What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

Here I am, back again after my mistaken foray into the world of new (thread) startups. It's a pretty cool thread on new oilfield licences issued by HM Government, but unless you get over and have a shufty you'll never know.

But to bring us down with a bump, we have this morning a real tragedy in our news - that of the killing of a fifteen year old girl in London, stabbed in the neck with a serrated foot long 'zombie blade' as she got off a bus.

The lass had apparently stepped in to adjudicate for, or protect her friend, who was being confronted by an ex-boyfriend (aged 17), when the lad, who was trying to present his erstwhile girlfriend with a boxed rose, committed the attack with a knife that he pulled from under his jacket. And now the girl lies dead and multiple lives are ruined.

I could go on about the youth of today or the problem of knife crime in the cities, or the fact that these appear to be kids from 'good school' (ie one that their parents have to spring shed-loads of cash for them to attend), but frankly the tragedy of the whole story simply surpasses all of this. There is nothing but victims in this tale, no reason or rhyme that you can attribute it to other than the sheer power of our inner human emotion to overtake us and bring around instantaneous downfall.

If our legal system had an equivalent of the eminently sensible French institution, the crime passionnel, then this would surely qualify. In a quotation from a Shakespeare work that seems entirely apropos in the circumstances (both the quote and the work), "All are punished! All are punished!"

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GB News presenters Dan Wootton and Lawrence Fox have both been suspended over crass and stupidly sexist comments that Fox made about a female journalist and at which Wootton made fun about (the comments, not the journalist).

So what?

That's the maximum 'coverage' the (non) story will get from me, unlike the legacy media who seem to think it's a kind of big deal and who wasted significant time on it, both on last night's news and in this morning's papers. Hardly a dead cat, but more like a poorly kitten (no - that doesn't work) - think a cheap squib on fireworks night. It makes you look - but not for long.

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I'm genuinely optimistic about the impact that AI's could have on medicine and health care in the coming years, as the technologies becomes increasingly able to diagnose, prescribe and treat multiple medical conditions with better efficiency than their human counterparts.

Just think about it; instant access to a medical professional, bang up to speed with every front-line advance as it happens, never so much as a single journal entry behind on the most up-to-date thinking and treatment of any condition. Every illness you have, immediately brought under the full scrutiny of the complete totality of knowledge and experience on the subject. Every prescription you currently take, immediately assessed for its appropriateness, its long term potential harms, weighed and balanced against every alternative.

And before long, even entering into the realm of repeatable surgery. Machines that can perform routine operations (and 99.9 percent are) 24/7, 365 days a year. A conveyor belt of surgery, optimised for peak efficiency never faltering nor needing to sleep or stop for food.

No need for doctors surgeries or appointments: just simple phone-calls or video consultations with empathetic AI's, capable of assessing your described symptoms and prescribing appropriate treatment on the spot, telling you what medication you need and where to collect it. And if in the rare circumstances a physical examination is needed, arranging an outpatient appointment at an appropriate centre where a physician will liase with the AI, providing it with the results of the examination, to feed into its deliberations on your case.

This level of change to our health care is entirely achievable, and in the very near future (think five to ten years tops). But one thing will stand in its way. The medical profession. They will hold onto their monopoly of health care tighter than to their own dicks. They will be buggered if they stand back and allow any pesky algorithms to queer their pitch, to undermine the golden goose that they have fashioned for themselves, to watch themselves become mere adjuncts to machines which take all the credit, hold all the kudos, that they currently (and so remunerativly) enjoy.

There's going to be a battle for the health care of our nations, and I'm on the side of the machines.

[peter]

Dragons Den investor cum presenter Duncan Ballantyne has said in today's Telegraph that Kier Stamer is the best of two bad options for PM following the forthcoming general election.

He's just about correct in his assumption - there's hardly room to slip a sheet of toilet paper between the two party leaders, with Stamer shadowing Sunak's every move on the economy, defence and pretty much everything else. As one interviewer put it to the Labour leader. "So you intend to do pretty much exactly the same as the Conservatives if you are elected, just better?"

There have been so many instances where the Labour leader has said that he won't reverse what the Tories have done that it becomes difficult for Stamer to argue any different. They're not going to go back on the issuing of licences for oil drilling in the Rosebank oilfield - they said that yesterday. They aren't going to go back on any of the rules tightening up on the freedom of the trade unions to call industrial action (minimum service obligations and the like). They aren't going to row back on the rules limiting people's rights to protest (what was it David Lammy said, "Labour can't go around undoing everything the Tories have done for the past thirteen years) and they aren't even going to lift the two child benefits cap that keeps millions of children in poverty in larger families of poorer backgrounds.

So this much is clear: a vote for Labour is a vote for Tory-lite.

But in one thing Ballantyne is not exactly correct. There is another alternative, although God knows, it's a pretty weak one. There is always the Liberal Democrats. In fact, there's even a few more that might be worth looking at on reflection. There's Caroline Lucas with her Greens, Reform UK (are they called?.....the one's that have taken up the mantle of the Brexit Party and UKIP before them). There's got to be a lot of pretty decent independents out there - people of high belief (often in one particular issue), but who generally would give us some honest political input in many other areas, people with zero vested interest and high moral codes to boot. Damn it, vote for the Monster Raving Looney guy if you want to - that clown that is always on the podium on election night wearing a big colorful top hat and a giant pair of spectacles - it doesn't matter.

Now I have a very particular reason for saying this, and that's because the saving of this country comes down now (in my opinion) to the getting of a hung parliament result in the next election. This would force the issue of electoral reform to the top of the agenda and almost guarantee that some form of proportional representation would follow. Because let's face it, the two party system has failed. We've finished up with two indistinguishable parties, both in the pockets of big business and both serving the interests only of themselves and the establishment elite of the country. The vast majority of the people of this country have no representation by either of the two parties that dominate our polity and nothing to gain by the continuance of the system as it stands.

And look where it has gotten us?

I'm not going to list all of the areas where the country is in disarray - hou can see, read and experience it for yourselves. You simply don't need me to spell it out for you - look to your own daily lived experience.

So this needs to end, and change must be brought about. These guys will not relinquish their strangle hold on the levers of power willingly, and it can only be done via the establishment of a top down reform of our voting system. The wresting od power away from the vested interests of today, the shadowy elite that fuel money into the coffers of those who will sing from their hymn sheet, who will serve their interests, whether they accord with those of the mass population or not, can only be achieved by a fundamental change in the way that the executive is made up - and that means proportional representation.

And dear God, this is an opportunity for the Liberal-Democrats waiting to happen if they would only but grasp it. Never have the British public been more ready to appreciate that the two party system is failing them but now. They hear it in the spoken words of Sunak and Stamer and they experience it in their very lives as they watch their living standards fall, year on year and see the devastation around them. Never have the two leading parties been more vulnerable to attack, than as now, when they represent no more than identikit images of each other with nothing to offer other than more of the same, more of the looking after the interest of the few rather than the many.

So this should be the main focus of the Lib-Dem attack in the next election. "Look what they have done to the country," they should say, "To you!" "Look where this system ha brought us!"

Ed Davy probably doesn't even realise it, but he has the potential to not only become the most important man of the day in British politics, but (and who'd have thought I could ever say this) the man who could actually save thiscountry! He could be the man, who if he can get this message out to the people, when they are perfectly poised to receive it, who could spearhead the introduction of electoral reform into this country......and dear God, do we need it. The policy of introduction of free social care for the elderly and disabled is a really good one (the Lib-Dem leader outlined his ideas in this area the other day) but it should come second on his agenda to the introduction of electoral reform. The attack on both of the main parties in respect of their almost indivisible policy platforms, their staid offerings of more of this same, and their both being beholden to the interests of those who donate the money into their party chests - these should be the fronts of his attack. He needs not to worry about getting people to vote Lib-Dem (though this, he should say, would be best) but to vote for anyone other than these two complacent sharers of power, who have led us to this place and would do nothing to change it, because it simply is not in their interest to do so.

It's time, he should tell the people, for this cozy two-part sharing of power in this country to be broken. Time for government of the people, by the people, for the people to be returned. And this can only be achieved by electoral reform.

If he can do this, this country will owe him a debt of gratitude and history will record the name of Ed Davy as the man who saved this nation.

[peter]

It was difficult not to feel revolted and angry when hearing that a 16 year old boy had cut down a 300 year old tree on Hadrian's Wall in an apparent act of mindless vandalism, thereby depriving future visitors the pleasure of seeing one of the most famous old trees in the country.

The tree, famously situated in what is known as 'Sycamore Gap', had featured in Kevin Costner's Robin Hood; Prince of Thieves (from whence it picked up its other name, The Robin Hood Tree) and was the site of many marriage proposals, assignations and photographic projects, many of the latter becoming iconic images in their own right.

And suddenly, a couple of nights ago, this was all brought to a crashing end in an apparent attack of senseless vandalism carried out by a stupid young man. Very few details have as yet emerged, but yesterday a man in his 60's was also detained by the police. The tree was reportedly cut down with a chainsaw in the early hours of Thursday morning, a white line having been painted around its trunk.

I've got to admit, I'm puzzled by the whole affair - and not least by our reaction to it. I'm certainly not alone in my visceral response to the story, my anger and desire to see this act punished to the maximum extent which the Law allows, but what should this punishment be?

Just as a start, I don't understand why or how a young teenage boy could be out in such a remote place (is it remote? - are there villages nearby?) - and with a chainsaw and a pot of paint? Painting what appears to be a practiced cutting line around the circumference of the trunk? This lad wasn't acting without any understanding of tree felling, that's a given. Then why? What is the backstory here? There is something here we don't know; something we are either not being told or has not yet emerged. What that something might be we can only guess.

But there was preparation here. This act was not that of a pissed up 16 year old performing a dare on the spot for his mates. The arrest of the elderly co-conspiritor confirms this. He, the older man, was clearly involved in the preparation of the act, and undoubtedly (I would imagine) the instigator of it. But the question why remains.

Now let's consider our anger at the boy. Our desire to see him 'locked up and the key thrown away '. We know nothing of his mental state in terms of his intellect, whether he was mentally disabled in any way, or indeed ill. Was he under some kind of Svengali like influence of this elderly man; what was the relationship? Was the older man present when the act was performed - directing it? What was going on here that this should be done?

And the act itself.

Like slashing a work of art or vandalising a beautiful building with a can of spray paint, it is the destruction of beauty that gets to us here. Anyone who has seen a photograph of this magnificent tree, standing in its hollow in the ground, will understand. Tree's are rare in this high country and this one must have been loved by many thousands who knew it intimately, not to mention those who knew it via the film or photographs of its majesty. But, when all is said and done, it was a tree. And I don't say this lightly, because I'm a tree hugger of the highest order. Proud to be one. But this is not that 15 year old girl lying in a morgue in South London, cut down at the beginning of her life by a mindless act of fury and a foot long knife. It's a tree, and in all except the most abstract and abstruse philosophical argument, does not compare. In different places, under different circumstances, our local councils and highways departments cut down similar trees of similar ages on a daily basis. So should a young man's life be blighted in its entirety, because of a stupid act carried out when he was 16? Under circumstances and influences we, as yet, have no knowledge. No this would not be justice, and despite our media playing this story for its maximum outrage value, we should remain level headed about it.

There is simply too much that we don't understand here, and too much sentimentality and emotive thinking going into our responses for them to be rational. So step back and think, put the act in perspective, and move on. Don't be played like a fiddle by the media, drawn down paths of outrage that are neither rational nor reasonable.

[peter]

Over the course of the next week, senior tories on the right of the party will hold a series of events at venues away from the main conference centre in which the Conservative Party annual conference will be taking place.

Including the likes of ex PM Liz Truss, the MPs will call on the Prime Minister to reduce tax and put more right wing policies into the Conservative manifesto for the next general election.

Well, we'd all like to pay less tax, but most of us recognise the necessity of taxation if the services upon which we are often reliant are to be maintained, and though we may grumble, we nevertheless stump up as the law requires that we do. (Always noting that the bulk of us have little choice.)

But it's the putting in of more right wing stuff that bothers me. There seems to a 'race to the bottom' going on at the moment, particularly between Home Secretary Suella Braverman and herTrade and Industry counterpart, Kemi Badenock. Both clearly have leadership ambitions, and see the predicted forthcoming demise of Rishi Sunak as offering them their opening for the presentation of their respective bids. (Nb. I have long been saying that this predicted loss of the next election by Sunak was being over-blown, and I was interested this week to hear that Andrew Marr had come, at last, to the same conclusion.) Both have called for the leaving of the European Convention on Human Rights, which Badenock seems to think we've been in for 100 years (it was signed off in 1950 and enacted in 1953), and which in her opinion, in itself justifies our leaving of it. Braverman has of course in the last week said that being gay or a woman isn't reason enough for being offered asylum, and anyway, many of the so-called 'gay' applications are merely spurious attempts to game the system. How she would know this she doesn't explain.

Oddly enough both of these individuals have significant connections to immigrants or immigration in their lives. Badenock is Nigerian born and bred (where incidentally, being gay carries a death sentence) and Braverman is the daughter of Ugandan refugee parents, thrown out iirc, by Idi Amin in the 1970's. Yet both seem to be carrying a deep animosity toward any other individuals who might want or need to come to this country. Funny that, and I can't help wondering whether it is from a simple desire that others might not enjoy the same successes that they have, or whether it is something that they just feel they have to express - and more forcefully than others - if they are going to advance up the ranks of the Tory Party in their chosen career of politics? Either way, isn't very nice and is in fact positively dangerous. (I suppose that I should include the possibility that they actually just believe that increasing immigration is "destroying our culture" here. It isn't very likely but it is possible. Stupid, but possible.)

The stirring up of hatred toward 'the other' is a classic trick of the far right, and never less so than when they are in need of a scapegoat upon which to place blame for their own failings. And what Braverman and Badenock are up to is absolutely no less than that. Braverman has this morning, lashed out at critics of her recent comments, singling out celebrities Elton John and Gary Lineker, saying, "Who do they think they are, sitting in their luxury yachts in the Mediterranean, telling the rest of us what we should think!"

But like it or not (and I don't), our government learned tricks during the Covid pandemic about how far we could be pushed and they don't seem eager to forget them. Innocuous legislation has a way of turning out not to be quite as benign as it appeared, and any number of small, thinly sliced erosions of our freedoms and rights can (and have) been slipped by us without our noticing, aided and abetted by a tame state broadcaster and a printed media with vested interest in keeping government onside. Our rights to strike have been curtailed, our unions shackled, our rights to gather in peaceful protest pulled from under our feet. The police now has the power to stop and search anyone at will, with or without reason, and hold the power to au, thorise or refuse any gathering of people above a small and limited number, upon application for permission.

Which segways nicely into the story of Trudi Warner, a 68 year old climate activist, who was this week charged with contempt of court, for standing outside a court, with a placard attached to her body.

Inside the court, a case was being heard in which the judge had decreed that the defendants could not use climate change, insulation or fuel poverty as motivation in their defence. Trudi Warner sat outside the court holding a sign which read,

JURORS - YOU HAVE AN ABSOLUTE RIGHT TO AQUIT A DEFENDANT ACCORDING TO YOUR CONSCIENCE

She was arrested, and this week on the decision of the government's solicitor general Michael Tomlinson (who is also a Conservative MP) has been formally charged with, as I say, being in contempt of court.

Let's just repeat that.

In this country, the United Kingdom who prides itself on its freedom and liberties, who fought a war against the type of tyranny in which people are prevented from speaking their minds, a woman is being charged for the crime of standing outside a court with a placard. And certain influential Tories who will be listened to - who will be listened to - think that this government is not right wing enough.

I leave you to think on this and draw your own conclusions as to the direction in which we are headed.

[peter]

Shall we just be clear about something.

Were it not for the huge sacrifice of the Russian people, we would doubtless still be labouring (quite possibly literally) under the thrall of the nazi jackboot to this day. Nigh on 30 million Russians died in the conflict of which around 11 million were soldiers.

Second point, the Russians were our allies during the dark days of World War 2, as were the Canadians. The Germans were our enemies.

Somehow this seemed to be forgotten when the Canadian parliament, with Prime Minister Trudeau and President Volodymyr Zelensky in tow, led a standing ovation to 98 year old Yaroslav Hunka, ex of the Waffen SS, in which speaker of the lower House Anthony Rota described him as a hero. And this all done on the eve of the most holy of days in the Jewish calander, Yom Kippur. You couldn't make it up.

Anthony Rota has taken the fall that should by rights belong to Trudeau, who has himself described the ''mistake'' as "embarrassing", not only to parliament but the whole Canadian people.

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong! This is an insulting attempt to spread blame, to lessen its impact, by deflecting on to the whole Canadian people (who far from being embarrassed, should be as outraged as the rest of us - more so given their own huge sacrifice in said war) that which should be reserved complete for those present, and in particular those leading the ovation.

And the idea that this was a mistake. What arrant nonsense. How can this be described as a mistake? What - did Prime Minister Trudeau, President Zelensky, Speaker Rota and the entire Canadian parliament forget whose side who was on during the war? Or do the nazis suddenly become heroes and friends because they were killing Russians back then, as our leaders would, given the chance, have us doing now? This was perhaps the most despicable political regime ever to be recorded in the annals of human history - how can you mistake this without being a historical illiterate to a degree almost unimaginable?

No. This was an ovation born of the glorification of killing of men. No less. The meat-grinder of war cares not a jot or tittle who falls under its tine - neither nationalities nor religions, ethnicities nor ideologies, have any meaning or preference between the covers of its black book. How could these people - supposedly our leaders and the better examples of us thereby - do such a thing, even if it wasn't to celebrate a participant in the most monstrously banal evil that the world has ever seen?

But the meat grinder runs on.

Today, Ukrainians and Russians in their hundreds of thousands feed its voracious wheels, and we in the West grease its jaws with money and weapons paid for by the fruits of our labours, while behind the scenes the 'kerr-chings' of tills being closed, fortunes being made, is drowned out by the tossing around of banalities like 'democracy' and 'sovereign territory' by people who could care less about such trifles in the face of a shilling to be made.

I say now as I have said from the start, this forever-war is an abomination and should be stopped now before it escalates into something much worse. Putin, Zelensky - Biden or Sunak? What difference does it make to people whose sons and daughters lie dead in the mud, whose houses and lives lie shattered and in ruins? These 'leaders' who would take us into wars we would not fight, sitting comfortably in their offices while others pay the price, whose morality runs no deeper than the pockets they attempt to fill, we should reserve the same contempt for them as we do for that Canadian parliament, standing in ovation to a history they would clearly rewrite if we would but let them.

[peter]

Are you sick or disabled? It doesn't matter - get to fucking work!

That's the message from Chancellor Hunt this morning as he sets out his election stall (leadership or general take your pick) in the Times. Benefits layabouts - always a favorite with Tories as elections approach - are in his sights as he promises us that if they don't get out and look for work hard enough, or take jobs that are offered them, then their money will be cut and they'll be out on their own.

He's convinced it seems, that since the pandemic, huge numbers of people have "chosen to quit the jobs-market for a life on benefits". Doesn't he read the statistics on mental health in post-pandemic Britain? Or is it that he's an adherent of the "man up and deal with it" approach? Doesn't he realise the absolute nightmare of suffering some people are going through? He fucking well should because it was his government that was in good part responsible for it. You think that you can frighten the shit out of people with a deliberate policy of fear and terror propaganda, sustained over months and years, and there won't be a consequence? What world is this idiot living in?

Of course, though, Hunt is well aware that what he is saying is impractical. That isn't why he's saying it, and it simply couldn't be carried through anyway. It's pre-election sound-biting. Were they actually to do this, against the doctors advice for individuals who are clearly too ill to work, as soon as the suicide and deaths caused thereby started rolling in there would be hell to pay. There are always those who will elect to sit on benefits rather than work - the way to deal with this is to identify them (not easy, granted) and then make their benefits increasingly directed toward minimal support in terms of food and bill payment etc, allowing no access to phone contracts and subscriptions for Sky, cigarettes, booze or scratch cards etc. They will soon enough return to the working fold if this is the life they experience outside of it. Beyond two years on benefits, no cash money should be paid to recipients, but all should come via cards issued for use only at designated sites and for designated products/purposes. Bill payment, rent payment and food alone.

But as I say, this is not Hunt's purpose. He's been enjoying a sort of rejuvenation of his languishing political career since the Truss debacle, and against such a weak or positively deranged selection of opponents for the top position, post Sunak (think Truss {again}, Braverman, Patel etc) he must feel that he has a good shot. So he's going for the 'right tough Hunt' approach (right, as in right wing, tough as in hard man, Hunt as in.....well, do I need to spell it out or can you 'c' it {geddit? }). In short, he's playing to the Tory voter base with some pretty basic tactics. Bit dull and not very clever, but hey - might just win him a vote or two when the time comes.

And spare a thought for poor old Rishi Sunak. As this week's Tory Party Conference kicks off, he's doing his best to set out the Conservative stall for winning the general election, and all his top colleagues can do is jockey for places as to who is going to replace him. He's got Suella Braverman leading the early field, with Kemi (I'm as right wing as she is) Badenock following up behind. Then we've got Priti Patel and James Cleverly coming up with alternative policy interventions and now of course, Hunt, with his own plans beginning to form (racist vote's in the bag at least Jeremy). Poor Sunak must be wondering why he's bothering - especially with all that Californian sunshine waiting for him stateside......

Time to get the fuck out of Dodge I'd think!

[peter]

Rishi Sunak's Conservative Party Annual Conference is not going as he would have liked. (That is, if you ignore the fact that what he'd really like is for it to be going without him, while he was rather a million miles away from the UK and being PM, and instead setting off on his new post-political career making gazillions in California.)

The questions over HS2 continue to dog the Prime Minister wherever he goes, and everybody and his mother knows that the decision to cancel the northern leg from Birmingham to Manchester has been made (Birmingham to Leeds having gone west {hem,hem} some while ago) but he hasn't the courage to admit it before conference. Rather, he continues to insist that "no decision has been made", thereby making himself look both cowardly and dishonest in one stroke.

But let's be honest, the project has become a white-elephant anyway, and an embarrassing flop in every sense of the word. Running at three times the estimated budget, the purpose it was designed to serve in the first place simply no longer exists.

Many people labouring under the misunderstanding that the reason behind it is to cut time off the journey between London and the North, do not get that its primary function was to increase capacity. The time savings are marginal at best (around 20 minutes even on the fastest trains) and are not what it was all about. The problem is, in essence, the different speeds that different trains run on the single line of (Victorian) track that is currently available. Because if you increase the frequency of trains on the same piece of track to meet rising demand, you run into the problem that faster trains catch up with the slower (regional) trains using the same, and then become stuck behind them as they pootle along. So the idea was to create a new line of track, the HS2 line, for the faster trains to run on. Thus would the (then - when it was first conceived) increasing demand for seats be met.

Thing is that demand has dried up. In no small part due to the pandemic, people have moved away from travelling, either to and from work, or indeed for work purposes (having learned the value of zoom), and thus the original reason for the line's construction has largely evaporated. But like any huge bureaucracy, our government is not capable of changing tack, but instead doubles down on its position. For this reason, the clever money for Sunak, if he wanted to show real balls, would be to take the podium at conference - and stun the balls out of them by cancelling the fucking lot! My God wouldn't that make them stand up in their seats! But it would be absolutely the right thing to do, and far from showing us to be a nation that is incapable of pulling off the big projects (the debacle is showing that already) it would show us as a country that could make the big - and necessary - decisions when circumstances demand it. But little Rishi is not made of that kind of stuff. So instead, he'll pussyfoot around, denying that a decision has been made and refusing to adress the issue, and give his opponents every opportunity they need to denounce him. Clever guy Rishi. Clever guy.

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Sober October? You've got to be kidding me!

It's a measure of just how serious the drinking problem in the UK is, that not being satisfied with nudging us toward a 'dry January', the health gurus in Westminster (or wherever else it is that the people who dream up these ideas live) have got to find a second month of the year in which to encourage people to give their livers a break.

And they're right to do so.

I work in a 7-11 store and see first hand all of people's grubby little habits. The number of people who souse themselves into near oblivion just about every night of the week, beggars belief. Every profession you can think of, high to low, has its outwardly respectable individuals who nurse the dark secret of burgeoning alcohol dependency within their breast. And prior to this, the new drive to get people to 'take a month off', a number had come up to me in the shop (always purchasing their nightly fix while they did so) telling me that they were going dry for October. All of them have failed to do so (and it's only the 3rd of the month).

We've always had a tendency towards excessive drinking in this nation - our bad behaviour is legendary on the continent where our tourists are the bane of many a Mediterranean town - but it's never been this bad. And the pandemic only served to make the problem much worse. (Yet another box ticked for the 'score' of the pandemic - I wish some of the covid zealots who used to berate me in these pages would put in an appearance now! Yet suddenly they are 'found to be missing: now, it seems, they have nothing to say). People confined to their homes did little but drink the time away, and the habit has stuck.

But I have no cause to feel superior; I've done more drinking in my time than a camel at a Saharan oasis, but at least I've learned the value of reigning it in. These days I drink only wine (and very expensive wine - a limiting trick in itself) in restaurants about three or four times a year. I sleep much better, I'm still a neurotic wreck, but I can cope with it, and I don't have hangovers. And only someone who has had experience of the truly mind crunching effect of real drnkards hangovers will ever understand the importance of that!

So much as I'm not a fan of 'nanny state' interventions, of nudging people on how to live their lives, in this case I approve. And for every person out there who secretly pops into their 7-11 every night for that bottle of wine, those two four-packs of beer, I say this. Go on - give it a go! Doesn't matter if you fail even if you fail on day one. Restart, or try again next time. Or next January, or next weekend, or tomorrow or next year. Never stop trying, never stop trying and failing, until one day you don't fail anymore. And suddenly the drinking time of your life is behind you, and the rest is in front.

-----0-----

Shameless Liz Truss will be as pleased to see herself on the front page of the Telegraph as the rest of the Tory front-runners for the soon to be vacant top job will be pissed.

She apparently held some kind of peripheral event at the Tory Party Conference which drew a packed house, while across the hall in the main auditorium ministers and other speakers faced a half empty room.

Could it be that the Tory attendees of her presentation have actually forgotten what she did? Or do they genuinely believe (as she clearly does) that she was in the right all along - that it was just the chickens in the market place who screwed everything up. Or perhaps they just went along for the laughs that a Truss performance always brings? In fairness, the conference proper is probably a pretty dry old affair and who can blame them for attending the Truss event in the hope of seeing her do a repeat of her 'cheese' performance or something. She managed to leave the venue without walking into a broom closet this time, and if her huge laughing countenance in the photograph is anything to go by, was mighty pleased with herself.

Oh Liz, Liz, Liz! You've got to love her (excepting being one of the thousands who will see their home ownership dreams shattered later in the year on the back of her actions).

[peter]

Yesterday was most definitely Suella Braverman's day at the Conservative Party Conference.

She gave Conference the main course they desired to hear after last week's starter - hatred basted in fear with a side order of xenophobia. The wave of immigration that brought (yes, she admitted it) her own parents to these shores, was a mere puff of wind compared to the "hurricane" of numbers heading towards us. Millions upon millions, she said. Don't listen to the celebrity whingers whose children wouldn't be the ones targeted by the criminals and groomers that their "ostentatious compassion" would allow to freely enter the country.

And the Tories loved it. They cheered her to the rafters and would have all but carried her shoulder high to the steps of Downing Street had the vague irritation of the Sunak incumbency not been in the way. There was little doubt that this was Braverman in electioneering mode - and not for the general one around the corner. But as she stood there, pouring contempt on the 'woke' brigade who had been too afraid to call out the dangers of uncontrolled immigration for what it was, the irony of the fact that it was only that same wokeness that allowed her, a brown-skinned woman, to say these things - words and ideas that would have seen a white man skinned alive in this morning's media - was clearly lost on her. Saying for example 'Thirty P' Lee (or Leenoch as some have more amusingly dubbed him) had said them. Imagine the reaction to that!

And today, Sunak has to get up on stage and respond to that. Number 10 has already said that Braverman's speech was "signed off line by line" by itself (yeah - right!) in an attempt to play down Braverman's egregious pitch for Sunak's job itself, but no-one is wearing that!

Sunak himself is full of trouble and woe: he's under huge pressure over HS2, and everyone knows he's going to pull the rug on it, but it's just a case of finding the right moment to do so (like...errr.....not on front of a conference hall of people who have just been cheering the main contender for your job; it's like standing before the school assembly on your chair saying "I am bottom of the class." Not good at all. Now the Tories are going to have to swallow the bitter pill of having the world see them fail at the biggest infrastructure project we have attempted in decades which is, to put it mildly, not a good advert for 'Gobal Britain'.

And as if this weren't bad enough, there's the sticky business of his phone messages that he has failed as yet to provide to the covid enquiry board. Instructed to do so by court order (if I remember correctly), his excuse for not handing them over is that he used so many phones at the time and simply didn't keep his messages or back them up....... At least Boris Johnson (what was it) lost his phone - or was it dropped it into the sea, or couldn't remember his access pin, or as afraid that opening the messages would delete them - take your pick. Funny how these all important covid related messages, the things that take us to the heart of covid thinking at that crucial time, are so hard to access. One could almost believe, if one didn't know better (because Johnson and Sunak keep telling us it isn't so) that the then PM and his successor to be, were not taking the whole virus issue seriously and that these messages might prove it? But no - surely this cannot be?

Anyway, for better or worse, Sunak has got to get up on that stage today. He won't want to be there - he doesn't even want the job anymore - but he's stuck with it. He'll do his best to make a good first of it, but his heart won't be in it. And he's got precious little to offer. His party is directionless, having changed leadership and policy direction too many times in the past six years to be anything but dizzy and disorientated. There is no 'vision for change' that he can sell the British people, nothing to convince them that life, under yet another conservative government, is going to be different, to get better. And so it will limp on, until the next general election changes everything - or it doesn't. Because Stamer and his weak tea Labour alternative don't offer anything but more of the same. So the only realistic possibility is either one of these two carbon copies followed by Braverman - and God help is if she gets into power. History shows that even the most radical of politicians mellows on arrival in Number 10, when the gravitas of the position they hold becomes clear - but in Braverman's case I somehow wouldn't bank on it.

[peter]

You couldn't make it up.

You've got Rishi Sunak standing before the Tories at conference, telling them that they are the party of change when they've been in power for thirteen disastrous years. That they have the vision to carry this country forward to this new utopia when there is almost complete disunity on every issue facing the country within his own backbenches. That he's the man offering this new vision when he's been in government for a tidy part of the time they've spent in office, and that the 'old guard' he intends to replace have been looking after vested interests rather than the wider electorate. He has this new vision for fundamental change (but he doesn't tell us what we'd change into) and he's the man who will bring it about.

And all the while, while this is going on, there are half a dozen plotters ready to drive the knife into his back, barely bothering to hide their intentions, and formulating their own competing visions of what this country should be. You've got Liz Truss, who very nearly single-handedly brought about another financial crash 2008 style, who firstly nearly screwed the pension savings of two thirds of the country which was only prevented by the Bank of England robbing the money from the mortgage holding public over the next twenty plus years (and no small number of which will soon be homeless as a result) - andstill they fill a hall to hear what she has to say!

The country is wrecked, wherever you choose to look, be it the economy, the health service, the roads, the infrastructure, whatever - and Sunak is up there telling us that his party is the party to do the job, to bring about the change to overturn the thirty years of missed opportunity we have experienced. Like they've never been anywhere near government! Just how frikkin' stupid do they think we are!

And as for being in it to look after the interests of all the people rather than just that of the invested few - well forgive me if I'm wrong but wasn't that the message that Jeremy Corbyn was putting out six years ago? So now we find ourselves in the surreal position of having Rishi Sunak paraphrasing the words of Jeremy Corbyn while Kier Stamer tries to don the cap of Margret Thatcher and kow-tow to business and the markets.

I'm serious, you could not make this shit up.

[peter]

Sunak's idea of an age related smoking ban, in which the statutory age at which cigarettes may be bought rises by one year each year, is interesting, but confusing.

I keep hearing it said that "no one under the age of fourteen will ever be legally allowed to buy cigarettes", but how does this work? If for example the law was brought in next year, then surely anyone aged eighteen next year would constantly see the age at which they could make a legal purchase moving ahead of them? I suppose I'd for the first few years, the age restriction only went up by one year every two years, then at some point this seemingly arbitrary age of (those currently aged) fourteen, would be reached. I suppose, therefore, that this is the way in which it would be done.

Many a slip twixt cup and lip however. The confusing aspect of the execution of this policy notwithstanding, who is supposed to enforce it?

No doubt this will fall to the hapless shop assistant (ie yours truly), the clown on the front line of this sort of illiberal thinking where the buck always stops. And if we get it wrong (which we no doubt often will) there will of course be an army of snoops going around to pick us up and issue on the spot penalties for our transgression. We'll can I make a suggestion. If this is to seriously be attempted, then can it simultaneously be made mandatory that proof of age be held by anyone making a purchase of age-restricted products, avaliable for presentation subject to the discretion of the vendor in requesting it, rather than the 'think 25' limit currently in place. If the customers are made aware of this requirement it will make the seller's job significantly easier in the enforcement of this ruling.

But going back to the thing of the ruling itself, the 'vibe' if you will, is it something we really want? What of personal freedom? Do not people have the right to make their own choices in these things? Certainly, once they reach the age of adulthood, one can make a case for this. At what point is it the business of the state to say, "you can do this thing, you cannot do that thing" when it comes to a person's individual choice about what they do in respect of themselves, and within their own lives? Is this not state intervention in our lives run amok? And why stop at smoking; do not other behaviors bring about people's downfall and place "burden on the health care system" as well? Obesity, or mountain climbing, or horse riding? And king of them all, drinking? Who could seriously think that tobacco is a greater social ill than alcohol? Yet why no purging of drinking from our society. And why us? Is not Britain supposedly the bastion of freedom of choice as to how one lives one's life? How will we look set against the rest of the world, with this ban in place? A visionary nation taking the necessary steps to stamp out a great evil, or an illiberal tyranny in which the state's limit to dip its hand into our lives has no boundary?

And this would perforce have to be a prelude to an outright ban on smoking; one cannot realistically envision some future point where say a 54 year old shopper was allowed to purchase a packet of cigarettes where a 53 year old was not - it would be ridiculous. The only way it could even begin to work would be to introduce at the same time a point, say in ten years time, when a blanket ban would be brought into force. And any such legislation would be bound to create a thriving black-market industry of smuggling and illicit trading which would itself have to be policed. Do our police not already have sufficient on their plates to cope with, without the introduction of a huge and widespread network of trading in illicit contraband? No - on reflection this must be recognised as an ill thought out and unenforceable piece of legislation, spawned rather as an ear-catching sound-bite for a party conference rather than as a serious bit of policy putting forward that can actually be brought into statute. It's playing at politics rather than being serious about what can and should be done, and it should be recognised as such. And shame on Sunak for engaging in it. We deserve better.

Not of course, that he could ever get it passed. Already Liz Truss (sensing yet another popular shtick she can use to revive her erstwhile destroyed political capital) has said she would oppose such legislation, and many others will join her. The tobacco industry has massive clout financially, and it will put all of its efforts into lobbying against this change. No stone will remain unturned, no palm ungreased, in order to kill this off at birth. Social media campaigns will be launched, private meetings held with envelopes of cash changing hands, telephone calls at the highest levels of the media and political influence - it will all be done. The arguments in terms of the ideology, the practicality, the desirability, will all be brought out. What for example of Sunak's statement that the ban would "save the NHS" expense and work? Nonsense; the same people will die of the same diseases just ten years later, without having paid any tax (and smoking brings in fifteen billion pounds a year in revenue - let's not forget that) and having drawn all of that extra pension in the meantime. The argument just doesn't stack up. All of this will be brought out and, contrary to the supposed actual good this change in legislation is supposed to bring about, in fact the debate that preceeds it may rather highlight the entire fallacy of the existing arguments as to why smokers are subjected to the punitive measures that they currently endure.

So Sunak is in dangerous waters here. If he is not careful, he might finish up actually shitting in his own nest. Scuppering the 'nice little earner' that anti-smoking policy currently nets the treasury and actually costing the country she'd loads of money rather than saving it. And as for the smokers - well, forced back on a black market trade that doesn't include paying eighty percent government tax for their product, they might actually see their costs fall dramatically in result. Think on this.

But as my wife pointed out (humorously, but I actually wonder if it hasn't actual occured to the bods who have cooked this up) at least it might help to stem the flow of immigrants to these Isles - for who would want to come to live in a place where the government can actually say whether you can enjoy a quiet smoke after your day's grind, a cigar after your fine dinner or a pipe while in front of the fire with a good book.

[peter]

You'd just as soon believe that the moon is made of green cheese as believe that the Conservative Party are the party of change. The clue's in the name - Conservative.....it means to conserve, to stay the same.

Rishi Sunak is going all radical and up for change because he ha no fucking other choice! What's he going to do? Go to the country and tell them that everything is going to stay as it is? The country's fucked, the economy's fucked, the NHS is fucked. The wealth gap is wider than it's ever been, hundreds of thousands stand to see their jobs and homes dissappear - but we're just going to keep on doing the same as we've been doing for the last 13 years? C'mon, get real. Sunak is saying the only thing that he can, taking a gamble that the country will buy it and maybe - just maybe - vote him/them back in.

And this is an absolute gift for the Liberal-Democrats, if they could but grasp it. They are seriously in the best position that they have been in for decades, to grasp back real political power in this country, and in their own right, not just as coalition partners to another party that regards them with contempt.

Look at it.

Sixty percent of the country are dissatisfied with Brexit and would go back into the EU if they could. Fifty percent of the country are smokers or at least liberally minded enough to believe that people should have the right to make up their own minds on things like smoking. Eighty percent of people would choose a government that had their interests in mind and were not in the pockets of big business (as both the Tories and Labour now are). Huge numbers of people are sick with the privatisation experiment that has seen them fleeced for money while the fat-cats and shareholders get richer and theservices are starved of investment. If they cannot build a winning ticket out of that lot then there is seriously something wrong with them.

Kier Stamer has alienated all but the very right wing of his voting base who are desperately looking for somewhere else to hang their hat. The tories have left their own voters reeling at the incompetence, economic, social, environmental, they have displayed in the 6 different administrations they have overseen since gaining power; you can't speak to anyone who voted for them who isn't sick to the back teeth with what they have done.......and from the Liberal-Democrats, who stand to capitalise on all of this mayhem, of whom a good leader would see their taking of the keys to Downing Street in the next election - not the one after that - we hear nothing (well, nothing except an outlining of a good policy on social care for the elderly).

Why are they not on every doorstep in the country, on every broadcast, fighting their case. It beggars belief that they will fail to seize this opportunity, but I see it happening before my eyes.

[peter]

What I'd like to know is what's happening with the Bibby Stockholm? Or what about Russell Brand? How come is it that these stories that receive wall-to-wall coverage for a few days, suddenly evaporate into the ether and we hear nothing more of them, just as if they were of no significance in the first place.

I suppose the Brand story has served its purpose: the message has been sent out, mess with the establishment and you get burned. Lawrence Fox is getting some of the same treatment (let's face it - he opened door for the ones whose side he was pricking to get their revenge himself) as is Dan Wootton. It can only be a matter of time before Neil Oliver is brought down. He's becoming increasingly outspoken about the 'project' of the establishment to increase the level of control we are subject to, to rein in freedoms that belong to us by right, and sooner or later they will come for him.

Brand has not, as far as I'm aware, as yet been charged with anything. Not that it matters much. He's had his means of earning income pulled out from under his feet, his shows and sinecures have been cancelled, his reputation is in tatters. No mainstream venue or outlet would touch him with a bargepole and I suspect that the offers of any meaningful work he or his agent are receiving are thin on the ground, to put it mildly. His punishment is all but complete by virtue of his being shifted from the 'cheeky chappie' naughty but nice category of celebrity into the Gary Glitter, Jimmy Savile set. Any actual police charging or arraignment before the courts is now just the icing on the cake. So against this background, the story has run it's course. It might reappear if any significant developments occur, but if they don't, if the police decide that no charges will be made, then don't expect any apologies from the media to be forthcoming, don't expect Fiona Bruce to be reading that out on the 6pm news slot - trial by media has been done and he's been judged and sentenced already.

And the Bibby Stockholm - well, that's just embarrassing for the government isn't it. Somewhere in the background they'll be tinkering around with the plumbing, flushing it out with bleach or doing whatever it is they do in order to shift a contamination with legionnaires disease, but no mention of the ship will be heard again until it's ready once more to serve as an example of the Tories 'getting things done' in the face of the "invasion" of small boats. At this point it'll be wheeled out again, another splash story to fill the headlines with for a day, to set the two sides of the whole immigration debate at each others throats once again. Righteous outrage vs government tough but fair. Good headlines for any day of the week. No call for the Bruce eyebrow to be raised too high for this one, no nasty taste of Brand left in the mouth after speaking the name, but it'll do.

And so the cycle rolls on; Outrage followed by moral panic, quick change of scenery and then return, dog to vomit style, at some later point. All peripheral stuff. All stuff that avoids the central role of the media, to hold a spotlight on what is going on in the dark corridors of power, to hold those who sit in positions of government of influence, some elected and some not, to account, the holding of feet to the fire. None of this will be happening. If you're waiting for this then you're out of luck. We don't do that stuff here.

-----0-----

Kier Stamer must be rubbing his hands together. The Tories are doing all of the nasty stuff for him, like cancelling HS2 and putting in curbs on the unions, imposing the two child benefits cap and introducing legislation to curb the right of protest, and all he has to do is say, with his best lugubrious countenance, that it won't be possible for a Labour administration to overturn this move, this decision, this legislation - it would be simply too difficult you see.

Today we have a perfect case in point. Asked whether he will reverse the decision on the northern leg of the HS2 line, he said that the tories have made such a hash of the project, "blown such a hole in the plans" was the way he put it, that it simply wouldn't be feasible to u-turn on their announcement and restart the project.

That's nice then isn't it. No nasty decisions to have to make there then. And frankly, this is the Stamer story from start to finish.

And it's beginning to be noticed. This morning, some of the old Tony Blair stalwarts, Alistair Campbell and David Milliband amongst them, are saying that Stamer has not yet done the groundwork in order to be ready for government. He hasn't taken any risks, come out with any policies that can be tested against those of his opponents (not that there's any coherence to be found there, even if you go looking for it). In fact, he hasn't come out with any policies at all (with the exception of introducing 'supervised teeth brushing' in primary schools). Except for telling us that nothing will change under Labour in terms of the economic policy, he hasn't really shown his colours at all. He is bland and grey, sitting in the shadows and borrowing from their hue.

Which is all about to change because it's the last likely Labour Party Conference before the next general election, and Stamer will be expected to strutt his stuff. Sunak has had his turn (possibly the Liberal-Democrats as well, but of course they got no coverage so we wouldn't have really noticed if they had) and now it's Stamer's. And it could make or break him. He's perceived as dull. A tory-lite version of the Conservative Party without any radical ideas to turn around the m3ss he will inherit. He's going to 'turbocharge the economy' that much we have been told. Deliver the biggest growth in the G7 over a sustained period. Great! But perhaps now might be the time to tell us how this economic marvel will be brought about? And on the EU: are we actually going to find out if you really believe you can 'make Brexit work', or whether it was all just a 'cunning plan', that you remain a remainer, determined to take us back into Europe, by the tradesman's entrance if necessary.

So come on Kier. Up you get. You and your ilk saw off the last truly radical politician to lead your party, you've expelled the left and turned to the anodyne center ground for your platform: now let's hear what it's all about. What are you offering the working people of this country? Not the middle class, already doing okay, guys who pull up the average wage figures to respectable appearing livable amounts - I'm talking about the people at the bottom of the wages pyramid, the ones who earn shit. The tens of millions who live on incomes that can't begin to buy them proper inclusion in the society in which they live. The ones whose wages go into buying the houses that make up the property portfolios of the million little landlords that our society has spawned. What have you got to offer them - because Tory-lite ain't gonna cut it. Not when you are facing destitution or revolving poverty from one monthly wage check to the next.

And let me just whisper something in your shell-like before you go on stage.......trickle-down doesn't work! If you don't take it in tax from the bastards they just hold on to it!

[peter]

Quick indulgence; I mean who in God's name would want to abduct and kill ITV daytime presenter Holly Willoughby? It'd be like wanting to prepare a six course tasting menu where every course was a bowl of candyfloss. There are shop window manikins with more range in terms of facial expression (and what the frick does the fact that the man "used to be 35 stone" (thanks to the Mirror for that one) have to do with it. I'm bemused by the story - poor Holly, under armed guard in her London home - with its inclusions of formerly obese villains and hired American hitmen "days away " from committing the iniquitous deed. Now as dead cats go at least this is a novel one!

-----0-----

Which brings me on to the sentencing of the guy who was found wandering around the grounds of Windsor Castle with a crossbow and who, on being challenged, said he was there to kill the Queen.

Said sentencing was done live on television, for what purpose other than feeding the public's ghoulish voyeurism I have no idea, and though I did not watch it, I did hear later that the guy, who styled himself on Darth Vader (complete with face mask knocked up out of DIY materials at home), had been sentenced to a good old custodial sentence (rather than one of indeterminate lengt, had he been judged to be mentally ill) on the basis that "he wasn't psychotic at the time he first formulated his plan."

Don't get me wrong, this guy needs to be away from the public in a secure institution for both their and his own safety - but saying he was sane at the point when he formulated his plan seems a bit of a stretch to me. It has the whiff of the Court deciding it wants its 'revenge' on this guy - revenge that takes the form of a zillion year sentence and the 'bang!' of the gavel, accompanied by the words, "Take him down!" Not sufficient to judge him as simply suffering from that most awful of conditions, schizophrenia, and detaining him in a secure hospital until such times as he clears the bars to be judged safe for release (and those bars are not easily cleared in cases like this).

I mean, why the need for revenge against a sick guy? Why the public display of his fall, his destruction by forces beyond his control. Yes, put him away for sure, throw away the key if necessary - but have the compassion to recognise that this is a sad case, not one that requires anger and revenge. Surely we are better than this?

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

Right. Now on to the important stuff.

There are, as I see it, four key issues that need addressing in this country if we are to get back on track (and I mean to a place where we all see our lot improved, not just that tiny slice of beneficiaries at the top end of our society that are currently enjoying the fruits of our collective labours).

They can be listed as follows.

1. The rising inequality in terms of both income and wealth. The gap between rich and poor in our society has been steadily increasing for the last (what) forty plus years and has, since the pandemic, been increasing at an even faster rate than prior. It is seeing ever more of the nations wealth collected in an ever smaller number of people at the apex of our society, while those at the lower levels see the fruit of their labours becoming less and less capable of providing first for any accrual of wealth in terms of equity, of assets held, then of provision of disposable income sufficient to pursue a high quality existence beyond that of mere payment of their regular living costs, and lastly, to even meet the costs of daily living with the result of an inexorable slide into debt and poverty.

This can only be countered with the establishment of an equitable system of progressive taxation whereby a rebalancing is achieved, and excessive wealth at the one end is channelled into services and support at the other. Fair remuneration for success, balanced with a safety net of support to ensure the absence of poverty for those not so fortunate or gifted.

2. Political representation. Our two major parties are both now, so deeply in the pockets of business, so beholden to their donors, that along with the lobbying system and the holding of second jobs by MPs, proper representation in parliament of the people no longer exists. Tied up in the same bundle, our first past the post system ensures that a large part of the population in any given parliamentary session, is completely unrepresented in the government of the day. Electoral reform in the manner of some kind of proportional representation, and the banning of political donations and institution of public financing of political parties, the barring of politicians holding second jobs and the tightening up of the rules surrounding lobbying. These things would go some way towards restoration of a proper political representation in the interest of the many rather than the few.

3. Political stability. Five prime ministers in six years, six chancellors. Is it any wonder we're in the mess we are. Each change represents a new direction, a volta face on the direction of the former, a new team and a new modus operandi. Chaos was the only thing that could result and chaos we have got. Again, the installation of some kind of proportional representation would hopefully solve this, insofar as it would likely bring about the fracturing of the two big parties into the smaller ones of which they are really composed, and government by consensus of the smaller parties that would result would be effectively forced upon them.

4. Trade and inward investment. We've shot ourselves in the foot and we all know it. Brexit has put up barriers to trade with our closest neighbors and biggest trading partners. Inward investment is flat-linining and exporting to Europe for all but the biggest of companies is all but impossible. The continent has no incentive to export their own goods to us, nor to import our goods to themselves. It's simply too costly in terms of time and documentation. Particularly when they have twenty seven other countries to trade with, without any barriers or hurdles to jump over. This must be acknowledged and steps taken to rectify it. Join the single market and customs union, rejoin the EU, do it in lots of small agreements all shadowing the EU regulations of the fields they pertain to - just do it.

(A bonus one - perhaps the biggest problem of all.)

5. Global climate change. Recognise that the policy of net zero probably isn't going to cut it. Even if we could achieve its goals, the idea that you can just affect global climate, then turn down the dial as though it were your central heating is for the birds. Sure, try to achieve this via equitably shared policies that don't just dump it all on the poorer members of society while leaving the wealthy able to continue to live as though nothing has changed (ie by doing it all based on ability to pay), but recognise that adaption to the changed circumstances is going to be key to surviving this. What form this adaption will take, the equitable sharing of the displaced peoples as opposed to throwing up walls of steel and refusing to take a proportionate share of the burden would be a start, time will tell. But it's time we start properly planning for what is coming.

That's it. Not as successful a post as I'd hoped, but a window into my thinking on things at least.

[peter]

No-one could be anything but disgusted by some of the stories emerging from the hell on earth that Gaza and the neighbouring region of Israel has become - naked bodies of victims being paraded through the strip and hostages being taken by force, often entirely innocent civilians.

But I'm alas, not sufficiently trustful of our media (and they only have themselves to blame for this) to take as given any such stories as the former - they have demonstrated before that they will spin almost any aspect of a conflict in order to nudge public ire towards the place that they want it directed. In respect of the hostage situation, given the high population density of the region and the fact that it is almost impossible for the Israeli forces to target Hama's centres of operation without incurring significant civilian casualties at the same time, I suppose that the idea is that if Israel has its own citizens amongst the population, then it is less likely to be cavalier about indiscriminate use of ordinance in its attempts to root out and destroy its enemies.

But even saying that the worst of the stories are true, let's not loose sight of the facts that have led to the situation. The occupied territories are just that - occupied: the clue's in the name. They have been since the Six-Day war of 1967 and though Gaza is to a degree autonomous in its administration, it is encircling by an effective ring of steel when it comes to what and who may cross into or out of the territory. The Israeli forces decide what foods, medicines and people may pass, and can even cut off electricity and water within the strip if they choose to. (The former is, I believe, cut off at the moment.) Under such circumstances is it any wonder that frustrations have built to a point where excesses will inevitably result.

I cannot for the life of me understand what Hamas seeks to gain by this offensive. The retribution costs exacted from the Palestinian population are going to be horrendous - the UK and USA are already mobilising fighter jets and warships to send to the region in support of the Israeli response, and the promulgation of the stories I have referred to above will be in part to be as a justification for the sledge hammer blow that is about to fall on the Palestinian nut. The imbalance of this conflict is simply not being and will never be emphasized. It will be presented as a struggle between equals, the background of years of occupation and impoverishment will not be spoken of, and the ferocity of the revenge exacted from the civilian population of Gaza will be justified by the promulgation of the tales such as the ones above. No level of restraint will be expected and any level of savagery will be excused - often by the spinning and one-sided reporting that the conflict has elicited to date (read the Media Lens published book Newspeak in the 21st century by David Edwards and David Cromwell if you don't believe me). We the public will be shepherded to the place we are meant to be in terms of our thinking and blind eyes will be turned by the civilised world as revenge is exacted. This will be a conflict of home made ordnance and angry but untrained youth against the might and technology of sophisticated modern militaries. Those who control the media control the narrative. Don't forget this in the weeks and months ahead.

[peter]

Words fail me as I contemplate the descent into savagery unfolding in the occupied territory of Gaza, unfolding as we speak.

Indiscriminate bombing of residential areas within the strip, promises of executions of hostages, and 2 million people in a concentrated area 35 miles long and 3 miles wide to be denied food, water, fuel and medicines while all the while being simultaneously pounded from the air and facing ground assault from sophisticated armaments and professional soldiers. This is not, despite what Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu would tell us, war in the traditional sense. It is descent into barbarism - on both sides.

And as usual, as always is the case, it is people who pay. Used as expendable pawns in a battle of increasing desperation on the one side, and ferocity on the other, they will be the means via which pressure and revenge will be exerted, as Hamas are made to pay for their actions over the weekend past.

And already the signs of the conflict spilling over, drawing in other nations into a battle on multiple fronts, are emerging. America is warning of Iranian involvement in the Hamas planning, unwilling to let an opportunity to take a swipe at its old enemy go by whether it be true or not. And over the border from Israel in Lebanon, proscribed organisation Hezbolla makes a few tentative jabs against its old foe, and pays a pretty immediate price. Elsewhere in the region, other players eye the situation nervously. Netanyahu threatens Damascus with being raised to the ground by means of an American warship en route to the scene, and gradually all of the pieces for conflict on a grand scale are put into place.

It's long been predicted that the middle east would be the region of the world in which the (most probably) final conflagration would begin, and looking at what is currently developing, you'd be forgiven for thinking that maybe this is what is unfolding. Put it together with the Ukrainian situation, the specter of renewed hostilities in the Balkans and you wouldn't have to be a dyed in the wool pessimist to be feeling a bit insecure.

I watched the 'vigil for Israel' held outside Downing Street yesterday, and read this morning of our government's pledge to send "all the humanitarian aid required" to the state of Israel while ever the conflict lasts. Last time I noticed, it was not the state of Israel that was being blockaded, subject to siege, denied food, water, medicines and fuel, obliterated from the air and potentially savaged on the ground. Certainly they have been grievously hurt, seen incursion into the territory they occupy and watched their people being taken and killed, but horrible and inexcusable as this is, it cannot be used as justification by a nation state to exact retribution on a civilian population as an act of revenge, the claim that it is 'acting to root out its enemies' notwithstanding.

The people of all sides in this conflict must be in our prayers at this time. Death and suffering has no preference as to whom it visits; it is egalitarian in the extreme in the distribution of its services. So be not led into support of this side or that in this terrible demonstration of human folly. Rather pray that sane heads and humane thinking reassert themselves in short order, and steps are taken to de-escalate this Armageddon in the making.

[peter]

Needless to say, the situation in Israel still quite rightly dominates the news, and on all fronts things do not look good.

The price of oil has skyrocketed, causing predictions of a third wave of inflation to travel around the world, doing nobody any good excepting the energy companies who have already enjoyed windfalls beyond their wildest dreams and have more money than they can begin to know what to do with. This tragedy equates to them as covid did to the pharmaceutical industry. As the saying goes, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

At home, Home Secretary Suella Braverman has encouraged the police to use the full force of the law (now considerably greater in consequence of the legislation enacted by her party during the Covid episode) to crack down on anybody protesting in support of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Does this mean that if you find the idea of starving two million people of food, water and medical supplies unacceptable as a response to even the horrors that have been inflicted upon Israel in the last week, and decide to make a public stand on it, then off you go, carted away to a police cell? Even ex Conservative Party leader William Haig said yesterday that there is a fine line between response and retribution, and that care has to be taken not to cross it.

No such care was however evident coming from the Israeli government minister speaking from Tel Aviv on the Sky news last night. He was almost beside himself in his hatred for Hamas (perfectly understandably) and allowed this to spill over into what even the presenter interviewing him seemed to think was intemperate behaviour in his predictions of the forthcoming Israeli response. There would, he said, be no quater given to either civilians or indeed Israeli captives within the strip. All would be sacrificed in pursuit of the goal of eradication of Hamas, was the tenor of his words. As to the blockading of food and water etc from the strip, at what point, he asked, could the Palestinian people expect Israel to help them after what they had done. The point of fifty percent of the Palestinian people being under the voting age of 18 (and thereby bearing no responsibility for the role of the organisation in the administration of the strip)made by the presenter, fell on deaf ears.

Not so however, on those of the UN commentator speaking from within Gaza, who openly called out the tactic for what it was - a war crime. In fact she made mincemeat of much of the narrative, as being presented by the Sky newsman. This outrage on the part of Hamas - and she conceded it as such - could not be seen in isolation, but had to be taken in context with the history of the occupation, and what the Palestinian people have endured (with the world seemingly oblivious to it) since 1967. She did a fantastic job of dismantling the questions she was being asked, refusing to accept their validity, except from the perspective of the situation as a whole. This was not a war of the last few days, she said, it was an ongoing struggle of a people to get recognition of an occupation they had been enduring for nigh on sixty years. Refugee within their own lands.

Needless to say, having the truth laid out so eloquently and in so bald a fashion did nothing to ease the discomfiture of the Sky presenter. He was clearly discombobulated at the narrative he was supposed to be following being so effectively deconstructed before his eyes (and of course those of the millions of viewers watching) and I have little doubt that this particular lady will not be being invited onto a Sky news broadcast on the subject any time soon in the near future.

Two people who, for different reasons, will be less than happy at the developments in Israel and the complete dominance it is having across the news spectrum, will be Sir Kier Stamer and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

Zelensky can ill afford for attention to slip away from the Ukrainian situation (there are already worrying signs of war fatigue setting in across the Western countries upon which his war efforts effectively depend) but in the face of the situation in Israel his own particular war has disappeared from the media consciousness in all but entirety. He will be desperately afraid that alongside the evaporation of media attention, will shortly be an equivalent evaporation of funding for Ukraine together with a drying up of the supplies of arms and ammunition. Who knows, perhaps a perverse side effect of the Israel and Gaza crisis will be a faster compromise by the combatants in the Ukrainian one? Certainly in the absence of continuing Western fueling of his war effort, Zelensky would have little choice but to go to the negotiating table as he should have done long, long ago. The Ukrainian war is and was always, going to be settled around the table. The time and lives, the destruction that we in the West have so massively amplified by our proxy war against Russia, is unconscionable. Perhaps Zelensky will now begin to realise that he has been used as a pawn in a bigger game and that the time for talking is inevitably approaching.

Stamer for his part, will be furious that the Labour Party Conference, in which he was to present himself to the country as the leader in waiting, has all but been forgotten by the media in the face of events in the Middle East. To add to his woes on this score, a protester made it onto the podium at the beginning of his keynote speech and poured glitter all over his head. The man was shouting something about democracy being necessary within the party (something that Stamer has, in his purging of the left, been decidedly lukewarm in his appreciation of) before he was hustled away by the goons who protect Stamer. Needless to say, the minimal comment that the incident received on the evening news (it never even made the hour long main 7pm broadcast, but had rather, along with the rest of the Conference news, to wait for the Sophie Ridge political slot) focused entirely on the potential dangers to our politicians from attacks, rather than on any point that the man was actually making. This will be of singular disinterest to a media who has been similarly disinterested in Stamer's purging of the left. The sooner that the people forget that they used to be represented by the left, the better, as far as the Murdoch owned media outlets (and the BBC as well) are concerned.

But I've been reading a book on the decline of the Conservative Party of late, and some interesting stuff has come out of it.

Called The Right to Rule by Ben Riley-Smith, it explains that of the political parties, it is the Conservative Party that absolutely pursues power with a ferocity with which none of the others can compare. He quotes one politician who said that the thing with the Tories is that they can never believe that they should not be in power, which contrasted absolutely with the Labour Party who could never quite believe that they should.

This makes the Conservatives much more ruthless in their actions, as was discovered by the Liberal-Democrats when they unwisely went into coalition with them back in 2010. Come the 2015 election, the Cameron government were full of assurances to their partners in government that the election would be fought on the grounds of a continuation of the partnership post the election. They wanted the Lib-dems onside, and would campaign on this brief. But behind the scenes they of course did exactly the opposite. They targeted the marginal Liberal-Democrat seats ruthlessly and come election day, slaughtered them in the polls. The Liberal-Democrats were left with only 8 seats (where previously they had held 59) and the Conservatives won their majority.

But beyond this simple ruthless pursuit of power, lies another point, more significant to grasp from the point of a voter. In the choice between policies and politics, the Tories will always choose politics. This means that if two courses present themselves, one in the country's interest and the other in the party's interest, the party's interest will always take precedence. Now this is important. Thirteen years of this approach - no, more when you take into account how much of the time the Conservatives have been in power since the end of World War 2) has brought us to the place we are in. The country's interest, that of the people, has without fail been second on the agenda behind party interest and the pursuit of power, for the bulk of our post war governance.

Think on that when you walk into the polling booth next year.

[peter]

Today is a strange kind of hiatus day as the world waits with baited breath for the inevitable invasion of Gaza by Israeli ground forces, which have been built up in large numbers on the border in the days following last weekend's attacks.

At last however, some understanding of the need for proportionality in the response is filtering through the outrage over the attacks. Joe Biden has pointed out that the observation of international law in respect of both times of peace and times of war, is what "separates countries like Israel and the United States" from the places of the world where terrorism and the law of the gun prevail. Meanwhile the aerial bombardment of Gaza continues with upwards of 2000 buildings obliterated and numberless casualties resulting therefrom. One IDF commentator was reported in this morning's press as saying that the focus was on destruction rather than targeting in the campaign to date. This can be corroborated by the aerial photographs showing extensive levelling of whole sections of the strip, one Israeli government official saying that "Gaza will be a city of tents by the time we have finished." In the face of such comments it behoves Western politicians to remind the Israeli authorities that the excessive targeting of infrastructure and civilians in a conflict situation is in contravention of the Geneva convention and constitutes a breaking of international law.

Meanwhile a spat has broken out over the BBC's use of term "militants" in describing the Hamas personnel involved in the fighting, rather than labelling them as terrorists as the government would prefer.

I can't say I've noticed much "balance" in the BBC reportage to date (though it is somewhat better than expected) - little mention has been made about the background of occupation against which the atrocities have been perpetrated (in fact to even mention this seems to be taken as evidence of antisemitism on the part of the observer) - but still, they are correct not to group the entire activity of the group under this one pejorative heading. The difference between the terms militants, freedom fighters and terrorists is somewhat meaningless and so much dependent upon the particular standpoint of the observer that it adds very little to the debate or understanding. Like pornography, as the guy said in the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial, terrorism is hard to pin down, but one knows it for what it is when one sees it. And what happened in southern Israel was terrorism. But one should not lump all of the activities of Hamas, nor all of the individuals who work in administration of Gaza as terrorists, just as one should not all believe that every Palestinian supports what was done at the weekend, nor what Hamas is doing more broadly in the region. Such a lumping is simplistic and the BBC do right in resisting the government desire to see it operate as a propoganda cum nudging tool rather than an unbiased news reporting entity. As I say, I hadn't noticed much even-handedness in the reportage I have heard to date, but if this is as the papers report this morning, then I support it. Needless to say the Express is outraged, screaming for the BBC to call the activists terrorists and have done with it. (King Charles and the Wales's have apparently done so, broadcasting their appal at what has happened and their hopes for a swift resolution. Won't hold my breath on that:it's been going on for nigh on sixty years already.)

Surely though, from the Israeli side, common sense would say that the opening up of humanitarian corridors, through which the necessary water, food and medicines so desperately needed in the strip could pass, would signal hugely their good intentions towards the civilian population of the region, and do much to draw them, the population, away from support of the type of militant/terrorist activity we have seen? This, if I was inside the Israeli government, would be my take. I'd see nothing to be gained, either locally or internationally, by actions that would punish the innocent alongside the guilty, and put Israel on the wrong side of international and humanitarian law.

Let's hope that some common sense prevails and the rhetoric of the Israeli leadership is just that - knee-jerk rhetoric.

[peter]

Hmm.... Things are heating up.

Yesterday Israel bombed the airports at Damascus and Aleppo (both Syrian cities) in order to make their use as channels via which arms could be transferred to Hezbolla (and possibly Hamas?) in Lebanon more difficult. The Saudi Arabian and Iranian leaderships held conversations ostensibly about what could be done to de-escalate the conflict in Gaza, but it would be nieve to think that they did not also discuss how they, as other players in the Middle-Eastern theatre, could become embroiled in the escalating hostilities. Putin has called for the UN to take a more active role in negotiating a way through the crisis and the American President is warning "other parties" from becoming involved, or seeking to inflame the situation to their own advantage. The UK is sending warships and helicopters to the southern Mediterranean in order to police the area and try to prevent arms from being transferred into the hands of Israeli enemies via the sea routes, and ex Defence Minister Ben Wallace says in today's press that Iran is trying to goad the Israeli government into an excessive response to the atrocities that have been perpetrated on their people, in order to capitalise on the negative effect this would have on Israeli standing in world opinion. (This may be true, but equally, could be a 'cunning plan' to dissuade Israel from any presumptive response/invasion, if they thought it would be running into an Iranian trap, or in any way conforming to what they (the Iranians) wanted them (the Israelis) to do. Israel continues to be needled on its northern border by rocket attacks from the Lebanese territory in which Hezbolla operates, and responds with air and rocket strikes of its own.

So all in all it's a mare's-nest, a bloody muddle which threatens to go hot at any time.

I'd wondered at the start of this what Hamas could have hoped to achieve in their actions - actions that could do nothing but rightly draw condemnation from all sides, as they rampaged like rabid animals through the southern villages abutting on Gaza. The reasoning behind their actions has become more clear as time has gone on, and seems to be as follows. Hamas, unlike it's counterpart (and by no means friend) in the West Bank, the PNA, in no way recognises the right of Israel to exist. The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) does recognise the right of Israel to exist, and latterly this has resulted in some easing of tensions between itself and the Israeli government. Similarly, other traditionally anti-Israeli states in the middle east, beginning with Egypt and now being joined by Saudi Arabia and Jordan, are beginning to show signs of being ready to start engaging with Israel as a legitimate entity. There are signs that they are perhaps ready to move on from the history of the region, to begin to treat with Israel as a permanent presence within the Middle Eastern community of nations, and to begin to enjoy the benefits and advantages on the world stage that this would bring.

This is of course, absolute anathema to Hamas. It is in serious danger of finding itself increasingly isolated in its position of refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Israeli state, and therefore had to do something to bring about the drawing back of the other nations of the regions to its side of the argument, to undermine the slowly developing rapport between Israel and these other countries. This would appear to go some way towards an explanation of what they have done. I couldn't go so far as to say that they deliberately wanted to elicit an over the top reaction from Israel, but undoubtedly (if this reason has any validity to it) they wanted to bring their situation in Gaza to the fore - and it is a bad situation....there is no denying it - and to stir up ire against Israel in their (Hamas's) previously supportive allies.

There has been much talk in the last few days about the atrocities that have been perpetrated - I don't know about this. It's entirely possible that it's all true. But the press themselves, when pressed, seems less than happy to corroborate the stories, and for two days running the Telegraph has made a point of saying so - before then continuing, and running the stories anyway. I don't think that there's much doubt that atrocities have been committed. Whether they were as widespread or heinous as is being speculated, indeed being suggested by our media coverage (and certainly by our government's, who, it has to be accepted, are not exactly without interest in how the narrative on all this plays out) who can say. You'd have to have the memory of a woodlouse not to get the feeling that we've been here before, that the departments of behavioural psychology and nudging have not got their sticky paws all over this, and (even accepting the possibility that all of this is entirely justified) that we aren't really being given much choice as to what we are supposed to think about it all. And just in case you are not clear on the matter, Suella Braverman is making sure that the police are in no doubt as to what is expected of them, should some people decide to express public support for what is deemed the 'wrong side' in this situation a thousand miles away.

But all in all it's a dog's dinner. It was a bad day that we,the British, decided that the Middle East would benefit from our intervention in the shared history of their nations that ran back for two thousand plus years. From that day forward it has gone from bad to worse, to the point where it is now all but insoluble. It's a lazy compromise to fall back on the two state argument as a solution to the region's ills - there are absolutely valid reasons why Israel could never accept it, not least that it would leave them vulnerable to hostile states on every border they have, states bent on their destruction, so what kind of solution could that ever be?

So who knows where this is headed? America will expect to be making the running with Israel in their response. Biden promises that the USA will stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel, come what may - but Israel will know that this is entirely contingent upon them doing what they are told, and whatever is in America's best interest. The Middle Eastern players will be looking as to their own interests and will perhaps even be prepared to put aside old rivalries in order to take steps forward against their common adversary, Israel.

As I say. A mare's-nest.

[peter]

It is down in black and white in Article 3 of the Geneva convention that collective punishment is a war crime, yet Labour leader Kier Stamer found it impossible in interview to deem it so. Asked repeatedly to condemn the blockading of food, water and medicines from entering Gaza, he insisted that "Israel has the right to defend herself", rather than speak the clear and honest truth.

Similarly, in interview on the BBC's News night program, asked the specific question of whether the blockade constituted a war crime, Labour Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornbury repeated the same mantra, "Israel has the right to defend itself," over and again. Accused by interviewer Victoria Derbyshire of deliberately not answering the simple question, she stumbled around the houses saying she was answering the question in the way that covered the context of the situation.

Embarrassing nonsense, and both Stamer and Thornbury knew it. So what is going on here, that the leaders of our official opposition are unable to speak the truth when answered a simple question?

The answer is simple. Fear.

Fear of what the media will do to them if they are honest about the situation. They are so focused on getting power, so aware that the heavily pro Israel and anti Palestinian press will crucify them in print if they so much dare to call out the inhumanity of what is going down in the strip, that they would rather avoid the calling out of this crime, than risk damaging their chances at the next election by doing so.

What does this say about the party that would replace the Tory government currently in power? Or perhaps this is unfair. Let's say rather, what does it say about Stamer and his team. At the minimum it tells us that they have reached a place where honesty, where common human decency, is considered an expendable commodity when set against the ruthless pursuit of power. If those who would lead us cannot find it in themselves to speak out against actions that threaten the lives of millions of people, that inflict suffering on a wide and indiscriminate scale across whole populations, then what is it all about? Surely the question of whether it's all worth it must be crossing their minds? Do they think that people cannot see? That we don't feel a visceral disgust at the sight of such naked disingenuousness?

I think that the Labour leadership do themselves far more harm in their refusal to answer straight questions with honest answers, than the right wing and pro Israeli biased media could ever do them.

And the tragedy unfolding in Gaza continues apace.

Yesterday, Israeli government leaflets were dropped by the plane load over the territory, telling the million plus inhabitants to immediately gather their belongings and to evacuate Gaza city without further ado. If they did not, they were told, their lives were effectively forfeit.

United Nations immediately condemned the action as illegal and were unequivocal their stating that such an instruction was impossible for residents to follow. There is but one heavily damaged road leading south to the region that the leaflet instructed people to head toward (even if that region were safe in itself, which it clearly is not), and besides this, the hugely damaged and debilitated population of the city is simply not placed to up sticks en masse and vacate the area. There are elderly, sick and injured people by the hundreds of thousands, hospitals full of severely injured residents and the staff upon whom their care and often lives, are dependent. The entire city is devastated and in ruins. People search the wreckage of buildings, as after an earthquake, for the injured and buried victims - and they are supposed to just down tools and leave? I saw a news report where a lady doctor in a hospital was crying out for the international community to come to their rescue and prevent this heinous act of reprisal from going ahead. In the same report a man, numb faced with pain, carried the shrouded body of his five year old daughter out to his car, one of hundreds whose lives are now blighted beyond repair, for the remainder of their days.

Evil cannot be countered by yet more evil. Surely, surely, surely, the Israelis of all people, understand this?

[Savor Dam]

Evil cannot be countered by yet more evil. Surely, surely, surely, the Israelis of all people, understand this?

Indeed. The respective motivations and conflicts, both internal to the Israeli and Palestinian multi-factions and broadly between the two is a major stew...further roiled by the external influences of Iran, USA, and a host of others.

We, as external observers, can see that the wisdom of Admiral Ackbar applies here. "It's a Trap!!" exactly describes the nature of the Hamas incursion; what Israel is doing -- had to do -- in response is exactly what was intended by those who made the provocation (huge understatement!) come to pass.

It is not much different from what I've seen time and again when a differently-abled child gets picked on, and the tormenters learn how to push the kid's buttons so that they can provoke a disproportionate response and have authority figures (who entirely missed the provoking) discount any evidence thereof and only discipline the different kid for lashing out at those abusing and taunting him.

Sometimes seeing the trap isn't enough to avoid it.