What Do You Think Today?

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Not to mention that it's not as though the release of said information has made the blindest bit of difference to how the polity operates...

--A

[peter]

Not in the slightest Av. I saw one of the hundreds of protesters that gathered outside of the courtrooms interviewed (not on mainstream media I hasten to add, where the coverage time still adds up to only - let me see - nothing) who said that it now rested with the global South to take the high ground in calling out injustices pretty much across the board. I have to agree; I've pretty much given up hope of seeing any change for the better at our end. As my following post will likely illustrate.

You might have read or heard that the Commons descended into chaos the day before yesterday, during an opposition day motion in which SNP chose to re-present their ammendment calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. It's a complicated story, and deserves laying out in full so that anyone not cognisant on how parliament works in these matters can grasp what actually went down. It finished up with a mass walkout of Conservative and SNP MPs, and the Speaker having to return to the House and deliver a crestfallen apology (which may or may not save his job in the days ahead).

Let's start with how opposition day motions work.

It is customary in the House that the government (or governing party more correctly) dominates most of the time in choosing what is debated on, and the votes that are taken. The Speaker, an MP drawn from the ruling party of the day by the incoming administration, makes the decisions about the order of business on any given day, and how it is conducted, but two things are expected of him - firstly that he renounce all party affiliation upon taking up the role and exhibit complete impartiality in the exercise of his role.....and secondly that he follow precedent within the House in the manner in which he directs business.

Now in order that opposition parties may get their say (as it were) on issues that are of particular concern to them, certain days are designated as opposition days, in which they (under the Speaker's jurisdiction as usual) get to choose the business of the day. The smaller number of MPs a party has, the fewer opposition days it will get, and thus those it does have are all the more important to it.

Wednesday was the SNPs day and as said, they chose to reintroduce an ammendment they had previously put forward (that the House support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza), but failed to carry by virtue of Kier Stamer whipping his Labour MPs to support the government in opposing such a motion. Kier Stamer did this (on that previous occasion a couple of months ago), not because he can't see that such a call for a ceasefire is not the right thing to support, but because he is intent on shadowing the government policy in (frankly) just about everything, such that he doesn't loose his 'safe and sensible (ie non-radical) reputation in the media, and wider country as a whole. (Nb. It is this presentation of being 'Mr Reliable' that will win him the votes of many disillusioned tories in the next election, and will probably cement his win: he isn't going to put this at risk on the back of doing what is right in support of the beleaguered Palestinians in Gaza.)

In this previous vote, there was a substantial Labour backlash, and upwards of 50 Labour MPs defied the whip, and voted against the government and with the SNP. Although the SNP motion was defeated by virtue of Labour's effectively ring-fencing the government under the whip of Kier Stamer's support, this substantial number of revolting MPs was highly embarrassing for the Labour leader, and was made much of by the press of the day.

So the reintroduction of the same ammendment (for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza) in Wednesdays SNP opposition day motion, was the very last thing he wanted. If the vote went forward as planned by the SNP, he would either have to change his position (in face of the quiet obvious to all by now, evidence that Israel was running amok in Gaza and that a ceasefire was an absolute necessity) and look completely weak and vacillating in the process, or continue to support the government in their now clearly immoral stance of unambiguous support for the Israeli actions in Gaza and not calling for an immediate ceasefire in the region. As said, Stamer would look like a weak turncoat if he changed his position to support the SNP motion (and the press would roast him for this), but if he didn't, he would risk an almost definite mass revolt by his MPs who would refuse to follow his whip (an absolute demand that must be obeyed, refusal to do so being understood as reason for severe punishment). Labour MPs, having watched the crisis in Gaza unfold in the intervening time between the two opposition day motions, are now in no doubt that their leadership stance is not only wrong but immoral to boot; they were not going to blandly follow the whip and vote in support of the government ammendment that no immediate ceasefire should be called for.

So Stamer found himself between a rock and a hard place. This could literally scupper all his hard laid plans, his working to court the establishment and its client-journalists: he could overnight be transformed into a Corbynite style radical who didn't support the government on an important foreign policy position (that of unequivocal support of Israel) and was effectively a pro-Palestinian traitor in sheep's clothing. What to do?



Put forward a third ammendment - one not actually calling for an immediate ceasefire, but for a "humanitarian ceasefire", and one that didn't contain the contentious demand that Israel stop with its policy of "collective punishment", as did the SNP ammendment. In fact the words collective punishment would not appear at all, and in addition so many other clauses and sub-demands could be inserted that the document became almost meaningless, and impossible for anyone to take any notice of. This way his MPs would be spared the necessity of defying the whip, and voting for the government ammendment (that there be no call for an immediate ceasefire) that they knew was plain wrong. He hoped that they would be sufficiently molified by the Labour ammendment that they would support it and thereby prevent a huge split on the issue being granted the full glare of public exposure in the media.

But there was a problem. By convention - one of those precedents I talked about, that the Speaker is expected to follow - only one ammendment is supposed to be presented in addition to the one being presented by the party whose opposition day it is, and that is the government's. To do otherwise would be to deny the said party (whose opposition day it is) the 'stage' to present their ammendment as the clear alternative to the government policy. It is considered bad form (as it were) to deny the opposition party of the day unfettered access to the stage, and to clutter up the day with alternative motions (nb. the words motions and ammendments are used interchangeably in this context, and throughout this post). But this was exactly what Stamer proposed in order to get him out of his bind, and it was the Speaker's job to put him to rights by refusing for the third (ie Labour) motion to be included in the vote.

This, to the SNPs and Tories horror, he declined to do.

The Tories were absolutely aware of the bind that Kier Stamer had got himself into, and were cock-a-hoop that at last he would be in a position to draw some media fire that might damage his electoral chances (and even demand his resignation from the leadership if the revolt was total enough), so they were furious at the Speaker (named Lindsay Hoyle) for giving him a get-out option. It seemed to them a pure case of political bias (Hoyle was originally a Labour MP) that was in complete contravention of the Speaker's obligation to impartiality. They were incandescent.

The SNP were equally so, not without their own political motivations, but chiefly because they really believed in the rightness of the ammendment they were calling for. The SNP leader in Scotland's wife is Palestinian, and her father is a doctor who has been working in Gaza throughout the crisis. They have real skin in the game and were furious that their opposition day was effectively being stolen from them by a connivance between the Labour leader and the Speaker.

In the uproar following Hoyle's announcement, numbers of both Tory and SNP MPs stood up and walked out of the Commons and general mayhem ensued. It emerged later in the day that Hoyle had possibly been threatened by Stamer, that if he didn't allow the Labour ammendment to be voted on, then he would be removed from his position as Speaker following a Labour win at the next election. By tradition, Speakers are left in situ as a mark of recognition of their impartiality, unless they have been egregiously out of line - but again, this is tradition rather than obligatory. The suggestion is that Hoyle was 'got to' via this threat, and acted under the duress of it to allow the third motion. Stamer yesterday denied having issued the threat, but he certainly met with Hoyle before the debate. He carefully did not say however, that no-one else had threatened Hoyle, and rumours have it that something along these lines did in fact occur.

(To be continued tomorrow.)

[peter]

Strewth! Where even to begin!

Because now is where things begin to get a bit confused.

Certainly following Hoyle's announcement a shed load of Tories and SNP members got up and stormed out of the Commons. There was a vote at some later point in which the Labour motion was carried. Stamer was thus lifted off the hook. The SNPs opposition day motion wasn't even voted on - that muchis certain (whether because once the Labour ammendment had been selected by Hoyle, it couldn't be, or whether because the SNP and Tory members were no longer there to vote for there own motions I don't know). Hoyle left the chamber and his deputy speaker took the chair. The Clerk of the House submitted a letter of complaint about Hoyle's decision and at a later point, Hoyle returned to the Commons chamber and apologised for his "error of judgement" in allowing the Labour motion to be heard.

He excused his action on the basis that he had "wanted as broad a base of opinion on such an important matter to be heard as possible" - what he did not mention was that he had likely been 'nobbled' by the threat to his political future, into making the decision, or indeed (at that point) anything about putative risks to MPs from terrorist threats if he hadn't allowed the Labour ammendment to be voted on. This latter excuse was wheeled out the following day, following an SNP rejection of his previous night's apology, and a declaration by the same that they "no no longer have confidence in the Speaker."

Serious stuff. The unseating of a Speaker is no small matter.

Hoyle tried to placate the House by offering an emergency debate on the (ceasefire) issue - not the issue of his own behaviour which as I say, he further tried to justify by bringing up the issue of MPs safety which he had not raised in explanation the previous evening, but irrespective of this, the SNP opposition day ammendment had been scuppered and they were not to be fobbed off with excuses.

It's notable that Hoyle didn't take the option of offering them (the SNP) another opposition day to put forward their ammendment - this presumably would have been to have opened up the whole can of worms once again, which Hoyle was definitely not going to do. It's also worth noting that his excuse of a "terrorist threat to MPs if the Labour vote wasn't allowed " is sketchy at best. Presumably we are talking an Islamist threat, not an Israeli or Jewish one? Hoyle didn't specify which kind, or where this threat was supposedly coming from, but the implied direction was that it was Islamic. (So in effect, Hoyle is adding to his sins by stoking Islamophobia for his own political ends.) But this defence doesn't stack up anyway, because how could organising Commons business so that a motion calling for an immediate ceasefire and firmly accusing Israel of committing collective punishment could not be heard, and demanding that a weaker motion in which collective punishment is not even mentioned be said to be lessening the threat of Islamic reprisals? Meanwhile it has emerged that almost definitely some kind of pressure was applied to Hoyle by someone with Labour interests in mind. It probably wasn't Stamer himself (though no-one knows what went on in that meeting) but he almost definitely knew about it. All in all its a grubby affair in which the really important issue - that of saving Palestinian lives by stopping the killing - has been shunted aside by the basest level politicking. Shame on all involved.

And it has not gone unnoticed. The Palestinian ambassador to the UK has said that on Channel 4 News that UK politics has shamed itself on the world stage and he's not wrong. Many pundits have played this down by saying that this is a domestic affair that has no bearing on anything actually happening in Gaza, but not so. Certainly, these opposition day ammendments, motions, call them what you will, are not binding on the government. No policy is forced upon the administration of the day because of them. But they do exert pressure. They let the government know in no uncertain terms, what it can get away with. They are an important barometer, a measure of the pressure building within the House, upon which government policy will be adjusted. Given that our policy on the Israel-Gaza conflict has been that of unconditional support of Israel, up to and including providing them with the weaponry to carry out their actions, this pressure upon them is, and remains, really important. It's not enough to dismiss what has happened as a simply domestic spat.

But back to the Commons, the following day the Leader of the House, Conservative Minister Penny Mordant roundly criticised Labour for what they had done in putting forward the third ammendment on the SNPs opposition day. It's a sad day, she said, when the Conservative Party MPs have to rise in protection of the SNPs privilege within the House (not that it made any difference - the SNP still lost their opposition day ammendment vote) and Labour attempt to thwart the democratic practice of the Commons. Against calls for the head of Lindsay Hoyle to be brought in on a pike (metaphorically speaking) she was more conciliatory than some of her backbenchers. Hoyle had apologised, she said. Let it be water under the bridge and everyone move on.

But the SNP and Tory backbenchers are less inclined to do so. A motion of no confidence in the Speaker was tabled by a Conservative MP and seconded by another. A petition of those in support of the motion was gradually creeping upwards and currently stands at the 60 plus level. If it reaches a hundred or more then the government will be forced to hold a vote on it which, even if Hoyle wins, would leave him in a pretty untenable position. A Speaker relys upon the goodwill of Parliament - trust and confidence from both sides of the House. Hoyle would appear to have lost this and Monday will see what his political future holds. Somewhat ironic that in trying to save his political career, Hoyle might have damned it. It's hard to see him returning with any credibility to the House for any length of time.

Well, there you have it. It's been a labour of love recording all of this and probably not worth the effort. Certainly nothing in Gaza will have been changed by all of this - but at home it has given us a flavour of how our politicians operate. Dirty, undemocratic and never to be trusted. And that's just the good ones!

[peter]

It's them Islamists wot is doing it!

The Times this morning (ever reliable for being there when needed) that continues to stoke the fires of Islamophobia building in the right wing elements of the country that couldn't give a toss what is happening in Gaza.

They run a headline story on a pro-Palestinian group that they say were demonstrating outside Westminster with a view that the inhabitants should have to "lock their doors", presumably because if they didn't they would be unsafe.

On reading the article it turns out that the group were calling for sufficient numbers to lobby government to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, such that the pressure could not be ignored. Doesn't sound too radical to me, but apparently political lobbying is only acceptable in this country when it is done in backrooms with envelopes of cash and political party donations changing hands.

There is a nasty racist element building up in all of this. Being stoked deliberately in fact. By people who should know much better. Our media is prodding and poking at the Muslim community, stirring up the Islamophobia for all it can, while at the same time crying out that antisemitism is on the rise. Every act of despicable antisemitism is given top billing, splashed across the media from one end to the other, while at the same time never is an opportunity lost in order to stoke up fear and anger against the Muslim population of the country.

Simultaneously images of the carnage in Gaza, stories of the horrendous conditions, the individual tragedies of the children and women, are piped into every house in the nation. The IDF and its Likud directorship is shown in all of its questionable light and the images of broken Palestinians keep coming.

Google Muslims in Gaza. Bad Muslims in Britain. Good Jews in Britain. Bad Jews in Israel. Is it any wonder we are for the most part going around with our heads up our arses?

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250 million is to be stumped up for bombs to be sent to Ukraine but no money can be found for dealing with child poverty in the UK, which is estimated to have doubled in the last twelve months. Something like forty percent of all kids now grow up in households deemed to be below poverty line in terms of income, but the government is perfectly happy to accept this. After all, Rishi Sunak is delivering -he told us so himself. And hes certainly delivering profits for all of the huge companies whose donations keep his party in funds. The billionaires have never had it so good. But hey, taxing billionaires to help kids living in poverty simply wouldn't work. It's a known fact that taxing the rich doesn't help an economy, it hurts it. Ask any rich person you like;you won't find a single one who says otherwise. (Thanks Jonathan Pie, for that one. Type 'Jonathan Pie recession' into YouTube and enjoy the best and funniest party political broadcast you have ever seen,.)

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Watching Sky News last night, I was amused by the rather low grade 'experts' they had dug up to comment upon the 'Plymouth Bomb' story that has unfolding for a few days in the UK.

To cut a long story short, an unexploded wartime bomb had been unearthed in Plymouth and was causing a problem. Houses had been evacuated and the MOD called in to deal with the 80 year old ordnance. It wasn't in good nick and much consternation about the best way to deal with it was ongoing. Eventually it was decided to lift the thing very carefully by crane into a flatbed truck and move it gently through the streets to the docks,where it could be transferred to a barge and then taken out to sea and dumped.

The first part of the operation - getting the bomb to the docks - had been completed, and the news presenter asked the expert, "What now?"

The expert looked a bit flummoxed. "Well ..." he faltered, "The bomb has to be transferred to the barge."

I think that we'd assumed as much. We didn't expect it to be taken on a whistle-stop tour of the provinces. Still, with hours of news programming to fill every day, I suppose they have to take whatever help they can get to fill it up.

One woman said of the bomb, it was like a "Message from Hilter from the past." I'm saying nothing.

[peter]

And on it goes.

30p Lee (who can never resist the opportunity to say something controversial to keep his name in the headlines) goes on right wing alternative media channel GB News and says that Mayor of London Sadiq Khan (London's first Muslim Mayor) has "been got to by Islamists" and has "handed London over to his mates".

It's all about the painting of the protests surrounding Israeli actions in Gaza as "extremist Islamist marches" (a "Conservative source" quoted on the BBC yesterday referred to them as such) rather than acknowledging them for what they are - legitimate outpourings of public anger at a government policy that is both immoral and misguided.

Lee Anderson (ex Conservative deputy chairman or something) was speaking in reference to the said marches, and in particular the one that I was speaking of yesterday, in which as was reported in the Times, a prior speaker had said he wanted "Westminster to lock it's doors" and an "image" had been projected onto the Westminster Tower.

The way the report was headlined made it sound as though the speaker had been exhorting the crowd to march on Westminster and lay seige to the seat of government in the manner of the Capital Hill affair in Washington. On reading deeper you discovered it was no such thing,. The man had simply said that he'd like people to speak to their MPs (perhaps in the Westminster lobby - a perfectly legal place for members of the public to go to) in such numbers as to leave them in no doubt as to what the public mood was on the government support of Israel. The "image" that had been projected onto the Tower was a simple message to "Stop the Bombing". No doubt the speaker was using colourful rhetoric - this much is to be expected at such events - but we are not talking violent insurgency here, just people (and an absolute mix of all kinds of British people, not just Muslims) being rallied to stand against their government's supporting of a palpable wrong.

But the media, undoubtedly in connivance with the administration itself, is attempting to throw a smokescreen over the government complicity in the Gaza outrage by using that most dangerous of tactics - whipping up a moral panic among the people, a moral panic that fosters the worst kind of public fear, namely fear of the other, the enemy in your midst, and to which only one name may be given in this case - Islamophobia.

This is a dangerous tactic indeed, and has been creeping around the edges of our society for a good long while. It sits in the constant drip, drip of anti-immigrant rhetoric employed on an almost daily basis by our right-wing client media. It hovers around the commentary used by malignant individuals like the said Lee Anderson who once said of asylum seekers who were complaining about the virtual prison like conditions they were being kept under, "If they don't like it, they can fuck off back to France". And now exactly the same tactic is being mobilised by our polity and our media, in a sordid attempt to undermine the legitimate expression of unhappiness by the public, at the actions of our government. Absolutely despicable. And very dangerous to boot.

But they are not getting things completely their own way on this, because people are seeing what is being done. I was pleased to hear the excellent Micheal Walker of Novara Media, yesterday saying of exactly the same Times reported protest outside Westminster, that it had been a perfectly legitimate and absolutely nonviolent expression of people's right to protest - and where better to do so on a matter such as this, than outside the very place where such policy decisions are being made. (As an aside, there is talk of placing Westminster within an 'exclusion zone' - a zone within which protest is banned, which for the reasons Walker gave would be absolutely ridiculous, never mind undemocratic and anti every right and freedom of expression that we should enjoy as a supposedly democratic nation.)

But it seems that even 30p Lee has gone too far this time. He's been suspended from the party for refusing to apologise to Khan, a situation to which he seems uncharacteristically phlegmatic, understanding if you like, about. He said that he recognises that his comments have "put the PM and the Chief Whip in a difficult position", but that he will continue to "support the government efforts to call out extremism in all its forms,be that antisemitism or Islamophobia."

Anderson is simply not a man to react in this manner, and his words alone tell you that he has been told by the Chief Whip that he will have to spend a bit of time in purdah (as it were) before being welcomed back into the fold at a later point. As an outrider outside the party, in fact, he is free to use his very public platform to spew out all of the most hateful bile of his own Islamophobic position, in a manner that party members cannot do from within the confines of the party. This is probably even more useful to the government/party than having him inside the party itself, and so he has probably been told to 'keep up the good work' from beyond said confines, in the understanding that his reward will come at a later point.

But just in case you think that Lee Anderson is getting all of the attention - not so. Another of the far-right party members, this time our much respected ex Home Secretary Suella Braverman has been throwing fuel on the fire of building Islamophobia as well.

She's put out an article in the Telegraph, saying that Britain is no longer the country she knew. The Islamists, the extremists, she says, have taken over the country and bullied their way into control of virtually all aspects and areas of our society. They have gotten the Labour Party under their thumb and run rings around all of our institutions, not least the judiciary and the teachers. Her article is a rancid spume of vitriol directed against the Islamic faith, masquerading as a virtuous call to arms against an invading threat. She plays on the purported rise antisemitism which she lays absolutely at the door of the Muslim population, and portrays herself as a Joan of Arc, single handedly standing against the rising menace of Islamist extremism threatening to engulf our society.

Certainly she is playing to the right wing popular crowd with her words - don't forget that she's after Sunak's job when he falls - but listen to this.

I may have been sacked because I spoke out against the appeasement of Islamists, but I'd do it all again because we need to wake up to what we're walking into: a ghettoised society where free expression and British values are diluted. Where Shariah law, and the Islamist mob and antisemites take over communities. We need to overcome the fear of being labelled Islamophobic and speak truthfully.

And this is the woman who would be our Prime Minister. And she might well be so in a short period of time. And she's speaking in one of the most influential newspapers in the country. And trust me - millions of people are buying this bullshit as we speak.

Now tell me that this is all nonsense - that I have it all wrong - that our government and media are just reporting on the true state of affairs. I don't buy it. I think we are on the edge of a precipice in this country and are being led by donkeys - and dangerous donkeys at that - to a very bad place.

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Headlines;

Telegraph: Bodyguards for MPs as extremism threat rises. (Bit more Islamist demonisation)

Times; Bodyguards for 3 female MPs as safety fears rise. (Bit more again.)

Observer: Stamer turns on Tories over toxic rhetoric (Pity you supported collective punishment in Gaza then.)

Mirror: Boot out this bigot! (Lee Anderson of course - already suspended as it happens).

Mail: Hypocrite Rayner's 48k profit on council house sale. (Angela Rayner - deputy leader of the Labour Party - not allowed to make money as a socialist).

Express: Rishi: 5bn to fire up the engine of the North (Heard that one before....election time approaches me thinks!)

People: 61 Million lottery winner's feud with brother (Here we go - the money can't make you happy thing. Your move winner!)

Star: You're the devil in disguise. AI bots imitate bishops voices to con thousands out of nuns. (Take 6 of the best on the botty.)

[peter]

Rishi Sunak speaks out against surging antisemitism in this country, but has no words to say on the Islamophobia displayed by people with his own party, such as Lee Anderson and Suella Braverman. Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden says that Anderson's words were ill judged, but refuses to brand them as racist. He seemingly has no problem with Braverman's Telegraph article (despite the woman's clearly pitching herself for the leadership role and openly criticising Sunak as well as her foam-flecked display of hatred of Muslim people) and doesn't feel that she deserves to be thrown out of the Party. The press continues in it's efforts to brand anything that smacks of support for the Palestinian people in Gaza as 'extreme Islamism'.....

So it's pretty much business as usual in 2024 Britain.

Outside, the world waits to see if Israel will make any presentation to the ICJ as it was instructed to do: to date there is no evidence that they have paid the slightest bit of notice to the instruction of the court that they must immediately begin to facilitate humanitarian aid passage into Gaza as a first priority, nor have taken any steps to limit the civilian casualty rate, which is hugely greater than in comparable military actions, historical or current, when taken on a per capita population basis. It's doubted that they will even turn up to the Court, essentially putting two fingers up to the highest legal authority in the world. In a virtually unreported development coming out of the United Nations however, that body has released a statement emphasising the illegality of supplying Israel with weapons and spare parts likely to be used in the Gazan conflict. This will be highly embarrassing for those countries (the UK included) still supplying the ordnance and equipment that Israel is employing in its deadly assault on Gaza.

The Houthis for their part, far from being incentivised to stop their attacks on shipping destined for Israel through the Red-Sea, seem to be stepping up their game. There have been three very significant attacks in the past week (again unreported in UK media), one resulting in the actual sinking of a commercial vessel, if I have it correctly (almost impossible to say these things for sure in the absence of reliable reportage). But what is clear is that the Houthis are employing some pretty advanced tech in their attacks - and expensive to boot. They've started using sub-marine drones for the first time, and their missile types seem suddenly of a far more advanced (and expensive) type than previously used. Undoubtedly Iran is behind the supply of these more sophisticated armaments, which will increase the pressure on the US and UK to start hitting supply lines of these weapons, an escalatory thing in itself. Further raids by the USA on sites in Yemen, with the odd accompaniment of UK involvement, are ongoing, but don't seem to be having much effect on a people already inured to the effects of continuous bombardment, following years of similar attacks from the Saudi front. The Houthis are quite clear. When the attacks of Israel on the people of Gaza stop, they will stop their attacks on shipping in the Red-Sea. Not before.

On the ceasefire front there are tentative advancements towards a pause in hostilities in order for hostage exchanges to take place (Israel hold large numbers of Palestinian women and children in jail without charge in the West Bank), but no suggestion that any such cessation (should it indeed occur) would be anything other than temporary. On the business of their stated intention of mounting a ground invasion into Rafa, Israel are adamant that this will take place, and I believe the date of the beginning of Ramadan (the 10th March) has been mooted. In a further unreported and chilling development, there has been reports of activities in the Sinai dessert - construction activities involving ground flattening and concrete structures etc - near the site where, should it happen, large numbers of Palestinians would cross the Rafa border into Egypt. Who is behind this work (and if the reports are even true) I cannot say. But what can be said with certainty is that if a ground offensive does proceed into Rafa, and if the gathered million plus population there do flee for safety into the Sinai, they won't be coming back. History shows us that once displaced, the Palestinian people stay displaced. There is no appetite in the world to return them to their homes. Not historically and not now. That the removal of every Palestinian from Gaza is part of the plan for at least some of the current Israeli administration is beyond doubt. They have said as much, baldly and in unambiguous terms. The rendering of the strip as uninhabitable for the return of the people who have lived there is absolutely part of the game. Removal of large parts, if not all, of the population "for humanitarian reasons" can then be carried out apace. The Palestinian people are a pawn in the game of the creation of the Israeli state, to be moved as and when, and to where ever, is seen as fit. It's been going on for decades and it's no different today. I heard an Arab-Egyptian comedian being interviewed on the BBC HardTalk program saying that when it comes to provision of a legitimate reason as to why the Israelis have more right to this land, than the Palestinian people who have occupied it for centuries, there is not a single argument that does not fall back on the religious/Biblical one. He's absolutely right you know.

None of which is going to help the people in Rafa. They've been bunched and herded, bombed and bullied down into the south, and now there's likely only one place for them to go. The Sinai.

[peter]

Ok. Contentious post warning.

This came about when I saw a clip from a Hard Talk interview of Arab-Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef, in which he asked the following question.

"Tell me a single argument as to why the Israeli Jews have more right to occupy the land they do than the Palestinian people they displaced, that does not rest upon a biblical foundation?"

It's a fair question, and if you are going to assert the right of Israel to exist, its one that cannot be avoided.

There may indeed be such arguments, but I confess that I cannot come up with one. I can attempt justifications of Israel's existence on the basis of what happened to the Jews in the Second World War........but I have to pretend to myself that the land they occupy was empty when they took it, which it palpably wasn't. I can use the historical association of the Jewish people with that land, but can we really use such an argument that would be indisputably ridiculous if applied to any other area of land. The world would descend into chaos if such an argument were adopted as a legal underpinning as a legitimate basis for land ownership. It simply doesn't stack up.

No. It seems that the only argument that can be given for the said right is that the world (or the militarily dominant part of it at the point of writing) declares by fiat that it is the case.

There are normally two kinds of State into which countries may be divided - states that are secular based, and those that are religion based. Israel seems to be one of the few cases that is allowed the liberty to straddle this divide, being able to present itself as a secular entity when it is to its advantage to do so, and as a religious one in other cases. But that it practices in a manner required of other accepted secular states could not be argued even by its greatest supporters. That equality of opportunity exists for the non Jewish occupants of Israel is a non-starter, even if you step back from labelling it as an 'apartheid state' as have a number of respected international bodies. Why is it that we are so tolerant of a situation in Israel that would be anathema to us if practiced anywhere else in the world - would render the offending country a pariah state, not to be dealt with under threat of sanction or international condemnation?

In fact its a difficult question point blank. Why exactly are we so committed to standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel irrespective of whatever they do, whatever injustices and outrages they commit against the Palestinian people who they have displaced from their historical homelands?

The answer is I'm sure, more complicated than the explanation I'm going to put forward below, but this undoubtedly plays a part in it.

(NB. The UK can be discounted in this explanation: we have become essentially a vassal state of the most weak and pusillanimous kind in our relationship with the USA - almost reduced to the status of a minor state in the political grouping that is the Union. We have no independent foreign policy mandate and can thus be ignored.)

It's an odd answer and goes right back to the founding fathers and further, to the very pilgrim fathers themselves. And it comes forward in time to today, where America, for all of its supposed forward thinking as a nation, is still in essence a very religious society where Christianity is a powerful force and driver of the political sphere as much as the spiritual.

Because those pilgrim fathers, escaping as they were from religious persecution back in the United Kingdom, were in essence doing exactly what it was always said that the Jewish people would do in respect of returning to Israel. They saw themselves as in effect a 'chosen people' of a different stamp, being led to a land that was rightfully theirs, by a God that had taken them under his wing and shown them the way.

And this belief was the underpinning of the colonisation of the land, and then the formation of the very nation itself by the founding fathers. It was the justification for the displacement of the native American population that previously occupied the land, the heathen that could be pushed aside without guilt because it was the wish of God that it was done so.

And in this, the coming into existence of the United States of America was an almost exact mirror of the situation of the returning of the Jews to Israel, ordained by God and therefore not to be questioned. And more importantly from the perspective of today, nothing that the Jews did in pursuit of their return to their own promised land could be criticized, because to do so was to undermine the very justifications that were/are used for the creation of the United States itself.

And this underpinning, in the hands of the immensely powerful evangelical Christian movement, still to this day demands that the United States support's Israel, irrespective of the egregious wrongs it commits, in terms of its treatment of the former inhabitants of the lands it occupies. A case of criticise not the mote in your brother's eye etc etc.

Now clearly these outdated modes of thinking will not stand up in the court of international opinion in a modern world, but they remain intensely powerful driving motivations. Even Joe Biden has to recognise when Israel is simply pushing its luck too far and overstepping what can be done under the scrutiny of the world's media, and the impossibility in the modern world of carrying out such crimes outwith the observation and spreading of images on social media. Hence his belated pressing of Israel to halt in its intention of launching a ground assault on Gaza. But the underlying beliefs I mention above remain. Irrespective of the outcome of this tragic conflict, no strong criticism will come from the American quater, even be it that the Palestinian people are displaced from Gaza and/or the West Bank for all of time to come.

[peter]

Now let's have a look and see what the papers are up to this morning.

The Mail has got its knickers in a twist over Chancellor Jeremy Hunt's reported decision not to spring extra money for the defence budget in the forthcoming budget day announcements. They say that ex defence ministers and military professionals are lining up to pour out anger at the Chancellor's failure to listen to their exhortations that he begin the build up of forces necessary to meet an increasingly challenging world. Ex Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace says that our "hollowed out armed forces" cannot begin to be "match fit for the conflicts to come", without a "commited rise in defence spending. Other commentators have described Hunt's failure in this regard as "absolute lunacy".

Perhaps these guys know something that the rest of us don't, but there is undoubtedly a lot of vested interest in pushing for such spending. We have many other pressing needs at present, not least the fact of the huge rise in child poverty, up forty percent (or something ridiculous of this order) in the last 18 months alone. Not that this will be high in the Chancellor's thinking; he'll be more concerned about squirelling cash away for a tax giveaway prior to the general election in the autumn.

Moving on.

In the Times we have Home Secretary James Cleverly telling the Gaza protesters that they have "made their point" and now they should stop because they are wasting police time and resources that could better be employed elsewhere. The likely response that the protesters would make to Cleverly is too obvious to even bother to say, but Cleverly has never been the sharpest pencil in the box, and the blindingly obvious response would probably be lost on him anyway. Another section of the front page tells us that Ministers and VIP's have a hot-line to HMRC (the tax office) in order to fast-track their tax related enquiries over the hoipoloi, who must wait on average eleven times longer for a response to their calls. No suprise there then.

President Macron has been blocked by the UK in a bid to see Nato troops deployed in Ukraine, because of the inevitable escalatory effect of such a move. The Telegraph reports that the French President, along with some additional Nato and EU leaders, feel that no stops must fail to be pulled out, in order to turn around the deteriorating situation in Ukraine, and see recent Russian advances reversed. Putin has said that such a move would inevitably lead to all out war between Nato and Russia, and the UK it seems, would agree. I've said that there is no way that the West us ever going to allow Russia to win in this conflict, and that there is equally no way that Ukraine - save however much weaponry they are provided with - can win without additional input of ground forces. Ergo, the West will have to start supplying men and women to fight on the ground. Aside from a negotiated settlement (which I have advocated from day one) there will be no alternative. I hate to say it, but in absence of any desire to negotiate a credible peace for the country, Macron is correct. Wars are never successfully half-fought. It's one of those situations in life where if you are going to do it, you have to be fully committed or else you'd better stay away.

Elsewhere the same paper tells us that an extra 30 million quid is being splashed on beefing up security at MPs events, following an increase in threats to the same since the Israel-Gaza conflict erupted. I saw an expert commentator on the subject talking on Sky News a day or so ago and asked about the reportedly increasing risk he was sanguine in his response. "It's very easy to get over exited about such perceived threat" he said, "but it rarely manifests." The truth is, he explained, that people who make threats are rarely the same individuals who actually carry out attacks. We've had two MPs killed in 10 years, and in neither case had the attacker ever contacted the victims of their attack. This fact was born out by a number of studies in the USA, and while such threats were upsetting and worrying to the individuals who recieve them, they were unlikely to manifest in much actual increase in the threat level to MPs in concrete terms. Needless to say, this interview was concluded rather quickly by a wooden faced news presenter. Clearly not the answer she had wanted or expected to hear.

In a small corner of the paper, we are told that the MHRA, the medicines agency responsible for the approval of drugs used in the UK, had been aware of the potential risks and side effects of the 'vaccines' pushed at pace through their trials, when they approved them, but had failed to provide warnings of the same while they did so. You bet they failed to do so - you bet they did! The increase in unexplained deaths over the expected rate is testament to this, even if our polity and media are not inclined to talk about it. As an aside, in a quietly done little tweak, the Office of National Statistics has adjusted the way it calculates excess deaths in recent weeks, such that the figures for the same are suddenly lower than they would have been if calculated by the older method (deemed perfectly satisfactory for the past 3 decades). Funny that - and not a word in the media eh?

And finally in the FT - I'm not even going to bother with the Lee Anderson claim in the Express that he isn't racist - we have the story that Thames Water, flagship privatised water company of the Thatcher privatisation era, is near collapse and in need of a government bailout in order to survive. Well you can't let a water company go tits up can you - not when the capital city is dependent upon its functioning to supply the water needs of the people - so the bailout is all but inevitable. BUT......the bosses say it might be avoidable if the government were to say, allow them to increase their charges by forty percent by 2030, allow them to pay their investors higher dividends and reduce the already only nominal fines handed out for dumping shit into the rivers......then, they feel, a turnaround might be achievable.....

What they want is all their Christmases rolled into one! I bet they'll get it as well. I wish Mrs Thatcher was around to witness the success of her privatisation programme, in the "increased efficiency" that private ownership would bring to the public utilities.... How proud she would be!

[peter]

I've done a post over in the film forum, a review of the Oscar nominated film The Zone of Interest.

It's taken up my morning time that I normally alot to this place.

I have some pretty bold claims to make in respect of this film so if it's not too bold a plug for a post of my own, can I request that you hop over there and take a look-see.

Normal service will (insh'Allah) be resumed tomorrow.



Quick observation on the problems of poor old Jeremy C....sorry - Hunt who has found himself somewhere up Shit Creek without a paddle, having promised tax cuts to all and sundry in his forthcoming budget, but suddenly after looking in his wallet, discovers that he hasn't got any money left to do it with.

It's an even bigger problem than it would normally be, because it's his last budget before the election, and is the one where Tory Chancellors are supposed to bribe the tax paying public with a few sops to make up for the fuck-up they've made of the economy and country over the previous term in office.

At least that's the way it's meant to go - except that Hunt now discovers that his fiscal headroom has shrivelled away faster than a cold-water swimmers nut-sack on Boxing Day morning in Southend. He's stoney, and now he's looking for a way to cover himself. He still has leadership ambitions (I reckon - yeah Jeremy...Good luck with that!) and taking the Conservatives into an election without the normal sweetness of a pre-election tax giveaway (and this election to boot) would see him more likely tarred and feathered on Commons Green than entering 10 Downing Street.

So he's come up with a cunning plan. Nick the Labour Party's big money grab source, the non-dom tax exemption discontinuation, and use the money nabbed thereby on the tax giveaway as promised. That way you only shaft a small proportion of the voters (shame that the PM's wife is one of them) while pleasing many more. Never mind that you said that the discontinuation would not happen under your watch - circumstances change don't they, and needs must when the devil drives.

The idea is being floated in this morning's Telegraph and the Chancellor will be nervously waiting to see what the public response (or rather the right wing media, since they will in effect lead the public on where they want them to go on this) to it is. Still possible that we might have a May election. Depends on how much cash Hunt can raise. If it's zilch, then the PM will cut his losses and run for an early election. If Hunt can raise some additional headroom then he'll want to give any tax breaks he can make in the budget time to work through, so we'll be looking at an autumn election.

Can't happen soon enough in my eyes.

[peter]

Nice!

One in the eye for Kier Stamer in Goerge Galloway winning the Rochdale by-election for the Workers Party, standing on a completely 'stop the war in Gaza' ticket.

Stamer has done more than any other individual (with the possible exception of Speaker Linsay Hoyle) to fan the flames of the current moral panic surrounding Islamist takeover, thereby driving up Islamophobia within the country to unprecedented levels. You will notice how in previous days the focus of news has been entirely shifted from the people of Gaza being the victims, to our own MPs being the ones who must worry for their lives. This is entirely Stamer and Hoyle's doing and comes on the back of the pair of them contriving to get a vote on an immediate ceasefire in Gaza in the House stopped, in favour of a weaker Labour motion. That the entire Muslim population of the UK carry the burden of their faux worries (only slubbered up by Hoyle when his pitiful excuses of the night before didn't cut it) is of no concern to them. Stamer was on the hook. He roped/bullied Hoyle into perverting the procedures of the House of Commons in order to get him off it, and fuck the Palestinians in Gaza and fuck the Muslims in Great Britain.

And now on the back of it, they call for yet more cutting back on the freedoms of people to peacefully express their displeasure at the policies of their own government in the form of protest, a rich tradition of which goes right back through our history to the Jarrow food marches of 1936 and before. The freedom to protest in peaceful manner - and the anti-bombing marches in London have been peaceful - is a fundamental freedom in any functioning democracy and these clowns would see it stopped. Because they hate it. The idea that the people should have anything to say about what they get up to in their House of Fools is absolute anathema to them. The police are already culturally primed to be disapproving of protest - they naturally lean towards the maintenance of the state narrative and against the mass gathering of people - so they can be relied upon to support any such curtailment.

The suggestions being mooted are that exclusion zones should be introduced around MPs constituency offices and the environs of the Palace of Westminster. Tell me, where else would the people go to protest except to the place where their legislators and executive are forming the policies they are protesting against? To distance the protesters from the polity is not only a comfortable thing for those members and ministers involved - no nasty protesters to listen to, to see out on the Green - but it means that the protest is effectively neutered, corralled away from the visible places where it must be reported on because it is being seen. It's very clever and highly undemocratic; and being foisted upon the people on the back of a fake moral panic whipped up by politicians and the client media that serves their will.

Shameful and saddening, that we should come to this. And the spineless moral vacuums that masquerade as our political class (in order to give us the illusion of choice, while the real movers and shakers remain invisible and never changing behind the scenes) are loving every minute of it.

-----0-----

And just in case we forget, 112 civilians in Gaza City were killed in a purported massacre as Israeli soldiers opened fire on a crowd surrounding a food convoy lorry. Details are sketchy, but the army claims it only opened fire on a group who had become separated from the main body and were "threatening a checkpoint". The bulk, it said, were killed in the panic and crush as people stampeded in the confusion (what? created by the gunfire?). This would seem to be at odds with the reports coming out of al-Awda hospital, where 161 injured people are being treated, most according to the hospital director, having gunshot wounds.

Crushed, shot, whatever. Dead is dead. Just more names to add to the terrible tally that yesterday passed the grim 30,000 benchmark. Soldiers with guns and crowds of panicked and desperate people. Petrol and matches waiting for the inevitable to happen.

-----0-----

Whitehall's spending watchdog has revealed that for each of the first 300 people sent to Rwanda (about a plane load), should such a thing actually happen, the cost will be nearly 2 million pounds per person. It's just as well that only thirty percent of the children in the country live in poverty (and that's the official statistic) because there won't be any fucking money left to sqander on them now, will there?

-----0-----

George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy. Just some of the long list of political leaders who have absolutely warned against the policy of eastward Nato expansion that has brought us to where we are today. The day after President Putin of Russia gives his most stark warning to date that the conflict in Ukraine risks spilling over into a wider conflict against the West, and even into complete nuclear conflagration.

But as per usual, his comments are being treated with contempt by our media, who would rather score political points by denigrating him in our press, than just actually listening to what the man (bad as he might be) has to say.

Back in 2008 he was unequivocal in another warning he gave: that any invitation to Ukraine to join Nato would mean the end of Ukraine. Well, we aren't quite there yet, but we're a good way along the path to seeing it happen. At every turn we have failed to display the care needed in our approach to Russian misgivings, never once since the fall of the Soviet Union, missing a chance to rub the Russian nose in its downfall. This, the unwisest of policies, was begun Back in the Clinton era, when it was believed (by some at least) in utopian fashion, that eastward expansion of Nato would not be viewed as a threat, but the West would rather be seen as a benign entity with no designs on Russian territory or desire to influence its people. They were wrong, and the realist school of George Kennan et al was proven correct. Far from seeing Western advancement towards its western border as benign, the Russians became increasingly nervous about our intentions and began to react accordingly. But rather than realise our mistake, Western leaders pushed on with their tranches of Nato expansion, first with Poland etc and then with the Romania group countries. The announced intention to invite Ukraine into Nato was the final straw at which Putin made his point unequivocally clear. That our leaderships in their hubris failed to take his warning on board, thus delivering us to the situation of today should not be forgotten. I'm no Putin apologist; I think he's a bad, bad, man. But that doesn't mean you simply discount everything he ever says.You won't hear the facts on the legacy media - they are far too intertwined in their incestuous relationship with our polities to ever spell out the stark truth to people, but those facts remain. Our misguided foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union has resulted in this, and there's no getting away from it.

-----0-----

And finally, I can only imagine the ejaculatory wave of pleasure sweeping across the Telegraph reading public as they fall wanking to the floor over this morning's leading headline.

"Russia flooding West with (Muslim) migrants"

I mean - it's got it all, hasn't it? Russia, Islamophobia, migrants the lot! Nb. I've inserted the word Muslim because I assure you, that is what the Telegraph readership will see on the page before their eyes. They won't be thinking of immigrants as white Eastern Europeans - they've already dealt with that lot with the brexit referendum. No; firmly fixed in their minds will be pictures of brown immigrants, Muslim immigrants. Dirty thieving beggars coming over here to take our jobs, live on benefits (yes - I know....the two things are opposites. I asure you - they can live together quite happily in the average Telegraph reader's mind), dodge our NHS queues and ultimately have us all living in an Islamic state.

Happy days at the Telegraph offices this morning. They've hit the sweet spot of ticking virtually every prejudice going with this one. Nice one boys and girls. Suella will be pleased with you.

[peter]

Just want to add a bit to what I was saying in respect of George Galloway's Workers Party win in Rochdale yesterday.

Galloway won by a stonking 6,000 votes but it's really the rest of the voting that is interesting to me.

Because the runner up was neither Labour (the previous holder) nor the Tories, and not even the Lib-dems - but rather an independent candidate who had never run for parliament before. This fellow got double the Tory guy who came next, leaving the Labour guy languishing down near the Lib-dem voting percentage - ie. the arse end of nowhere.

Now certainly the Labour candidate had blown it. Abandoned by Stamer mere days before the by-election because of anti-Israel comments their candidate made (he said that Israel had deliberately allowed the October 7th attack in order to give themselves leave to wipe out Gaza.....not clever at all really), Labour essentially went into the election with no approved candidate, although it was too late for the disgraced candidate to be removed from the ballot paper and so he did still stand as the Labour man. (He'd have been thrown out immediately if he had by chance still won.)

Now Galloway got around 13,000 votes, the independent around 7,000. Next the Tories with around 3.7 thousand and then the suspended Labour chap with around 2.4 thousand. Now a couple of weeks ago Labour could have expected to win this seat - easily. But instead they got spanked. Let's assume that Kier Stamer is right and its because the voters dropped the Labour man because of his comments and his suspension. Galloway fought his ticket on a purely Gazan stand. Stop the bombing. So we know from his win that the people were very supportive of this position. Clearly he took the Labour vote, but why? Was it because the people were pissed at the Labour man for his stupid comments? Sorry - I don't buy it. Not being funny but the Rochdale electorate is a pretty Northern pragmatic one. Sensitivity to comments like the disgraced candidate's ain't their long suit with the best of intentions. I think they'd still have voted for him irrespective of what Stamer said, but something else put them off.

And I think it was what Stamer and Hoyle did in the Commons last week that did it. I think people were pissed off with the Labour Leader's scuppering of the SNP ceasefire vote and they let him know in the by-election. And if so, if I'm right, Stamer could be in deep trouble. Because if this were repeated in too many constituencies, the sure-fire win he'd been banking on could shrivel up and dissappear before you could say Jack Robinson. If I were Stamer, I'd be worried by this result - very worried indeed.

[peter]

The Galloway win in Rochdale has really set the cat amongst the pigeons in the UK, prompting the PM to step out of the front door of No 10, to deliver an impromptu announcement om the "shocking increase in extremist activity" he says is sweeping the country.

In a carefully choreographed (for all its unannounced nature) delivery, the PM implored us to "come together to beat this poison" and deny the trend being exemplified by the George Galloway win, which he described as " beyond horrifying". He said that this was an attack on democracy itself. Being careful to throw in the occasional sop to the Muslim community and the rights of people to protest, he essentially branded the marches as extremist activity and a reflection of a wider rise in extremist activity and messaging within the wider community.

And Kier Stamer threw himself behind the PM's statement saying he was "right to condemn the intimidatory and unacceptable behavior we have seen". Both Stamer and the PM implied that there was evidence of voter intimidation in Rochdale, but tellingly neither bothered to supply any further details on this matter. A useful smokescreen to cover their own respective car-crash performances at the polls, I wonder? Stamer himself voiced his approval of Israel withholding for, water and medical supplies to Gaza early in the conflict, before denying he had done so when it became apparent what the consequences of that policy were on the suffering peoples affected.

So anyway, let's get this clear. The people of this country have come together, Christian, Muslim and Jewish, to say that what is going down in Gaza is unacceptable, and that they are not prepared to accept their elected representatives enabling the same by their continued unconditional support of the unsupportable, their continuing to supply Israel with the means to perpetrate this atrocity, this disproportionate and collective attack on a beleaguered population, starving and denied the basic means of survival to the point where thirty thousand lie dead in the ground.......

And this is "unacceptable extremism"?

The people who stand together in peaceful and legitimate protest against this crime against humanity are the ones in the wrong. That they choose to elect a candidate for parliament who represents their position on this matter, is beyond horrifying and to be reviled from a soap box in front of the very front doors of our first minister's house? We are into terribly dangerous waters now if the rightfully expressed will of the people - expressed in the time honoured tradition of peaceful protest and at the ballot box - is to be traduced and vilified in this manner, by twisting media narrative and manipulatory whipping up of faux moral panic, the stoking of intercommunal hatred and the base use of outright lies and confected statistics to demonise the very people themselves.

Make no mistake, Sunak and Stamer are playing with fire. They unleash societal forces in support of their degraded positions, with little or no thought of the consequences. For political expediency, they stoke the fires of racial division, setting community against community and the state against the people. They cover their own guilt for their support of the actions that led to the humanitarian disaster that is Gaza, by the labelling of anyone who dares to call them out as extremist, spinning a skein of distortion and disinformation in order to cover their tracks.

Sunak instructs the police in the performance of their duties, placing them in an impossible position and in so doing, attempt to stir up the very violence and confrontation he is warning about. Because such outcomes would play exactly into the narrative being spun, would justify every restrictive law that will be passed, every draconian measure that will be enacted, to 'protect the people' from the very crisis that has been confected before their eyes.

What will it be next? Lock us in our houses again for our own protection? Ban all protest marches and public gathering? Censor what may be written and even decide that, "now is not the right time to be holding an election"? Already we are told that Michael Gove is preparing "a new definition" of what constitutes extremism, and this should set alarm bells ringing if nothing else does. What will his new definition decide is unacceptable? Any criticism of the government? Any questioning of the much vaunted 'British values'. What even are British values? If not calling out the indiscriminate killing of 30,000 people, the collective punishment of an entire population and the withholding of food, water and medicines constitutes British values then I want no part in them.

What Sunak did last night, what Stamer and Hoyle did last week, what the media are doing today, is a crime against our democracy, our freedom and indeed our intelligence. They rely that sufficient numbers of us are blinkered enough not to see what the game is, to be duped into believing this pantomime presentation of reality passes for the truth. Don't bank on it boys. The Rochdale result tells us a different story and that's why you're running scared. You know it and so do we.

[peter]

The Chancellor is being urged by two ex-treasury officials to put the country before political gain in the next election, and refrain from pursuing tax cuts in the forthcoming budget that the country simply cannot afford.

So tells the Observer today, in which said officials (ex government advisors on the subject) are authoring an article.

The Sunday Express has a different angle however. "Cut taxes or loose the grey vote!" it screams from its front page.

Hunt and Sunak are apparently squirreled away this weekend, trying to come up with the bish to fund a two pence in the pound tax cut in order to bring about a pre-election spending splurge. Absolutely the last thing that the country needs, say the Observer article writers, since the only way such a cut could be funded would be via further cuts to services which have already been cut to the bone.

There are two reasons Chancellor Hunt wants to cut taxes; firstly the obvious one of trying to scrape back a few of the election votes that the tories are hemorrhaging from all sides at the moment. And secondly, as a spiteful little welcome gift to an incoming Labour government, who would have to try to manage a raft of election promises (repairing and improving public service provision etc) from Labour's manifesto, from an empty cookie jar.

You will notice that there is one thing missing from all of this head scratching on the part of our governors - what is actually good for the country! This passes by in their thinking like the idle wind that they regardeth not. They couldn't give two figs about what is good for the country, the people, as long as they get back into power, or failing that, absolutely limit to a minimum the time that they are out of it. And all of this goes on openly in front of our very eyes. They don't even bother to try and hide it. If questioned, Hunt on this, Hunt simply dodges the question by spouting some bullshit about his plans having delivered, about economic headroom and other smokescreen excuses for his blatantly obvious, slap you round the chops, vote grabbing exercise.

But the country is fucked. Fourteen years, three Conservative governments, five fucking leaders and fuck knows how many Chancellors (7 is it?) and the country is screwed. It's never been worse. But like a dog returning to its vomit, the British public keep returning these clowns to power. Just for them to do the whole thing again - rinse out some more cash for themselves, their mates and the smug behind-the-scenes patrons who fund their show.

Why do we fo it? Why do we never learn?

Was it Einstein who defined madness as keeping doing the same thing over and over again in the expectation of getting a different result?

Come the fuck on people! Put these fuckers to bed once and for all! Deliver... (there's that word. "Deliver. They love that word, don't they. Sunak's been 'delivering' for us, he tells us repeatedly, on all fronts. Fuck off you twat! The only thing you've delivered is profits to the fat-cat big-business community who are the only ones you are in power to serve.)..... Deliver them a kick in the electoral balls so hard that their eyes pop out and the muck filled self serving pile of political crap masquerading as a political party splits into a thousand shit-splatter fragments and can be washed down the drain of history never to stain our parliamentary underpants ever again!

Not that I'm prejudiced against them or anything....



-----0-----

"Ministers failed to consider long term consequences of lockdown" the Telegraph tells us this morning.

Well tell us something we didn't know will you!

The paper goes on to list some of the damage done - generation of kids stunted, futures ruined, cancer and heart related deaths through the roof...that sort of thing - and then goes on about something that really gets my pip. It tells us that a large proportion of scientists now think it was a bad idea and contributed nothing to minimising deaths from the virus.

Not only this, the report says that a much larger proportion of the scientific community was doubtful about the efficacy of the policy at the actual time. They kept schtum apparently, for fear of loosing their jobs, seeing their research budgets cut, and out of general fear of being pulled out and labelled as deniers in the media, by their colleagues and the like.

The government for its part led us to believe (we are told) that there was almost universal support amongst the scientists, where in fact as many as a third to a half had significant doubts. A prominent cancer specialist at Ruskin-Anglia University says that he has real concerns that "We would not do anything differently" were a similar situation to arise in the future. (It will, by the way; the WHO are planning and preparing for the next one as we speak.)

Certainly we won't do anything different if the current ongoing covid enquiry has anything to do with it. They're not even considering whether lockdown was the correct or even efficacious policy, just whether it could have been better implemented. I'll tell them how it could have been better implemented and save them a few years work: by chucking it straight in the bin when the first suggestion document was presented and kicking the fool who brought it in straight up the arse and out of the door!

Don't fucking dare tell us all of this now. You bastards. Some of us beat our hands bloody, trying to say all of this at the time, just to be harangued rotten for our efforts. Too fucking little, too fucking late!

[peter]

I've been reading an interesting book by Peter Obourne, ex political editor at the Telegraph and something similar at the Spectator.

Not exactly a left-wing radical then, Obourne has written a scathing account how Muslims (following the example set by the USA as per usual) have been systematically demonised in Britain, divided into 'good' and 'bad' variants, and othered in the time-honoured traditions of countries on their way to authoritarianism, who love nothing better than to select a minority group upon whom blame can be shifted for whatever particular ailments the society is suffering at the time.

We are of course far down this road already: the remit of the state has been widened from the narrow band of dealing with 'violent extremism' (a very minor element, even within the most radical of extremist movements, to straightforward extremism.

This is significant. It means a shifting away from just those who would break the law, into the realms of the policing of thought, of opinion. Suddenly you are in a whole new ballgame where to simply not agree with the prevailing state position, state narrative on where you should be, puts you at odds with the very organs of policing, of monitoring, of surveillance, themselves. Identified and labelled, you can be swept up and placed into programmes such as 'Prevent', that attempt to cajole and bully you back into the correct state-shaped hole where your thinking should be.

In the case of the Muslim population, a right wing media driven push, lasting years, has slowly but inexorably shepherded public thinking to a place where all Muslims must be suspect, irrespective of how integrated and conservative (small c) they might be. It's been fostered by a right-shifting Conservative Party, responding to the rightwards shift of Labour during the Blair years, and influenced by a neoconservative movement from the USA, that is not Conservative in the traditional sense (ie slow in adaption and suspicious of anything too far removed from the traditional institutions of society and state) but quite the opposite really, in its belief that the end justifies the means, even if those means involve deception and sharp practice, and the hoodwinking of the voting public.

The shift of the Tories from a one-nation inclusive party to this inward looking and manipulative beast we see today, began in the Cameron primacy, when the leadership was essentially taken over by the Osborne-Gove (with Cummings in the background as usual) wing of the party. Cameron was initially an inclusive type of leader, keen to bring on board all of the different communities that make up modern Britain, and a believer in the multicultural ideas of progressive liberal thinking. This was to change. The weak Prime Minister was influenced by his right wing advisors and fellow ministers, to gradually abandon these inclusive views and to embrace the sectarian ideologies of his influential cohort. He moved from being an old-school almost Macmillen like individual (casually monied and sitting on the edge of the landed gentry) into a spearheading of the new, more aggressive form of Conservatism that we enjoy today.

Few stories represent this shift of the party better than that of the first Muslim minister ever appointed to the Cabinet in this country, that of the brilliant Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, ex chairwoman of the Conservative Party and Minister for Faith and Communication, amongst other roles. Appointed by Cameron to the Shadow Cabinet and elevated to the House of Lords, Warsi was given the specific role of establishing inter-community links, especially with the Muslim community, who she was at pains to stress, were a deeply conservative thinking one, with a deep and abiding loyalty to the country that had taken them in. Born into a British Pakistani family, Warsi had by dint of hard work and application, forged a successful legal career for herself, and upon entering politics as a Conservative MP, had naturally caught the eye of the new broad-thinking leader, who would lead the party out of the doldrums and back into power following the Blair years.

But Warsi's view of the Muslim community as an untapped asset in British society did not gel with that of the right-wing clique she found herself in. Specially Michael Gove did not take to her, and before long she found herself embroiled in a contest for the mind of the leader that she could not win.

Gove himself has an interesting background. Ten years as a journalist for the Murdoch press fitted him with an ideal background to embrace the new Conservatism of the American stamp, and he built on this with the formation of a right wing think tank, the Policy Exchange, which he chaired for three years. Coming into government alongside George Osborne who he was ideologically twinned with, he also hooked up with the behind the scenes Machiavellian operator Dominic Cummings, who had his own views on the questionable good of the multiculturalist project.

With the leader Cameron being surrounded by these strong minded individuals, all pulling him away from the position of embracing the Muslim community as a positive contribution to British society, and toward that of the American position that it was something to be used at best (as an othering tool) or feared at worst (as a potential 'enemy within'), and having only herself a few older washed-up Tories from the backbenches and the pretty feeble Nick Clegg (Co leader with Cameron, of his first post-election government) Warsi never stood a chance. She left the government in 2014, citing her disagreement with the government policy of supporting escalation of attacks on Gaza by the then Israeli government, and called for an immediate arms embargo on Israel from this point onwards. It hasn't been adopted to date, despite countless deaths and indiscriminate bombing of the strip, culminating in the recent assault and unprecedented slaughter following the October 7th attack.

Warsi has been a single voice within the Conservative Party calling the government to account for its policy in respect to Israel and Gaza, and her interventions in recent weeks have been without exception reasonable and thought out, despite the emotive and fraught nature of the discourse. That the career of such a promising and potentially valuable contributor to the Conservative Party has been wrecked by such an insidious and slippery operator as Gove, bent as he is on the fostering of intercommunal strife and disingenuous distraction, is a travesty. That this same individual should be currently tasked with a "redrawing of the meaning and understanding of the term extremism", should give us all pause to think, to fear, the direction that our leading political party is heading in. What we have witnessed in recent days is straight out of the Manuel of Operation for any aspiring authoritarian regime. Identify your (minority) target in the public consciousness. Use the media to whip up a moral panic in the public at large and then use the excuse of 'for the public good' to justify whatever restrictions and activities you want to impose in order to further your cause.

It starts with the neoCon idea that the end justifies the means, and ends, unless you are very careful, with the sound of the jack boots on the stairs.

[peter]

Apropos my above post, the above article appears on the front page of today's Times (always a keen participant in the vilification of the UK Muslim community) under the headline....

Definition of 'extremism' will be widened

Ministers are to broaden the government's definition of extremism as part of a clampdown on people and groups "undermining" Britain's institutions and values.

Rishi Sunak has asked Michael Gove, the Levelling Up Secretary, to update the definition, which was set out more than a decade ago (and doesn't include the likes of people who voted for George Galloway in the recent Rochdale by-election.....my parentheses). It describes extremism as "vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values" (which are themselves not defined, making it a catch-all term for anyone who the government doesn't like, or speaks out vocally against what they are doing....my parentheses) and is seen by ministers as no longer fit for purpose.

A new definition which is being finalised, is expected to cover actions that more broadly "undermine" institutions or values. The change is significant as groups or individuals deemed as extremist by ministers can be excluded from government or council funding, or from working with public bodies.

Whitehall sources said the announcement, expected later this month, would include a list of groups that fell foul of the new definition, but added that it was "legally fraught". Gove is also expected to announce details of a unit that will be responsible for providing leadership and training across government departments, to better identify signs and instances of extremism. The unit is also expected to assess whether individuals or groups have breached the new definition and will collect data and research to inform counterextremism policies.

Sunak pledged on Friday to face down extremists who would "tear us apart". The Prime Minister said that the government would "redouble support" for the Prevent Programme (the thought crime unit I spoke of above....my parentheses) which is designed to tackle radicalisation and would "demand that universities stop extremist activities on campus".
---------

The report goes on inside the paper, but I think you get the gist. If you don't agree with government policy you are ripe for the bundling into the extremist handcart. Once in it, you certainly won't be getting any support or voice within the establishment community, and you might well find yourself on one of the deradicalisation programmes that Prevent run up and down the country.

Just for a taster of how this all operates, how many people know that every public employee is bound by contract to bring to the attention of superiors or Prevent officers, anyone they suspect of being in danger of radicalisation. This includes teachers, and leads to some bizarre situations. Like the eight year old boy, who was wearing a T-shirt saying "I want to be like Al (someone or other) who was thought by the teacher to be the then leader of ISIS. it turned out, as the boy was being interviewed, that the Al being referred to was actually the aide to the Prophet Muhammad, revered but alas dead for nigh on thirteen centuries.

Prevent has to date, identified zero people who it is deemed, would actually have gone on to commit terrorist acts had it not been for the programme. Oh well - you can't win them all I suppose.

[peter]

It's becoming increasingly clear that Jeremy Hunt hasn't got a pot to piss in ,for when he delivers his spring budget statement tomorrow, despite having made big promises and dropping hints like confetti at a wedding over the last few months.

Laura Keunsberg pulled him up about it on her Sunday show, but at the end of the program summed up by saying that the Chancellor might or might not be able to reduce the tax burden on people this Wednesday, but if he couldn't we should understand that he'd picked up a difficult situation, what with the covid bill coming in and the war in Ukraine.

Hang on a moment Laura; are you here to make the Chancellor's excuses for him or to hold his feet to the fire? And haven't you forgotten to mention Brexit - you know, that Conservative elephant in the room that is sitting on our economy and flattening it like a dod-turd under our collective future's shoe?

Rumours have it that Sunak and Hunt are fighting like cats in a sack about what course to take. Sunak wants to go big on a pre-budget tax cutting binge, in a last ditch attempt to not be the Conservative leader who leads the party into oblivion, while Hunt is determined not to be remembered as the Chancellor who blew the country's future on a misguided bit of politicking when a carefully planned economic recovery budget was so desperately needed. All of the economic bodies with skin in the game are warning Hunt not to play fast and loose with the future, but the right wing press, the right of the Tory Party and his own PM are piling on the pressure for him to do just that.

Meanwhile, elsewhere the Labour Party are staying pretty quiet, licking their wounds following their recent Rochdale by-election disaster. They know that they have received a dire warning about just how illusory their current poll lead (a whopping 22 percent in favour of Kier Stamer as the best person to be Prime Minister) might be. Rochdale winner Galloway secured the biggest overturning of a constituency vote in electoral history last week, showing just how damaging the Labour leader's position on Gaza has been. It's worth observing that deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner holds the very neighbouring seat to Rochdale, so she is going to be very much less than happy at the result so close to her doorstep. Bad look for her political future if she fails to keep her own seat in the forthcoming election.

More interestingly, George Galloway sent out an impassioned plea to Jeremy Corbyn in interview following his victory. He said that his victory had shown that the making of a major turn around for the fortunes of the political left (so badly damaged by Stamer) was entirely possible. Galloway stands for the small Workers Party of Great Britain, which he was instrumental in forming in 2019 following the defeat and resignation of Corbyn, and he said he couldn't understand why the latter still persisted in maintaining his ties with the party which had turned it's back on him. He refers of course to Corbyn's being thrown out of the Labour by Stamer for his suggestion that the claims of antisemitism within the Party were blown up for political purposes. "Come join us," said Galloway. "Lead us with me as your deputy - and we can knock a hole in Stamer's Labour Party in the forthcoming election the like of which has never happened before."

And pie in the sky as this might seem (and most probably is) there is a certain amount of sense in it. Corbyn is still one of the most, if not the most, popular politicians in the country, and he's the natural leader of any movement that aims to overturn our position of support for Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people. They couldn't win an election, but such is the public anger at the government position on the actions of Israel since October 7th, that they could really throw a spanner in the Stamer-Sunak 'UniParty' that we are being effectively presented with under the illusion of choice. Corbyn has a political platform - when he speaks the people listen. Never has the odious two party system been weaker, and with Reform UK crowding on one side and a Corbyn led Workers Party of Great Britain attacking from the other - well, who could say what is and isn't possible.

This is what our political mainstream is so afraid of. This is what has the establishment quaking in its boots. This is what lies behind the sudden emergence of the new 'enemy within', the 'extremists in our midst's'. It's why the Galloway result in Rochdale was "so appalling" to Sunak (the man who, let's remember, has never been voted into leadership by anyone, as he criticises the candidate who has just achieved the biggest vote turnaround in history, and labells the result as "undemocratic").

It's a dream I know, but the result in Rochdale was a sign that people are getting tired. They are wising up to the fact that their elected representatives have no interest in actually representing the interests of the people, that the electoral system and our polity as a whole is a con - a sham perpetrated at their expense and designed to ensure that nothing ever changes, that the interest of the few over the many system that has emerged is never challenged, never changed. Money has flowed upwards in a never ceasing stream in the past few years, while the lot of people in the main has gotten worse and worse. Now it is the middle class that are effected where once it was just the poor, and suddenly they are beginning to take note. This is the big fear of those running the show - that they are loosing the audience, that the suspension of disbelief trick required to keep the show running is slipping away.

Carefully nurtured, with the right leadership and proper presentation (because the mainstream media is also beginning to see its dominance crumble with the emergence of alternative media sources), we could be witnessing the emergence of a long overdue and much needed change.

Here's hoping.

[peter]

Today, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will unveil his last budget before the next general election.

He is expected to knock 2p off national insurance, which would save a family earning the average disposable income around 900 quid a year. This is reckoned by the number crunchers of the treasury to be far cheaper for the government than a similar level cut in income tax, because I suppose, far fewer people pay NI stamps, by virtue of being retired.

It should be noted that the average disposable income figure is heavily skewed upwards by the small number of households enjoying very high incomes, but it sits at around 32,000 pounds per year or 615 pounds a week. The number of actual households actually enjoying this level of income or more would be significantly less than fifty percent, though actual figures on this are hard to find.

When it comes to wealth distribution in the UK, things are pretty ropey. To say the least.

Figures from around the 2020 mark show that at that time, the top ten percent of wealth holders held 43 percent of the nation's wealth, while the poorest fifty percent held just 9 percent of the same. Ten percent of the cumulative wealth of the nation was held by around 0.1 percent of the population.

Since the massive transfer of state wealth into the hands of the richest people in this country that occurred during the pandemic giveaway, these figures have gotten by accounts, significantly worse.

Here's the thing with wealth (the wealth that the Chancellor studiedly ignores in his budget) - once you get above a certain amount, it just becomes difficult to, well, stop getting more.

Here's how it works.

You've worked hard and made it big. You're a footballer, a BBC celebrity, a top lawyer or doctor, or you've even been lucky and inherited a shit-tub of money.

When you've actually got the lot, all the houses you can live in, all the cars and Rolex watches, the Armani suits and jet-ski holidays, you could want or use, what do you do? Your income is still pouring in so what do you do with it? You invest. You invest in housing stock, shares and bonds, even more Rolex watches, art, wine, you name it. And this stuff, these investments, they themselves start earning you more wealth. The housing brings in rents, it increases in value. Your stocks increase and the other stuff does as well. Like an ouroboros, that snake eating it's own tail, your wealth just keeps pulling in more wealth. You have entered into the 'rentier' class of capitalists, those who get their income not from working, but from investment (the name comes from the rents which that housing stock brings in).

Now, if GDP in a country is flat, ie in other words there is no significant increase in the overall value of goods and services produced in a nation over a period, if the overall wealth of the nation is stagnant, then it figures that if one section of the populace is getting richer, then the other or others are getting poorer. This is best exemplified in our case with house ownership. As house prices rise,due to increasing demand from the wealthiest part of society buying up stock as investment, it becomes harder and harder for the children of the middle and poorer ends of society to meet those rising prices. Only the young of the wealthy can fall back on loans from parents, to be able to raise the deposits necessary in order to got a foot in the housing door. The housing stock thus flows upwards.

And this happens everywhere. As the imbalance, the inequality of wealth grows, it feeds itself like that ouroboros, cycling ever upwards with almost unstoppable momentum.

And this is why a wealth tax is absolutely critical to rebalance things.

Let's just look at it.

Is it really fair (to take capital gains as a single example) that the money gained from the increase in value of a house that has been bought, for no other purpose than as an investment, from which an additional unearned income has been taken while the ownership was ongoing, should be taxed at a lower level than the income of a man who has gone out and grafted for forty hours on say a building site, down a mine, in a hospital ward? By the simple expedient of rising capital gains tax to the same rate as income tax, the Chancellor could raise billions. But he will not elect to do so. Rather he will cut the desperately needed income to the NHS, risking the fiscal black hole of 2 billion pounds that the IFS warned against in the last couple of days.

Make no mistake. This ever growing income inequality in our society is destroying this country and must be adressed by the implementation of an equitable taxation system designed to redress this increasing imbalance. Wealth taxation is of far greater significance than income, but it receives little to no attention in our money fixated society. I'll lay you a pound to a penny that Chancellor Hunt doesn't even mention it when he takes the rostrum in the House today.

(Thanks to the brilliant guys at Novara Media for the content above; Aaron Bastani's explanation of how things work outstrips mine by a thousand times; go check him out. )

[peter]

Waking up in America today, you'd be forgiven for wondering if the geriatrics had taken over the rest-home?

Faced with a third election of Trump vs Biden (and there was speculation whether the latter was up to the job during the first one), we see a contest between two men, neither of whom should be doing anything not involving gumming milk-sops from a specially modified baby-seat (with the occasional 'golden shower' moment expected from both, but with possibly different meanings for each).

Trump has been selected despite facing something like 90 charges of breaking every rule in the book from trying to instigate a civil uprising to farting in public, and Joe Biden is so far gone down the road to senility that he barely remembers to put his teeth in in the morning, let alone that he's president of the United States. I mean really guys, is this seriously the best you can raise?

I couldn't help but laugh at today's Guardian account of the Biden win on Super Tuesday: "President Biden meanwhile, swept past Nissan nominal challengers on his inexorable march to the Democratic nomination....". Come on fellas - swept past on his inexorable march? Not exactly the imagery I'd associated with Biden of late. Last time I saw him on TV he was struggling to remember the difference between Ukraine and Gaza, and looking confused when trying to find his way through a door. This guy's days of sweeping anywhere are over. The only marching he'll be doing is in his head as he dreams he's back playing with his tin soldiers.

Which basically leaves Trump for POTUS. That would be 'Pity old Tump's Under Suspicion' presumably.

-----0-----

You've got to give it to old Jeremy Hunt. He turned out to be a right - well - cunning bastard..... let's leave it at that.

He pulled a right flanker on Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves yesterday by blatantly stealing her two main weapons for raising taxes without hitting ordinary working people in the pocket. He abolished the non-dom tax exemption whereby uk residents with interests abroad can register themselves as not being domiciled in the UK, and thereby avoid being taxed on their foreign based investments. And secondly he extended the windfall tax on the energy companies in respect of unearned profits they have made as a result of rising world energy prices.

And to add insult to injury, he promptly gave all of the extra revenue this generated away, in the form of tax cuts (or rather cuts to National Insurance) and extending child benefits to those earning up to 60,000 pounds.

Which effectively leaves her without a pot to piss in when it comes to keeping all of the promises she has made re public services and the like, when Labour wins the next election.

Aside from this, the long awaited spring budget turned into a bit of a damp squib. Hunt had been expected to pull a rabbit out of the hat to springboard the Tories election push from, but as one backbencher noted, "If that was it, God help us!" The FT analysts were less than overwhelmed by the affair, observing that Hunt was continuing with his "fiscal drag act", by not moving up any of the relevant tax thresholds in order to keep up with inflation. By not doing so he effectively claws back anything he is giving away anyway, giving truth to the Labour accusation of giving with one hand, while taking away with the other.

The only vague bit of electioneering that has emerged is a sort of stated intention to do away with the two-tier tax system of NI payments as well as income tax. This touted manifesto promise will not be materialised anyway if Labour win (which they surely will), so it's really so much pie in the sky. The chances of a quick election in May are diminishing now and it looks like we're in it for an autumn election. One certainly couldn't see the fireworks in this one that would indicate a May return to the polls. It's still not impossible however. If Sunak believes that things can only get worse between now and the autumn, he might make the plunge anyway (a latest set of atrocious polling results could tilt things in this direction) - and he will no doubt be being reminded that John Major back in the late eighties, pulled such a snap election the day after the spring budget, and went on, against all odds and the then polling of the day, to win it. Maybe this will convince Sunak that now is the time? (Also, never forget; he's off to California, and would far rather make his move before the summer, so he could be ready for the autumn beginning of the school year for his kids.)

So it looks like autumn for the election - Hunt would certainly prefer this - but a May one is still (just) possible and might yet happen. Watch this space.

And finally I'd like to quote the front page coverage of the budget from the Daily Star, in its entirety, because I think it sums it all up best.

Budget: Blah Blah Blah Blah

The Daily Star. You gotta love 'em!

[peter]

With each passing day the economic truth hidden within Jeremy Hunt's budget emerges and the voices raised in opposition get louder.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies, a right-wing economic research institute based in London, has said that it struggles to see where the cuts implicit in Hunt's statement are going to come from. With services already cut to the bone, councils up and down the country on the verge of bankruptcy and the backlogs of accumulated workload facing everything from the NHS, through the Courts, to the DVLC and Passport Office, how exactly are such cuts going to be effected? With a projected 20 billion pounds black-hole building up by the year 2028 (if the Chancellor's 1percent spending limits are maintained by the incoming Labour government), it's difficult to see the country becoming anything other than the effective third world wasteland for any but those enjoying the highest incomes.

Because it's always the poor that are effected by this sort of thing.

Take a local school near where I live as a typical example. The school runs trips to a nearby swimming baths for four of its year groups, in order to satisfy the curriculum commitment to teach all schoolchildren to swim as part of an important lesson in life-skills. Struggling to fund the transport it already times it's swimming classes for first thing in the morning, so that parents may drop their children off at the baths instead of at the school. This cuts back on one journey. The single return to the school costs 109 pounds for every trip - a distance of about 5 miles - and this is multiplied by four years times the number of pool visits made.

The headmaster said in interview on local TV that the only way forward was to cut the year groups in which swimming instruction was provided down to two. This cut to the education service won't impact on the children of wealthier families - they will have access to pools and beaches far more readily than those of poorer families - but poor families will feel the loss keenly.

Take dental services. In my area, you won't find a NHS dentist for love nor money whether you are an adult or a child, and with more and more dentists closing down the NHS side of their businesses, the number of people without access to NHS dental care is rising exponentially. So who will be the people turning up at hospitals with dental emergencies? The poorest in our society who simply cannot afford even the most basic of private treatment.

The story is the same everywhere and is the reason that local authority leaders are warning about civil unrest if services are cut yet further (this morning's 'i'). The Mirror tells us of 8 billion pounds worth of stealth tax hidden in the detail of the budget that will hit the oldest people in our society (which I happen to be rapidly heading towards) - also a source of future discontent. And while, like Laura Keunsberg last weekend, the press and media generally are quick to point out the ravages of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine on our economy, no mention of either Brexit or the Liz Truss mini-budget debacle is ever made.

This economic travesty which is impacting the lives of ever greater numbers within our society is down to the Conservative governments we have had for the past 14 years. They are going to try to tell you different; on the television and in the papers, and very shortly on your doorstep. Don't believe them. Don't listen to the lies and excuses they will be boning up on even as I post. They are to blame. Again - they've been in power for 14 years. The buck stops there.

Chuck 'em out and then next time, chuck out Labour as well. Let's have some new blood entering our political arena; the overlapping of our two main parties is now so pronounced that only at the furthest peripheries of either party can any true differences between the two be found. Truly have we entered the era of the UniParty. We have it presented to us as two parties with a half of a percent of difference between them, masquerading as the illusion of choice. Both now dance to the tune of the same invisible masters, the business and commercial interests that fund them with donations, with the tacit understanding that nothing of significance will be allowed to change.

We need to put a stop to this, even if it means stepping away from the center for a while. The center has had its way for decades now and does not seem to be working in our collective interests. Democracy has been usurped by liberal-democracy, and they ain't the same thing.

-----0-----

Here's an interesting thing that you won't have heard in the media.

You remember that thing in parliament last week, or a couple of weeks ago (I loose track) where Kier Stamer stole the SNP's opposition day motion and got himself off the hook?

At the time I wasn't sure how it had worked, but I've learned a bit since then.

You remember it was the SNPs day, and against parliament courtesy (if you like), Kier Stamer, because he would be embarrassed by a Labour supporting of the SNP motion for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza which he himself had not supported previously, introduced a watered down motion. Now Speaker Hoyle should not have elected to put this Labour motion to the vote before the SNP motion was voted on, because the rules of the House are that once a motion is passed, then no other motion may be heard. So in putting the Labour motion to vote before the SNP one, and knowing that the Labour motion would likely pass (saving Stamer the embarrassment of being shown to be at odds with three-quarters of his own party), he effectively stole the SNPs right of having their own opposition day motion heard.

Remember that Hoyle was a Labour MP before being elected speaker, at which point he is expected to renounce all party affiliation and act in a completely non-partisan manner.

So, discounting Hoyle's weak excuses which are effectively worthless, what exactly was going on here? Who stood to gain from this stepping away from parliamentary convention and courtesy?

Clearly Stamer: his leadership could have been rocked by a large scale rebellion on an issue as important as the ceasefire in Gaza. It was imperative for him that he slubber up a watered-down version of the SNP motion that would just about satisfy his MPs, but still not see him calling for an immediate ceasefire. (He did this by demanding a 'humanitarian ceasefire' rather than a straightforward ceasefire (the one being a temporary one, the other a permanent affair) and removing the demands that Israel cease in its "collective punishment" of the Gazan inhabitants.)

Certainly not Hoyle. His credibility as Speaker is permanently tarnished and this perversion of the House protocols will be the defining memory of his time as Speaker. He'll have earned his guaranteed continuation in his role as Speaker following the election, but he will carry the whiff of his treachery around with him for the rest of his political career. The right wing media will not forget that he saved Stamer from taking a serious pre-election blow to the body and will make him pay in their own good time.

The government of Israel. Now they were perhaps the biggest beneficiary of all. It would only take one of the major Western powers to speak out openly, to change its support for Israel from unconditional, to conditional upon its starting to behave in a civilised and democratic manner towards the Palestinians, and the whole edifice of their post-war (WW2 that is) strategy would begin to come asunder. These seemingly unimportant votes a thousand miles away from the Levant are very important to them. Very important indeed.

So it will come as no surprise to learn that the Israeli government has fostered strong ties with the Labour Party over many years. Large numbers of MPs are members of the 'Labour Friends of Israel' political lobby group, who regularly take groups of the same over to Israel on tours, fact finding missions and regular jollies of the normal political kind. And the funding of all this is in good part from the Israeli state itself. And just so that we have political balance, the same situation pertains with the Conservative Friends of Israel as well. So whichever of the two parties is in power, Israel will have friends that they can rely on. And this is hugely important if Israel is to continue doing what any other country in the world would have been virtually cancelled for, in the occupied territories, in the settler communities, and most pertinently in the ravaged territory of the Gaza Strip today.

So it should come as no surprise to learn that both Kier Stamer and Linsay Hoyle - both of them - are members of the Labour Friends of Israel.

And as I say, square meters of printed press space, hours of visual media time, were expended on the parliamentary debacle of the SNPs stolen opposition day, but not once did I hear that particular fact mentioned.

[peter]

'Shocking CNN report puts Israel to shame', posted by Novara Media on YouTube.

Anyone who doubts the obscenity of what is transpiring in Gaza should watch the above horrendous YouTube posting. I defy you to do so and not come away feeling that a boundary has been crossed that can no longer be ignored by the people of the West, even while our leaderships continue to gaslight us about "rising extremism" and how we threaten to align ourselves with the same for simply calling out our administrations for their support and enablement of Israel in their murderous activity.

The video shows the poor emaciated children of Gaza, literally starved until they look like skeletons lying on their cots and beds, dying in their hundreds by the day as we speak.

Meanwhile presenter Aron Bastani tells of imagery that Novara Media cannot put up on the channel (and dear God, what is there is bad enough) of tanks being driven over civilians, of people being shot in food queues, of savagery not imagined as being possible in a civilised world - and somehow it is we who would call it out, we who would take our governments to task, who are the bad ones, who risk being radicalised by standing shoulder to shoulder with the Gazan people in their plight.

And meanwhile, our leaders engage in furious backtracking and distraction techniques, in order to cover their tracks, to obfuscate their guilt and wrongness, in having lent their support for the atrocity in the making. Joe Biden, alongside Ursula von der Leyen - the two biggest criminals in their complicity with the Netanyahu administration in the unfolding horror - scramble to suddenly express their outrage at what has been done. Biden even has the brass gall to make his volta face into a photo-op as he begins his presidential bid to secure a further five years in the Whitehouse. He is going to build a floating port, a pontoon, from which to unload food and medical supplies for the humanitarian relief of Gaza - a humanitarian disaster which he, along with the UK government have fostered by cutting of their support for UNWRA - to supply relief to the dying population.

He has to know that there is absolutely no shortage of food and relief supplies already on the borders of Gaza: that the problem is not the lack of such supplies - it is that the Netanyahu regime has no intention of allowing such supplies to reach the Palestinian people within the Strip. And no amount of pontoons groaning with supplies will make the slightest piddling difference if the relief cannot be got to the people, be distributed from one end of Gaza to the other, in order to adress the suffering as seen in the above video post. The Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant made absolutely plain at the beginning of this operation that the Gazans would be denied food, water and medical supplies for the duration of the Israeli operation, and he has made good on his promise. The language might have toned down in recent weeks, but the promise remains, and all of the American pontoons in the world won't make the slightest difference without boots on the ground going in and completing the distribution - which Biden has not the slightest intention of doing.

And meanwhile Michael Gove, the man who would re-write the meaning of the term 'extremist' so it can basically be expanded to include anyone that the government chooses to, tells us that by attending peaceful protests we stand alongside enemies of the state and risk being radicalised ourselves. In attendance of future protests, he says, "Ignorance will no longer serve as an excuse."

My God, what have we come to that this lizard in human form should threaten us - we the people - for the exercising of our hard won right of protest, because in so doing we expose the moral vacuity of our elected leadership in their misguided support of a potential genocide. It simply beggars belief.

Except that it doesn't. And that it is happening as we speak. Yes Mr Gove, the Sturmfuhrer's outfit will look just fine on you, and if the cap fits, then wear it.

-----0-----

Apparently Foreign Secretary David Cameron has had a meeting with an Israeli minister to discuss the aid situation in respect of Gaza, and subsequently said he had told him in no uncertain terms that Israel must improve its performance in terms of 'improvement on the ground'.

This has apparently pissed off some of the more vocal supporters of Israel amongst the Conservative Party backbench MPs, and some have confessed to being "irritated" by the Foreign Secretary's comments.

Theresa Villiers is quoted in the Telegraph this morning as saying, "The UK government must support Israel's right to defend itself against the genocidal death cult that attacked it on October 7th." She continued, "Lord Cameron should acknowledge the huge efforts being made by the IDF to minimise civilian casualties, and also facilitate aid to Gaza."

Seriously, I barely know where to begin with this. I mean, what planet is this woman living on? Has she seen nothing of what is going down in Gaza? Has she really no conception of what is happening or is she just wilfully blind to it because it is simply too horrifying for her to face up to?

Watch the CNN report I site above Therese, and then return to us with the same commentary. I challenge you to do this. Go on - I challenge you.