What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[peter]

Live by the sword - die by the sword.

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

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

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

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

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

[peter]

The first thing that jumps out at me in my daily perusal of the front pages, is the report in the Financial Times that tells us that the backlog in the processing of asylum seeker applications is doubling the cost of the system to the nation, largely due to the cost of housing the 175,000 plus individuals in hotels, centres and other places while their applications are considered.

Each of these applications costa around 20,000 pounds to process and the total cost of housing and processing is now nearly double that which it was 12 months ago, sitting at around four billion pounds a year.

This is absolutely fucking ridiculous.

Not least so because it is totally fucking unnecessary!

There is absolutely zero reason as to why, from the moment an application is formally submitted, an individual should not be immediately free to enter the labour market and pursue legal work in his or her field of expertise or capability, providing both the labour that our market is screaming out for and the means to support themselves while their claim is being processed. The bulk of claims are successful and there is zero reason why these individuals should not begin building their new lives and contributing to our society from day one. The situation as it stands is absolute madness and one wonders if it is deliberately held in this state of ruinous chaos because otherwise it would not present the government with the dead-cat distraction that the media can use to shift public attention away from its myriad failings on every front. Is this simply an oblique form of election strategising on the part of a government and Party that has absolutely nothing else to offer?

What other reason can there be? Give me one!

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

The Banks are a hypocritical bunch of fuckers aren't they.

They refuse to bank for a feminist group that won't accept that transgender individuals should share exactly the same rights as women born as such, yet deem that continuing to bank for serial killer Rose West doesn't damage their reputation to the extent that closure of her account should be considered. (Nb. I don't think her account should be subject to closure. Having access to basic banking services in this age is not simply an advantage - it is indispensable. Without them you cannot function, you cannot work, you cannot pay for goods and services without which you cannot live. Everyone should have access to them with virtually no exception - even Rose West.)

The Banks deem that Nigel Farage is too politically exposed to hold an account, that he represents too great a reputational risk, yet they deal with the arms industry that pedals death around the globe to whosoever can afford to pay their blood money without a second thought. No reputational risk there then?

As I say - hypocrits of the most egregious kind, wallowing in presumptuous judgement of other people and in consideration of a reputation that already occupies a rung in the popular perception as something below that of the guy in the circus ring who walks behind the elephant with a shovel!

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

MPs are the only group I know of who get paid not to work.

The buggers get an automatic payment of seventeen grand when they stand down as Members or loose their seats at an election. Not much, you might say in the golden handshake stakes (the departing boss of Nat West recently got a couple of million, even though she sloped off in shame having revealed Nigel Farage's banking details to some BBC guy) but hell, why should they get anything. I work, they work, what's the difference? No-one will see fit to give me money the day I choose to quit or get fired - why then should my MP trouser a wedge when we chuck him or her out either? If he'd done a better job, he probably wouldn't be being chucked out in the first place.

And given what this lot has done to this country, I think it should be them paying us and not the other way around!

[peter]

Apparently the cost to the nation of absenteeism from work due to mental health issues is through the roof and Chancellor Hunt along with sidekick Mel (SoS for Work and Pensions) intend to adress it in the autumn budget statement, in order to see if something can be done about it.

Is it any wonder you dickwads! Your government spent two years bombarding the population with fear propoganda, enabled via the willing collaboration of its media lapdog the BBC and a supplicant press, and this is the inevitable result. What exactly did you expect? Still to this day you see these poor gullible fols walking around with their disgusting bit of sopping cloth hanging from their ears, clearly too afraid to live for fear of breathing the same infected air as their fellow men and women.

Now you intend to tell people, damaged to the point of no return by your policies, that they have to ignore what they are experiencing and get out and support themselves. Or what? Have you another plan to manipulate, frighten and otherwise drive them out into work. Starvation is always a good one - oh no, you know that one already don't you? Social shaming might work. At least if that fails to get them out, then the increase in suicide rate that will follow shortly thereafter will take care of a bit of the problem.

Maybe you ought to think about these things before you decide to embark on another two year terror campaign directed toward the people who you are supposed to be serving.

Idiots.

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

I was horrified last night watching the BBC 6pm news, to see them run a story about a woman who had been cleared by a court of cruelty, following a charge that she had been slapping and shouting at her horse that had been misbehaving. The court accepted that she had been disciplining the horse and the verdict of not guilty passed.

For starters, in no way do I condone the slapping of a horse or shouting at it. Horses understand being reprimanded, just as children do, but only in the most controlled of ways, which this didn't sound like. It sounds rather, that she lost her rag with the horse and flew off the handle. But let's face it. The horse will not have been in any sense disciplined or trained by the outburst, but neither will it have been hurt physically or 'emotionally' by it. Two minutes later it will have forgotten that it ever happened.

The same cannot be said for the woman. She will carry this round her neck for the rest of her life. That the BBC chose to take this small incident and publicise it, airing it to an audience of tens of millions - and not forgetting that the woman had been cleared of the charges - absolutely beggars belief. The consequences of this incident, the costs this woman will pay, are out of all proportion to the crime which it turns out, she didn't commit. How dare they? The editor should be sacked forthwith. Marched from the building and cast into the street. The punishment of this woman for the crime she never commited begins today, and will never cease for the rest of her life. A life sentence is exactly what she has been given, and in no small part thanks to the BBC. She should sue them for ten million pounds. More. Far worse than anything Jeremy Kyle ever did (that vampire who used to run a show belittling low-lives that he had convinced to come on and spill the beans about their private lives), this was presented as serious journalism when it was in fact no more than trial by media, by ill-informed public opinion, with a life sentence the only option at the end of it.

Shameful! Absolutely contemptible! Heads should roll.

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

That Donald Trump is as good a ham actor as ever trod the boards in Broadway goes without saying, but is he a felon of deepest guilt and matchless resource, or an unjustly vilified politician who has fallen foul of an establishment clique determined to destroy any chance he has of returning to the Whitehouse?

It's a difficult question for a pleb like me to answer, but there is little doubt as to where the BBC sits on the matter. Their evening broadcast made clear by its coverage of the arrest and processing of Trump on charges of attempting to subvert the course of the 2020 election, that it regarded the former president as something equating to that which one might accrue on the sole of one's shoe, when walking in the local dog exercise area. The presenter could barely contain their disdain for the man, presenting him as an attention seeking narcissist, worthy of being laughed at, but no more.

This is clearly the establishment line on this side of the Atlantic, as well as on the other. For them, the Trump presidency was an aberration, best forgotten; a brief moment during which, the establishment had uncharacteristically let slip its grip, allowed a renegade to slip into the seat of power.

If you just watch the news (as I guess most people still do) as a source of information, as the way in which you get the facts about what is going on in the world, then you aren't going to question this narrative (unspoken, but left in little doubt) very much. Trump is a buffoon. He tried to overturn the election and is now making a pantomime of American politics. That's it. That's what you come away with, what you lazily accept and do not question.

But for the likes of me, things are different.

I can no longer just swallow what the BBC, Sky or the printed media tells me. Because I saw what they did to Jeremy Corbyn. I saw what they did during the Brexit referendum. I saw what they did during the pandemic. And I've seen what they've been doing ever since. Because once the scales have been pulled from your eyes, once the house lights have gone up and the machinery of the show is exposed to the bright light of scrutiny, you can never take any of this stuff at face value again. If Corbyn could be pulled down by an establishment that was determined he would never - never - attain power, that it could never be allowed that a true man of the people could actually get into a place where something could be done to bring about some real change........then why not the same for Trump? Are half the American people so fucking stupid that they would vote a complete clown into the highest office in the country? Or is it just possible that Trump on his side of the Atlantic, represents the same threat to the established order of things that Corbyn did on this side. Except over there he briefly pulled it off before they pulled him down?

I could go on for a long time giving examples of how this works, of how it is done......but chances are I'd be wasting my breath. But here's a couple of pointers just to watch out for. Just see how, whenever the government position on something is stated, in the main it is presented without question. We are providing arms to Ukraine for humanitarian reasons - to prevent greater evils in the future. Never questioned. No alternatives ever put. But if anything not from the government playsheet is aired (rare, but it does happen) a qualifying alternative approach is always given. Israel has been targeted by missiles coming out of Hamas held sites in Lebanon. No further comment. Palestinians have been killed by Israeli shelling in Gaza . Sources in Jerusalem say that the region had been used for the manufacture of munitions to be used in attacks on Israeli cities. It's subtly done, almost invisible unless you are looking out for it. But quietly, insidiously, a narrative is placed in your mind almost without your being aware, that conforms to that which the establishment would have you believe. And the media outlets in general and the BBC news unit in particular, do not need to be instructed by government, by the establishment, in this........because if they needed to be they wouldn't be there in the first place. The system is such that filters out dissenting voices long before they reach the editorial teams, the top presenter slots, in the organisations.

So there you have it. Forewarned is forearmed as they say. But be careful. The theatre with the house lights on is a pretty cold and dismal place. Safer to stay in the dark and suck it all up. Donald Trump is a clown. Jeremy Corbyn was an anti-semite. Covid was real and we're all in it together. And oh yes - Brexit is a roaring success and we're the good guys in the world. It's them, be it the Russians or the Chinese, that you have to watch out for, not us - no, never us.I believe, oh yes I believe!

[peter]

Don't make the mistake of thinking that because I sometimes make posts critical of this country that I don't love it. Quite the opposite, it is because I love it, hold it in the highest regard, that I am so affronted by what those who have governed it in the past, those who govern it today, have done with it.

Yes we have a history behind us and yes that history contains aspects that we should be ashamed of - but this was not us. We have learned, as a people and as do all nations in their own time, that the world is not ours for the taking. That other nations have their own destinies to fulfil., that we have no place in going out and subjecting others to our will.

But it seems that those who attain power will always see themselves as holding ownership of some special quality, some special right, to believe that they know best and feel that in pursuit of goodness knows what interest (other than the most base one of increase of that power, that dominion over others) they have just cause to go out and project their might beyond these shores. And this I deplore, and I consider that I do my nation no disservice in calling it out when it does so.

But equally it seems that at times, when our gaze turns inward, we do not like what we see. That in our desire to demonstrate that we are cut from different cloth from those who came before, we must pull ourselves down as a nation, and that on occasion this can lead to our throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There is also a risk that this tendency towards excessive criticism of our past actions can lead ta kind of reverse racism (for want of a better phrase) in which to be seen as a white and English is to be viewed as a thing of shame, of inherent guilt and worthy of putting down.

Neil Oliver, in one of his recent YouTube postings, gives a couple of examples of this type of thinking and draws attention to the fact that were the same opinion reversed, were the comments applied to other skin colours, they would be wholly and rightly unacceptable, but because it is the white coloured people of our nation to whom they are applied, they are seen as fair game.

In the first, he refers to a comment made by someone or other, pundit or person whose comments are deemed worthy of note, that the woman's national football team, recently returned from their creditable performance in the women's world cup in Australia, were "too blonde and blue-eyed" for comfort. Too blonde and blue-eyed? This can only be interpreted as reference to the colour of their skin (surely the individual was not suggesting that the team was lacking in brunettes with hazel eyes or other hair and eye colours), but can you imagine what the repercussions would have been had the remarks been reversed to point in another direction? There would have been uproar and calls for the public flaying of the individual responsible. But because it was given the direction it was, it was accepted with minimal notice being given it.

Similarly no negative publicity was aroused in our media when one of London Mayor Sadiq Kahn's team made the observation that a white family sitting around a table was no longer representative of the typical London household. True or not, what has the colour of the family's skin got to do with anything? Why did the individual need to make the observation at all and would they have made it the other way? But because it was made the way it was, in our topsy-turvy world it isn't seen as the reverse racism that it comes perilously close to being.

It's easy to sound peevish and thin-skinned when making these observations, and the crimes of our forebears (for they did commit crimes - let's own it) do mean that we have to be more accepting of this kind of comment than would otherwise be required of us......but it's also necessary that we adopt a level playing field if we are ever to get to a place where the past can be put behind us.

We are a nation. White, brown, black and blue-eyed and blonde haired alike. We have a collective past of which we share, some of it good and some downright atrocious. We all share in that past, and none of us are culpable for it, or indeed deserving of praise for it either, any more than any other. We have a collective future in our country, and have need for good men and women of all creeds colours and backgrounds to step up to the plate and partake of its governance.

And most importantly, we have to collectively start taking responsibility for where our country is going, for the legacy we are leaving as the inheritance of our children. Too long have we allowed this nation of ours to be subject to the wrecking ball policies of individuals who serve only their own ends, who care nothing about us as the people of this nation. People who sow division between us as a means of keeping us misdirected from what is being done while our attention is thus diverted. Pay them no heed. Work to make this a place you will be proud to hand over to the next generation and live at peace with your neighbours, be they whatever. We are British, bonded by a common heritage, and having every right to be proud of the fact.

(Ed; What a crock of shit this post is. I leave it in in hope that at least some of the intent I had in posting it comes through. Try to forgive the prigish self-righteousness of the thing asee instead what I hope is the good intention behind it. If you can't even see that, then may it at least serve as a warning to you as to how often you will be the agent of destruction of your own best ideas as you attempt to reach further than your grasp in putting them down on paper. God, what an idiot!)

(Edit: 24 hrs later. Maybe not as bad on rereading as at first seemed. And in the interim period I've read Nadine Dorries resignation letter - again, cause for not feeling so bad. )

[peter]

Moscow has confirmed the death of the warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Western media are having a field day with it. "See how bad Putin is! He'll kill anyone who opposes him!", is the takeaway from the coverage we are getting fed with.

But in reality, we no more mourn the death of the man than any other monster who spends his time organising the killing of other people for money. We've got these shadowy groups too; people who can be mustered to be sent into places where our governments don't want to be seen to be officially involved. So let's cut the bullshit and stop trying to run with the fox at the same time as we ride with the hounds. The clever money would be to just stay the fuck away from Africa, from the Middle East and all of the other places where it is that these nasty operators do their thing, and concentrate on sorting our own mess out before worrying about what other nations are doing.

And talking of Putin, he recently made a video appearance at the Bric countries gathering in South Africa at which, if I have it correctly, another 6 countries were formally invited to join the grouping. Like it or not, our leaders are watching the slow organisation of an alternative centre of world economic focus, and they don't like it. Time will be when the countries of this alliance will operate independently of the Western economy, trading amongst themselves, using currencies other than the dollar (and quite possibly a single unified currency) and sidelining a West that has hitherto dominated the world economy in a manner that is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

And not before time.

Look at how we function now. If the example being set by our own political class is anything to go by - that people can be hoodwinked with misdirection and propoganda, with outright lies when this is not enough, that opponents who stand a chance at the ballot box become fair game for smearing with false allegations or even imprisonment if it is possible - then more power to their elbow. Our love of freedom and democracy stretches only as far as our self interest and the non-western world knows it to its cost. Only we, the duped inhabitants of the W3st still believe it. Our tenure as the single dominant focus of world power and activity issues however waning as new, more youthful and vigorous areas are stepping up to the plate. Our polities, our establishments, our 'one-percents', are going to do everything in their power, right up to the use of promoting destabilising wars and killing, in order to slow the process. This will be the focus of our greater foreign policy goals in the coming years and all news that we are presented with, will be done so with the intent of justifying actions we are taking in order to further these goals. Whatever arms and support we are giving, wherever our militaries have a footprint, there will be our attempts to slow our decline, to hamper the developments that will ultimately come to challenge the western hegemony in years to come. It will be presented as 'good versus evil'. It will be our 'care for the people' our 'humanitarian values', our 'furtherance of the cause of democracy' that will be assumed without question in our media. We will never be the bad guys. Just as we did nothing to bring about the war in Ukraine, we did no wrong in invading Iraq, we do not support the killing of innocents in Yemen by provision of the arms that fuels that conflict, so in the future will we only extend our power in the interest of humanitarianism, of democracy, of freedom. Never in support of simple maintenance of our own geopolitical and economic interests, our waning power and influence.

Never listen to a news report relating to our involvement with other countries beyond our own shores without this in mind. Whenever you see our politicians moralising about the evils of another regime, whenever journalists tell you that you can't believe a word that this or that leader tells you, be it Putin or President Xi or whoever, whenever the unspoken assumption is made that if we are doing it then it must be right, remember that the two biggest war criminals in the world, the ones who behind closed doors cobbled up a plan to invade a third country and to topple its leadership, who lied and dissembled to whole nations, not to mention the United Nations Security Council, in order to justify what they had already long decided to do, still to this day walk the streets and exercise influence in our world, rather than rotting away in the prisons in which they deserve to be held.

So much for our much vaunted rectitude, our Knight in White Shining Armour image. It's smoke and mirrors my friends. Not worth the thin veneer of cheap tinsel in which it is clothed.

[peter]

The Times reports this morning that voters, while marginally more convinced that Labour were the better option in terms of dealing with the immigration and small boats issues, were in the main still fairly balanced in their belief that either the Tories or Labour would do a better job of running the country. Around twenty percent still remain undecided as to who might be the better option, which leaves the next election still fairly open in terms of who might win.

Given the absolute shambles that the country is in, the economic meltdown, the future time bomb of mortgage and housing crisis just waiting to go off, the fact that the infrastructure and buildings are crumbling before their eyes, they have lower living standards than ever before in their lives, it beggars belief that people could still think that the Tories are up to the job, are the better option, but that's people. That the Conservatives have been in power for 14 years, have overseen the Brexit fiasco, the pandemic mismanagement, the destruction of the economy, seems to elude them. What would it take, one must ask, to change their minds? If they would require the house they live in to be pulled from under them, to find themselves sitting on the pavement with no place of abode, then have no fear - the Tories can organise this too.

Let's put this into a way that might be graspable. Food and shelter are the two most basic things you need to survive. Both of these most fundamental responsibilities of government are in dissaray.

In the case of food, we import forty percent of our needs from the EU. The withdrawal agreement demands that we begin post brexit checks on food imports and we have to do this - and soon - under world trading organisation rules. If we don't, we will become pariahs that no-one will trade with, for fear of contravening WTO rules themselves. But if we impose the checks (and we've put it off five times now), we'll simply stop EU exporters from coming here with their produce. It simply won't be worth it. And the result of this will be even worse food supply issues than we see at the moment. And inflation of food prices. Eye watering levels of food price increase that will have people out on the streets.

And our PM's plan for dealing with this? To keep putting it off until the Tories loose the next election (or win it and boot him out) and then let someone else sort it out. Brilliant!

And the other staple for survival, housing. Hundreds of thousands of households facing a situation where their already maxed out finances are going to see their biggest monthly outlay, their mortgage payment, go up by four times. So if they are paying fifteen hundred pounds a month now, then in short order, over the next twelve months, they could be faced with having to find six thousand pounds a month. Not for one month, but every month. Common sense tells you it ain't happening. Houses will be lost, coming onto the market, like leaves falling in an autumn gale. Supply goes up, cost comes down. Basic economics. House price crash, negative equity chaos in the housing market.

And the rest.

Health service, fucked. Education, fucked (a quarter of a million kids they don't even know where they are!). Immigration, fucked (desperate for workers and housing 140,000 asylum seekers who are not allowed to work). Defence spending - well business is booming in the killing game, but the problem is we're giving it all away. Crime - again, booming.....if you're a criminal (seeing as how you've got a ninety percent chance of getting away with it - pretty good odds if you fancy a bit of shoplifting (or are forced by poverty into it).

Come on people! Wise up! Undecided? Use your freaking eyes!

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

Spare a thought for the poor bastards sitting in airports this morning - hundreds of thousands of them - watching their holiday dreams turn to ashes before them.

They are victims of an air traffic control system meltdown, the like of which (they say) has not been seen for a decade.

That's entirely possible because I remember being involved in the last one (well, maybe not the last, but certainly over a decade ago) and it was absolute hell. I was travelling to China and going through Heathrow when the new (at the time) system collapsed. I spent near 24 hours in limbo, with no-one to be found from British Airways who could begin to advise us what to do. They simply vanished, leaving us in our tens of thousands completely adrift. 21 hours after arrival in the airport, at 3.am, I threw in the towel and went to get my luggage, which had been unloaded. It took me two hours to find it,dumped on the floor of the concourse along with thousands of pieces in an area the size of a football field. At 5am I began the seven hours drive back home having been 24 hours without sleep or proper food, and in a state of absolute confusion. When I phoned my travel agent later that day I was told that some people were still waiting in the airport. The planes never left. Thousands of flights were simply written off and holidays cancelled. It was chaos and the airport was simply not up to the job of bringing it back under control. They effectively just wiped out a few days of travel and began again from scratch.

This is what these poor people will be facing this morning and my heart goes out to them.

-----0-----

I ran into Michael J Fox in my local garden centre over the weekend. At least I think it was him - I can't be absolutely sure, he had his back to the fuchsias.

[peter]

First front page I looked at this morning; " Basket Case Britain fells like a Third World Country" from the Daily Mail's Sarah Vine (ex wife of the Brexit supporting minister Michael Gove. )

They follow up with how the passengers effected by the glitch that caused air traffic control systems to crash will likely get no cash compensation for their losses. They say the glitch was caused by a 'French blunder' - Well, it would be wouldn't it, just as the failure of Brexit is their fault well, and the queues at Dover, and the gaps on our supermarket shelves...... All down to a vengeful EU. Nothing to do with the government that has bent us over and shafted us.

The Times meanwhile considers the important topic of whether the beer-goggles phenomenon of a fer jars making a rough looking pull appear a bit more 'doable' is true, concluding (as per the study carried out by some half-pissed boffins in a Canadian university) that it's bollocks. And they also report on eureka moment insight of the majority of Church of England clergy that we're not actually a very religious country anymore. The berobed bods worry that it could spell the end for CofE, but I wouldn't worry boys - you've got sufficient millions invested in the arms industry and petrochemical industries, both doing pretty well at the last count, to tide you over for a while.

The Express tells us that our Brexit freedoms will allow us to build hundreds of thousands of more homes as we ditch old laws pertaining to environmental concerns. What they are in essence doing is scrapping EU regulations pertaining to the levels of infrastructure such as sewage removal pipework, that must be provided for new building projects undertaken in a given area. That's okay Rishi. We have no problems with our new homes filling up with a miasma of shit stench every time too many people all decide to flush at the same time (just tell Gove to further relax the laws on sewage dumping into rivers; that should do it). And road access and transport services are as the idle wind which we regardeth not - we don't need that stuff. You build away my man - tear up that pesky red-tape wherever you find it. Brexit will look even more successful from California where you'll be living this time next year. Word of advice - don't try your arm at American politics. Lying can get you into serious trouble there - like jail trouble.....ask Trump. Unless of course you're going to join Biden's team..... that might cut you some slack I suppose.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan is pressing ahead with his Ulez scheme, making London the biggest emissions regulated city for driving in, in the world. This is going to cripple the poorest inhabitants of Greater London, hitting them for twelve quid a day for the simple daily stuff like going to work, visiting family, going out to the cinema or to socialize. As per usual, the stupid ****s who plan these things don't get that the moment you start hitting the lower end of the triangle of wealth of our society (that's the bulk of us) disproportionately in terms of the cost of climate change policies, you loose their support. It's not that people are too stupid to get that stuff needs to be done. It's just that they don't want to see their lives blown out of the water by it, and especially so while the wealthy upper parts of the pyramid keep on as though nothing has changed, simply because they are able to absorb the additional costs without feeling them. Hence the reason why, as the Telegraph reports, people in Greater London are protesting in their thousands against the charges. In the words of the song, I predict a riot.

The Telegraph also goes with an oblique blaming of the French for the air traffic meltdown, and runs a story about the UK Foreign Secretary's forthcoming visit to China (much criticized as 'appeasement' of the Chinese in some circles, who would see a harder line approach) as well. The truth is that Secretary Cleverly can go to China all he likes - the administration over there will barely even notice he is there and certainly won't take any notice of anything he says. It's all very well Cleverly talking about the UK "using it's influence in the world" to effect change and improvements, but the truth is we haven't any. President Xi won't even break stride to acknowledge Cleverly's visit, and similarly, if he can be persuaded to see Rishi Sunak at next month's G20 summit in India (the real purpose of Cleverly going to China being to set this up), he'll treat him with indifference at best, complete contempt at worst. Few will forget the absolute boredom visible in Joe Biden's face as he sat next to a grinning, simpering Sunak at a brief meeting the pair had last year. We are nothing to these big players, and the more so since we left the EU. We don't get to tell them what we want: we get to listen to what they tell us what to do, and then go do it. At least Cleverly understands that a new world order is emerging and that engagement with China will be a part of that, irrespective of what Joe Biden's position on it might be. That at least is hopeful.

Page 4 of the FT has a report on the holding up of funding for the support of Kiev due to increasing concerns being put forward by anti-war factions on both sides of the Atlantic. The realisation that the 'forever war' in Ukraine is getting nowhere and threatening to cost more than it is worth is starting to bite, and suddenly the voices that have been calling for peace talks from day one (and I'm one of them) will be begun to be listened to. Of course it won't be presented that way. Reasons will be found - suddenly Putin will be caving in, or the terms of a deal become that much more favourable or something - why we should now engage in talks where we shouldn't have before (when tens of thousands of lives, civilian and military both, could have been saved).

Or perhaps it will be presented as a Ukrainian decision to give up some ground. An odd little report on the BBC news last night spoke of bodies piling up in Ukrainian morgues as the casualties of the war were brought in. The report went on to say that the Ukrainian administration was, in keeping with normal practice, loathe to give details of casualty figures, but that theyhad to be significant. I think what this report was doing was to pave the way for our government to say, the Ukrainian administration was, as was its right, considering the possibility that it should enter into peace negotiations, and that it would not be our place to hinder them if this was what they desired to do. As always, we will say, it is the Ukrainian desires that are uppermost in this, and the wellbeing of the people of Ukraine must come first. Of course it will be nothing of the kind. If the wellbeing of the people of Ukraine was a factor, talks would have begun eighteen months ago when the invasion was first mounted. The truth is it is the West that is loosing heart.....or rather finding the thing a more expensive game than we had envisaged. Getting harder to justify, politicians nervous of their seats are eyeing their constituents, and beginning to balk at continued and seemingly endless spending on a pretty much lost cause. So when it ends (in negotiations as anyone with a grain of sense always knew that it would) it will be at the Ukrainian insistence and we, avuncular and magnanimous to the last, will be entirely supportive of this. Watch out for it. Here it comes and you heard it here first.

(Edit; And when the negotiations come, we will damn well want to be sure that it is us that is seen to be behind them, not the Chinse and South Africans. That kind of diplomatic coup could not be allowed to fall into their hands, not as long as we have holes in our arses!)

[peter]

D'you get days like that, when one day feels like it should be another?

Can't say why but today feels like a Saturday to me, even though I'm well aware that it isn't. It might be because I'm having a couple of weeks off work (despite only doing two days a week anyway) and as a result my 'day clock' is a bit out of kilter. So somehow it seems a bit strange to see the papers doing their workaday stuff, when I somehow expect it to be more 'weekend-ish'.

But let's have a look.

Most papers are concentrated on Sunak's 'decision' that convicted felons ccan be forced into the dock to hear sentence passed against them.

It's bollocks, because they already could be - the law allowing for it already exists - but Sunak has suddenly said (because it seems timely to say so due to the recent Letby refusal) that it will be enforced. Goalers who have to do the actual forcing however have sensibly said otherwise. Only once in ten years since the law was signed off has it been applied, the reason being because of the judges awareness of the very real risk to life and well-being attendant with actually physically forcing someone to do something that they are adamant that they will not do. Satisfying though it might to see someone in the dock receiving their due desserts, it isn't actually a necessity that they are so. Balanced against the risks to both the guards doing the forcing and the defendant themselves, this satisfaction element does not hold the candle and thus judges are reluctant to force the issue. Rightly so. The first time a prisoner was seen being wrestled into the dock, arms behind back and puce in the face, the idiocy of it would be exposed. The first time an inevitable death occured (remember what happens when the police try these kinds of strong arm tactics - people die) there would be shock and outrage to match anything that the failure to appear is causing today. "A public execution," the papers would scream and they would be right.

No - the judges know what they are doing in this situation and so do the warders. They do not force these issues because they understand what the consequences would be, and Rishi Sunak (if he really gave a shit about the relatives of the victims and wasn't just up for a grabby headline to make him look good) would explain this. But being who he is, of course he'd rather go for the headline, the photo-op (he's there this morning, with Olivia Pratt-Korbel's mother). Nothing changes.

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

According to the Times, disgraced former Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi (he who 'forgot' to pay a couple of million in tax to the Exchequer......as you do ) is in negotiations with the receivers and some Middle Eastern financiers, to see control of the Telegraph newspaper returned to its owners, the Barklay brothers. The remuneration for brokering this arrangement will possibly (according to the report) be the Chairmanship of the board of governors.

Sweet!

Zahawi, a natural slitherer around the backrooms and undergrowth of shabby dealings, is out of favour at the moment, but I very much doubt that we've heard the last of him. And Chairmanship of the Telegraph group would be a big step towards his political rehabilitation, given that (as Boris Johnson once observed) the readership of the paper were the true masters of the Conservative Party. To control the Telegraph is to control the mood of the Conservative Party membership, and to control that is to control the country.

As Rishi Sunak is currently finding out.

Because he's done for. He's lost the right of the parliamentary party - and they call the shots. It's reported this morning that Hunt will not be giving in to right wing demands for tax cuts and they don't like it. And Hunt and Sunak are joined at the hip. Sunak's cabinet is split over the issue and in truth all he wants is to get the fuck out of Dodge. He's had it with the UK and the UK has had it with him. And look and behold, the Telegraph seems adamant to help him on his way. Ever in the pocket of the right wing of the Tory Party, they are now not even hiding the fact that they want him gone. They never wanted him in the first place (because he was Indian, not because he wasn't right wing enough, because at that point, until realpolitik took a bite at him, he was) and now they want him even less. They never forgave him for ousting Boris Johnson, or because he replaced Liz Truss whose immoderate economic policy (can you call it that?) they loved - and now they are going in for the kill. This morning's front page runs a story about hospital waiting list deaths, the figures having doubled in the last five years. They actually have a little box squared off saying "360,000 The rise in the number on the waiting lists since Rishi Sunak promised to reduce it in January." Don't think for a moment that the Zahawi involvement with the paper's future and the stance towards Sunak are unrelated. Zahawi is not a natural right winger of the Braverman type - but he is an opportunist and manoeuvrer of the highest resource. To get the Chairmanship of the paper at the time it is sharpening its swords to bring down Sunak will suit him just fine. He might not be king, but he'll be king-maker, which to a power and money broker like him is just as good.

And maybe - just maybe, who knows........

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

I bought a boomerang from a ghost on ebay the other day. I hope it doesn't come back to haunt me.

Chow for now. Have a good weekend (when it comes).

[peter]

If you needed a clearer example that the polarity of world activity/power/influence is shifting away from the West and reforming in other more vibrant and youthful regions (either collectively in the one alternative or even in the form of a mult-ipolarity, for want of a better word), then the small inclusion, low down on the front of this morning's FT gives it.

Unreported in any of the other papers (and probably in future televised news reportage as well, though it can hardly go unnoticed when the time comes), we are told that President Xi of China will not be attending the forthcoming summit meeting of G20 leaders scheduled to take place in India in a few weeks time.

The FT notes that Xi "dominated" last week's Bricks summit held in South Africa.

Irrespective of our stamping our foot and shouting like a truculant child, the world order is shifting around us, like it or not. Recognition that we cannot be going around the world throwing our weight around, that the era of the West's saying to the rest of the world, "Jump", and them replying, "How high?", is over, is crucial if we are to retain any influence on the new world developing around us.

Yet this is the one thing that our leaders - and most especially the American leadership as it stands - seems absolutely unable to grasp. They just don't get that the era of Western dominance is over. The rest of the world is simply turning its back on it and, under the guiding lead of a fast growing China (current problems notwithstanding), getting on with development of it's own centre of gravity, of activity - and one in which the West is currently playing no active part.

Oddly, the one 'leader' that does seem to grasp the changing nature of the world (albeit in his own boorish way) is Donald Trump.

In his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Trump was adamant that the war in Ukraine must be brought to a swift end, and that relationships with Xi and Putin, and even Kim Jong Un, must be refostered. He stressed that he,as president, had had good relationships with all of these individuals and (one can assume by implication) that this would be important for the future, if the West was going to retain any kind of influence in a fast changing world.

I never thought I'd see the day when it was Trump who seemed like the clear headed one, the one prepared to accept that hankering back for a lost time of Western dominance was no longer going to cut it, but such are the topsy-turvy times we live in.

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

So Ben Wallace is out as defence secretary and Grant Schapps is in.

The focus in today's media is whether Schapps will be an advocate, a bulldog in the face of Treasury parsimony, for the increase of defence spending and the rebuilding of our defences in general and our army in particular. He promises he will be, but others suspect he has been given the role simply because he is a Sunak 'yes-man', who will agree to anything his boss says without complaint or opinion of his own.

There is likely to be some truth in this. It's not just Sunak that Schapps has been loyal to. He's held five positions now in government in recent years, always following the government line, always being one of the ones wheeled out on the Sunday morning political slots (along with Nadhim Zahawi) when the government found itself in a sticky situation - a safe pair of hands to deliver the government excuses, no matter how contrived and tenuous they might be. He clearly has ambitions of his own in respect of the top position, and until he's ready to make his own move for the top job, will toe the line with whatever the leadership of the day require of him, just for the simple expedient of not blotting his copybook. He won't make a dissenting move until the top slot is in his grasp, and this move to defence secretary brings him one step closer. Next will be one of the big three, Chancellor, Home Secretary or Foreign Secretary, and until then, and until the incumbent PM is clearly weakened to the point of no return, he'll stay obedient. (As an aside, it must be galling for a PM to have to appoint these quite obviously snakes in the grass, those whose political ambitions trump anything they have in the way of beliefs or principles, but they have to because those are the only ones who can be trusted to tow the line.)

So in respect of defence spending, it won't be Schapps who'll be making the running. Unlike Wallace, he has no particular love or interest for the military, for the defence of the nation, and he'll do whatever is conducive towards his final goal. If this means standing by while the armed forces are whittled away, then so be it. If on the other hand his purpose is furthered by making a noise for defence, he'll make a noise.

Which brings me to Ukraine.

Given what I've said in an earlier post, I am cognisant that any scaling back of our commitment to the maintenance of spending on the Ukrainian war, on provision of arms and money to the Zelensky cause, would have been impossible under Wallace. He'd have shouted out to the rafters against it. If we are preparing behind the scenes to row back - and I believe we might well be - then having a new defence secretary in place, and for that man to be a yes-man, would be essential. If I was Zelensky, I'd be viewing the announcement of Schapps as the new man on the job with disquiet. It isn't the final end move, 5he coming out and saying that the game is up, we're out, but it's a possible step towards it and that must give him cause for concern.

[peter]

I've been reading a dry old book. Reaction and reform; 1793-1869. Part of the Blandford History Series, it isn't exactly a page turner. It's not going to set your heart pumping and the blood racing in your veins, but it has tought me something rather significant.

Dealing with the period from 1794 to 1869, it charts the period following the American war of independence, through the Napoleonic wars and then onwards through the nineteenth century in the early reign of Queen Victoria.

It's an interesting period of British history insofar as at the start of it the bulk of the population was still rural, employed in cottage industries of pre-industrial England, where by the end huge tracts of the population had moved into the cities and urban living with all of its early horrors, was the order of the day.

But this isn't what I've learned: rather, surprise, surprise, has to do with politics and the arrangement that pertained for our elected representatives in the House of Commons. Because unlike today, with its rigid organisation into tightly controlled political parties, although there were indeed whigs and tories, the forerunners of today's parties, there was no tight allegiance of individual MPs to any given party, and each tended to vote according to his conscience on any given issue.

In fact the book says that as far as any parties existed (though they were not formally organised as such) they tended to focus around issues rather than the political allegiances we understand today. The tightening up of party control into something we would recognise today did not, we are told, occur until later in the nineteenth century, meaning that the PM of the day, if he wanted to get a given law or vote through Parliament, had to navigate a variety of different interest groups, convincing each in turn to lend their support. (Not to mention the King of the day, George III (he of the madness fame), who still exercise his perogative to interfere in politics to the absolute maximum, even to the point of refusal to sign off on laws he did not agree with and barring individuals he didn't like from holding cabinet positions. George was in fact, the last monarch given such freedom, and was the reason why the role of monarch was pushed back into the truly constitutional one it occupies today.)

Without the whip system that we see today, MPs were much freer to follow their own opinions on a given issue, and there was not the 'punishment' system of having the whip removed (effective political death in today's system) to corale them into voting in a particular way.

This need for the exercise of significant diplomacy in order to bring all of the opposing viewpoints on an issue into line, sufficient to get a vote passed, must have bred a very high quality politician in terms of those who found their way into the government, and this is I think, demonstrated by both Pitt the Younger and Fox, the two leading opposing leaders of the day, both men of high repute and historical renown.

How much better would be a return to this system today. How refreshing it would be to see our elected representatives voting as their consciences saw fit, voting in the interest of the people who had voted them in, not just paying lip service to them while in reality their hands are pretty much tied by the control which the party authorities exercise over them. And that is assuming that they are not just ambitious young toads who will say anything required of them just to get political advancement. You know the ones: they always ask the planted questions at Prime Minister's Question Time - sycophantic homilies highlighting a particular area that the government or PM thinks a bit of success has been made in. Essentially time wasting exercises, wasting valuable minutes when the PM should be answering important questions. (In fact the whole of the QT exercise has become a public showpiece rather than the serious political occurence it should be. And PM's love it that way. The last thing they want is for it to become an actual grilling of themselves on what they are really up to. Perish the thought.)

Those old guys of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries knew what they were on about, and it was a poor day for the functioning of our political system when the quasi-independance of our elected representatives was lost to the tight strictures of the party whip system. How many of our current crop of second rate wasters could have survived without the whip system to bolster their authority? Not many, I'm thinking!

[peter]

The Sunday papers are very often used by political parties to push whatever they have decided their electoral strategies are going to be to the fore, and today's Telegraph is a pretty good indicator of what the Tories have settled on as their best hope of working a seemingly miraculous turnaround of their failing fortunes.

It's becoming clearer by the day that the climate issue has been decided on as the 'wedge issue' upon which the UK public is split, and given that most people are feeling the pinch, and that environmental policies in the main cost people money to little or no tangible gain (that they can readily see or feel), the move towards a climate denier stance (dressed up as a "pragmatic and practical" approach) is where the votes lie.

So, suddenly since the Uxbridge by-election, where the public animosity towards Sadiq Kahn's expansion of the Ulez zone drove the vote into their (the Conservative) arms, and after years of going along quite happily with all of the net zero undertakings and the banning of this and that - fossil fuel cars and gas boilers and whatnot - the government is turning about face and doing everything in its power to demonstrate its pulling back on its green commitments. In today's Telegraph it's the commitment to no expansion of UK airports and the net zero goals surrounding our existing ones. Sunak had earlier said in interview that being environmentally conscious did not mean that people had to "stop going on holiday" and today's Telegraph report is a sort of 'proof of the pudding' demonstration of this.

Essentially the government's Climate Change Committee, the advisory body who reports to government on what is needed to be done for us to meet our envoronmental commitments, has delivered a report saying there must be no airport expansions, and the PM is refusing to commit to this. It's a nice, cost free in terms of money, demonstration that he is 'on the side of the people'. In other words, if more airport space is needed for the airstrips for you lot to go on holiday from, then I'm the man who'll allow it! He doesn't actually have to build the strips, simply to say that the Tories would be prepared to do so. The Telegraph puts this forward as the government moving towards a more "pragmatic" stance on climate change, by which we can read that they'll abandon any policies that are likely to loose them votes, be they necessary for effective climate change action or otherwise. They now want to be seen as the party that has the people's interest in mind. The ones who'll say, "There is room for manoeuvre in climate change policy - it doesn't all have to be done yesterday. It can be thought out and done in ways that doesn't tear people's lives apart, blasting them back to the middle ages." Suddenly the old time-framed commitments are slipping as the election gets closer.

Because the truth is, people don't want to loose their cars. They don't want to install heat pumps that don't work as well as what they have now and cost a fortune. And the Tories are going to play on this, promising that they'll be the party that will not ban the sale of petrol cars, of gas boilers, as would the Labour Party. And by jingo, it'll work. I'm already half on board and I can see exactly what they are doing - and am equally aware that they cannot be trusted as far as you can throw them. But as I've said before, they'd have cut the head off the Queen in Trafalgar Square had it meant winning an election and retaining power, so sacrificing the future lives of generations yet to be born should be no problem to them - and on this basis they probably are prepared to row back on our envoronmental commitments.

So yes - they are on to something, and even in the face of their abject failure at getting anything - anything - right in the last fourteen years, it could work. People have short memories, are inherently selfish in their attitudes and don't want to loose what they have. Focus on this, and convince them that your party is all that stands between them and their shouldering the costs of all that do-gooder environmental stuff, and you might just get them to forget what it is that you've done to the country. So this will be the background to much of what any minister has to say in the coming months. And it'll be eagerly seized upon and reported by the right wing press (which is just about all of it) ,and even the BBC won't go too hard on them for it. Gradually the people will be brought round to thinking that this "pragmatic" approach is the right one (let's face it - they'll buy anything that says they don't have to give up their car, their holidays abroad) and not just a disastrous avoidance of reality in order to secure populist vote (the sweetshop politician who'll give you sweets rather than the doctor politician who'll give you medicine) - and they'll be won over. And once again, they'll vote in the very people who have shafted them for the last decade and a half, who will continue to shaft them, to oversee a wealth gap increase where the richest in our society get ever wealthier while the rest of us see our living standards drop like a stone in a well. And we'll go into it happily and suck it up when it happens.

Ahh well. That's life I guess.

(Edit: And the Tories are nothing if not a practical bunch. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the climate change debate, if they have realised that the climate change goals and commitments are not achievable whether we stick to our policies in respect of them or not, and that those policies are vote loosers, then they will have no qualms in abandoning them in pursuit of a further election victory. They have nothing to loose and everything to gain in doing so. Hence the volta face we are now seeing.)

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

And there's another interesting article on the Telegraph front page and it relates to the increase in wealth distribution in our society that I refer to above.

Now Michael Gove is a slippery sod at the best of times and it will not have escaped him that the ever increasing gap between the small group of have's in our society, and the ever growing proportion of have not's, is beginning to rankle. Here then, lies another fault line that can be exploited if handled correctly before the next election.

Sunak and Hunt, along with the Labour front bench, seem adamant that nothing must be done to adress the rising wealth inequality in our country, but Gove, if what he said in an FT podcast yesterday can be believed, thinks differently. I'll give the quote as it was reported this morning in the Telegraph as a starting point.

One of thebig gear changes of the past however many years has been that income inequality has worsened. This is incorrect. It is wealth inequality that has increased. So those that already have assets have seen them accumulate in value......you've got to look at all these factors

He went on to say that he wanted to, "find a way of extracting what we need for public services from those who are living in a rentier fashion."

Now this is being presented in the Telegraph as a divergence with the Sunak/Hunt position of no increase in tax or instigation of a wealth tax, and indeed it might be so. Gove has a very astute political antenna, and he'll know that the Sunak administration's days are numbered, even were they to pull off a suprise election victory. He'll also be aware that to be putting forward an apparently proletariat based opinion, one that appears to champion the common man over the monied elite, is going to be a public opinion winner (the more so because not even the Labour Party, the supposed 'Party of the People', are suggesting it). It's even possible that he actually beleves it. As levelling up secretary, he did actually seem to want to achieve something, and as a grammar school chap who has not the monied background of many of his colleagues, he's always stood slightly apart from them on the privileges of wealth aspects of the party. At Oxford he is reported as being a bit of a 'hanger on', used as a gofer for the Johnson-Cameron set, and tolerated rather than allowed to be a fully paid up member. This is something he will not have forgotten, and it's just possible that he really feels that those with the most should contribute a bit more than they currently do (especially given our current financial woes).

Is he then preparing to launch a more centrist movement within the party - there is some evidence of the nascent beginning of such a movement already - preparing his place, as it were, in the post-Sunak party. And either as a truly more centrist believer or because he sees it as the best place to be for when the inevitable shit hits the leadership fan? With Gove it's impossible to know.

And it's even possible that he's not doing it in opposition to the views of the leadership of Hunt and Sunak. They may know that this is going to be a big election issue and could be using Gove as an outrider to bring it into the political debate, without themselves appearing to share his views......yet. Again, impossible to know, but nothing can be put past them at this stage. Hunt is certainly a more centrist orientated individual than his place amongst his current cabinet colleagues would imply, and he for one will not be completely deaf to the point that Gove is making.

All to play for and very politically interesting. Schemes and wheels. Smoke and mirrors. That's the order of the day today, and these Telegraph stories reflect it.

[peter]

Why, I'm wondering to myself, is all this business about the concrete used in building schools, suddenly occupying such a prominent place in our media?

Don't get me wrong, we all want the kids at school getting their proper education in, but suddenly this thing has broken like a tidal wave over our entire media spectrum, to the virtual swamping of any other stories that might be of interest. I mean, this is important, sure - but that important? They are talking like it's a return to lockdown, to remote learning for years to come? Bullshit. It means a bit of reorganisation, a bit of shifting about of timetables and rooms while rectification work is carried out, and then back to normal. Why then the concerted shifting of our collective media gaze onto this relatively unimportant topic? As usual, I'm suspicious. What is going on over here, while our attention is being directed over there.

I don't know the answer to this; I wish I did. But I'm damn sure that there is a whiff of dead cat in the air here, and I don't much like it.

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

Spare a thought for those poor new-agers wallowing around in the clay at this week's Burning Man festival in the Nevada dessert.

Torrential rains have turned the usually dry terrain into a quagmire through which neither walking or bike riding (one of the festival's big attractions apparently) is really much possible.

Billed as a sort of sustainable future living project, there is apparently limited mobile phone or internet coverage at the festival, and people are encouraged to bring what they can and share with each other on a mutual exchange basis, rather than using money to enable transactions. The festival has morphed over the years from its original new age roots into a fashion fest to which celebrities and influencers flock in order to be seen.

The love-in is supposed to show the rest of us how we should be living, giving us a glimpse into a place where things are much better, but it always looks to me like a load of people letting their hair down at a pretty bog-standard weekend blowout, from which they will return on Monday morning with hangovers and slot back into their normal high-consuming lives and reach again for their over stuffed wallets. But maybe not this year. Perhaps the hardship and travails of meeting mother nature face on will teach them some humility, some appreciation of how perhaps, nieve, their antics can seem to the rest of us 'unenlightened' proles. Either ways, I hope that they manage to squeeze a bit of fun out of their experience and that they all return home safe and sound, ready for a good hot bath and a square meal.

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

Interesting to read in the FT that on the pulling out of Western banks and financial institutions from Russia at the onset of the Ukrainian hostilities, China almost immediately stepped in with alternative funding to the tune of billions of yuan. This is now manifesting itself in a swivelling of Russia away from the traditional exchange currencies of the dollar and euro, and towards the renminbi (the equivalent of the word sterling to the UK pound, the renminbi is the name of the Chinese currency). This will further help China in the establishment of an alternative currency exchange in which traditional Western currencies are not a significant part. Yet a further development in the ongoing project to create a multipolar word in which economic power is more evenly distributed, rather than being concentrated in the West as it currently is.

Again, stories like this receive little attention in our blinkered news media, but are actually where the real news lies. This is the reshaping of the world as it moves into its next historical phase occurring before our eyes. Nothing to see here then.

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

Finally, Prince Andrew will no doubt be relieved to hear that any state papers relating to his affairs will not be released into the public domain by the Foreign Office until he is 104 years old.

A freedom of information request by a biographer was denied, with the assertion that the requested documents would become available in 2065.

The author has suggested that perhaps a "culture of secrecy" surrounds royal correspondence.

You don't say!

[peter]

No-one in Nato is going to be happy at the idea of North Korea's Kim Jong Un meeting up with Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok to discuss the trading of Russian satellite and nuclear submarine technologies for arms (of which Russia is, like Ukraine, going through at an alarming rate), but this is apparently what is slated to happen in the next couple of days.

Travelling by armoured train, the North Korean leader may also squeeze in a visit to Moscow, before heading back to his own problem beset country. North Korea is apparently struggling to feed its people (why this should be, I have no idea - I'd always thought it was essentially an agrarian society with huge tracts of land dedicated to rice production) and the provision of some kind of food aid from Russia may form some part of the deal.

The Ukrainian forces seem to have finally punched a hole in the first of the three layered defensive strip that Russia has established along the front line of hostilities (the broad line of mined territory which forms first layer) and the expectation is that having done so, they will attempt to move out sideways, effectively 'unzipping' the mined line from the next two (somewhat less wide) lines.

But this is all taking time and time is just one of the things that the Ukrainians are short of (arms and troops being the other two). If winter hits before any significant progress is made, then it's a case of sitting out the bad months, during which the Russians will simply repair the damage and bingo, it's back to square one next spring. If this happens, it's likely that the Ukrainians will start coming under significant international pressure to start talking in order to seek a resolution to the dispute. (And Putin also - this is costing Russian allies big money as well, in the form of disruption to international trade, commodity prices etc.)

Significant gains have got to thus be achieved in short order, or it's looking like game-over for both sides. It's unlikely that any deal with North Korea will change the situation on the ground that quickly, but who knows. The continuing destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure and cities is bound to be having an effect on the morale of the people. There isn't much point in winning the war if the entire country is reduced to rubble in the process, so increasing Russian barrage attack capabilities might have an fairly quick effect here.

Don't know. More likely that the stale-mate will go on into winter I'd think, during which there will be some hard decisions to be made.

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

The aerated concrete debacle is descending into farce, with education minister Gillian Keegan taking most of the flak and not, it would seem, liking it very much. In an open-mike accident yesterday she railed that wouldn't it be nice if someone for a change gave her some "fucking credit for doing a good job while others had sat on their arses!"

Fair comment, until it emerged that actually, while the 'crisis' unfolded, she'd been.....errrr.....sat on her arse in Spain (where she apparently owns two properties) on holiday. Her office rather weakly insisted that she had been working while there - honestly - answering calls daily and whatnot, but in truth the damage had been done already.

The Telegraph reckons her days are numbered however, but does recognise that she is serving a useful purpose in remaining in situ for the time being, insofar as she is to a degree shielding Sunak himself from taking the stick. Or she would be, if some pesky civil servant with a grudge over being previously sacked hadn't crawled out of the woodwork, and spilled the beans that it was Sunak who as Chancellor, had denied funding for the necessary repairs to be undertaken, which would have dealt with the problem. Still, she still serves as a first line of defence and the more stupid she is made to look, with open-mike blunders and stuff, the better to draw attention away from the boss himself.

Still, the article manages to convey a sense of criticism of the PM, in keeping with the Telegraph's campaign to undermine him (in support presumably of the right wing elements of the party who hate the PM {still angry at his role in unseating Boris Johnson} and at the instruction of their anonymous but influential right wing movers and shakers who sit behind everything, every spin, that the paper takes). These people know that in unseating Johnson, Sunak has cost them the next election (not to mention that he's a high tax PM whose policies they hate - they want tax cuts, and they want them now - unseating a man voted into the position and who held an eighty seat majority in the last election. Sunak has by contrast, spaffed it up against the wall and put up taxes to boot. That he's doing it in order to sort out the mess that Liz Truss made with her disastrous mini-budget, is neither here nor there. The people behind the Telegraph have forgotten this, just as they have forgotten how they backed Truss and applauded the very budget that sent the entire UK economy into a tailspin. To them, Sunak has taken an eighty seat Johnson majority and turned it into an almost inevitable loss in the forthcoming general election - and has taxed the crap out of them to boot! Talk about adding insult to injury!

So there you have it. Usually Tory shenanigans and disaster management.

Oh, and Stamer had a reshuffle of his Labour front bench as well. Don't need to say anything about that - it's exactly as you would have predicted. Shift to the right. Every Blairite with the exception of Blair himself in (and he's skulking around in the background, make no mistake). No discernible difference from the Tories as they currently stand to differentiate them. Grey people with grey ideas, and nothing to offer the working people of this country.

[peter]

Yesterday I received a silly little booklet through the letter box, a poorly produced small 'magazine' called Cornwall in Focus (or some other bland, meaningless title - it didn't make enough impression to stick). Produced by my County Council, it was full of dull reports about the St Minver Over 60's Swimming Club (I made that up as an example - it doesn't exist) or the Polperro Union of Former Lifeboat Crewpersons (ditto) and other equally parochial organisations, together with cheap advertising for local businesses in the area.

I flicked through it for 30 seconds, tore it up and binned it.

About twice a month I receive an email, purportedly 'keeping me connected' with what the Council are up to, but in reality just a means of making sure I'm receiving whatever propoganda or nudging that the government wants disseminated through the population at any given period. This first started appearing during the pandemic, during which it gave all of the lockdown restrictions and exhortations to get vaccinated, and has continued thereafter with more bland, but equally unnecessary material. Similarly as to the magazine, I give it scant attention (if I even bother to open it) and then trash it.

Yesterday Birmingham City Authority announced that it was effectively bankrupt, and that while all essential services would be maintained - those that it was legally bound to provide as a regional authority - all non-essential services would be put on hold forthwith.

My question is, if what is meant by non-essential services includes the kind of nonsense I'm talking about above, what the flip were they doing involving themselves in it anyway? In my daily perambulations around my home town, I see dozens of things that the Council are spending our money on, money hard earned and then taken in rates before being spaffed up the wall on 'non-essential services' (ie wasted), and it gets my pip. I see youth 'community cafes', with groups of idle kids lounging around outside them (and personally know one young lass who's life was destroyed - I mean this - by an unfortunate alliance she struck up at one such essentially uncontrolled environment), I see flowers and statuary, drop-in centres for the aged and unmarried mothers, e-bikes and empty park-and-ride busses, and a plethora of other things, all of which must be paid for out of my hard earned cash. And the Council is near bankrupt (or in Birmingham City Council's case, actually so).

Is it any wonder? We have a county hall stuffed to the gills with people employed to organise this stuff, all on good salaries with index linked pensions, half of them working remotely and the other half enjoying a bit of 'flexi-time' (especially in this good weather) and we have to pay for it. Millions upon millions of pounds.

In times like these - especially in times like these - essential services should mean what it says. Rubbish collection, crematoria operation, transport and roads,local utilities, libraries and municipal cleaning etc. You know the stuff. Road sweepers and traffic wardens and the like. Only when these truly essential services have been fully provided should a very limited and carefully selected handful of non-essential services be considered. None of this essentially job creating stuff - magazines and emails, skate-parks and old people's coffee mornings. Out the window with this lot. People are quite capable or organising coffee mornings themselves. There's no reason why a man should be employed to sit at home with a council computer and mobile phone, doing it for them.

We've heard this week that Sadiq Kahn is introducing free school meals for all primary school children in Greater London (and quite right too). But the only way he is able to do this thing - a thing which should fall under the Department of Education central budgeting, not on local council's to resource for themselves - is because he's just increased his income on the backs of millions of Londoners who will have to pay the Ulez charge of twelve pounds fifty a day, just to move round London in their cars. He's flush with money to spend, this time on an essential service that no-one could complain about, but in a week, a month, a year's time - on any old rubbish he has a mind to. It'll be mural city with flowerpot hangings from one end to the other, and the people will be starving in their homes to pay for it.

But I can't speak for London - it's a big enough problem thinking about what goes on outside my own front door. But given that times are hard, and getting harder by the day, do me a favour and next time someone puts forward an idea for another magazine or email shot - tell them to can it!

[peter]

Well that's alright then.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) has revision its figures relating to UK GDP upward, now showing it to be nearly two percent better than was previously thought. Rishi Sunak was like a dog with two dicks at PM's question time yesterday, even though it has nothing to do with the period of his premiership (the figures relating to the end of 2021, not the present figures) and it just means we are the second worst performing country in the G7 rather than the worst. At least, it seems, we are not bottom of the pile after all.

The right wing press will be over the moon, needless to say, though notably the Telegraph only mentioned it in passing on the bottom of the front page. It is essentially a statistical shift, but important insofar as these estimates are what the policy of the day are based on, and such inconsistencies and adjustments (especially of this scale) can wreak havoc with ongoing plans already in motion. The FT, for whom such things are bread and butter, are calling for an investigation into the statistical modelling and sampling methods the ONS is using, questioning whether they are fit for purpose. GDP figures are notoriously difficult to arrive at, we are told, but errors on this scale are worrying in the extreme.

But irrespective of Sunak's briefly being let off the hook, the reality is that we are still very, very, much in the shit. In fact you could even argue more so. Because, given all of the other bad indicators seen in other figures (persistently high inflation, highest interest rates for fifteen years, negative inward investment, business closures, flatlining hospitality sector, trade deficits of epic proportions, borrowing sky high.....the list goes on) if these are set against a backdrop of GDP figures that are comparable with other European countries.......then how do we improve them? At least if GDP is low, you have something to work with, an excuse for all of the other figures being bad. With GDP figures that are holding up, it means that some other dire problems with the economy are behind our atrocious economic outlook. And we don't know what. And if we don't know what, then how do we fix it? The worry starts to set in that maybe there are structural problems with the economy that are not simply solvable by the usual methods, that a complete rethinking about how our economy is structured is required.

Besides, what does this have to do with you and me and how we live our lives. Inflation is destroying the purchasing power of our money. Living standards for the huge bulk of us are falling to lower levels than ever before and the future prospects for our children are grim at best. People are struggling; struggling to pay for their houses, feed and clothe their families, they can't afford to go on holiday, to go out for meals, to the cinema etc. What matter to them if the GDP figures are better than were thought. It doesn't make their lived experience better. They aren't suddenly more able to pay their mortgage. They are still getting poorer by the day while the richest in our society are thriving like never before. Wealth inequality is rising to levels never seen before, to levels only normally encountered in third world countries with no welfare systems to speak of, and nothing is being done to adress this. Even levelling up secretary Michael Gove recognises this as being a significant problem, but services upon which people depend - and the more so as their wages become less and less capable of paying for alternatives - keep getting worse because there is no money to pay for them.

So spare me the bullshit about how suddenly everything in the garden is rosy. It may work for the brainwashed idiots who buy the Express, Mail and Telegraph (they have a vested interest in their disastrous decisions seemingly not being so bad) but me, I have eyes. I can see the prices of everything going up and my ability to afford things falling. I can see the homeless people on the streets of my town, see the increase in shoplifting and aggression towards retail staff as poverty levels rise, see the dilapidation of the buildings, the roads, the infrastructure, getting worse around me. I don't need such things as GDP figures to tell me how things are going.

I can paraphrase an old saying, replacing the word 'God' for 'the economy'.

What care I, if good the economy be,
If the economy be not, good to me?

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

The Times this morning, runs a headline, "Warning: your latest gadgets are spying on you in the home."

Apparently all of these smart devices - phones, laptops, tablets, doorbells, washing machines and TVs - are hoovering up data on just about everything we do, and when we do it, far in excess of anything they could begin to need, if just provision of the service they were bought to carry out was all they were concerned with.

This data (for that is what we have all become - data streams for number crunching) is sold to Google, to Meta, to TikTok and other tech conglomerates, to use as they see fit in whatever manner they consider appropriate. How and what is done with it is anyone's guess. Designing specific ads, tailored to your psychology (which ain't gonna be that much different from the psychology of a million other clowns out there) that are honed to get a result with much higher frequency than the ads of old? Prompting you to vote certain ways in elections, subliminal steers that you are not aware of? As I say, who knows.

But this much we do know. That this is the age of surveillance capitalism and we are happy with it. We like all these smart devices in our lives; they make them simpler. So what if they scrape a bit of extra data over and above that which they need? We don't feel it, we don't notice the effect of this so why should it bother us?

Well okay. But how far are you willing to go with this? Do you mind if Alexa listens in on your conversation with your wife as you are talking in your kitchen? If your TV is gathering data on you as you speak on the phone (to your mistress)? Is this OK? Because, I don't know, it might be happening - we wouldn't know and the implications of it might not be immediately apparent until, say, you start getting feeds to your social media site from legal services designed to get you easily through divorce......and suddenly, instead of giving it that final go that might just have worked, you start thinking about divorce instead?

Pfft! You say. Fantasy stuff. Conspiracy thinking run wild. You are far beyond that kind of manipulation. Couldn't be done to you because you are too in control of your own decisions to be manipulated like that! You'd see through it in a flash, recognise it for what it is. Except if you didn't. Because you didn't even see it because it was so subtly done. At a level lower than your conscious apprehension of it.

And suddenly things look different. Here's a story.

News presenter Aemon Holmes was in conversation with international conspiracy theorist David Ike on his podcast. He told Ike that he'd been in conversation with his brother a few days before (Holmes' not Ike's) and had mentioned that he was doing the interview. This was a bog-standard call, mobile phone to mobile phone, nothing out of the ordinary about it. When he got home, moments later, he went almost immediately to his laptop to check his social media feeds etc. As soon as he logged in he was bombarded with advertising for David Ike's books and dvd's, without having typed Ike's name anywhere on an internet device. The only way it could have got there was via voice recognition tech having picked it up from the conversation with his brother a short while before.

Now a woman who was in the studio had no problem with this. She said that she found it "useful" for her AI to predict what her requirements, her needs might be, and be there with almost supernaturally fast provision of choices etc.

Holmes and Ike were less sure. "Saying you were organising a suprise holiday for your wife?", asked Holmes. Do you really want your tech that involved with your life? The woman was quite clear that if you weren't doing anything wrong, she felt that you had nothing to fear. From my point of view, I just don't really get it anyway. I mean, why do you need your washing machine to be smart? Turn the frikkin thing on and do the washing! How hard can it be? Until it's smart enough to get off its arse and hang it out on the line I'm not interested in it.

Same with phones. Why would you want to be constantly at the beck and call of a tyrant in your pocket? I only speak to the people I want to talk to, when I want to talk to them. My family know where to speak to me if they need to. The rest can fuck off. As for social media - this is as close as I get. And no-one ever tries to sell me anything here! So as far as surveillance capitalism goes, I'm not thinking that I'm going to be much use to them. I doubt if I met a tech geek from Google we'd even be able to understand each other. And that's the way I like it. I'm not a luddite - if you like the stuff good for you. But in my case if the doorbell rings and I'm not at home, too bad - I'll deal with it. And in the meantime I don't want it talking to my kettle and clocking my every move to report back to Google. It's not 1984 yet, but if we aren't careful it might creep up and be on us while our backs are turned.

[peter]

God it's a dreary old job, looking at these papers every day, and today's lot are no exception.

Threatened cuts to the triple lock on pensions (Express), Harry and William still feuding (Mail) and prisoners just about walking out of jail (pretty much all the rest). King Charles pays tribute to his mother on the anniversary of her death, and yet another maternity unit is investigated for its higher than average rate of infant deaths (no suspicion of another Letby here - just human inefficiency and incompetence I'm thinking).

To be honest, it's all a bit uninspiring, though no doubt important, each in its own way. I was interested to hear that Ken Dodd (he of the feather dusters and Knotty Ash fame - never could get him myself, but each to his own) had instructed his wife on his death bed, to burn all his diaries and notebooks, but she had decided to ignore this, and instead they will form part of a permanent museum dedicated to the comic's memory, in Liverpool.

Not sure what I make of this. Surely a man has the right to some privacy, even posthumously, when it comes to his private writings. I mean, it isn't as though he was a political mover and shaker whose inner thoughts could give insights into the decisions affecting millions of people, or indeed history itself, so it seems to me that his wishes should have been followed. Still, his wife will have had her own reasons for making her decision and she must live with them. I won't be running off to the Knotty Ash Museum of Tattifilarious Rib-Tickling or whatever they choose to call it, but I don't know, maybe there are millions of avid students of comedic history out there who will. Sounds more like the kind of place a bored visitor to the city might come across in his 10 Best Guide to Liverpool and decide to visit when he'd seen just about everything else. He'll get fleeced for twenty quid on the door, spend around 45 minutes looking at feather dusters and silly hats and coats behind glass cabinets, and then wander out, never to think of it again (other than to briefly regret the loss of his twenty quid). I wonder if the museum will have a mock up of the bed, complete with suitcase stuffed full of twenty pound notes underneath it, for which the comic won some notoriety to go along with the rest of his fame in his much reported tax evasion trial? I think he'd have liked that.

Anyway, cheers to you Ken, wherever you are. Making people laugh is a pretty good thing to do with your life and you certainly did that. Don't be too hard on your wife when you see her again; life's pretty tough down here and we all have to use whatever means we have to their best advantage in order to catch the breaks. Ta ta for now and watch what you do with that tickling stick. The top man won't need his golden orbs dusting and won't be best pleased to find it running around his cracks and crevices without invitation!

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

Krishnan Guru-Murthy made a good point when interviewing Kier Stamer the other day. Asked what Labour had to offer over and above the Tories at the next election, Stamer replied by listing the complete breakdown and dissaray that was effecting virtually every area of the state responsibility. Guru-Murthy immediately came back and said that, if he got it right, there was no material difference in what Labour was offering - they were just offering to do it better. In other words, better management of the same was their pitch.

He couldn't have put it better and though I'm sure Stamer would have made some rhetorical repost claiming otherwise, the point was in essence, absolutely correct. There is no radical divergence, no vision of optimistic hope, no exciting and reactionary program to right the country's wrongs, to heal its ills........yet everyone and his mother takes it as a done deal that Labour has the next election in the bag.

Owen Jones, on his podcast, said that it was "game-over" for the Tories. There was no way, he said, that they could turn around a twenty five point lead for Labour in the polls, and come out in front. Such a feat hadn't ever been done. I wanted to remind him that no government had ever lost, going into an election with an eighty seat majority either, but this was what he was suggesting was now inevitable....but leave that as it lies.

My personal belief is that everything has become so topsy-turvy in our political world, matching, some will say, the broder world as well, that just about anything has become possible. The certainties of yesteryear are simply gone. It's not going to happen, but if, on the eve of the election, the 1922 Committee called in Rishi Sunak, sacked him and reinstalled Boris Johnson, they'd win the election hands down with almost the same majority. The tories liked Boris Johnson - they don't like Sunak. The public liked Boris Johnson, they don't like Sunak. The people in the main couldn't have cared less about the parties. It wasn't exactly shooting someone in the middle of Oxford Street, but it might as well have been because the same principle applied. They knew what they were getting when they voted Johnson in and they didn't care when he played it true to form. Like Doddy above with his suitcase, the people didn't judge him badly for his behaviour - he was just being Boris.

But as I say, the Tories are not going to (for whatever reason) going to go down that route, and so they will go in with Sunak. And it's far less likely, but he could still win!

Stamer's Labour is so lacklustre, so intent on presenting themselves as the 'sensible' party, with Stamer as 'Mr Reliable' at the helm, that they have forgotten the need for some magic, some special dusting of enchantment, in order to inspire people to put their name down for the cause. Blair (and I hate the bastard) had it. Stamer doesn't. His lead is as a result of the negative vibe against the Tories (who are blamed for the mess that the country is in - that people find themselves in. It's not a lead based on a positive approval. It could be taken from Labour by the simplest of tricks.The Tories shift away from green policies is, as I have said above, the start of it, and there will be more to follow. If the establishment didn't see Stamer as a foil for the Tories - an unthreatening alternative to their natural party of choice, and one who can be allowed in for a single term to pick up all of the shit left behind and then, when out of office in five years time, be blamed for everything that has gone wrong - then the deconstruction of the Labour poll lead would be well on the way to being done already. The movers and shakers behind the Tories are still deciding whether they want to win the next election or not. With the shit coming down the road, there are many good reasons not to want to.

Anyway, that's my take on things. Enjoy your day.

[peter]

Impeccable timing that a new covid variant 'of concern' should appear just before the autumn booster vaccination programme is due to begin; they've got 'em trained like circus fleas, ready to enter stage left just when they are needed.

BBC news reader Clive Myrie was all but playing with himself under the table as he asked of health editor Hugh Pymm (with all the cod-concern that we haven't seen wheeled out since the pandemic), "How worried should we be?"

Pymm himself could barely contain his glee at once again being centre stage (it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, eh Hugh? - what are you.....paid piece-work?); he gave the usual meaningless answers, uncertain transmissability, virulence etc, before coming to the punchline.....what it was really all about....

"Advice is that you come forward for your vaccination as soon as you are called."

I'll bet it is! I remember a line from a song that seems strangely apposite, "Because the line on the graph's getting low and we can't have that!"

Already the Lib-dems Layla Moran is calling for the booster age limit to be reduced from 65 to 50 years old: no doubt Moderna would be more than ready to second this suggestion. Still, in fairness there is an election round the corner and the Lib-Dem coffers are looking a trifle bare as we speak. No suggestion of any connection here however.......

And there's all sorts of other benefits as well. Dead cats. The 'fear effect'. Nothing like adding a bit of additional anxiety to the public mix in order to keep people in their place. Helps keep their minds.....focused.....on who best they need to look after their interests.

No. All in all there will be some pretty satisfied bunnies with the turn of events this is taking. Who knows - we may even get another extended period of leave, sitting on our arses doing nothing while the government prints money to pay us with. Let's face it:everything is so fucked up already it barely matters anymore anyway.

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

Why is it that every time the new pension figures are released, regular as clockwork the right wing think tank, the Institute of Fiscal Affairs (or whatever moniker this bunch of Conservative outliers present themselves under) start shouting that the "triple lock must go!"

The triple lock gives an assurance that pensions will rise on an annual basis by either the rate of inflation, the increase in average wage in percentage, or by two percent, whichever be the largest. And every year we get the same old clamour. "It's too expensive!", "It'll cost billions!", "The country can't afford it!".

Well as a pensioner, perhaps I might add my penn'o'worth to the mix.

You've been happy enough to take my money week after week, month after month, for the entirety of my working life, but now when it comes to paying it back, suddenly it becomes too much! We in the UK receive lower pensions than just about any other country in the EU (no - I know we're not in the fucking EU - I use it merely as a measuring device!), sitting barely above virtual third world countries like Albania. Yet even this, it seems, is too much for our country to bear.

We're the seventh richest country in the world for fuck's sake! How can we not afford our commitments to those who have paid their shilling already?

If, as these c***s want, we abandon the triple lock, then let it be replaced by a new assessment of how we calculate pensions, say based upon the equivalent countries of Europe - France, Germany and the Netherlands - and see which deal is less expensive. We pensioners are already getting jack shit for the money we paid in in contributions: I think it behoves you young beneficiaries of the money we paid in to shut the fuck up about the miserable pittance we are paid to live on, or stump up a proper pension that doesn't leave the bulk of us needing to continue working until the last day we can physically crawl out of the door to get there!

[peter]

Terrible tragedy in Morocco as the population reel following the devastating earthquake that occurred yesterday, with its epicentre around 45 miles south-west of the capital Marrakesh.

It's a region I'm fairly familiar with. I've driven down into the capital city itself from the very direction of the quake's heart in the High Atlas, and can only thank the heavens that the focus was not in the city itself. The medina in Marrakesh is tight (in terms of the concentration of the streets and close proximity of buildings) but thankfully not nearly so much so as the older one in Fez, where such an occurence would be even worse thereby. Still however, I can only imagine how terrifying it must have been, and reports of families being too frightened to return to their homes for fear of aftershocks doesn't suprise me in the slightest. Pictures in the media show buildings in a state of near collapse, bearing huge cracks in the solid walls and masonry and it will be many moons before all such damage is sorted out and they are returned to safety.

The people themselves are a tough and resilient breed and, though undoubtedly devastated by their losses, will rapidly fall back on their reserves of faith and inner strength to see them through. Earthquakes, though devastating things, are not in themselves events of evil, and we may take some consolation from this. But our prayers must go out, both to the victims themselves and the families grieving their losses this morning.

Godspeed to you. May you awake this morning in the place of your dreams and the arms of your fathers and mothers gone on before.

-----0-----

I watched an Andrew Marr post on YouTube yesterday in which the New Statesman journalist spelled out some pretty bald truths to the British people, which will not make for easy listening for most of them.

The central fact facing any government of this nation is that the systems economy is simply too small to provide the level of public services to which the public has become accustomed. The ongoing effects of this dilemma, as successive governments have struggled to square this circle, is that anything that is not immediately pressing is pushed back into the long grass, and ultimately manifests, years later in exactly the kind of situation we now face with the raac problem in our schools and civic buildings.

The only solution to this,said Marr, was growth of the economy (though shrinking and efficiency savings in the provision of services does occur to me, but I suppose that this is neither palatable or indeed desirable to most people) but this was easier said than done. This I suppose is why both the Tories and Labour are at the moment focusing on growth of the economy as their main economic priority, but in truth neither seems to have the faintest clue how this is to be done.

We've had Jeremy Hunt and his airy-fairy talk of becoming a "technology superpower" - but with virtually no investment going into the area, then one wonders how we can begin to compete with say America or the EU, who are putting tens of times the amount of money into their tech sectors in comparison to us. And in terms of trade, post brexit we find ourselves minnows swimming in a very big ocean. As is always the case in such unequal negotiations, the smaller participants tend to be very much the lower beneficiaries of such deals as can be slubbered up, not exactly the kind of stuff to move mountains in terms of growth.

Our economic woes are too well known for me to bother repeating them, and these are coming home to roost big time against this backdrop of failing growth. It's not rocket science to see that we have some significant problems ahead.

The first thing we need, according to Marr, is a period strong government. One in which the administration of the day is able to make the hard choices necessary in order to get us through this, while not constantly looking over its shoulder as to what is going on behind its back. This depends on its majority, and the liklihood is that our next election will not provide either party with a big enough one to fit the brief. The tories have simply spaffed their majority up the wall with their shenanigans and while Labour might be well positioned to win the next election, it's very unlikely that they will secure a majority sufficiently large to grant them the unbridled headroom to do the difficult stuff (like for example raising taxes on our highest earners and introducing a wealth tax). We also need labour to do the work of the country and again, Labour has not the time or the vision (let alone the cojones) to bring us closer to the EU in order to supply this need. The idea of shadowing the EU in lots of small sectors of the economy, such that a number of micro-deals can be established, each covering its own area is a good one. In this way we can effectively rejoin the single market without actually taking the politically divisive step of doing so, but it seems a cack-handed way of doing something (or rather pretending not to) that we all know needs to be done.

And the idea of an authoritarian Labour government headed by Kier Stamer is not one that fills me with relish. He's already shown his bent in this direction when he was the DPP and his behaviour since becoming Labour leader isn't such as to make one comfortable with the idea of him holding almost unlimited power.

And then Marr went on to talk about a different challenge waiting in the wings; one, he said, that would increasingly come to dominate our public debate in the decade ahead.

He'd read a study by a respected academic from the States, in which the professions most quickly to be effected by the rapid advances in AI were listed, and they read, said Marr, like a list of every middle class job from lawyers down to teachers (why do I say down it isn't down; teaching is really important). When you think of the great turbulent changes that have wracked societies in history the French revolution, the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, the Russian revolution - these were not, he said, uprisings of the proletariat, the workers of the society. Rather they were of the academics, the bourgeoisie, the middle-classes. As such, the imminent and unstoppable rise of AI to impact the lives and careers of the huge central layer of our society was a thing that should give us pause for thought. One way or another, the times they are a'changing and it's not going to be without a certain amount of pain. Probably another reason for his belief that we need a strong authoritarian government for a period, in order to see us through this 'revolution'.

I'm not sure I like the sound of this. I'm not an Andrew Marr fan in the main - he's too far up the arse of the establishment for a good journalist to be in my opinion, but he's undoubtedly clever, and what he says wants some listening to.

But it's an interesting post on YouTube and I highly recommend that you take the time to give it a watch. It's called Brexit: the nation is in a state of collapse, or something along those lines. It's Andrew Marr posting on the New Statesman channel - recently put out in the last day or so, so shouldn't be too hard to find. Give it a look-see.

[peter]

What the fuck is an American Bully XL dog?

I spent twenty five years working in a veterinary practice and never once came across such a breed. Granted there was different types of bull terriers coming out, particularly towards the end of my period working there, often of American origin. These were essentially Staffordshire bull terriers that had been selectively bred (and crossed with other breeds I'd guess) for increased size and (presumably) ferocity. The American bull terrier was an example of this, and treating these highly excitable dogs (in which their excitability could rapidly and without warning spill over into aggression) was always a chore.

And a chore made all the more difficult by virtue of the nature of the people who tended to keep them.These were almost always individuals of pretty low mentality, with aggressive personalities themselves, who presumably felt these dogs added to their aura of 'toughness', how 'hard' people perceived them to be. Of course we recognised the thing for what it was - weak aggression, and ignored it, merely adding a couple of tenners onto the bill for the annoyance of dealing with them.

They would inevitably stand in the surgery, with the dog on a chain and leather lead, studded collar around its neck, and let the animal (straining towards you, jaws befoamed) inch closer and closer, until its slavering maw and bloodshot eyes were but mere millimetres from your hands. Presumably it gave them some sense of power - a display that they could 'control the beast' while everyone else was afraid of it. They got some kind of kick out of frightening people with their charges, and would bring that risk of damage as close to actually happening as they dared to, without you actually getting bitten. (As an aside, there is a bloke who walks his dogs - two rottweilers - near where I live, one in each hand straining on the end of their chains. He clearly thinks that he looks 'the business' with his dogs and cut-away T-shirt, like Samson pushing down the columns or something, but I think he looks like a ***t.)

Anyway, these Bully XL dogs seem to be the last manifestation of this penis-extension type of dog breed, but if the statistics are anything to go by, then it seems that they might have pushed it a bit far. The breed has been disproportionately involved with dog attacks that have resulted in a death, to the point where the Home Secretary has said that she will act to ban the breed and outlaw its breeding in this country.

The rspca have said that no particular breed can be linked with aggression any more than any other, and while there is truth in this, it is an oversimplification. Temperament is a feature that can be manipulated by breeding practices, and add to this the influence of training (and of the animal simply being 'moulded' by the atmosphere in which it develops) and the dog in question can undeniably be turned into a more aggressive example than might be the case under different circumstances. That these breeds are selectively bred to maximise these traits, and then often trained to enhance this further, means that the breed can be singled out as one which should fall under some kind of legislation pertaining to its keeping. Clearly the Dangerous Animals Act legislation (under which certain listed animals must be kept restrained within enclosures and inspected for licencing purposes annually) is too broad in its sweep for a particular breed of dog to fall under it, and the Dangerous Dog list of breeds (which if I have it correctly, outlaws the keeping of certain breeds) is the most appropriate legal tool with which to deal with the problem.

This is not however, quite as clear cut as it might seem, since how do you actually prove a dog to be of the proscribed breed, if the owner claims otherwise. Unless you can establish that it was bred and purchased as being of the given breed, then providing the necessary proof that it is so is nearly impossible. Looks alone are not sufficient, dog appearance being sufficiently 'plastic' that all kinds of look can be thrown up in mongrel crosses just by chance. Thus controlling the breed must be done via outlawing of the breeding, and the severe punishment of individuals breaking this proscription.

The types of individuals who go for these dogs are not sufficiently socially conscious as to care about the approbation of the society they live in, by virtue of their flaunting these obnoxious breeds - indeed they revel in the notoriety of it. Perhaps any legislation pertaining to the outlawing of breeding of these animals could be extended to cover the people who would buy them as well?

As an aside, we had to on one occasion euthanase a parrot that the owner had allowed to become morbidly obese, to the point where it was suffering. The man realised that this was so and while feeling sorry to lose his pet conceded that it was a weight off his shoulders.