What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

In a continuation of my observations on rising authoritarian government in the UK, this morning we have news of a redefinition of what is considered extremism in the country, to include anything that constitutes criticism of our institutions, or is deemed to be undermining of the nation or itsvalues.

Basically, a catch-all charter whereby anyone or anything that a government or state official deems undesirable or embarrassing, can be swept up and brought in for censure, either formally in the courts or privately in the form of a threatening interview etc, designed to scare the bejeebies out of them, and slap them back into line.

For some reason it is Michael Gove the Levelling Up Secretary that is behind this, and while we all know that he's a slippery bastard and not to be trusted as far as you can throw an elephant by the tail - ask Boris Johnson - I hadn't really marked him down as one of the Suella Braverman style right-wing nut jobs who went in for the 'knock on the door in the middle of the night' style of tactics. But it seems that I might have been wrong.

This morning's Observer says that the proposals being drawn up are fiercely opposed by many civil servants, who fear that "legitimate groups and individuals" will be branded as extremist. Included in the definition is that of undermining British values, but I'm not sure exactly what the term means - what exactly 'British values' are - and as I pointed out yesterday, I'm not convinced that any definition that our government came up with would be agreed on by other countries around the world who have experienced their application first hand.

Seen by some Whitehall advisors as "criminalising dissent" and being a "crackdown on freedom of speech", this is exactly the type of stuff I was referring to in my post of yesterday.

As it was once noted, a government can get away with almost any level of dictatorial practice, of reduction of the freedoms enjoyed by its people, as long as the changes are brought in thinly sliced over an extended period of time. It seems that in the UK the slicing machine is spinning away behind the scenes as we speak, and the setting is getting thicker as the government gains in confidence. Fascism doesn't come in charging through the front door in one bound; it slides toward you sideways, step by seemingly innocent step. In fact, it's even possible that the people who usher it in don't realise what they are doing. It might be that each slice just seems like a natural and reasonable thing to do in its own small corner. Then suddenly the whole shebang falls into place, or some more unscrupulous administration than the previous iterations of governance realises that the snares are set and ready to be sprung, and bingo, away it goes.

Meanwhile Suella Braverman (and now there is one that wants watching) is out on front page of the Telegraph again. This time, building on yesterday's headline, we're told that she thinks that many live in tents on our streets as a result of a "lifestyle choice". Of course, this is just the Telegraph 'trolling' the liberal elements, of our society - getting a 'rise' out of Labour supporters etc (and playing to their own right wing readership {old, rich and white} at the same time). They've even quoted a comment from Braverman that brings in a bit of racist slant - that lots of the occupants of these tents are from "abroad", just for good measure.

But Braverman is nothing if not clever,because this clearly attempted policy to sweep away visible signs of the failure of Conservative policy over the past fourteen years, is mixed in with stuff that really does need clamping down on. She is including plans to tighten up on organised begging, which I totally agree with. Also the transportation of individuals to and from sites where they beg is under scrutiny. Again, this part of what amounts to criminal abuse of vulnerable individuals for the purposes of collecting money (which the bulk of is taken from them by their criminal organisers) is something that absolutely should be adressed. I read of a terrible case in Romania where children were kidnapped from their homes and mutilated, before being put out on the streets to beg (and this was a true account, many years ago in a travel biography, not a government propoganda piece). Clearly, this kind of thing cannot be tolerated here and must be stamped down on - but to group it in amongst measures to deny people genuinely down on their uppers shelter.........this is taking things too far. No-one likes to be hustled by aggressive begging, or see their streets being cluttered with tents and the refuse that street living generates, but these people are down on their luck and need a helping hand to get back on track, not Suella Braverman sweeping them under the carpet by criminalising them in order to boost her own political capital as Sunak's successor. And in the meantime they need the shelter from the elements that the government declines to provide.

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I saw two interesting YouTube videos on Gaza yesterday (well, one actually, but the second was related).

In the first, a coloured American author was describing how he had visited the occupied territory, and had had a startling epiphany while he was there. The damn situation wasn't complicated at all.

Here was a people who, in their own land, could not vote, could not move around with freedom (his Palestinian guide had told him at the end of one street that if he wanted to go down it, he'd have to go alone because Palestinians were prohibited from walking down it), treated as second class citizens. At another point he had been pulled up by an Israeli guard and questioned as to what his religion was. He said he had none. What about his parents? They had none either. His grandparents? His grandmother was Christian. Only at that point was he able to proceed past the checkpoint.

This he said, was apartheid as experienced by blacks and coloureds in South Africa. It was segregation as practiced in the Southern States of the USA. It wasn't difficult at all.

The second post was in response to King Charles' recent visit to Kenya when he expressed his sorrow at the excesses commited by the British army in their response to the Mau Mau uprising in 1952 - 60.

The presenters showed a British news clip from the time, in which the atrocities commited by the Mau Mau were described as abhorrent acts of terrorism without any context being given (such as the brutal colonisation of the country from 1920 to 1963,in which the Kenyan people were treated as second class citizens in their own country), that no quater would be given until the KLFA (aka the Mau Mau) had been destroyed completely, and that operations such as this would inevitably result in civilian casualties, saddening though this was. You bet it did. Large portions of the population were effectively put into concentration camps and the harsh and brutal recriminations against the Kenyan people remain a benchmark in colonial degradation to this day.

Alas, it was all depressingly familiar to what we are hearing today in respect of Israeli policy in Gaza: it seems that nothing much has changed in the last seven decades and we in the West are still up to our old tricks. But I suppose I'd better be careful saying that. Michael Gove might be one of my few remaining readers!

[peter]

Israel has clearly gone beyond the point where its intentions in Gaza are to recover the hostages taken on October 7 and deal once and for all with Hamas. It now pretty much intends nothing less than the complete annihilation of the territory and the removal of all Palestinian presence from the strip.

As it is advancing into the occupied territory (it now claims to have cut the strip completely in half, leaving only one road open for a few hours a day for travel down) it is telling the civilian population to move south, but continues to bomb the south as well. One anguished Palestinian man on television yesterday asked why they were saying this, "There is no safety here!"

The IDF say that if you stay in the north, and are encountered in the proximity of the Hamas 'positions', it will be assumed that you are a supporter of the group and your life will be forfeit. They (the Israeli forces) continue to bomb hospitals and refugee camps on the basis that they are being used as human shield positions, under which Hamas operations are being planned and controlled. They deny that they are using blanket bombing and are not taking sufficient care that innocence civilians are not being killed in excessive numbers, but the photographic evidence, the eye-witness accounts, the news-reel footage from within Gaza, all contradict this.

But one American ex general speaking in interview yesterday said that the ultimate cost to Israel could be far higher than the Netanyahu administration envisage. He said that a Jewish friend he had spoken to had said that the Israeli government had achieved what no-one else in recorded history had ever managed; they had managed to unite the Sunni and Siitte branches of Islam. Basically, he said, they had united the entire Muslim world against them, Arab, Asian, Persian and Turkic. There was every possibility, in his opinion, that they were sowing the seeds of the end of the State of Israel in doing so. Hence it was absolutely crucial that Israel were reined in and made to stop this massacre of the innocents.

But Netanyahu shows no sign of being prepared to do so. Which sooner or later, this general said, would result in the escalation of the conflict. All of Blinken's footwork around the region will come to nothing unless Israel suspends its operation. Once the conflict escalates and Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Syria and Turkey are drawn in, then all bets on the survival of the state of Israel are off. Israel has a nuclear capability that it has made explicitly clear that it will use, and while none of the close neighbours likely to be involved in an escalated conflict possess nuclear weapons, Pakistan who do have made it clear that if necessary it would be prepared to supply Turkey (if I recall correctly) with the same.

In fairness, the world seems to be full of armchair generals at the moment, all of whom have a view on where this conflict is headed. But the guy did seem to have an understanding of the geopolitics of the region, and spoke in depth and in a manner that you rarely see in the legacy media. He was more fearful for the future of Israel if they carried on down the path they seem to be set on than anything else. He said, you would not stand back and see a friend destroy himself without attempting to stop him, and he regarded our relationship with Israel in the same light. This conflict had the capacity to potentially set off Samuel P Huntingdon's 'Clash of Civilizations', with the Muslim population of Europe and Asia all united in their burning anger against what Israel was doing in Gaza, and what our own government's support for them in their actions said about us. Europe's threat was not Russia, he said, not China, but rather the threat of mass insurrection within its own nations from the mixture of different cultures it now contains. Situations such as this could set a match to tinder boxes that already exist within our own societies.

I hate to say it, but what is happening in London and other cities at the moment would tend to back this up. Purely on a domestic front, our own government must be careful in its handling of the ongoing demonstrations, that it does not itself strike that very match.

[peter]

I just don't get what Home Secretary Suella Braverman wants?

Get the situation. You've got the 7 percent (give or take) - around 4.5 million - of the UK population who are Muslim, absolutely enraged (and rightly) by what is going down in Gaza, you've got Islamophobia (no small thanks to the Home Secretary herself) on the rise and you've got this woman herself poking at the situation with a stick, all but deliberately trying to inflame matters to the point where civil insurrection occurs.

I'm not joking, starting with Braverman herself, I must have heard politicians saying, "We will not tolerate attacks on the Cenotaph on Armistice day" a dozen times on the television and radio over the weekend. The newspapers have taken up the chant and are all but waving it at the prospective protesters like a red flag at a bull.

Let's just be clear. No-one has suggested attacking the Cenotaph! There was no suggestion that the protest route would go anywhere near the Armistice Day ceremonially on Remembrance Sunday. The organisers said as much themselves yesterday. Why would they? These protests are about men, women and children being killed in a 'war' - not about desecration of a monument or disruption of a ceremony remembering those lost in previous wars.

It's almost like this demented woman wants to see a full scale confrontation between protesters, police and anti-islamists on the streets of London. Would that give her the chance to get out her Home Secretary's Big Stick? Slap us all under curfew? Lock us down in our homes again? Give her (as it were) her 'Matt Hancock' moment?

Surely the thing to do at the moment would be to stand back, let the protesters let of some steam in a peaceful march, express some understanding of why they are so angry..... not to dig at the situation by telling the police they should "Stop the march!" and thereby sending out a signal to the hurting Muslim population that she cares nothing about what is going on in Israel and Gaza, that their pain is of no consequence to her.

If this is her idea of a good pitch for the soon to be vacant Prime Ministerial position, then God help us if she succeeds. Or perhaps it's just a preparation of the 'next big thing'. For let's face it - since the pandemic it's been a constant succession of 'big things' such that we've never the once had a moment to stop, think, reflect, on what was done to us - done to our world.

I don't know - sounds a bit conspiratorial, but do you ever get just the smallest suspicion that we might all be being played, that it's all a bit too conveniently timed?

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As the grim milestone of 10,000 dead in Gaza was passed yesterday (over 4,000 of them children) the United Nations Secretary General warned that the strip was becoming a "graveyard for women and children". Antonio Gutteras said that hundreds of women and children were being reported as being killed or injured every day, but added that Hamas was using civilians as "human shields".

Well as to the graveyard bit, I'm thinking that it's a bit late in the day to say that it's becoming a graveyard - it's been a graveyard since the first day of the bombing and has gotten worse every subsequent day from then on. And as for Hamas using the people as human shields, how the fuck do you cram that number of people into that small an area and not have them falling over one another, let alone conduct a war in amongst them.

No. Israel suffered a terrible blow. But their response has been beyond the pale. You don't carpet bomb an entire region, levelling huge areas of housing, office and administration infrastructure, just in order to root out the terrorist perpetrators of a crime like the October 7 attack. You do it to clear an area of people, to reduce the population to zero. To drive them away and to hell with the consequences. There is nothing about the way that they are proceeding to suggest that getting the return of their hostages is uppermost in their minds over this. Nothing could be putting their abducted people at more risk than the way they have been carrying this forward. It has evolved, on the face of it, from a revenge response to a land grab. Our leaders are weak in their refusal to come out straight and tell Netanyahu that "This - Must - STOP!"

(Notable recognition must be given to both Jeremy Corbyn in the Commons, and Gerald Kaufman in the Lords, for their courage in standing up and calling this atrocity out for exactly what it is. From Corbyn one would expect no less of course - he has ever been a supporter of Palestinian rights, and has consistently called out Israel for it's treatment of those in the occupied territories, earning himself the ludicrously aimed slur of being an antisemite for his pains - but Kaufman is somewhat different. In no way a Corbyn supporter, the Labour peer is of course Jewish himself, and has a family history of loss in the Holocaust. This has however not stopped him from risking the ire of his fellow Jewish political colleagues, by unequivocally condemning the actions of Israel in Gaza. There is a man who truly understands the difference between right and wrong, and gets the old adage that all it takes for evil to triumph, is for one good man to stay silent.

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Two silly young girls yesterday displayed the utmost of stupidity by smashing the glass covering a painting by Diego Velazquez on display in the National Gallery.

The same painting, once slashed by suffragette protesters complaining about the imprisonment of their leader Emiline Pankhurst, was targeted by the girls, who clearly thought its historical associations with the feminist protest movement would bring them some additional publicity (and no doubt kudos with their own associations), was targeted under the banner of a Just Stop Oil protest.

We get it. Of course we get it. But the girls argument that if you love art, then you love humanity, and that is more important, just doesn't cut it. You don't save one beautiful thing by destruction of another. All you do is to make it more likely that these beautiful works will be shut away, or access to them will be limited such that many will miss out on our national treasures at a point in time when we all desperately need them.

The judge hearing the case when it arrives in court must, alas, make an example of these girls to deter others from committing the same kind of vandalism. They should be given ten years in prison each, in order to send out the message that this kind of act will not be tolerated. I'm sorry about this, but there is no other way. (Or if you can think of one, then tell me.)

[peter]

I just want to add something into the post I made this morning.

Israel has to tie up the idea of anti-Semitism with any criticism of what it is doing in Gaza. Without doing this, it has absolutely nothing that can justify its actions since the horrendous Hamas attack. Not that even anti-Semitism would in any way justify the collective punishment that it has meted out to the citizens of Gaza, but such is the world so afraid of attracting this label that Israel is prepared to piggyback on the victims of the Holocaust in order to deflect criticism of its abominable response. The world is rightly sympathetic toward the Jewish people for the many hundreds of years of persecution they have endured culminating in the horror of the Shoah. But this does not provide a blanket for Israel to hide under in the face of its actions in Gaza. And the protests that are going on around the world have nothing to do with anti-Semitism either. They are an outpouring of abhorrence at an egregious wrong being committed in full view of all to see.

Secondly, I was so gratified to see ex Conservative Party minister Baroness Warsi speaking to Sophie Ridge in interview, where she called out the Home Secretary Suella Braverman for exactly what she is - a dangerous and devisive woman.

Even Sophie Ridge seemed a bit taken aback to hear a Conservative member of the House of Lords using such strident language, and asked why she would say such things.

Warsi replied, "Because that's how she operates. She deliberately stokes confrontation between groups every time she speaks."

Not finished, she went on.

"I'm afraid that we have in our government, some individuals who would pretend to be promoters of harmony, but who in reality act in an incendiary fashion to provoke cultural division and antagonism. It is the job of government to promote peaceful coexistence between different cultural groupings within our society not to act against it."

I post this just so that you understand that I'm not the only one who seriously questions the way our government is behaving. To hear such a respected member of the House of Lords pretty much reiterating what I was saying this very morning makes me feel a whole lot more vindicated in saying it. Thank you Baroness Warsi. You have my promise that should you ever choose to run for Conservative Party leader, I will join the Party for no other reason than to cast my vote for you.

[peter]

A YouTube posting in which GBNews presenter and Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg went head to head with political activist and LBC presenter Barnaby Raine over the Israel-Gaza situation got me to thinking.

In the clash, which occurred on Rees-Mogg's show (so he was supposedly doing the interviewing), he took the old track of asking his 'guest' questions, and then immediately interrupting his answers the moment they began to make for difficult listening for someone of his entirely pro-Isreali position.

He, Rees-Mogg, used a number of the stock responses to Raine's arguments - responses that we are hearing from across the wide range of voices commentating on the tragedy, and I genuinely think it's time we laid some of them to rest.

Number 1. Israel has the right to defend itself. This phrase is being touted out every time someone criticises the collective punishment that the State of Israel is levying on the population of Gaza, in the form of blanket bombing and ground invasion. Let's be clear. The Israel response has gone way beyond that which is served by a description of Israel defending itself. This is a response, punitive in purpose in the first instance, which has morphed into a land-grab cum clearing exercise which intends to pretty much eliminate the Palestinian presence in the strip (or certainly change it fundamentally in its nature). It is certainly not covered by the description of Israel defending itself.

Number 2. Hamas is using the civilian population as a 'human shield'. This stock answer is wheeled out in justification of the bombing of hospitals, of refugee camps, of civilian housing, in which thousands of people, men women and children who had nothing to do with the October 7 attack, have been killed. (It was interesting that Rees-Mogg, when first confronted with the figure of 10,000 Palestinian dead, initially denied it was true, and then when Raine had responded that the Palestinian Health Authority had provided both the names and identification numbers of those killed, immediately switched to the human shield argument. Worth noting, I think, that no such information has beengiven in relation to the numbers of Israeli deaths in the initial attack, and neither have these figures been questioned, nor such corroboration requested. Palestinian death figures seem somehow, less acceptable to the likes of Rees-Mogg than those supplied by Israel, yet he would no doubt consider himself unbiased in his viewing of the whole situation.) But the point that seems to be escaping everyone here is simple. So what? So what if Hamas is using the civilian population as a shield? Does this give Israel the right to simply ignore their presence and drop their bombs anyway? Of course not! This is a ridiculous twisting of logic that would not stand up in defence of any other country in the world, were they doing what Israel is doing, and it doesn't stand up for them either. The use of the civilian population in this way means that different tactics must be found other than bombing. End off. This may make things more difficult, but that's the way it is. Israel must, like the rest of us, obey the rules and operate within the constraints of the law (never mind the clear moral bounds) or be held to account.

Number 3. The "Do you condemn the Hamas terrorists for what they did," approach. This question is posed at anyone protesting the Israeli response to the October 7 attack, as though it has some kind of meaning. Of course they must be condemned for it. Just as the Zionist terrorists who bombed the KIng David Hotel killing 91 people at the very formative time of the State of Israel must be condemned. Just as every atrocious act of barbarism on all sides in this conflict from day 1 must be condemned. People are not condoning the terrible things done by Hamas on October 7; they are condemning the disproportionate and ill-judged response to it that has resulted not in the perpetrators being brought to justice, but in excess of ten times the number of innocent lives being lost on the other side as a result of a direct violation of international law.

Rishi Sunak was yesterday going on about the planned protests on Armistice Sunday.

He previously said that they were disrespectful and yesterday said that the metropolitan police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley would be held accountable for his decision to allow them to proceed. It's a strange situation where it is the police themselves that must make the decision as to whether a protest or demonstration is legal or otherwise, but the Home Secretary who must issue the ban at the police commissioner's request (ie. The police commissioner is subordinate to the Home Secretary, but gets to make the decisions. Odd)

Here's the thing. It's actually difficult to find out why march or protest is planned. Is it called in support of Palestinian freedom? Is it called in support of Hamas? Is it called in protest against the blanket bombing of Gaza? These are entirely different things. It's only a protest if it's the latter, otherwise it remains simply a march. Surely the organisers, when they approach the police for permission to hold such a march or protest, must be specific about why it is being called, yet even a close search of the media does not actually reveal what the answer to this is. And it matters.

Suella Braverman has labeled the events as "hate marches." This implies that they what, are made up of people who hate Israel? All Jews? Or is it the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians that the marchers hate? The Home Secretary is not (to my knowledge) clear on this. It's a good sound bite, I suppose, playing to the voter base that she hopes will carry her into Sunak's job, so why should she worry about clarity.

The BBC call the events protests, implying that they are in protest about what? The blanket bombing of Gaza I presume (and we can all get on board with that) - but it could be the treatment of Palestinians more generally, or the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, or the apartheid conditions under which Palestinians in Israel live. There's a whole host of possibilities here and some clarity is desperately needed if we are to make sense of it (re the marches).

Taking Sunak's comments at face value, and given the meaning of the word armistice - the temporary cessation of open acts of warfare by agreement between the opposing sides - I'd have thought that Armistice Day would be the perfect day to hold such a march. Who could not want this in the current crisis between Israel and Gaza? Where, tell me, would be the disrespect in that?

As for the bullying of Sir Mark Rowley by both Braverman and Sunak, he shouldn't worry too much about it. He seems to be of a far more balanced temperament than the borderline swivel-eyed Braverman, or indeed the weak and vacillating Prime Minister who frankly, can't wait for his premiership to be over and to get the frick out of Dodge and over to the sunny uplands of California where his new life lies already prepared.

[peter]

Disgraced ex Nar West boss Dame Alison Rose has had her 7.6 million pounds severance package withheld because it has deemed that she doesn't merit the 'good leaver' status that is a prerequisite of its being given.

I don't know about that, but I'm damn sure that there is something wrong in a society where such egregious imbalance of return could see one individual net for leaving a job as much as another could hope to earn in 7 lifetimes working at theirs.

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Today the protest march in London will go ahead against the Israeli actions in Gaza, despite the 'reservations' of Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak and the request of the metropolitan police commissioner to the organisers that it be cancelled.

This is absolutely correct and it beggars belief that it should ever have been thought that it should not. The freedom of expression that the march represents is exactly that freedom which has been fought for by British soldiers and others who have died on the field of battle. If they have not died fighting for this, then truly have their lives been wasted. The marching in support of a ceasefire in Gaza on Armistice day in the UK could not be more appropriate if it tried. Far from being in opposition to each other, the celebrants at the Cenotaph and the marchers on the Gaza march are merely expressing two aspects of the same struggle, one for those already fallen, one for those dying as we speak.

I would have no problem visiting London for the purpose of attending both events, and would see no contradiction in doing so.

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Pity poor Rishi Sunak.

He's in the sticky position, we are told, od deciding whether to sack the rogue Home Secretary Suella Braverman (who published an uncleared article criticising the metropolitan police in the Times newspaper) and piss of the right wing of the Conservative Party who love her and have a formidable rallying point against himself on the backbench..........or leave her in situ and look like the weak little pimple that he really is.

All such Ministerial articles are by convention supposed to be cleared with Number 10 before publication to ensure they are in line with cabinet unity (ie the cabinet speaking with a single voice as it were), but Braverman simply ignored this and went off script by doing something a Home Secretary should never do - criticising the police.

It was a deliberate tilt at Sunak, her boss, and she clearly took the judgement that her ambitions were better served at this point by undermining him rather than supporting the government position (that it is the police's job to decide on things like whether the march should go ahead). He is thus put in a position of either letting her get away with it (through his fear of the reprisals that a divided party could exact on him before the general election) or taking the risk of kicking her onto the backbenches, where she will be a right (wing) pain in the arse.

From her point of view, either eventuality serves her equally well. If she gets kicked out, she follows the time-honoured path of many leaders before her,who have shown their grit in taking on a Prime Minister who they no longer thought was up to the job himself. The tories have respect for this type of behaviour, indeed Boris Johnson, although he walked rather than being pushed, began his tilt for the top job by undermining Theresa May while he was foreign secretary. If alternatively he doesn't sack her, then he just brings down the contempt of MPs who can see that she's got him by the balls; that he's a PM who no longer has control of his own cabinet.

Either way he's toast (before or after the election - it doesn't really matter which) and someone else will step into the role). Baroness Warsi had the measure of Braverman when she called her a dangerous and divisive individual (and she's in the same party as Braverman for God's sake). God help us all if the stupid ***ts that hold Conservative Party membership and who get to choose the leaders (and very often, by association, the PM) choose this woman - and I bet they will - for then we will really be on the verge of what those guys who we are remembering today, fell on the battlefield to prevent.

[peter]

Just watching the unfolding scenes in London as, true to predictions, Braverman's right wing army of counter-protesters have gathered under the organising principal of Tommy Robinson (he of English Defence League fame) and have engaged in scuffles with the police on the fringes of the Cenotaph exclusion zone, as delineated by the met earlier in the week.

In contrast, the anti-bombing protest against the assault of Gaza by the IDF which began in Hyde Park and will at no point go near the Cenotaph, is an entirely peaceful affair with no evidence of the "hate march" that Home Secretary Braverman accused it of being. Contrast the picture from Hyde Park of the peacefully walking marchers, with the red-faced and chanting mob of hooligans, pointing in unison and throwing cans and bottles at the police at the Cenotaph (and Sky News did exactly this, side by side) and I think you can clearly see where the hate in all of this lies.

Braverman may not have explicitly called for these thugs to descend on the capital, but she did as good as do so, and all it took was for Robinson to take the hint and it was job done. This is, if not exactly what Braverman wanted to see (she'd have rather seen the anti-bombing marchers fighting the police) it's the next best thing. The papers will be full of it tomorrow and somehow the spin on protesrter involvement will be got in. But everyone watching what I am as we speak will know that it is the far right counter protest (ostensibly there to "protect the Cenotaph") that have been the source of the disorder.

The real risk now is that the far right protesters will find a way to circumvent the police and attack the anti-bombing marchers at some point along their route. The Cenotaph ceremony is now over and the thugs will be looking for some entertainment for filling up the rest of the day.

[peter]

It's hilarious to see the attempts of the Sunday's Mail and Express to twist the narrative away from what everyone knows is the truth: that at least 300,000 pro-Palestinian marchers wound their way through London with barely a foot being wrongly placed, while the 1000 or so far right extremists that turned up to confront them (at the Home Secretary's unspoken invitation, such was her earlier rhetoric against the anti-bombing campaigners) behaved exactly like what they were - essentially a crowd of 'hired thugs' of the football hooligan variety,

So much for the pro-Palestinians being hate-marchers. So much for the far-right thugs being 'defenders of the Cenotaph'.

Yet for evey grudging mention of the right-wing extremist violence, both papers had to tag in the words "and the pro-Hamas supporters" (as in "....the violent clashes in London between police and right-wing extremists and pro-Hamas supporters...."). You only have to listen to the briefings given by metropolitan police spokespeople after the event to give the lie to this. They universally state that of the multiple arrests made for offences of civil disorder, the huge majority were of far-right counter-protesters.

Levelling up secretary Michael Gove found himself briefly surrounded by Pro-Palestinian protesters (and subjected to chants of "Shame on you!") at a London railway station as he returned from his constituency to the capital, and this again is focused on by the right wing media as evidence of the "hate filled" nature of the anti-bombing marchers. But it's thin gruel in comparison to the right-wingers elsewhere (who are far more antisemitic in their background than most of the pro-Palestinian marchers ever were) running rampant. Gove was never under serious threat and the occurence bears no comparison with what was transpiring elsewhere where the counter protesters were going full head to head with the police.

Many of those arrested it transpires, have previous convictions for football hooliganism offences, and this comes as no surprise since the EDL (Tommy Robinson's 'Rent'a'mob' brigade) are drawn by and large from the terraces anyway. They will be as proud as punch today with their 'achievements' of yesterday, and no doubt the Home Secretary will herself be very pleased that at least some of the predicted trouble of yesterday's event actually came about. That she actually stirred it up in the first place won't trouble her in the least, and this morning she'll be waiting at home with interest to see if PM Sunak actually has the balls to sack her, as the non right wing press and many left wing pundits are calling for.

She won't be too concerned by the prospect of being sacked; her tilt for the top job is now firmly underway and can be continued from the backbenches just as easily as from within the government. There are pros and cons in either position from her perspective, and she'll not be too much bothered either way. Any prospective tory leader has, at some point, to strike out away from the existing leadership, and this may be as good a time as any other for her. Remember, the Tories rarely change leadership in an orderly succession, regicide being by far the more common route. Braverman knows this and her pitch has to come sooner rather than later. Also, she won't be best pleased to hear another name that has oddly, suddenly been suggested as a possible future leadership contender. None other than our own resident fly-in-the-ointment, Nigel Farage! I never saw that coming, but I kid you not - it is actually being suggested. And in many ways it would make a lot of sense. He'd certainly be taken to by the existing tory party membership, would bring all of the old UKIP and current Reform UK voters with him, and would be infinitely more preferable to the far-right element both within the Conservative Party and beyond it, who will be fed up to the back teeth with "all of these Indians occupying the top jobs"

But now I'm going to go and read the other front pages (the more quality ones) to see if anything else comes out of them. If it does, then like Arnold Schwartzenegger (if that's how you spell it) in The Terminator, I'll be back!

-----0-----

Yes, even the Prime Minister is at it. Here's a quote from this morning's Sunday Times.

Rishi Sunak has told the met commissioner he expects the far-right "thugs" and Hamas sympathisers who confronted police during violent protests in the capital yesterday to face the "full and swift force ofthe law."

Further on, the paper says,

The demonstration was the fifth to have taken place since the October 7 massacre perpetrated by Hamas in Israel, and by far the most violent with 126 arrests being made. Nine officers were injured. Last week 29 were arrested.

Although the paper does go on to point out that most of the arrests were far-right counter-protesters, there is an attempt in the first paragraphs, and indeed in Sunak's words, to create an equivalence between the pro-Palestinian marchers and the far-right hooligans.

Looking at Sunak's words alone- no, actually just the Times account of his words, we have 'far-right thugs and Hamas sympathisers who confronted police'.

They didn't. The far-right thugs confronted the police at the Cenotaph and in Chinatown. The anti-bombing marchers did not at any point confront the police. On the contrary, the worst they appeared to do was in some isolated cases, wear headscarves reminiscent of those worn by Hamas fighters/terrorists, call them what you will, and carry placards comparing Netanyahu to Hitler, Gaza to Auschwitz. Not nice. Not fair. But a criminal offence? I think not. (In fact in the photo of the few desultory individuals wearing Hamas style scarves, one of the guys was actually making a peace gesture, as in the reverse V-sign.)

Similarly, we are given the arrest figures and told that most were far-right counter-protesters as opposed to Pro-Palestinian protesters, but no breakdown of the figures is given. They can tell us that 126 arrests were made, but somehow not how many were of each type of protester. I'm betting that the reason for this is that in the case of the pro-Palestinian marchers there were none.

This whole affair is being told with spin and twist to present the official narrative of Israeli supporters good, Palestinian supporters bad, and the uncomfortable truths of yesterday's events have to be contorted to fit this narrative.

Nothing changes. Nothing changes. Nothing changes.

[peter]

Unrepentant Home Secretary Suella Braverman is at it again in this morning's papers, saying of the "hate filled marches" that, "This has to stop!"

Her ire is roused, apparently not by threatening mobs of aged skinheads chanting, pointing in unison in aggressive nazi-like gestures, throwing bottles and cans of beer at, and ultimately battling with police on the streets - of these she has nothing to say.

No, it is rather the peaceful marchers protesting against the actions of Israel in Gaza that attracts her ire. She finds their chanting of "From the river to the sea", to be a crime for which the police should wade in, truncheons flying, to apprehend the chanters. She is offended by the wording of their placards, carefully written, she says, to just avoid being covered by anti-terrorism laws, and she wants those laws tightened up to scoop them in.

And what is worse is that in her own hate-filled rhetoric, she is pulling weak Rishi Sunak behind her. Truly we are in danger of becoming that very thing that all of those people died in order to prevent; a society bound in chains by a government of which it must be continually afraid, rather than a people free to exercise their right to free protest, free expression, free criticism of those who would exercise control over their lives. The pandemic has, it seems, with its lockdowns and pressure to conform to a state driven narrative, opened up the doors to a floodgate of new political confidence in the possibility for increased control and coercion of what people can be allowed to think, say and do. It has given confidence to the Suella Braverman's who were always waiting on the sidelines of our political system, the one's for whom a population controlled is a population a population governed, who simply don't get that the state is a thing that should lie like a carpet beneath the feet of the people, and not be raised like a ceiling, above their heads.

We are in deep shit in this country. If you cannot see it now, then fear not, you will at some point in the near future. As Bertold Brecht said of fascism shortly after the defeat of the nazi menace following WW2,

Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men! Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
the bitch that bore him is back in heat again.

[peter]

....12 hours later.....

Interesting day by any standards. Sunak finally gew sufficient balls to unload Suella Braverman, sacked this morning before she'd even had a chance to finish her breakfast.

She's been replaced as Home Secretary by the pretty popular James Cleverly, who now vacates his old position of foreign secretary.

But it's the replacement Foreign Secretary that has stirred up most interest, because Sunak has chosen none other than ex Prime Minister and bringer about of Brexit, David Cameron to fill the post. Why he's done this (and indeed why Cameron has agreed to do it) has been the cause of furious media speculation all day. The consensus seems to have settled on his (Sunak's) being aware from the polling figures that the adversarial policy of stoking division between cultural groupings within the county, of ever increasing rightwards shift, ain't working the oracle. So brining back in a trusted centrist is sending a signal to the electorate that things are going to change, that a more 'moderate' form of Conservatism will be the order of the day.

Well, maybe. Or maybe he's just faced with such a dearth of talent that any old hack will do? Cameron isn't likely to want Sunak's job any time in the near future, so that at least will be a plus for having him in the team.

Braverman for her part, has kept her head down. The right wing of the party is not happy about her sacking (Jacob Rees-Mogg said as much on GB News) but a point had been reached where Braverman was doing more harm inside the government than pissing off the right of the party by chucking her out will do. So off she goes. She has said that she will have more to say on her dismissal at a later point (I bet she will!) and you could interpret this as a clue that she is going to try to do a Geoffrey Howe. Howe, you will remember, famously pulled the rug out from the government of Margaret Thatcher after he had been sacked (or had walked - I forget which) by ripping her a new arse hole in an excoriating speech in parliament. Whether Braverman has the political clout to pull this off is debatable. Sajid Javid tried to unseat Johnson like this as well, but though Johnson fell shortly after, it wasn't really as a result of Javid's words. Braverman is popular with a right wing rump of the party, but perhaps not sufficiently to actually bring Sunak down. One interesting point is however, that since her sacking this morning, Braverman has gone up in the bookies odds as being the next leader of the tory party. She's second only to Kemi Badenock now, which will probably give her a bit of a lift.

But something very interesting has struck me about Braverman since this morning, and I think it explains a lot about why she has acted the way she has - not just recently but since day one.

I'd always thought that her almost rabid seeming hatred of the boat people, of immigrants more generally, was down to an attempt to curry favour with the tory party membership type, the Telegraph readership Conservative voters. These, I thought, are the people that she needs onside if she's ever going to win the party leadership. I also thought that she was slightly overdoing it, in her not really understanding the way that this particular group of English people are. A sort of overstepping of the need to display anti-immigrant opinion born of not really understanding how it could look.

Suddenly, this morning, I realised that there might be more to it.

That what we are seeing in Braverman's crusade against immigrants, and now in her rabid hatred of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, was not just a hatred directed towards them.......but rather a hatred of Muslim people in general! This was, it suddenly occurred to me, the hatred between Hindus and Muslims, brought forward in time from partition in India, and across from the streets of Delhi to the corridors of Westminster. The inculcated hate, imbibed by an upbringing in a home where the move to England was seen as something that should have been for the Hindu population alone, not for the lower grade Muslim population. As an aside, I remember eating in a good London Indian restaurant in the 1980's where I'd gotten quite friendly with the owner. He was sitting with me and my friends one night following our meal and enjoying a drink with us and shocked us by saying, "There's only one thing wrong with this country - there's too many Pakis here!"

This is exactly it. This, I think, is what was driving half of what Braverman was saying. For sure, she knew it was a good political strategy to carry her to the top, but I always thought that there had to be more. I believe that this is it. I don't think she likes the presence of Muslims here in her England, just as that restaurant owner didn't like it. They brought their animosity against Muslims with them from India and Braverman is now fighting the same fight here as her grandparents did in India.

I could be wrong, but it's a thought?

[peter]

It was heartening to listen to ex Conservative Party minister Rory Stewart telling Novara Media's Ash Sarkar in interview that he had been "appalled" by the throwing of Jeremy Corbyn out of the Labour Party.

Kier Stamer, who delivered the 'sentence' following Corbyn's comments, now acknowledged as being true, that antisemitism within the Labour Party had been exaggerated for political purposes during his tenure as leader of the party, has not to date repented of his decision, nor reinstated Corbyn's membership.

Stewart said it beggared belief that an individual who had led the party, who had served the party for forty plus years and who represented such an important side of radical Labour thinking, both historically and in the present day, should be thrown out of the party. This, he said, was not how the two main parties were meant to function (he was referring also to Johnson's purging of the Tory MPs who refused to support his Brexit withdrawal agreement, who were similarly tossed out of the Conservative Party). The two party system thrived on inclusiveness, on the cut and thrust of different streams of thought and argument. The excision of particular strands by simple exclusion was detrimental to the formation of policy with broad consensual agreement as well as insulting to those individuals so removed from the party of their service.

I couldn't agree more, and would that this old-style Conservatism as represented by Stewart could make a true comeback (not just under the slick guise of ex-PM David Cameron, who has milked the system since leaving office in the usual 'rinsing' way). This was a Toryism that one could respect while at the same time disagreeing with. One that one had no fear of, nor doubt that, come what may, would act in the national interest (in the true one-nation sense that we understood) when the realities of events demanded that they do so. There must to this day be Conservatives out there who represent this train of thinking, this ideological base, as their starting point. Thatcher did this country a terrible disservice in many ways, not least of which was the branding of this type of thinking as 'wet'. It was a dismissive contempt that ushered in the right wing Conservatism that rules the day today. It empowered the likes of Priti Patel, of Suella Braverman, of '30p Lee' Anderson.

The country lies broken on the back of this manifestation of Conservatism and if Sunak and his ilk are at last starting to get this (and I won't hold my breath on it), then I say this. "You took your bloody time about it!"

-----0-----

War in Ukraine? What War in Ukraine?

It seems that one-time glamour boy of the Western Celebrity Circuit Volodymyr Zelensky has fallen down the ratings and is now clocking in at - well - zero. There has been hardly a mention of the Ukraine war since Hamas kicked off the latest round of atrocity in the Middle East, with its inhuman actions in Israel. And no doubt some in our political sphere would be thinking not before time.

There have been signs that war weariness has been on the rise, not just within the region of fighting in Ukraine itself where the much vaunted 'spring offensive' achieved pretty much nothing, but also within the ranks of the Western coalition that came together to support the Zelensky leadership, with both money and arms to a literally eye-watering degree. Anyone with the smallest knowledge of UK finances could see that this could not go on indefinitely, and true to form as the bills (and Zelensky's demands) have kept coming in, the grumblings have begun to take more concrete form.

Time magazine ran a front page edition at the beginning of the conflict in which President Zelensky was named 'Man of the Year'. In the last issue an article by a commentator from within the Ukrainian administration said he was becoming "increasingly delusional" about the real state of affairs in respect of Ukrainian chances of winning the conflict. The Ukrainian forces have suffered terrible casualties at the front lines, to little or no gain. They simply don't have the manpower to keep this up. The Russians have conversely, learned from their early failures, they have five times the manpower, five times the armament capability, and all the time I the world to simply dig in and win the war via attrition. Morale, so important in any conflict, is apparently at an all time low and its even been reported that such is the corruption within the Ukrainian system, that injured soldiers have to pay to get ambulance drivers to come and retrieve them from the field. Bribery and corruption have ever been the normal in Ukrainian politics, and no less so at the lower levels of societal functioning either. But this is now resulting in increasing difficulty to justify to the troops what is being asked of them.

And the truth is that Putin has no wish to be at war in Ukraine. Why would he? These are people he regards as essentially the same as Russian people themselves. He is just giving truth to his statement of many years ago, that having Nato weaponry sitting right on the border of Russia is (like having Russian missiles sitting in Cuba on the US doorstep all those years ago) not going to happen.

The truth is that the Ukrainian conflict looks increasingly like a busted flush, a chicken that won't fight, and we in the West want out of it. You won't hear this in any of our media. You won't hear our politicians speaking about it. Instead you will hear nothing. Media silence, except for the odd embarrassed few desultory words by that Sky war analyst, who hasn't got much good to say about it.

No. There's a new show in town - the Netanyahu Show - coming to a news outlet near you. It's bloody. It's not for the faint-hearted. But it's certainly a swivel seat of attention grabbing efficiency when it comes to bringing that other situation that has outlived its usefulness to a close. Off you go Zelensky. Off you go Ukraine. You have served your purpose. You kept people's attention diverted from what had been done to them during the pandemic and now your run is over. Off to the media page 14's with you. You can eek out a bit of ongoing coverage in the provincial theatres, but the big stage is not for you anymore

What's that? You say that you have suffered half a million dead? Well, I hope you don't think that we can be held responsible for that do you? After all - we printed up flags for you (they're still to be seen, rotting away on lampposts and roadsides dotted around the countryside). We opened our homes (OK, perhaps only briefly until you outstayed your welcome and got too demanding) to you. It's not our fault if your government takes up battles that it can't win now is it? I hope you don't think that we wanted you to go down this road, because that would be a mistake.

Welcome, President Zelensky, to the world of Western realpolitik. Ukrainian politics may be a dirty business - but step aside and watch while the *real* experts show you how it is done.

[peter]

Well, what can you say.... We're back to this again as the Tories go 'blue on blue' once more in a re-run of the leadership battles that we have seen (what?) four times since 2016 (we've had 5 Prime Ministers in 6 years already).

Yesterday 'batshit crazy' ex Home Secretary Suella Braverman sent Rishi Sunak an excoriating letter in response to her sacking the day before. (Nb. The description of Braverman's mental state is that of the Daily Star, not mine!) In the missive she called the PM out as weak, disingenuous, failing in everything he had promised her he would do (and upon which her agreement to support his leadership bid was based), and only just stopped short of actually telling him he was a right good-going ***t!

Sunak has hit back by taking a swipe at Braverman with a wet lettuce leaf and saying that he believes in actions not words.

He's then followed up on his claim last week to be the "Prime Minister for change" by.....errrr......reappointing an old PM from 7 years ago, polished up like a coprophyte on the cabinet shelf. It's got some wrinkles round the edges but is still pretty shiny in the centre.

So far the right wing of the party has not rushed to come out swinging for Braverman; only 20 MPs turned out for a crisis meeting called by her team after she was sacked, so it's safe to say that like sheep, these MPs are standing huddled where they are, each eyeing the rest to see what they will do. If it looks like Braverman's bid has legs, they might suddenly flock to support her, but unless it happens pretty soon it might not happen at all. One thing in her favour - and this might be part of why she has prompted the PM to sack her now (because make no mistake, she has brought this down deliberately on herself) - might be that the Supreme Court is due to rule on the legality of the Rwanda policy (ie the shipping off of our illegal immigrants directly they arrive on flights to Rwanda), and it looks like it will get the thumbs down.

Braverman will be banking on this because it is she that has said that we must leave the European Convention on Human Rights if this happens and defy the European Court of the same by beginning the flights anyway. This potentially dangerous policy that would set us pretty much on a collision course with the EU is not one that Sunak will relish, but he has vowed to get on top of the small boats issue and the Rwanda deal is a big part of his plan. Braverman's course has pretty solid support with the backbenches (on the Tory side) and she will be banking on this to pull the backbenches in behind her tilt for the top. Tories will be reticent to chuck out yet another PM before the election (it's starting to go from tragedy to farce really, if they do) - but many will see their chances of re-election as screwed anyway (if the Labour lead in the polls and recent by-election results are anything to go by) so what the hell, in for a penny in for a pound, what?

Sunak will be praying for a win for the Rwanda policy today, but it's pretty unlikely. The general consensus is that, excepting a really significant overturning of the previous court of appeal results, it's a chicken that won't fight. If the policy is kicked out by the Supreme Court today, then all bets about Sunak's future must be off. (In this friable atmosphere, could even the impossible happen - could even Boris Johnson make a pitch? No - thinking on it, he's not an MP, so would need to be got into the Lords {I suppose} to qualify. I don't think it could be done, which is in some ways a shame for the Tories because he'd certainly win a vote from the membership, and quite possibly a general election as well.)

But if Sunak was unseated it's difficult to see who could actually take up the mantle of leadership.

Braverman might look good to the backbench Tory MPs, but the membership won't support her - at least not unless the entire field is either black or Indian, in which case she would have a chance. I don't know, I suppose that some other stalking horse could emerge from the backbenches, perhaps even Gove might decide that this time he could have a chance - who knows?

But whatever they decide to do, the Tories, they better decide on it quickly. The country is suffering big-time under all of this swapping changing and people have clearly decided (pretty much) that they are running on fumes. One commentator said of the appointment of David Cameron as Foreign Secretary, that it was a pretty big insult to the 350 Tory MPs that not one of them could be found to be suitable for one of the 'big four' jobs. It was certainly an appointment made in desperation and can only be interpreted as such.

The house of cards looks set to collapse for Sunak and then the Tories - and it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.

[peter]

Blimey!

The columnist from the Daily Mail must have been watching a different press briefing from the one I saw the PM give yesterday following the Supreme Court decision to brand his flagship policy on dealing with illegal immigration itself illegal.

Here's how the (shall we say) 'over exited' lady journalist described it.

The PM's eyes blazed like hot coals as he thundered....

"We are a reasonable government, a reasonable country, but the people's patience can only be stretched so thin."

They went on to say,

"Let me me tell everyone now," he snarled, "I will not allow a foreign court to block these flights. "

Phew! I'm glad I wasn't Mrs Sunak when he got home after that confrontation with the press - her Janet Reager's wouldn't have been worth a plugged nickle if he carried that lot home with him.

But it just goes to show how different people see things differently. Because to me he looked like what most of the other (perhaps less hormonally influenced) journalist observers seemed to see: a Prime Minister on the backfoot with a key policy that he had been banking on to revive his flagging fortunes, lying in tatters around his feet.

He explained how we were going to deal with the Supreme Court's concerns that Rwanda was not a safe destination for the boat people to be shipped away to.... We were going to legislate that it was safe.

Oh well, that's okay then. That'll immediately make it safe and the Court won't be able to deny it will they? Yes, I can see how we can change what goes on in some secure compound up the arse-end of some Rwandan backwater from the plush benches of the House of Commons. We really do have that much influence in Africa.

Sunak is also quoted in the papers as saying he "won't take the easy way out!" when it comes to ensuring that flights take off to Rwanda. I don't know about Rwanda Rishi - but I do know that you won't be taking the easy way out. You're a Tory Prime Minister so that, my friend, is a given.

But the press seems to be at least partially assuaged with his answers (if not in a knicker frothing frenzy, Daily Mail) and so it would seem that he has at least for the moment, been able to put his immediate leadership challenge worries to bed.

Kier Stamer on the other hand is waking up, if not to a direct challenge, then at least to choppy waters in his own premiership.

Over 50 of his parliamentary colleagues defied his three line whip to vote for his own amendment to the King's Speech (that Israel should allow for an immediate humanitarian pause in the ongoing Gaza conflict) and instead voted for the SNP ammendment calling for an immediate ceasefire. (Nb. A three line whip in UK politics is an instruction to MPs from their leadership that they have to vote with the policy put forward by their own party, or face disciplinary action in consequence of failure to do so. It's not clear as yet what disciplinary action, if any, Stamer intends to levy, but 8 front bench opposition members have resigned from their opposition posts.)

The press are gobbling up this story like Henry the First with a dish of lamprey. They are all over the idea of Stamer coming a cropper, especially since he has been riding so high in the polls and seemed unable to do any wrong. I've always said that the assumption that he'd got the next election already in the bag was presumptive. There's loads of time for him to fuck it up, and this is just the beginning of it. Labour are past masters at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory - they just have no belief that they should be in power - and this time will likely as not be no different. Stamer has been shadowing the government for so long he's actually forgotten how to think for himself. Jess Phillips (the most prominent of the front benchers to vote against the Stamer amendment and for the Scottish one) and the rest of them get that the public do not like what is going down in Gaza. These are MPs responding to what their constituents want. People want a ceasefire. They want the images of broken children dying in unlit hospitals to stop. Stamer, in his fear of suddenly appearing radical if he goes against the government policy of support for Israel irrespective of what they do, has chosen the wrong horse to back, and those fifty MPs know it. Stamer no more supports the killing of women and children in Gaza than the rest of us. He wants a ceasefire as much as we do. He's just afraid to say it, because the government aren't calling for it and he so, so, so, wants to be seen as one of the big boys in the room. But this time he's got it wrong. This time the egg is wobbling in the spoon as he carries it so carefully along. Has he fucked it up in a mortal way? Only time will tell. But he ain't done himself no favours that's for sure. And one thing that must rankle more than anything - forefront of the people who led the Labour rebellion under who's harrow he finds himself the toad, is a man who's not even a Labour Party member. A certain Jeremy Corbyn........

[peter]

Had a lad working with me in the shop the other night, his first shift in the shop, and we got to talking about the pandemic.

"I loved it," he said. "I'd just started a 40 hour week job in a pub about 2 weeks before the place was closed down and I was sent home on furlough." Spent 9 months at home getting 80 percent of my wage, going surfing every morning."

I didn't like to respond that I spent the whole thing working extra shifts to cover for people who didn't want to come to work, getting nothing more than minimum wage, and now that the damage is done and the country's economy is fucked, half the MPs in parliament think that we can no longer afford to keep the triple lock on pensions that keeps them in line with inflation so I'm likely going to be fucked up the arse on that score as well. So basically, I loose money now, as a pensioner, to pay for little pricks like this who sat at home enjoying a 9 month sabbatical, even though I was the one working all the way through the damn thing.

And it was the same for every person you spoke to who was in support of the lockdowns. Always, at the end, you'd get, "Well, actually, it didn't work out too badly for me because......" Every time a coconut!

Well I'd just like to say, it didn't work out okay for lots of us - the clowns who had to keep working for jack-shit wages and who are now paying the cost through savings that are rapidly falling in value, through pensions that will likely be cut in real terms value because of the disastrous policies we followed during that period.

But we don't hear much from them now do we? No. We don't hear much at all!

[peter]

Saw a KC tearing Sunak's response to the failure of his Rwanda plan to get past the Supreme Court to ribbons last night.

He pointed out (as I did yesterday) that it was ridiculous to legislate in parliament that Rwanda is a safe destination for our illegal immigrants to be shipped out to, and that this would make it so. He went further than this, commenting on the idea that the Supreme Court could be persuaded to change its mind were a 'treaty' to be drawn up between the UK and Rwanda that would guarantee that none of the illegals sent there would be returned to their original countries of origin, where they might be in danger. Said treaty would if I have it correctly, stipulate that the UK would be the only country that one of the individuals could be returned to.

All well and good, he said. That would take care of one of the points of consideration taken by the court. But what about the fourteen or so others where the court had decided that Rwanda fell short? What about, for example, their record on the state's treatment of gay individuals? How could we guarantee that there would be no persecution of these people?

In all, he thought about 4 or 5 of the areas of concern could be covered by treaty, but that 10 or so remained that made the PM's suggestions unworkable. In short he concluded, from a legal standpoint, the Rwanda policy was dead in the water. It would go round and round in the courts doing nothing but making the lawyers involved huge sums of money at the taxpayers expense.

Not music to Sunak's ears I suspect, but it had the ring of truth about it.

Government ministers commentating on the troubled policy however, were adamant that it would go ahead. Despite Suella Braverman's suggesting that Sunak's "tinkering around the edges" was doomed to failure, they still believe that the flights will take off. It's not the whether that gets them however - it's the when. They are all fixated on getting the first flights off the ground before the forthcoming general election (projected for either spring or more likely, autumn) - obviously for electoral reasons - and seem singularly unconcerned about the safety of the shipped individuals, the reputation of the UK on the international stage, the legality or otherwise of the policy itself...... As per usual with the Tories, the impact on their voting figures is the only thing that concerns them.

Power first. Bollocks to the rest of it.

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

The BBC proudly announced that it was being granted permission to accompany IDF soldiers into the Al-Shifa hospital complex. The excursion would allow it to 'verify' (the new name that the Corporation has come up with to convince everyone that it only reports the verified facts of any situation - not the 'fake news' propagated by other news channels) the claims that the hospital was being used by Hamas as a "centre of operations", a hub in their (as it were) control network.

Cue shakey hand held camera footage as our intrepid verifiers pick their way through the broken and bombed out corridors and lo!, what have we here! A cupboard pulled forward revealed a few rifles and ammo boxes piled up against the wall and a pair of trainers sitting on top.

Well yes, we could quite easily see that this was evidence of a sophisticated control centre - I mean it would have taken minutes and minutes to set up such an operation. This clearly justified the shelling of the hospital, the raising of it to rubble and the displacement of hundreds if not thousands of patients and sheltering people, driven out into the hellish landscape that bears the name Gaza. An IDF spokesperson has since explained that there was probably more stuff there before the Hamas occupants fled. This is apparently what they were forced to leave behind. Okay, fair comment. No doubt the donkey that could have carried this lot along with the man who loaded it, would have been hard to find in what remains of Gaza. We can imagine that this is clear evidence that Hamas were operating a highly complex and sophisticated logistical base from the evidence we have before our eyes. That the dead and broken children we have seen on our TV screens have all been an absolutely necessary price that had to be paid in order to disrupt this deeply dug in and deadly adjunct to the Hamas war effort.

Another score to the BBC Verify team! Where to now? Perhaps off to Rwanda to verify that our government legislation that "Rwanda is a safe country!" is bang on the mark. That 14 refugees who were protesting about lack of food and shelter in one of the camps provided for them were not shot dead by the police a few years ago. Safe as houses boy's! You can't argue - the BBC has verified it!

(And while I'm on the subject of the BBC, I note that they are at present pushing the 75 year anniversary of investigative news program Panorama. They've got a 'special' planned for the anniversary, in which they intend to revisit some of their notable exposes over the years. I wonder if it will include the one where they branded Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite presiding over a Labour Party full of the same, but subsequently shown by the Forde report to have been a confection of distortion and spun 'facts', presented to promote a narrative that bore no resemblance to the truth. Somehow I'm thinking that that one might not make an appearance.)

[peter]

Despite their woes over their Rwanda policy, of which there seems to be a growing realisation, it is dead in the water, the Tories are still going into all out election mode, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt spearheading the day's drive to draw in the voters.

In a typical Conservative ruse designed to lure in the old faithful Telegraph readership (those who should be Conservative voters without question, but as a result of - well, just about everything the government has done for the past 14 years with the exception of Brexit, are wavering) Hunt has come up with a cunning plan. Give the wealthiest people in the country even more money to play with and clobber the already poverty stricken even harder.

He's come up with the great ruse of stopping payments for prescriptions, dental and optician charges, and any other auxiliary medical services for people on benefits if they are judged not to be searching for work with sufficient vigour, or indeed turn down any job offered to them while they are claimants. The issuing of sickness notes he has decided, would be better done by benefits officers who oversee peoples claims than by the doctors who attend them in their surgeries.

Meanwhile, the Chancellor has indicated that at last he thinks there may be sufficient 'fiscal headroom', wiggle room if you like, to spin a bit of money towards the public in the form of tax cuts prior to the election. Now there's a suprise. This of course, effects the top bracket earners way more significantly than those grubbing around on minimum wage, and the poorest people in receipt of benefits not at all.

Nice one Jeremy. Drive the sick and old back to work with a stick and shovel cash into the pockets of the wealthiest in the land. Good old fashioned tory politics red in tooth and claw. That'll bring 'em back in for sure.

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Interesting little segment on the BBC 6pm news last night about the illegal leaving of Ukraine by tens of thousands of men of serviceable age, dodging the draft into a war they want no part of. Although the report didn't say as much, these individuals clearly see no particular advantage of living under a Zelensky government (effective puppet of the West) as opposed to an eastward orientated one that is in Putin's pocket. They get that they are just the pawns, the cannon-fodder that is being used to fight this proxy war between the West and Russia, and they are taking the clever money and getting the fuck out of Dodge by any route that they can.

And there are lots of them. 7 porous borders between Ukraine and neighbouring countries it shares borders with. Medical exemption certificates that can be bought from corrupt officials in the offices that administer them (while those who should qualify cannot get them for love nor money). All in all the report did not paint a very pretty picture of what is going on in Ukraine in support of the war effort, and one was surprised to see it on the BBC who have to date been nothing but effusive in their love for anything Ukrainian, from Zelensky himself down.

That is of course until you remember the post I made but a few days ago when I said that the Zelensky had reached the end of his run. That the bottomless pit of Western arms and money that was fueling the proxy war was beginning to run dry - that it wasn't quite as bottomless after all, and that given the Ukrainian failure to secure a quick victory over Putin's forces, Western resolve was starting to display cracks. And sure enough, suddenly the tone of the BBC reports from Ukraine just seem to shift a little. Not quite as effusive in their praise. A tinge of question in their commentary. And this is how it will be done. Slowly we will be led in a turning circle. The bright young heroes of yesterday will become the dupes of a threatening state machinery tomorrow. Zelensky's pedestal will be chipped away until we no longer recognise the green costumed leader as the lion of Ukraine that he has hitherto been presented as. The moving finger of history will have passed on, and a new narrative will be required. Because he who controls the media controls the present. And he who controls the present controls the past. And history is whatever we say it is today and if you remember it being different in the past, you'd better forget it, because you surely must be wrong.

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Emma Barnet in today's 'i' newspaper, has an inside piece advertised on the front page under the heading "How to be happy!"

I can't see inside to actually read the piece, but from her self-satisfied picture by the header,I'm assuming it reads pretty much as per the following list:

1. Be rich. 2. Be beautiful. 3. Be powerful. 4. Mix only with people who are all of the previous things and who occupy exactly the same tiny stratum of society that you do. 5. Don't be poor, ugly, ineffectual or live on a council estate. (5. Have been to a posh private school if you can - optional, but it helps.) And most of all, 6. Know that you are doing better than just about everyone that you see from the moment you get out of bed until the moment you get back into it, and if you can, write purile columns in the 'i' newspaper and appear looking smug on 'HIGNFY' (that's the BBC TV show Have I Got News For You for the uninitiated: where smug happy people get to mix with other smug happy people and pretend they're of the proletariat and "really socially minded!" - basically Guardian readers in other words).

(Oh, and I forgot. 7. Don't be old. Because if you're old it stands to reason, you can't be beautiful, and you probably smell as well. )

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In the single most pointless observation I can remember in many a moon, yellow jacketed boss of energy giant Centrica Chris O'shea is warning us from the front page of this morning's Daily Mirror, that, "People already financially stretched are going to struggle to pay their energy bills this winter."

Mustachiod hipster O'shea (see the little twiddly points he's pomaded onto his facial fur there) who won't on his multimillion pound income, feel any financial stretching beyond fitting his wallet into his pocket, seems to think it fit to tell the rest of us what we already know. I imagine he's pretty happy with life. Every price hike that freezes a pensioner to death puts a bit more money in his pocket. What's not to like? After all, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good!

[peter]

Do you know how it feels to have a certainty you have maintained suddenly pulled from under your feet? That's the way I feel this morning about my assertion that Suella Braverman's labelling the pro-Palestinian marches and demonstrations in London as "hate marches" was all wrong.

I have always accepted that there would be a small proportion of those present who would be carrying hate towards the Israeli people and (Jews more generally) present - it is all but inevitable in such circumstances - but I'd genuinely believed that the huge bulk of people present would be so in order to protest at the blanket bombing of Gaza and the resulting widescale loss of limit had caused.

And this position (which even as I post, I still maintain is the likely one) was not based on the simple belief that because that would be the reason I would be present, that it had by necessity to apply to the majority of those who actually were. I'd done the research first (if you like to call it that) to underpin this belief. I'd watched video's of the crowd, listened to first hand reports from those who were there, seen the reports and pictures as broadcast on the daily news programs. All of this had convinced me that the tenor of the demonstrations was not anti Israeli beyond the obvious actions of the armed forces and Netanyahu administration. I'd even seen a noticeable Jewish presence within the crowds, heard their own criticism of what was going down, and their disputation of Braverman's characterisation.

Suddenly, yesterday however, this certainty received a blow.

It came about while listening to internationally renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek in conversation with Novara Media front man, Aaron Bastani. Zizek proposed (and I immediately knew that he was correct) that antisemitism was on the increase across Europe and America, and was being hugely facilitated in this, by what the Israeli government was doing to Gaza. This bald assertion was so obviously true, that I immediately began to question (and still do) what I had hitherto believed about the makeup of the demonstrators in London. Was antisemitism creeping in far more than I had believed? Was the rise in right wing administrations being seen in so many of Europe's nation states also infecting our thinking, the thinking of those out on the streets protesting? Were the obvious feelings that marchers had about the bombing of Gaza, really sitting over a more broad antisemitism in many of the people present? Hell, was even Jeremy Corbyn, whose non-antisemitic nature I had taken as read for all these years, actually a closit antisemite, despite his protestations to the contrary? (I quickly discounted the latter - it simply doesn't fit in with the nature of the man, nor the personal accreditations he had been given by Jewish friends and colleagues he had known and worked with over the years.)

I'm particularly prone, like Donald Trump, of being influenced by the last person I have been listening to and my spin on Zizek's words (noting that he himself, made no observations about the anti-bombing demonstrations, only on the rise of antisemitism more generally) is I guess,just another example of this. It doesn't immediately mean that the marches become hate marches, it just means that I have to be more critical in my appraisal of things, less certain that my interpretations are going to be the right ones. Like Zizek, I believe that the burden of the Jewish people, condemned to wander their way down through the centuries, has been to the inestimable benefit of European society and culture. The intelligence and insights that Jewish thinking has brought to just about any field of endeavour you can name is unequalled. Zizek went as far as to say that European society could not have developed as it did without that presence. The Jewish misfortune has been entirely to our gain and we owe them a debt of gratitude.

None of which means that Israel should not stop the collective punishment that they are visiting on the population of Gaza, but it does behove the rest of us to be careful that we do not let ourselves be fooled into thinking that antisemitism does not play a role in the outpouring of anger that is being generated as a result.

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[peter]

Later on today Rishi Sunak is going to tell us all that the UK economy has turned the corner, it's all on the up and up, and everything is looking rosy.

It's bollocks. Don't believe a word of it.

The PM's claims to have "kept my pledge" to halve inflation is disingenuous at best. Inflation is only down because energy costs are down. But this doesn't mean that you aren't paying more for it because the figures don't include the support that each household was receiving last year, which made the actual cost cheaper. Food inflation however, is still running at over ten percent and climbing, and everybody and his mother knows that the Middle-Eastern conflict (let's stop calling it a war - it isn't a war.....war's imply some degree of parity between the opposing combatants) is going to have knock on effects that will push up oil prices, and trigger a new round of rising prices in turn. Chancellor Hunt is starting his pre-election giveaway to businesses and the richest in our society, talking about "supporting business with tax breaks" (too little too late for the tens of thousands of businesses your party have fucked up the arse with Brexit mate), though he has been warned to keep schtum about his plans to do away with inheritance tax at the current time when millions of people can barely put food on the table.

And on Brexit, the truth is out there, but no-one wants to talk about it.

I saw a program on YouTube that went to various towns around the coast where the fishing industry had previously been the thriving enterprise driving their prosperity. The anger at what Brexit had done to them, especially in the face of the lies that had been told to them by the Leave campaign prior to the referendum, was palpable. They had been betrayed and they knew it. Similarly with the farming community; they had bought to a man that they would be better off out of the EU, only to find themselves struggling to get the workers to harvest their crops, struggling to get their produce across the newly closed borders, watching deals struck with Australia and New Zealand that saw them placed in direct competition with countries that farmed under totally different standards and with whose prices they could not begin to compete. The so called free trade deals struck, rather than being an opportunity to exploit new markets, turned out to be a one way traffic of goods into this country that would put them out of business.

On the larger scale our country is now the underdog of Europe. Our inward investment is nonexistent, our trade with our closest neighbour down to a crippling degree and the barriers to importing those goods we actually need such that the distributors from continent would as soon not bother with us. This is effecting availability of goods in multifarious and unpredictable ways. (As an example, today you can't find lard on the shelves anywhere. Lard! We produce tons of the stuff as a byproduct of our food industry. But as a result of who knows what chain of circumstances, whatever we produce is for some reason being diverted away from our supermarket shelves.) In short order, as a woman farmer put it on this program, the reduction in home production as 'the greenhouses' close down, and this failure to be able to import the necessary foodstuffs we need, is going come together in a significant and noticeable reduction in food security. This, she said, could not be behaviour of a competent government, to bury its head in the sand about such an important area of national security as the availability of food. At best this situation is going to drive food costs even higher: at worst we will see scarcity the likes of which we have not experienced since the Second World War.

And Rishi Sunak has brought David Cameron back into his cabinet.

David Cameron, whose capitulation to the right of his party, whose constant giving of a bit here, a bit there, to their demands about Europe, and most of all, whose policy of austerity actually brought about the circumstances under which the normally sensible people of the United Kingdom could be duped into voting to hurt themselves in so deep and fundamental a way, is brought back into the fold. The man who single handedly in his desire to head off an election defeat, and then in his complacency to understand and take seriously the threat that he had exposed the country to, allowed this killing stroke to be levelled at the heart of our nation......he's now brought back in as though none of this had happened.

Shame on him. Shame on them. Shame on the lot of them!

[Avatar]

So...did Bravermann deliberately get herself sacked? Are we looking at the last days of Rishi Sunak? Will we have yet another Tory PM before the desperately needed elections?

Anyway, what I think today is I have neglected the Watch.

(Also I merged that other topic back into here.)

--A

[peter]

Braverman is sitting on a very narrow political fence Av.

She most likely did contrive to get herself sacked. By writing her article in the Times and submitting it without No 10's approval, she was effectively challenging Rishi Sunak's authority. Either he wouldn't sack her and be further weakened in his position by virtue of his timidity, or he would and then it would free her up to begin her challenge proper, which had to start at some point pretty soon anyway.

But she will be discovering a pretty harsh reality as we post. She sits either on the verge of going up towards a real leadership challenge with possibly the top prize of all within her grasp......or on the verge of political oblivion.

This is exactly what Boris Johnson faced when he left the Theresa May cabinet (he was, you may remember, foreign secretary, but walked out over her Brexit policy). Suddenly he was alone. The media may have been watching him, giving him a profile, but this means nothing in the corridors of Westminster. It's whether you can get MPs to come to your cause or not. This is where Braverman is, and I'm betting she's feeling pretty lonely right now. Few are coming out in true support of her (she doesn't have the 'Boris factor' about her), and if she doesn't get some traction pretty quickly, then she's toast.

But......

She has to be a pretty smart woman with smart people advising her. She had to know the risks and had to have a longer term strategy in mind. I would guess that she's going to make her play over the Rwanda policy. She's fixed herself both in Westminster and in the media eye, as the champion of it's being successful, and she knows that it isn't going to be. It's dead in the water (and she quite possibly always knew it was). She's going to galvanise the Tory right by blaming Sunak for its failure. She'll do her damndest to keep it in the media, keep it high profile in the public awareness (and a friendly media will aid her) and keep chipping away at Sunak's credibility via this. That's why he's making such a show of being forceful about it. He's not going to allow any courts to stop the planes taking off!, etc, etc.

Sunak is unlikely to fall before the next election, but it's not impossible. But whether Braverman is among the serious contenders for the crown, or whether she's on the way to political Coventry is anyone's guess.