed out the virtual identikit policies of Sunak and Stamer, saying that the elections we now hold are as meaningless as those once held in communist Russia, because choose who you vote for, you are going to get the exact same thing - and that is just exactly what the establishment movers and shakers decide what you are going to get.

As I say, strange bedfellows indeed, but united in their now being pariah status individuals in the establishment elite in which they once circulated.

The next two I encountered were two ex political players, Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell, who between them host a political podcast called The Rest is Politics. Still very much establishment figures, although out of politics proper, they represent the orthodox liberal democracy stroke establishment end of the spectrum, and are in combination, a polar opposite to the former pair I have been describing - almost a mirror image you could say.

Stewart was a minister in the May government, serving under Boris Johnson when he was foreign secretary, and for whom he has never (since leaving the Conservative Party at least) disguised his contempt. He ultimately left the Conservative Party after a failed leadership attempt, and in furious dudgeon about the staggeringly deceptive and damaging withdrawal agreement which Johnson had slubbered up. Stewart, for all of his having left the Tories and being out (as it were) on his own, is still way more establishment than his former boss, and one could easily see him returning to the fold after his 'wilderness years', should the party ever move back towards the centre ground of politics again. Stewart would be a happy participant of any BBC political debate show.

Similarly his foil for the podcast, Campbell, is an ex Labour political advisor to Tony Blair. They were almost joined at the hip when Blair was in office, and Campbell no doubt still retains his contact with his former boss on a regular basis. He isn't to my knowledge a Labour Party member anymore - I believe he left while Corbyn held the leadership (and no doubt did his bit to undermine the latter's premiership, even from the outside). Absolutely an establishment man from top to toe,Campbell is to Stewart what Galloway is to Oliver. In fact The former two are politically so close that they could easily sit within the same party, that amorphous blob that has formed out of an admixture of the Tories and Labour in the centre of our political landscape; shall we call it the ConLabish Party...or the Labative Party, depending on what arm the public has been gulled into voting into power. Never forget however, that the party actually in power is the Establishment Party - and there's only one of it. And it was never going to let an outsider like Corbyn (or come to that, outsiders like Oliver and Galloway) have a sniff of the action. It was - and is - never going to happen.

But Stewart and Campbell, now there's a different kettle of fish. Both are absolutely still towing the establishment line: for them our liberal democracies are headed in exactly the right (general) direction. They abhor the rise of populist politicians, seeing them as usurpations from the lower orders into the political arena's best left to those who understand such things. And they regard popular expressions of the people's will (like Brexit for example) as aberrations that will have to be 'fixed' in time, and when the opportunity arises. The threat of Corbyn being now neutralised in the UK, and the Labour Party absolutely back where it should be, all that remains for Stewart and Campbell to achieve is to pull the Tories back from the abyss of right wing populism that threatens to swamp it.

When considering their greatest fear for 2024, both Stewart and Campbell agreed that one thing would be worse than anything else - if Donald Trump won US election. This of course, would be (as it was before) the equivalent of Corbyn having won an election in the UK. Surely, they are not of the same political stamp - but they share the similarity of not being establishment men. It happened once in the USA, it was narrowly averted in the UK, it must never happen again. The march of the world towards universal liberal democracy must never be halted, the establishment order must never be threatened again. And perhaps - just perhaps - as Oliver fears, the ruling oligarchy or plutocracy or globalist capitalist corporatist cabal (or whatever it is) behind it all.....the ones who invisibly make all these plans for pandemics and climate disasters and forever wars that seem to inexorably push us all in the direction that is not of our choosing......well perhaps their plans (if they exist) must not be thwarted as well.

But (and the establishment, and possibly even the guys behind the guys, will not be pleased to hear it) there are other players out there who may have different ideas. The West has been judged by the rest of the world and it seems possible that we have been found wanting. History as predicted by Francis Fukeyama, might actually not be about to end, with the world as one homogeneous lump of liberal democracy. The Southern states of the world seem to be having some ideas of their own, thinking that perhaps there might be other ways of doing things. Evidence suggests that the West might actually just be sidelined, put into an annexe while the rest of the world gets at last, its collective act together. And more power to their elbow I say. Better this than.....

The end.