Kevin's Watch

The big news story of the day however, has to be the shooting of Donald Trump in the ear at a rally in Pennsylvania.

Seems like the ex-President got away with minimal injuries, but it won't get any closer than that! I'm not aware of who the shooter was but irrespective of this, had the outcome been different I shudder to think what the public reaction could have been.

I'm guessing that this is going to impact the election results in a pretty serious way. Put it together with the problems that Biden is currently undergoing, and it looks like a slamdunk for Trump. He'll pick up a large sympathy vote on the back of it, and this'll likely push him well clear and over the line. He won't be loosing any sleep that the creep has been iced for what he did, but in the days ahead he might end up thanking him. It'll draw the teeth of the media, who have been on his back continuously; they won't want to be seen to be jumping on a virtual national hero who has survived a serious assassination attempt and this with the sympathy vote and Biden's palpable unfitness - well you do the math.

What this means for the world however, remains to be seen. I'm guessing that the charges against him will now shrivel up and dissapear. The war in Ukraine will become more problematic, but even here things probably won't change that much. Trump and Putin, contrary to popular belief, have no love for each other and trust between the pair is minimal. Neither wants a full global conflict to develop out of Ukraine, and this must be a good thing. Beyond that, Trump won't accede to Russian preconditions for ceasefire talks and Putin won't drop them, so it looks like stalemate. And Trump, if he does get back in, is going to be spiteful and full of the desire for vengeance against a state machine that tried to destroy him. He won't be a happy bunny and people will pay for it.

I watched a Novara Media debate on whether the amassment of huge multimillion pound fortunes was acceptable and the lady philosopher/economist (who had just written a book on the subject) started by saying, in case it should be mistakenly thought so, that she was "not a communist" in no uncertain terms.

This was said with a degree of humour, to which the interviewer, Ash Sarkar responded in kind with a laughing, "What's wrong with us?" piece of banter.

Sarkar was,despite her humour, making a point of letting us know that she is a communist. Station founder and, I imagine, co-owner Aron Bastani, is also a self-proclaimed communist, and as such I'd like to adress the question that Sarkar raised in a more serious tone.

Because, while there is nothing wrong with Sarkar or Bastani per se, or indeed others claiming the same 'status', the problem has to be with the historical associations with the ideology. Pol Pot, the Kamer Rouge. Mao and the Chinese Communist Party. Stalin and the murderous history of the Soviet Union.

It goes without saying that the number of people who have fallen to communist regimes, the number of instances of mass killing of the populations who have fallen under its yoke, puts any other political belief system into the shade. Fascism can't come close, and yet any individual with a speck of cultural nous would balk at the idea of standing up and saying, "I'm a fascist," as anything other than as part of a humorous sketch, let alone with the serious intention of speaking the truth about their beliefs.

Certainly the concentrated nature of the nazi period of German history, the war and subsequent exposure of the death camps, ring-fenced as it is into that peculiar period of the 1930's and 40's, provides a much easier 'bogeyman' scenario to hang our societal opprobrium onto, and this goes some way towards explaining the difference in perception between bald professions of belief in one or other of the doctrines. Society seems not to mind a proclaimed belief in the one, but to regard the same in relation to the other as somehow shocking or unacceptable.

How has communism done this - shed it's association with its murderous past - where fascism has so singularly failed.

The standard response of those challenged with communism's history on this score is a dismissive, "Oh, that was not communism. It was not the ideology that failed, was responsible - it was the people who ran the regimes that were corrupt and failed to implement it properly."

Well perhaps so. But the problem is that there has never been an instance where the people running the show haven't failed. It's every time a coconut with communist regimes: without fail they seem to feel the need to start killing their own people and I haven't the slightest idea why. Perhaps there is some intrinsic failing in the human makeup that just doesn't allow for the attempt to follow the communist path to go otherwise?

As an aside, one could argue that there has never actually been a historical instance of fascism actually going down the same path, because Italian fascism didn't do so and many people do not regard the Nazi regime as truly fascist at all. On the latter point I'd ask, if not fascist, then what, but this will have to remain unanswered for now.

I wonder Ash Sarkar and her like are not perhaps.....over stating?..... a bit, in their desire for us to see how goodly they are as people? Everyone is equal in worth! Equal shares in the produced wealth of our societies for all. Equal treatment and status for all under the law. All good ideas that we can get behind, but unrealistic - just a tad perhaps? Maybe the (not even chequered) history of communism - because there aren't any good examples to make a chequered pattern with - should feature a bit more in their thinking before they make such open displays of these beliefs. But that doesn't answer the question as to why society is so much more forgiving of the crimes of communist regimes, to the point where people can now openly declare themselves communist, while the lesser crimes of fascism (in terms of numbers killed) are still held sufficiently starkly in the public conscious, to the point where a declaration of fascism brings almost immediate societal repulsion and exclusion.

Perhaps you'd have to go into the central arguments of each ideology in order to pick this apart, and to be honest, I haven't got either the time or inclination to do this, but interesting note that our dominant political ideology (is capitalism an ideology?) of today is , most would believe, closer to the ideology that we hold in the deepest disgust (ie fascism) than the one that we allow laughing young radio presenters to attach themselves to, without so much as turning a hair.

(All respect to the guys at Novara Media notwithstanding. They are out in front one of the best alternative news outlets on YouTube and do absolutely sterling work holding governments and politicians to account, whatsoever party they represent.)

"Every lie we tell is a debt incurred to the truth; a debt that must be repaid at some point in the future."

So said Valery Legasov in the HBO drama Chernobyl.

As I listened to the Israeli account of the strikes made recently into Gaza, purportedly to take out two Hamas leaders that were secreted in the area struck, I thought of the above words.

The account being given by the BBC of Israeli claims, that strikes were made on "open ground" with only some Hamas bodyguards in the area at the time, was clearly and absolutely at odds with the pictures coming out of the scene. People screaming, milling around in confusion, doctors in the completely overwhelmed and virtually dysfunctional hospital telling of children with their limbs blown away and whole families killed: these things simply gave the lie to what the official story was, and eroded any faith we could ever place in what we were being told about the reason for such strikes and the purpose of the operation in Gaza as a whole.

The standard excuse of our politicians that "Israel has a right to defend itself" simply falls flat in the face of such atrocity. Of course Israel has that right - but anyone who still places what is being done as included in such a definition is either wilfully denying the truth either to themselves or to the people they are addressing, or they are simply incapable of using the judgement that the Good Lord or a million years of evolution gave them.

I'll spell it out.

Placing two million people in a space 25 miles long by 5ish miles wide, repeatedly driving them from place to place in seemingly random and meaningless fashion and bombing, missile striking, shooting and starving them, to the point where they are running screaming from place to place with no knowledge of when or where the next strike will fall......this does not constitute defending yourself. This does not constitute a war that you can (rightly or wrongly) say that "all's fair" within. No - let's call it what it is.

This is a turkey shoot. This is shooting fish in a barrel.

This is a stain that Israel will bear for the rest of its days, when that debt to the truth comes time to be payed. That a nation formed out of the horror of genocide should itself, so soon after the events that brought about its inception, itself descend to such treatment of another people beggars belief. We are all lessened by it. My heart bleeds for the Jewish people who see what their brothers and sisters in Israel are doing, who are powerless to stop them, except by attending the rallies and protests that now occur on a regular basis in so many western cities that they are no longer reported. They are truly heroes of their people who will be remembered for their compassion and humanity by Arabs and Westerners alike, when this madness is finally over.

And dear God it must end. Kier Stamer may not care that he has lost the faith of the Muslim community of Great Britain in his stance of support for Israel through thick and thin, and even in the face of palpable atrocities being commited (watch the pictures of random shootings of Palestinian citizens walking down a strip of coastal sand on the excellent Democracy Now news channel, if you don't believe me, described by IDF members as "when we're bored, we start shooting"), but history will judge him too, for his actions.

We must stop supplying Israel with arms and Intel. We must stop UK bases being used as staging posts in the logistics of their murderous rampage in Gaza. We must through support of the ICJ and ICC and by what we say and do, show Israel that if it continues, it will not be with the complicity of this nation as an allie. This is the responsibility of Kier Stamer and his newly appointed Labour government. It is the first and foremost of his responsibility as a British Prime Minister. More than that, as an individual with power to make his voice heard, it is his prime responsibility as a human being.

No one with a shred of humanity can look at what is happening in Gaza and not know that this must stop. Must stop. Must stop. The turkey shoot must end.

Trump's appointment of J D Vance as his running mate is being taken as a signal as to where his position on the war in Ukraine will lie, should he secure a second term as president in November.

Vance has been excoriating in his criticism of American involvement in the debacle that has seen Ukraine reduced to rubble and tens of thousands (hundreds even?) of its people killed in a pointless and unnecessary conflict with Russia.

In a recent article in The New York Times, he argued that the position of President Zelensky that Ukraine's borders must be returned to their pre-war placement was "fantastical". He has also roundly criticised the Washington stance that it cannot negotiate with President Putin, calling it "absurd".

I absolutely agree with him. How in God's good name is this thing ever going to be ended if we in the West will not sit down and talk about doing so?

In fact, from a line in this morning's Telegraph, it would seem that we have no interest in seeing the conflict end. It says

The Biden administration, the UK and other Nato countries have said that any negotiation that involves Ukraine ceding territory to Russia would n be acceptable.

My question is, what right do we, America, or anybody else have to say what is and is not acceptable when it comes to ending this conflict. Surely this is for Zelensky and Ukraine alone to say. Had Biden and Johnson not scuppered the agreement reached in Istanbul at the very start of this conflict, Ukraine would not be in this position now and all those thousands of deaths, the destruction of the country itself, could have been averted. Our input to date has been catastrophic for Ukraine and the sooner we are out of it the better.

But for reasons I've given in an earlier post, it remains problematic to see Trump making good on his boast that he will "end the war on day one." And Boris Johnson, who apparently had a heart to heart with him in Milwaukee on Monday certainly doesn't want him to. He was seeking assurance from the likely to be next president, that he will not abandon Ukraine, should he win in November.

Stamer on the other hand shows no inclination to dial down the heat in the world's hot-spots; on the contrary, if reports yesterday prior to his urgent defence review commencing are anything to go by, he us intent on ramping things up.

He's appointed an ex Blair defence secretary, Lord Robinson, to oversee the review, and this man has already come out claiming that we need to prepare ourselves to take on a new higher level of threat from the combined cooperation and activities of the "deadly quartet" of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Stamer himself has said that he has no intention of seeing any further shrinkage in size of our armed forces. On the contrary, he seems ready to increase defence spending as part of his aim to reach the 2.5 percent of GDP commitment to Nato (I expect they'd prefer the money to actually be given directly to them, rather than spent domestically - in fact I don't think it's their idea that domestic defence spending should be included in countries Nato spending commitment at all). We are already committed to giving Ukraine billions of pounds annually until the war is ended, and to my knowledge, Kier Stamer has no intention of suspending this. Should Zelensky unilaterally decide to pursue peace negotiations with Moscow on the other hand.......

Because, as Neil Oliver recently pointed out, the truth is that when all else fails war is the final fallback. When the shit really hits the fan and when all is crumbling around you, there's nothing like a good war to shake things up and mix up the pot. Trouble is, we in the West have been used to bullying smaller countries - countries that cannot begin to match our firepower, cannot begin to put up any sustained resistance. Our wars have been walkover wars against weak enemies - but this time it's different. We've bitten off a big hunk of gristley meat and it's fighting back. Remember how at the beginning of this we were told how weak the Russians were: how they couldn't even take Kiev. This was going to be another one of our walkover wars.

Well it wasn't true. Certainly the start was less than propitious. The Ukrainians turned out to be ferocious defenders of their own territory and the Russian war machine slow to get going. But in the end the sheer disparity in size and productive capability, in manpower and firepower had to come out, and so it did. Now we find ourselves facing a battle-hardened army with high level equipment, good logistics and an armaments industry up to the job. They've taken the ground they wanted to and will not be shifted without huge risk and effort (not to say money and lives) on our part.

We brought this on ourselves with our firstly reneging on our promise back at the end of the Soviet era,that Nato would not expand eastwards, and secondly when in 2008 George W Bush announced his intention that Ukraine be brought into Nato (a position that Russia had made abundantly clear, it could not accept). Add to these facts the failure of the West to implement the Minsk Agreement of 2014 and the overthrow of the elected pro-Russian government (with Western incitement) in a pro-Western coup, and here we are today. Surely, but surely it's time for us to butt out to give Ukraine the reins in running their own affairs and, if it wants to, to seek a peace on its own terms (or alas now, the terms that the Russians will impose on them). This is unpalatable. Unpalatable for Ukraine. Unpalatable for the West. But we've fluffed it, and the alternative is worse. More death, more destruction, more expense, more risk. And no end except the one that any sane person would fear.

No. Time to learn from our mistakes, lick our wounds and call it a day. Enough is enough.

So at last we have it!

Come the glorious day! Hoist the red flag. The socialist revolution is here!

Kier Stamer has released his first directive - sorry program of priorities - in the King's Speech, delivered at the State Opening of Parliament held at Westminster yesterday.

While the Communist Manifesto it was not, it did hold some interesting nuggets of information about the type and direction of governance we will experience over the next five years.

I like the idea of the railways coming back into state ownership, even if it is a staggered sort of nationalisation, piecemeal and half hearted, of an industry that the private sector has had its fill of anyway. There's the setting up of this green national energy company - nothing there to piss off the great energy giants for whom solar panels and wind turbines offer no threat to the regular reliable generation of energy that they provide. From Stamer's perspective it's good PR for his green credentials, while not alienating the source of the political donations any future premiership will be dependent upon at the same time.

Some lip service paid to union freedoms and workers rights (now to be equivalent on day one to an employee of many years standing - but when these rights are worth l3ss than shit anyway, well frankly, what's the difference.

He's keeping on with the smoking ban, staggered by age, that Sunak declared in a previous Conservative budget, but conspicuous in its absence was any mention of the NHS, smouldering in the wreckage of decades of underfunding, and absolutely no mention (shudder) of lifting the two child benefit cap which it is estimated, would bring a million children out of poverty in the UK.

But compared to the 2017 manifesto (or that of the Green Party in the election just gone, it is pretty thin stuff. Of course the housing proposals (to build 1.5 million homes before the next election) are necessary and welcome - but where is the evidence that the bulk of young people will be in a position to buy these houses? All the talk in the world about increasing their incomes via the creation of a high skilled economy is not going to make this happen in time for them to avail themselves of these houses in the near future. Such plans take decades in the making, in terms of coming into effect. What is needed are practical schemes for cooperation between the private sector and the state, in respect of rental and right-to-buy, in which the distinction between the two is blurred, and tenure in terms of rent moves inexorably into payment towards ownership as time passes. Of this kind of thinking there is none.

wow that’s a fulsome overview if the politics al spectrum these past months.

Fun times, right?

Honestly I’m ok with Sir Kier Starmer lol at least he’s not a bit wit… but that bar has been set pretty low over the past few years.


Gotta dash but you’ve covered off on some interesting points which I’d like to unpack. brb

Hey Sky!

You'll see I've changed my above post (I got sidetracked into the problem of benefits manipulation) but in essence it remains the same.

Personally I'll never forgive Stamer his perfidy - defined as ' the state of being decietful and untrustworthy', which sums him up perfectly. You'd need to be very on top of internal Labour Party politics to have a full grasp of what he has done in order to achieve his position: having the necessary 'killer instinct' doesn't cover the half of it. His excision of the left has been brutal in the extreme. Removal of Jeremy Corbyn is but one small part of it - the bit that has been focused on by the media. Beyond that, people with membership spanning decades, people with years of voluntary and paid activism for the Labour cause have been drummed out of the Party. Careers of long standing service have been trashed without a second thought. This might be good politics in terms of positioning the Party into a place from which it could be elected - but this is thin gruel to those who have given a lifetime's service to the Party, and who find themselves out in the cold because they believe in a different interpretation of socialism than Kier Stamer does. Jeremy Corbyn, for all his manifest failings, never felt it appropriate to carry out such a heartless culling of the membership and Party machinery. The 'broad church' policy of previous years, the settling upon policy by discussion and argument, is gone. It now reads as 'my way or the highway',with Stamer calling the shots.

It is noteworthy that our media has seen no need to bring this side of Stamer into the spotlight whatsoever, and hence the larger part of the population are entirely unaware of this side of the man, seeing only the sanitized version that the press and mainstream television channels has seen fit to run with.

And then we have his earlier career.

There are serious questions about a number of things he was involved in during his tenure as DPP. His role in the holding of Julian Assange in captivity for the crime of carrying out serious journalism. His involvement in the use of UK bases as staging posts in the 'rendition' of prisoners to third countries, in which they could be subjected to interrogative methods that would constitute torture in any open investigation of the same. His membership of the US trilateral commission and the mysterious visits he made to Washington on three occasions, records of which the Public Prosecutions Office saw fit to "destroy", making public knowledge of what occurred during them impossible to attain. These are things which point to a shadowy past, which again, our media seems not to think are in the public interest to dwell upon.

I've posted earlier about the whiff of authoritarianism that hangs over Stamer and his thinking. With a Chief of Staff in the form of Sue Gray next to him, we could be in for a rough ride in the pretty near future. It won't be the three 'o' clock knock on the door or anything, but in terms of rights of protest and free speech I wouldn't be holding my breath. And as for collective decision making in cabinet ,government by concensus - forget it!

I completely agree with you that new builds may not go far enough to addressing the current housing crisis.

Have you ever considered running for government? Some really good thinking here … here we have schemes, like the first home buyer scheme to assist new & young buyers enter the market. And rental subsidy schemes to assist low income/no income families …

Recently I attended a volunteer agency meeting where volunteer agencies from all over the state & capital territory got together to compare notes and provided sector feedback/lessons learned & I was soooo impressed with the number and diversity of volunteer organisations in existence…

There is a group (forget their name ~ I’m old) that run a bus kitted out with beds ~ that provide a warm place to sleep safely for families who find themselves struggling for shelter.


I got to talking to this team and was surprised that homelessness affects a lot more people today than I would have guessed. They’ve housed public service employees who lost rentals (for whatever reason) and they’ve put families up for extended periods til they’ve got back on their feet.


The ACT housing market like much of Sydney is harsh ~ and very often rentals hard to find. It’s a comfort to know folk experiencing hard times can get a breather.

My volunteer work is limited to emergency response re flooding, storms & natural disasters. We do search & rescue too though ~ and actually get a lot of those, folk getting lost hiking, involved in an accident, remote locations across the state etc.

I’d like to get involved more with helping individuals… so I’ve signed up as a volunteer support worker. Haven’t started yet ~ but now I’m getting older State Emergency Service jobs are getting harder for me.

Plus I’ve gone backwards in my fitness since getting COVID lol . To be fair I could never compete with younger members but could definitely hold my own and it’s highly physical but since COVID I struggle to do the same things/activities I did before.

Though I did do the March On/Soldier On Kokoda Trail challenge to raise money for veteran & active personnel support services and I raised twice as much money as my unit combined and finished my 96km 2nd … and every other member is up to 20 & 30 years younger than me.


So I haven’t written myself off completely but I question the value I add to my unit & community in the SES now.

Damn Sky!

You're putting in the miles!

Puts me to absolute shame (but in fairness I'm so crocked it's all I can do to climb the stairs to bed at night! )

We've had some really great initiatives dealing with homelessness since the pandemic, during which the local council was forced to adress the issue.

They did so by putting a temporary site for containers to be placed, in which homeless individuals could set up basic homes for themselves with on-site amenities for loos, washing and showering etc. It was so successful that the idea has been continued, and now occupies a site next to the County Council buildings themselves. I know a security guard who polices the site, and he says the community spirit between the residents, the guards and even the councilors who occasionally stop by to visit is really good.

Stuff like this really goes some way to reviving my hopes that with a bit of goodwill and effort we can overcome our problems as a society.

All we need is more of the same!

An awful story about a Downs syndrome man attacked by IDF attack dogs and left to bleed to death is reported, on the BBC News website, and if any more is needed to convince you of the atrocities being committed in Gaza as we speak, then this is it.

24 year old Muhammed Bar, was autistic as well as disabled by Downs, was sitting on his sofa at home when the IDF entered their house and began breaking and smashing furniture etc in a search for ammunition or bomb making equipment.

They entered the room where Muhammed and his mother were sitting and released one of the attack dogs they had brought with them. The dog began attacking him, biting his chest and arms, while his mother was screaming for the dog to be restrained, crying out, "He's disabled, he's disabled!" While this was happening Muhammed was attempting to pat the dog's head, saying, "Enough my dear. Enough." The dog bit him savagely on the hand, apparently causing his worst injury there.

The soldiers, recognising the man's condition, pulled the dog back from him and took him to a different room where they attempted to staunch the bleeding.

They told his mother and Muhammed's neice, 11 years old to be quiet and aimed their guns at them. They were requesting to be able to see Muhammed, but were refused.

An Israeli army doctor arrived, at which point the family were ordered out of the house, leaving Muhammed alone with the soldiers.

Finding refuge from the ongoing fighting in a bomb shelter, it was a week before they were able to return to their home. They found Muhammed dead on the floor with a tourniquet on his arm, but neither stitching nor bandaging had been applied. They had assumed him to be in Israeli care and had not made efforts to return earlier on this basis. The situation being what it was, it had not been possible to find any information on the whereabouts of Muhammed in the interim period. It appears that following the application of the tourniquet he had simply been left to bleed to death.

Muhammed had been frightened and distressed by the whole situation in Gaza, the noise and destruction going on around him, but his condition was such that he was only comfortable and quiet on his own sofa. Muhammed's brothers remain in custody as I post, and it's unlikely that they will be released any time soon.

Due to the dangers of the location Muhammed was buried shortly after his family found him, not in a cemetery as would be the befitting way following such a tragedy, but instead, in an alleyway next to his house.

Didn't have time to post on this yesterday, but the Telegraph reported that the longest ever sentence was passed out by the courts for the 'crime' of staging a nonviolent protest.

It wasn't called that of course, but rather something like 'conspiracy to cause a public nuisance' or some such.

It was given to one of the founder members of the protest group Extinction Rebellion (also Just Stop Oil I believe) for organising a protest which stopped traffic on a major road ìnto London and caused a media outcry at the time.

The gentleman in question has been given 5 years in prison - a sentence the harshness of which has caused raised eyebrows across the political spectrum alongside calls for the Attorney General to step in and rescind the sentence.

I have little doubt that the purpose of this sentence is not so much to punish the individual involved, but rather to send out a wider message. It reads, "Fuck with us and see what you get!" The man's relatively high profile in the environmental protesting world has, far from protecting him, in this case been a useful tool for the state. It says, if we will do this to this clown, just think what we'll do to you!"

I've no doubt that the erstwhile director of public prosecutions who now leads us thoroughly approves. These protesters are getting above themselves, he'll be thinking. Time to take them down a peg or two.

Expect more of the same.

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I cannot believe the stupidity, the knuckle headed idiocy, of developing a global system of IT, so freaking fragile, so Jenga like balanced in its interdependency, that a single flawed update introduced by a single company, can wreak havoc across the world bringing multiple huge global industries and institutions to their knees, and leaving a trail of damage and consequences almost beyond calculation in their scale.

What morons in their right minds thought that this was a good idea?

I mean, shouldn't there be some kind of international framework to divide up the potential ramifications of a system failure at the top level, such that the fallout resulting therefrom is mitigated? Doesn't this seem like 'Getting your shit together 101'?

Don't these guys, these tech morons, realise that they came close to reaching a tipping point beyond which global catastrophe - and I'm talking back to the frickin' stone age, global nuclear war level catastrophe - could have resulted?

I mean what the fuck? Is anyone running this show or what? C'mon guys. Focus, here will you?

-----0-----

Still on the above subject, I found it extremely annoying to hear the representative of the company in question holding up his hands and saying, "Oops! Our bad!" on the news last night. Like this is going to cut it?

People will die as a result of this. Businesses will fail, individuals will be rinsed by their banks with charges for late payments, they will see benefits claims rejected, payments halted for failing to declare or whatever on time. Holidays, business meetings, appointments of life changing importance effecting millions will be missed, and the company apologises. The absolute scale of the consequences here is incalculable and the media knows it. Stupid **** Health Secretary Wes Streeting describes it as a 'glitch' on the news. A glitch? No Wes. A glitch is something that irritates you, slows things down, causes a temporary but solvable problem. It doesn't kill people. Or bring the world to its knees and threaten to push it over into armageddon. It doesn't nearly cause the collapse of civilisation as we fucking know it. Someone sack this idiot before he does some real damage beyond just uttering totally inane comments on things he clearly understands nothing.

And I thought that the adults were supposed to be back in the room!



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If anybody doubts just how fragile our society has become, how highly strung and on the edge of meltdown, just look at the pictures of the civil disorder in Leeds the other night, when social workers tried to intervene in the family arrangements of an immigrant Roma community that had built up there.

Barricades of twisted burnt-out metal and concrete, blazing fires and crowds of enraged individuals smashing up police vehicles and throwing bricks at windows etc.

And shrewish little Home Secretary Evette Cooper is in the media this morning describing it as "audacious criminality".

No it isn't audacious criminality dear, it's society pushed to the brink of what it will put up with. It's communities of people who have watched as they have been left behind while a small section of society has scooped up all of the gain, filled their boots, while the rest of us have been busy going under. It's a sign that the game is close to being up for those who have abused their positions as movers and shakers in our society. That people have been pushed beyond their ability to tolerate the bullshit they are being fed. That they are damn close to saying enough is enough.

And it's Evette fucking Cooper's self-privelaged set that has pushed them to this point. So no Evette - its not simply audacious criminality, it's a measure of something that as Home Secretary you are going to have to get to grips with. But you're sitting on a powder keg, and inane pretences if righteous outrage aren't going to cut it. Time to start acting like someone who knows what they are doing.

(Clue; The correct response here would be to have said that this was a visible manifestation of the frustration that had built up over 14 years of Conservative mismanagement of the country. That if the spark that ignited it was a heavy handed approach by the social services/police into a family situation then it was her intention to get down there and speak to the individuals involved, find out what had transpired and listen to the community grievances that lay behind it. Don't drive further distance between yourself - your group - and the people expressing outrage. Engage and bring together, don't inflame and make worse. This is not the time for acting the 'Tough Home Secretary!' You'll have a nationwide explosion on your hands if you're not careful.)

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Name of the Week has to go to the guy commenting on the above IT outage on the front of today's Mirror. "Security consultant" (wait for it), "Troy Hunt said that it wasn't too early to call this as the biggest IT outage in global history."

Troy Hunt. Security consultant? How long did it take to come up with that subtle moniker - or perhaps it was the name that shepherded the man towards his career.

I can only imagine 'Troy' as he arrives for work on Monday. The office girls all swoon as he enters - all six four of his tanned frame with turtle neck jumper, slacks and loafers (not to mention lopsided grin permanently fixed in his chisel like jaw).

Good on you Troy! Go it! We need more of your type standing alongside the Dirk Steele's and the Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax's (I kid you not) of this world. Makes it an altogether more interesting place.

An incredibly important advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice went by with barely a passing nod by the legacy media this week, passing it by like "the idle wind which [it) regardeth not."

In its first such ruling for five years (the last being on the unlawful separation of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius by the UK), the Court declared that the longterm occupation and settlement of Palestinian territories (particularly in the West Bank and Jerusalem) were "unlawful" and should be ended immediately.

Pulling together strands from both the Geneva and Hague conventions, with particular reference to article 49 of the former, the report was long and complex, its significance resting on the fact that it firstly comes from the highest Court in the world, and secondly that for the first time it adds the legal heft of said Court to similar proclamations from the UN and other concerned bodies. As such it provides a weight such rulings that will make them increasingly hard to ignore and although advisory, will provide a basis upon which third party entities can bring private 'domestic' prosecutions against say companies (and even whole states) for provision of goods and services which aid in the furtherance of the illegal occupation.

The last such ruling of the ICJ on the matter of Palestine was 20 years ago - a ruling still referred to in ongoing deliberation of the subject - and so this latest ruling is Al the more significant thereby.

But did the ruling get top billing in the coverage of the Western media, in say countries that might be particularly interested in terms of their own record of supporting this now established to be illegal annexation (de facto in the view of the ICJ ruling, in terms of its 50 year duration)? Did it my arse! On the BBC 6 o'clock bulletin - the main news of the day in the UK - it recieved about 30 seconds of coverage, coverage that gave the briefest of outlines of the judgement with no discussion or analysis of the importance or consequences stemming therefrom, whatsoever. The following article reported on pertained to the jailing of a Western journalist in Moscow on spying charges - a report that received a full seven or eight minutes of coverage with on the spot reporting and interviews on the significance of which. No need to ask which was considered more important here then - the fifty year occupation and brutal suppression of Palestinian lands and peoples, or a single man jailed in Russia for activities that might or might not have been illegal in that country. But then - at what point could we have expected things to be any different.

But in fairness let's give credit where credit is due.

There are signs of a changing attitude in our new government in terms of its approach to the Israel-Palestinian question. Foreign Secretary David Lammy has said that the ban on providing financial support to UNRWA will be lifted, and the administration has confirmed that it will abide by the ICC issuing of arrest warrants for key individuals within both Hamas and the Israeli administration (most notably Benjamin Netenyahu and his underling whose name I forget). Small progress and too little too late, but better than nothing.

The closest I can come to a solution to this intractable situation is an immediate withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories, and end and removal of illegal settler activities and restoration of the stolen lands to their former and rightful owners forthwith. The withdrawal of Israel to its 1967 borders and complete end to restrictions on food and medical supplies entering Palestinian territories. The release of hostages on both sides and the establishment of negotiations pertaining to advancement of the two-state solution forthwith.

Not exactly asking for much I admit, but you come up with a better plan.

One question that's been bugging me is why the recent ICJ ruling is why it should be advisory rather than mandatory?

This seems almost like a 'get out of jail card' for Israel and its allies, and a major stumbling block preventing any concrete action that could actually get this untenable situation moving in the right direction.

In essentially ruling that Israel's ongoing presence in the Palestinian occupied territories is illegal and must end, the highest court in the world has spoken and it behoves the world to listen. It is nothing less than a serious undermining of the post war international riules based order for such a ruling to be denied - and denied by the very same people who rely on that very order to give them the moral high-ground in supporting their own actions elsewhere in the world.

Of course America has always been a reluctant follower of such an order, preferring to make its decisions based on its own interests rather than what is morally defensible. America is not a signatory to the ICJ (the politicians could never be gotten to vote in sufficient numbers to support entry) but was involved in the setting up of its predecessor. America likes to pick and choose which rulings and edicts it supports, depending upon whether it suits its needs. When the ICC brands Vladimir Putin an international criminal and issues a warrant for his arrest, the court's word is final and must be adhered to. When the same ruling is made in respect of Benjamin Netenyahu, suddenly the court is acting beyond its remit and has no authority to pass such judgment.

But going back to the advisory status of the ruling, I can only speculate that it is so because it is given in response to a request for its judgment, rather than as a result of a direct charge being brought as for example was the case in the South African genocide claim. I suppose that the Court is very sensitive to the shifting sands upon which its authority rests. It only functions as a result of the support of the signatory nations upon which its charter is based. If it goes against the grain (and by this I suppose I mean whatever Western hegemony that has until recently been calling the shots in terms of what goes down in this world, thinks is right ) then it is likely to see its authority drain away, and very quickly.

But things are changing. The West is no longer the only kid on the block in terms of the geopolitical polarity of the world. The rise of China, the breaking away of Russia from its previously suplicatory position to the West which has prevailed since the end of the Soviet era, the gaining economic power of the Bricks movement - all of these things are undermining the Western hegemony and in turn its dominance over the functioning of the ICJ, UN etc. Suddenly the international rules based order is not just what we say it is: suddenly it seems that other players might also have a shout in deciding what should and should not be supported in terms of what goes on on the world stage.

Western media, in its attempt to ignore the recent ICJ ruling, to treat it as being of minor significance, is in fact showing its fear that in truth, the game is coming to an end. In the face of indisputable evidence of our being on the wrong side of history in the Israel-Palestine situation - and this is at one thing we can thank the internet for....the impossibility of now hiding the truth about such situations from us, despite governmental propoganda to the contrary - the ICJ is beginning to show that it perhaps no longer feels as constrained as it previously might have done. Rulings are still advisory, non binding if countries choose to ignore them, but they are nevertheless not always going to go in the direction that, had they done so, would have received our full-throated support, and in which case we'd have been holding up the court as 'the highest authority who's rulings must be adhered to in support of a rules based world order'.

And I think that this can only make the world a better place. Like Jeremy Corbyn, who alluded to this in his recent acceptance speech following his win in Islington North, I don't believe we have to live in a world divided by fear and bloodshed. I believe that the other nations of the world, like the populations of our own western countries, just want peace. And I believe that applies to the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians and the North Koreans.

In fact the more I see of it, the more I believe that it is only a limited number of establishment oligarchs, with disproportionate power and influence within the Western world, that actually want otherwise. As per usual, as Neil Oliver recently said, it's just about those two old chestnuts, money and power. That's all it is. And there are a few guys right at the top of our Western societies who are quite prepared if necessary, to march our kids off to war just to keep hold of it.

Interesting article on the front page of today's Times about a study into the level of integrity displayed by people in the UK today, compared with that recorded in a similar study carried out in 2011.

The study, carried out by Portsmouth University, found that levels of integrity had fallen amongst the populace, from one in fourteen people thinking that it was acceptable to carry out things such as benefits fraud and tax evasion in 2011, to one in five now.

Interesting but not entirely unexpected I'd say, given the levels of poverty and desperation amongst the population, but equally responsible I'd say would be the example that has been set by those who sit in positions of power and responsibility above us. For years we have been fed a constant stream of information about the behaviour of our politicians, our captains of industry, our supposed 'betters' as they have lied and cheated their way through life, fiddling and scamming at every opportunity and generally displaying the morals more normally attributed to workers in the porn industry, than the elected representatives of state.

We've had the MPs expenses scandal, lobbying scandals and cash for questions, buy yourself a place in the House of Lords (cost's a million pounds in donations I believe, at the last count.) Then of course the mother of all scams - the Covid-19 pandemic - during which 600 billion (was it) was siphoned out of the treasury and handed to the wealthiest individuals in the country. We had the PPE scandal with its fast track involvement of MPs, the bounce-back loans (queue up here for 50,000 quid, no questions asked, partygate......the list goes on. Hell, we were led for three years by a man who made lying into a rarefied art form, and now are led by yet another Grand Political Liar.

And we wonder that people are less honest than they used to be?

Perhaps some of these points made it into the inner pages of the paper where the article was continued, but there was no appearance of them on the front page whatsoever. Rather the focus was firmly on the cost of benefits fraud to the country. Not, you notice, the cost of tax evasion, which to my knowledge costs the Exchequer far more in lost revenue than the money lost to illegal claims for benefit, but rather to benefits fraud.

No suprise, I am forced to say, there either.

(Fact check; Annual revenue loss to the Exchequer each year as a result of tax evasion is estimated to be fifteen times that lost as a result of benefits fraud. The figures are around 15 billion in respect of tax evasion and 1 billion to benefits fraud.)

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A few observations about the situation in Ukraine.

Or perhaps rather, questions I'd like to pose to those in power - those who have the influence to determine the course of events over the coming months and years.

Where, I'd ask, do you think this is going?

Ukraine cannot beat Russia without the help of the West. It's questionable if they can beat them even with the help of the West. What exactly is your plan, in the face of these incontrovertible facts?

The average age of serving men on the front line in Ukraine is 48 years old. Get that - 48 years old. This means that numbers of them are older - probably much older. Ukraine has not the manpower to drive the Russians out of the territory the Russians have taken, even with all the firepower we could grant them. It's boots on the ground that are needed to finish the job after the rockets and bombs have done their job, and Ukraine simply hasn't got them.

So if this stated goal of driving the Russians out of the whole of Ukraine is to actually be achieved, it cannot be done so without Western boots on the ground. This is a given. And where are these troops to be found? Our own armies, on both sides of the Atlantic, are depleted in numbers to the point where they simply couldn't take on the Russian forces in Ukraine. And this doesn't even adress the situation in terms of experience. The Russians are battle hardened with experience of fighting in difficult conditions over years, while our own troops have barely any combat experience under their belts whatsoever. To throw them into combat against the Russian troops would be akin to sending in chickens to fight against foxes.

But forget this. Just in terms of numbers we couldn't do it. Which brings us back to the inevitable questions of how such troops are to be mustered. And then we are into the vexatious question of conscription. And does anybody really believe that the people are going to wear this as they did in the second world war? It isn't going to happen.

Or maybe our movers and shakers think otherwise? Perhaps they believe that they can pull off another pandemic level hoax on the populace, convincing them that they must "take up arms for King and Country!" as though they could turn back the clock to 1939 (or whenever it was they last did it).

And just say, just say, the impossible happens, and Ukraine manages to turn the tables on the Russians, or they manage to get hundreds of thousands of our youngsters, by what ever means, to take up arms and head off to the meat-grinder that is the Ukrainian front line, and these novice soldiers manage to begin to beat the better armed, more highly experienced troops of the Russian military machine - what then? The Russians are just going to take this? They are not going to use their tactical nuclear weapons on the Ukrainian field of battle? They are just going to put their hands up and say, "Fair play Guv. You got us beat!" Let's be realistic. The Russians regard this fight as existential in a way that we can only faintly understand. They will fight to the bitter end using every resource at their disposal, even striking deep into Nato territory - that's our own towns and cities - if necessary, to keep their chances alive.

And we all know where this ends.

Or maybe we are just going to go for a forever war. Like Orwell's 1984, an ongoing running sore on the global face, consuming the wealth of some, lives of others, while yet others (no doubt on both sides) accumulate fortunes on the back of the defence and armaments contracts available to the sector. (Remember the Iraq war - companies like Halliburton make fortunes to this day from the revenues of the Iraqi oilfields and the like, so never let it be thought that all 'suffer' equally as a result of wars.) Maybe this is the plan?

But I'd surely like to ask those in the know exactly where they think this ongoing struggle is going to go? Where, if we don't sit down and start to negotiate with the Russians, they think their insistence that this war must continue, is going to lead to

I suppose with the majority Labour won at the last election, Kier Stamer thinks that he has MPs to burn, and is thus quite prepared to sacrifice a few early on in his term in order to make a point.

Thus we learn this morning that he has suspended the whip from seven Labour MPs, including staunch Corbyn allies John McDonald and Rebecca Long-Bailey, for voting for a SNP amendment to scrap the two-child benefits cap.

These MPs are suspended from the Labour Party for months, during which time they must sit as independents, outside the Party proper.

Stamer maintains that he will not end the cap, estimated to keep a million children living below the poverty line in the UK, until he can be sure that the nation's finances are up to doing so, but this is not playing well with many Labour MPs who see (for example) money being commited to Ukraine, to defence, to tax breaks for the wealthy, but none to lift children out of poverty.

Even some of the furthest right MPs in the House believe the cap to be unfair and think it should go, but Stamer is having none of it. The SNP ammendment to get rid of it was put forward yesterday and voted on, and Labour MPs were whipped to vote against it. Only seven had the courage of their convictions however, and they have paid the price. So what should have been an opportunity to demonstrate to Stamer that he isn't going to get it all his own way, instead turned out to be a shepherding of sheep into the pen he wanted them in. With his customary brutality he sacrificed the dissenting members as an example to those who remain. "It's my way or the highway," runs the refrain.

It didn't hurt of course, that the seven who went were composed mainly of Corbyn supporters. They would always have been troublesome and Stamer won't loose any sleep no longer having to worry about them. He wants compliance at all levels in his parliamentary flock, backbenchers and government ministers alike, and weeding out the troublemakers early on is no bad thing for a man who wants his authoritarian grip on his party to be absolute.

Stamer will extend the same principle to governing the country, make no mistake. He's not the sleazy grinning type of Tony Blair, but far more the steel fist in the velvet glove - a glove that will be shown to be pretty thin sooner rather than later.

And in respect of the benefits cap, it's a no-brainer to anyone with a grain of socialist principle that it's a cruel and unfair policy that has the potential to make the lives of countless children and families a misery, but our new manifestation of Labour seems comfortable enough with that. Many had thought that Stamer, once in power, would immediately turn tack and do away with the cap. They'd thought his refusal to say he'd do so in oppoition was a cunning plan - a device to fool the right wing voters of his intent to clobber the poor for their irresponsibility (how dare they have ten kids when they hadn't the income to support one) and thereby get them to vote fover him. They were wrong. Turns out he really doesn't give a toss about the suffering the two child cap causes - not when it can be used as a warning shot above the heads of what could be a very recalcitrant flock of sheep. It says "Go against the grain and your political career is over before it starts." Many of the new intake of Labour MPs are freshers into the House: they get that message loud and clear.

The message we take away is somewhat different. We've saddled ourselves with a dictatorial authoritarian as our leader. He won't like being defied by the people any more than he does by his MPs. And he'll react just as decisively to put down any example of public dissent. It only remains to be hoped that this increasingly present little block of independent MPs can actually start to work together in the House, maybe with some of the smaller parties and even Conservative MPs minded to make Stamer's life less easy than he wants it, and gradually bring across more of the truly Labour thinking MPs - MPs of a more socialist bent than Stamer clearly is - to make their influence felt.

Here's hoping.

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The new head of the army has said that it doesn't much matter how the conflict in Ukraine ends, Russia will emerge "more dangerous" and will be seeking retribution for "what we have done to help".

Not much need to worry then because what we have done to help wouldn't fill a thimble. If you call persuading Zelensky to walk away from the peace talks in Istanbul at the start of this conflict (and terms that he at that point was ready enough to agree to), to then watch his country reduced to rubble over the next couple of years helping, then I suppose, yes, we could be worried. But encouraging Ukraine into a war that it couldn't win, overseeing the deaths of God knows how many Ukrainian soldiers and civilians (not to mention Russians), and watching the country battered into oblivion from the sidelines hardly constitutes help in my book. In fairness we've helped the arms industry to the tune of billions, made a small number of individuals rich beyond the point of avarice, so perhaps this counts as helping?

But no, this military-industrial mouthpiece stooge likes to spread his net a little wider. It's this new axis of evil, conveniently renamed as an "axis of upheaval" that he's interested in bringing to our attention. "War isn't inevitable," he hastily assures us, but with these four baddies (think Russia, Iran, China and North Korea) increasingly supporting each other and working together, we have exactly "three years" (not two or four) to get 'war ready'. He deliberately isn't mentioning the defence spending budget, but his message is clear. "Give us a shit-ton of money or else."

Well I don't buy it. I don't believe that Putin is the new Dr Evil. I think he just wants Russia to survive and he doesn't trust the West as far as he can spit into the wind. And why the frick would he. We've fucked Russia over with every promise we've ever made, starting from the one we gave at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that Nato would not encroach eastwards.

Neither do I believe that China wants an all out global conflagration. Why would it? It's already beaten the West hands down at its own game, capitalism, and proved decisively that democracy is not a prerequisite for this system (as if we've ever enjoyed true democracy anyway).

The rest of the world is just getting its post-Western hegemony act together, starting to find its own measure and liking it. Why the fuck would it want to see the whole arena blown to shit at the very point that things are looking up for it. Contrary to what these clowns would have us believe, the rest of the world is not still trapped into the type of stone age thinking that sees only the path of military victory and territorial acquisition as the only measure of success. They can dominate by economics quite as successfully, and if we're anything like clever this is where we should be concentrating our efforts to meet them. We can hold up our end by trading with them, by doing it better and by cooperation with them where we can't.

These guys like this army clown are the dinosaurs: either that or they're just playing an exceedingly dangerous game of brinkmanship in order to secure fortunes for the tiny section of the population whose interests they represent. If so, it's a brinkmanship that sees thousands of bodies piled up high as a price for those fortunes.

We've had enough scare tactics and propoganda pushed at us in the past few years. The last thing we need are a new lot of greedy bastards stepping forward, eager to get their share of the pie by throwing in their penn'o'worth of complicity.

Putin is a revanchist whose worldview is from 1975. He started the war in Ukraine as well as in Georgia, Chechnya. The Ukrainians are fighting for the freedom of not living as a suppressed minority in their own lands. Aspiring for a future where they are part of Europe rather than a corrupt kleptocracy. Let them decide when they are done rather than deciding for them.

Great to see you Damelon, but I barely know where to start.

Let's start from the first sentence.

By saying Russia is "revanchist", do you imply that it attempts to recover the status it once had in terms of influence (which essentially means the projection of power) in former times, ot that it seeks territorial expansion by means of acquisition via militaristic advancement into countries of Western Europe (or at least west of where it currently sits), which is a position being pushed by those who would see this war continued (it seems) ad infinitum.

Incidentally, the statement of this new leader of the British army that "It doesn't much matter how the war ends....." is essentially an admission that it is lost, but let that go, other than to say it is the beginnings of a preparation of letting the UK public rise to awareness of this fact.

While I'll buy that Russia would like to increase it's projection of power - what country would not (we're trying to do it in the UK as well - but it is perfectly capable of doing this economically and by trade rather than involvement in futile wars from which no-one emerges unscathed. I don't believe there is any indication whatsoever that they harbour intentions of territorial expansion westwards (and more to the point, neither do individuals like Professor John Mearsheimere, who have some credibility in terms of the value of the opinions they hold). This is a bogeyman slubbered up by a military industrial complex who absolutely need ever increasing quantities of money allocated to defence budgets in order to maintain and increase their profits.

As to whether Putin started the war in Ukraine - well, we could equally say that Churchill started the war with Germany. It might be true but it simply ignores everything that led to that 'starting'. On the Georgia and Chechnya observation I can't comment. Our movers and shakers weren't particularly interested in them, at least in terms of funding their fightback or taking the world ever closer to a major power confrontation on the back of them. Or maybe the secret services had their grubby fingers stuck into those pies as well. They certainly have had a long presence in Ukraine stretching back to well before this war started. What is it - a dozen CIA bases? The truth is that poor Western foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union has made an enemy of Russia when it absolutely did not have to. Politicians such as George Kennan and Angela Merkel were desperately unhappy with the eastward expansion of Nato, and said it would lead to exactly where we are today.

"Supressed minority in their own lands." Well, perhaps we should ask the ethnic Russian Ukrainians about that. Speaking the Russian language illegal did I hear? Remember this war didn't actually start with the Russian invasion - it's been going on in the eastern provinces for a decade and a half.

"Aspiring to a future in Europe, rather than as part of a corrupt kleptocracy"? I doubt anyone could teach Ukraine very much about the nature and practice of being a corrupt kleptocracy, but again let this go. Damelon - have you actually looked at the state of European polities of late? Pots calling kettles black springs to mind. I can't comment upon America, but gosh I'm absolutely cognisant about what's been going on in the UK and Europe in the past few years, and whiter than white it ain't. I don't know if Western corruption is worse or better than in Russia (and I'm damn sure that their's is bad), but shit - none of it is worth seeing Ukraine reduced to rubble over and piles of both Ukrainian and Russian corpses growing ever higher over.....of this I'm a hundred percent convinced.

On the last statement, that of letting the Ukrainians decide for themselves I absolutely concur. Trouble is they sit under martial law at the moment and cannot express their opinions much one way or another. And come to think of it, when they did express their opinion at the ballot box in (what) 2014?, and chose a leader that didn't fit in with Western ideas about the country's future direction, that leader was replaced by a coup which raised a much more acceptable administration to the West. But of course, we had nothing to do with that did we?

But my observations notwithstanding, thanks again for your post Damelon. It means a lot to me to know that people occasionally drop in to see what I'm posting. It makes it all worthwhile.

Here we go.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has "discovered a twenty billion pounds black hole" in the national finances, and might therefore have to introduce the tax increases that she claimed were "not part of her plans" on occasions too numerous to relate, during the six week election campaign.

Everybody and his mother knew she was going to do it. Even Andrew Marr said it was inevitable (either that, or borrow more, or go back to austerity), but she carried on with the charade of pretending she wasn't even thinking it. Just to try to convince people to vote Labour - that they weren't the high tax, high spend party of old.

No-one believed her, but they voted Labour anyway, because another five years with the other lot in charge was simply not to be contemplated.

And now the same old tired rabbit is pulled out of the same battered top hat, and we're supposed to believe her cod-suprise that she might have to do what she'd said that she wasn't thinking of (or it can only be assumed at this point, that she was refusing to think of.)

Why do they do it? Wouldn't it be refreshing just to have had a politician tell us the truth we all knew? That we screwed our economy with Brexit, ground it into little pieces with our pandemic policies, and it wasn't technically an economy anymore, but rather one of those little bags of dog-shit you see hanging from trees when walkers have chucked them carelessly away following their virtue-signalling pantomime of picking them up when the dog drops them. Jjust leave the fucking turds where they are fer Christ's sake! Nature will get rid of them far better on the ground than hanging from a branch in a plastic fucking bag!).

But (back on track) of course that would be too much for us to expect. A politician telling the truth. That with borrowing figures higher than Mick Hucknall's conquest count (waking up next to that scaly lizard can't have been much fun - and then for him to issue his 'group apology' on the radio, to the three thousand women he'd bonked.....the absolute fucking twat!) and with public services already ground down to pre-industrial levels of utility, she'd have no choice but to squeeze an extra few pips out of the already wrung out pockets of the British public....that truth would have been too much to expect. But we all knew it was coming anyway.

Truth is that what she'll do in the forthcoming budget (reckoned to be coming before the summer recess) will be to pick around the edges of all three. A bit of pruning of the public services (we're into the marrow now, the bones having already been picked clean), a bit of extra borrowing (doing the credit card shuffle on the thousand maxed out cards in the Exchequer's economic wallet) and (yes - here it comes....drum roll please) ....tax rises!

But be absolutely assured, it'll be tax rises on the middle classes. None of those countless trillions of rentier income stashed away in vaults tens of thousands of miles away will be touched. City of London money is sacrosanct and no more to be touched than Queen Elizabeth's hand by the plebs invited to her garden party (Gloves pleese Jeeves. They're here!) No, the establishment one percenters, the one's who could refloat the economy and not even miss it in doing so - they will slip through unscathed. Because you don't bite the hand that feeds. And if Labour wants to be more than a one-hit wonder, it needs access to some of that mullah for campaign costs down the road. Power and money baby! Who luvs ya! The circle goes around and we as usual, pays the price.

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Let's have a quick look at the potential runners in the forthcoming Conservative Party leadership contest, and see if a potential winner emerges.

Three MPs have to date thrown their hats into the ring. Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly, and Robert Jenrick are declared. Four more are likely runners. Kemi Badenoch, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Mel Stride. Penny Mordaunt, the only white female potential runner, lost her seat to Labour in the election and so she's out. She would have been in with a reasonable chance had she not fallen at the election.

Of the seven mentioned, we can pretty much discount Cleverly (black and he isn't clever), Patel (Indian and not highly thought of by the Conservative Party membership), Kemi Badenoch for being black and too right wing, Braverman for being Indian and too right wing.

Sorry this seems overtly racist, but this is the Conservative Party membership we are talking here. If a person of colour makes it into the final two, as with Rishi Sunak, the membership simply won't vote for them. They regard the role as one that should be held by a white person and most certainly not a black individual (their racist ranking runs parallel with depth of colour, Indians ranking as less undesirable than African or Afro-Carribean descended people).

So much depends on the two individuals the membership are presented with. The parliamentary Conservative Party are hard-headed enough to know that the British public simply won't vote for an Indian or black individual, and so for sure the final two will be a white and a coloured individual, or two whites.

Of the white individuals mentioned above (Jenrick, Tugendhat and Stride) and now we can think at last of political orientation, Jenrick will be seen as too right wing and so he'll go out, leaving Stride and Tugendhat. Jenrick also has a pretty sketchy past that will go against him. Stride and Tugendhat are both credible candidates, but of the two something tells me that Stride would be the favourite. He's a pretty well respected member within parliamentary circles, and whilst not well known outside the political sphere, he's always been well presented by the media. He'll be the centrist politician who Conservatives will hope to utilise to steal back the center ground (from which British elections are always won) from Kier Stamer.

So there you have it: new candidates not emerging and all things being equal, I'd go 3 to 1 on Mel Stride and 4 to 1 on Tom Tugendhat.

Let's see if I'm right.

Here's Labour's plan.

They are going to attempt to turn the post-war pattern of two or three Conservative terms of office to each Labour one, on its head.

They don't want to do for the two party system - on the contrary, they like it. It allows for them to share the field with a single opponent, each enjoying a hegemony of power while they are in situ in the leading role. A multiparty system, as might be seen under any form of proportional representation, would dilute this power and clip the wings of the party leading the government of the day. For pretty obvious reasons, a one party state, though it is no doubt lovely to fantasise about if it happens to be your party, is not an option. You know - democracy and all that. (Not that we have two effective parties in terms of political ideology or policy formation: the two main parties have long since run together into overlapping 'sets' on that score, fulfilling a brief set by the behind the scenes overlords, more of whom in a bit.)

So this is Stamer's aim. He wants the status quo to persist, but with the Conservative and Labour roles switched. Labour becoming the default party of government and the Tories being thrown the occasional term of office while the Labour forces retreat and have an effective five year holiday from office, while they have an assessment and a planning session.

This will serve nicely, and will give us our history to be going forward with in the decades ahead.

But step back from this and consider the system more broadly. What is it's purpose? It used to be the case that governance was all about service. In fact Kier Stamer made a number of schmaltz references to his "burning desire to serve" over the course of the recent election. To listen to him, one would have expected him to come out wearing a samite robe with a basket of loaves and fishes. But of course it's bullshit. Service in the best interests of the people may be a good line at election times, but in the day to day running of the country it's but a small part of the show (and that only because without it the public might start to get fractious and difficult to govern). And of course you have to think about that next election as well. No during times of business as usual, its the interests of the one percenters that has to be prioritised. These are the guys who call the shots, and the hands of government are tied not only by the constraints of the economic circumstances they happen to find themselves in, but also by the demands of those who pay the pipers. The guys who fund the party expenses, who made sure the largesse keeps rolling in to whichever party happens to be in power. Like a great big football game, the two parties take the field each electioncycle, with the prize each five years being the chance to gain exclusive access to this largesse.

And within the parties the football analogy holds true as well.

People enter politics, sure because they have beliefs that they want to push, but primarily because they are ambitious, they are human. Like all of us, they want to get on in life and politics is just one of the gateways into the highest levels of our society. Once in, like the lowly apprentices of any football club, you jostle and fight to get yourself to the top. No-one enters politics not to succeed in it. They enter with dreams of winning the crown. And the higher up you get, even if you never get the title, the better the access to that largesse I was talking about gets. The revolving doorways get more grand, the boots flowing backward into your coffers gets more substantial. The higher up you go, the more social acclaim you get, the more establishment doors open, until one day you yourself suddenly realise that you are there. You have moved from being one of the hoi poloy triers into one of the one percenters. You are on the top team, one of the guys who files out onto the field on cup-final day at Wembley, one of the ones who's bank ballance swells with an ease that most people can only dream of.

And if you get to the actual top spot, well, the sky's the limit. Suddenly if you are lazy, a night's work here and there nets you a ten year income for most people (think Boris Johnson). Or you might be a Blair. Running a 'foundation' that itself keeps you circulating in the most exhaulted circles on the planet. Power and money - and you have them both.

So this is the prize our two teams are working for. Access to the rarefied world above their heads - the place from whence the largesse flows and the movers and shakers reside. They may be content to take their time at the top to furnish themselves for the rest of their lives, or they may have greater aspirations, to move into that world and become active participants themselves. But make no mistake. None of this is about serving the interests of the people.

They forget about them - just as you did if you continued to read up to this point - long ago, right back at the beginning.

Hmm. It seems that 10,000 plus people attending a far-right rally in the centre of London isn't worth a mention in our legacy media this morning. Only a small, tucked away piece reporting the bare bones of the story on the BBC News site and not a whisper in the papers, despite their being five arrests and a huge police operation to contain it.

In fact it must have been a tricky day for the police in London altogether yesterday: they had the Tommy Robinson organised far-right march, a small opposition march attended by left wingers and pro-Palestinian held nearby, and not very far away either, a trans-pride affair that could also have crossed paths with either of the other two. Seemingly they did a pretty good job of policing the centre of our capital however, because five arrests out of that potentially explosive mix doesn't seem like a bad result to me.

Sky News did run a feature on the 6pm bulletin last night however, in which they interviewed a number of participants of the Tommy Robinson march. They all claimed that they were not marching in support of any racist ideology, but simply on the basis of people who had "had enough" of untrustworthy government and failure to control the flood of people entering the country. Fair enough I suppose, given that Kier Stamer has run his election campaign on pretty much the same grounds in the last couple of months, but somehow it is less palatable coming from one of the far-right spokespeople in the country than from our once Corbyn sidekick leftist, but now center ground Labour Prime Minister. I'm no Robinson supporter, but I was interested to read that the BNP (or whatever right-wing political party he now stands in) leader is in the process of awaiting arraignment before the courts, for defying a ban placed against him on speaking online about a previous conviction that had been served against him.

Banned from talking online about a conviction you have received in the courts? Is that what we do now? Ban people from claiming they have been wrongly judged? (I'm assuming that this is what Robinson was doing.) This seems a bit.....Orwellian, or something to me? But hey, what do I know.

Robinson spoke at the rally, but no reportage exists of what he was actually saying, other than he considered the rally a milestone in the fight of ordinary people to make their voices heard (presumably to say, "We don't want all them there foreigners coming here!"). He said that he'd invited Nigel Farage, another man who isn't best pleased by the sight of a coloured face walking down the street towards him, to speak, but that Farage had said that he "couldn't make it." (More like, "You must be kidding you sweat and beer stinking neanderthal!" I'd sooner stand on stage next to Prince fucking Andrew than you! I've not waited ten years to get into Westminster and have a shot at the big-time in order to fuck it up by standing next to you while you spout your one syllable foam-flecked drivel.) I wonder if someone in the establishment paid him to say that (what Robinson said to the march - not my half-arsed attempt at a humorous version of Farage's 'real' reply). It's going to be absolutely the very last thing that Nigel Farage wants to be associated with Tommy Robinson - and the establishment polity would love to see him squirming in the media in attempting to deny any similarities (much less collaboration) between the two. Robinson could be the establishment fifth columnist 'turd in the punchbowl' response to Farage's Reform Party rise to political prominence for all we know. Stranger things have been done.

But in fairness, all things considered, the rally seemed to go off without too much trouble. I suppose our bosses decided that it wouldn't be a good idea to give too much oxygen to this event, not least because it was so well attended. There is simply too much distrust and anger against our established political class at the moment and these of course, are exactly the circumstances under which the extremist parties flourish.

But there you have it. It happened, no matter how much our leaders would wish that it didn't.

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