Kevin's Watch

So - can I get this clear.....

All you have to do, if you are head of a designated terrorist outfit with a price on your head, to get said proscription lifted, is to work hand in glove with the American security services to topple the government of a country - pretty much any one will do - that they don't like, and then assume leadership of that country yourself.

I get it.

It doesn't matter how many killings you've signed off on, how many attacks you've participated in or atrocities you've claimed responsibility for. The number of heads that have rolled off under your blade on your grisley way to the top is immaterial. None of this matters once you have achieved final paydirt as the unopposed head of a nation: in fact, if you play your cards right, the CIA will even help you to polish up your CV - smooth out the wrinkles as it were - and make sure that your PR in the media slides imperceptibly into your new image - that of the 'reformed character', the new clean-green garbed jihadist, complete with neatly trimmed beard and kind reasonable (yes - good word that)....reasonable persona.

Gone will be the foam-flecked anti-Western rants from the BBC footage: instead you'll be seen placing your clean, neatly trimmed nail bedecked hands on the heads of children in mosques. No more wild-eyed screaming from the back of pick-ups, dusty fatigues still bloody from the last victim that fell under your knife. Instead you'll stand against peaceful arabesque backdrops radiating beatific calm. And your previous nemeses sitting at the heads of other governments will express their being pleased with your transformation - you'll not be let off the hook lightly you understand.....you've got a ways to go yet......but they'll proceed with caution to allow you to demonstrate that you are indeed a reformed man. More...Western....shall we say, in your thinking. And all that Koranic nonsense? Well that'll have to go of course. Or at least morph into the more reasonable (love it!) version. You know - the one that shows peace and tranquility and golden hues, rather than black garbed, beard surrounded fist-shaking as its main form of communication.

If you can manage that, then okay, a bit of religious expression can still be allowed here and there.

How does it go? Kill one man, you're a murderer. Kill a million, you're a conquerer. Kill them all you're a God.

Don't think you're up to the God stage yet my friend but you're definitely close enough to the conquerer for your past to be airbrushed away. Have no fear - our lot will treat with you with absolutely no problem, as long as you stay within the Western hegemonic playbook and don't go rogue on us. Nasty or nice - makes no odds to us, as long as you are on our team. For the God stage incidentally (should you aspire to it) you need to be one of the ones with your finger on the button. You've got a long way to go to get to that exhaulted place, and ultimately there can only be one God (but you know this already). That accolade of course, will go to the one who ultimately plucks up the courage to push the damn thing - and the way things are looking someone else is going to get to that place long before you. But in the meantime, you've helped.

Now here's a thing that both the Tories and the Labour administrations absolutely agree upon: we need more prisons to lock people up in.

Angela Rayner, Deputy PM and Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, is so determined to get these prisons built that she'll put them wherever she wants to, irrespective of planning restrictions, green-belt prohibitions or local opposition. And new laws have apparently been put, or are being put, into place, that will allow her to do it.

And these new laws will also apply to the building of new and huge data centres, which are considered a national infrastructure requirement and are presumably needed to store all of the data being collected on us (and which will no doubt be useful in filling those prison places with hardened criminals who speak out against curbs on free speech, criticise policy on gender recognition, are unhappy about information manipulation in the media or what is and is not released by the government to the public).

So this is the 'new normal' in the UK. Collect as much information as possible about every one of our lives, and then sift us through a sieve to remove any troublesome individuals from society, and into prisons from where the harm they can do is limited.

Sounds about right. If I don't believe a man can be turned into a woman by a surgeon with a scalpel and a fist full of hormone tablets, away with me. If I have feelings about the environment, or what is happening in Gaza, or my governments support for a nation accused of committing genocide, away with me. If I walk down the street with a placard that offends a policeman, or protest with others in a march that hasn't had official approval beforehand, away with me. If I post on social media and my words offend someone or can be construed as inflammatory, away with me.

What the fuck have we become? This used to be a freedom loving country. Now we are forced to accept things that might run contrary to our perception of common sense, threatened because we might step out of line and find something our government does necessitates criticism, might run contrary in some sense to what our society deems the norms to which we all must capitulate or face punishment. Our governments use exactly the same tricks that we used to laugh at when used by Pravda or Tass. News is manipulated and spun to suit the official narrative, or is simply ignored and not spoken about if it is too difficult to twist.

Sometimes I feel like I'm going mad with it all - that it's just me - and then, thank goodness, I'm able to listen to the words of people like Neil Oliver, like Matt Kenard, like Russell Brand and even that old codger from History Debunked, and I know that I can still sort fiction from reality in my head, even if others around me seem unable to. Stations like Novara Media and Judging Freedom, commentators like Owen Jones and Crispin Flintoff, Professors John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs. These people tell me I can still recognise reason when it is presented to me and it chimes with my own lived experience.

I thank goodness for the presence of an alternative source of reportage, as found in the non mainstream media outlets. Without these I'd still be drinking the cool-aid. Don't get me wrong: you have to be careful to sort the wheat from the chaff, not to fall into rabbit-holes of conspiracy and misinformation. But take your news from a wide enough selection, from different flavours of political opinion, from the left, right and centre, and it becomes possible to get a feeling for what is sound and what is not.

But it ain't always easy and I have to confess that I am probably nearing the point where I haven't really the energy for it anymore. In the immortal words of John Coffey from The Green Mile, "Tired boss. Dog tired."

Or they're all just as mad... (Or some of them anyway...not sure I'd be turning to Russell Brand under these circumstances... )

As for the rest...it's a period of technological and social upheaval, and that always leaves many people feeling wounded, dispossessed, betrayed, etc. Politicians harness that in order to impose their own agenda's (usually for their own benefit).

I suspect that the people who are feeling that now under current circumstances will provide the fuel for the next swing, although whether we will be here to see it is open to question.

--A

I suspected that the inclusion of Russell Brand would raise an eyebrow Av, but (much as I dislike his delivery and his 'personna') he actually speaks much that is worth listening to. He's by no means stupid and has a far greater handle on the detail of things than most people who have never listened to him would realise. Needless to say, he's been an easy target for the 'blob' (by which I mean a combination of the establishment, the media, the polity etc) to attack, but for all the accusations made against him it seems that actual material upon which any wrongdoing could be hung is thin on the ground. He remains, some years after his pasting in the MSM and investigations against him, still actually uncharged with any felony. He's the proverbial thorn that pricked the powers that be in the side, and paid the reputational price for doing so. No plaster saint certainly - but no swivel-eyed conspiracy loon (contrary to popular belief) either.

As for the idea that what we are experiencing is randomly born out of societal/technological change, and that venal politicians are just capitalising on it for their own interests......well, there may be some truth in it but I think it's by far from the whole picture.

There is a very good Danish film called Speak No Evil, in which a family on holiday befriend a couple they meet and take up an invitation to visit them on their isolated smallholding for a weekend upon their return. The family are a typically 'modern' in outlook, with the man being of rather weak nature. In contrast their country 'friends' have a sort of earthy confidence about them, which pretty soon morphs into some excessively dominating behaviour, in which they effectively force their city visitors to do and accept things that they could and should have drawn the line at. At the films culmination, just before they are about to be brutally murdered, the man turns his tear-stained face towards his tormentors and says, "Why are you doing this?" The gun toting sadist looks contemptuously down on him and replies, "Because you let us."

I tell this story because in my mind we have become that city dwelling family. And what is done to us is so because we let it.

We have been weakened and thinned, to the point where to dig our heels in and say no, has become more than we are capable of. These venal politicians are far beyond mere opportunists looking for a break. In the case of America we have two effective crime families heading both mainstream parties. The Biden family history is as dark and murky as any traditional mobster's - backroom deals with millions of public money siphoned off into private accounts - all publicly known and tolerated. Trump's history needs no recounting here, and yet he's just been given another 5 years as the commander in chief of the most powerful country in the world.

The deep state and security services run riot across the globe, overturning governments and organising coups with impunity. Crises after crises are manufactured and thrown out in order to discombobulate and confuse us, to keep us vulnerable and afraid, and even though we can see behind the curtain, see the wires and contrivances that keep 'the show on the road', we are powerless in our weakness to do anything about it. Like that family, we just cannot bring ourselves to say no, enough is enough.

I see nothing random in this. I'm reminded of the Jon Ronson series 'Them - Adventures with Extremists' where he finished up his foray into the world of conspiracy theory with the telling comment, "I don't know which is more frightening: that behind the scenes there is some shadowy group that organises everything, makes all of this chaos happen. Or that there isn't."

And talking of extremists, they have become a really useful tool in the hands of the blob, in order to denigrate anyone who dares so much as breathe a question about what is going on. Extreme right. Extreme left. It doesn't matter. The Romanian elections were recently cancelled or delayed because a populist candidate looked like he might win them. We can't have that: he's an extremist! People who voted for the alt-right in Germany were, according to Olaf Scholz, "voting against democracy." How can you even do that? Vote against democracy? If you don't vote for either the sweets or the cakes that mother offers as a choice, then you must by definition, be an extremist. Two party democracies are fantastic polities by which ruling elites can ensure control never slips from their grasp, and yet election after election we buy into it, trotting out like good dogs to mark our X's into the box while our media pontificates with cod-sincerity on how our votes could "change everything."

In the UK today, the entire focus has switched, quick as you like, from Syria, where it looks like things are not going exactly as the hype and excitement following the fall of Bashar Al-Assad would have had us believe. Instead suddenly, everything is about the putrid case of poor little murdered Sara Sharif, no gruesome detail being spared following warnings of 'distressing content ahead'. The almost gleeful presentation of the tragedy to a metaphorically rubber-necking public whose attention can easily be swerved by a lurid presentation of dash-cam footage and taped conversations, as bad as any of those Yorkshire Ripper or Fred West examinations you see on the shelves of cut-price bookstores.

So yes - let's just take a look back at Syria shall we, the Syria that we've just seen of another government in.

Israel are now (having bombed the shit out of everything that could be used as a weapon against them) now reportedly only a few short miles from Damascus. Oddly, not a single shot against their advance has been made against them by the now apparently ruling new conquerors, the HTS. Funny that. You'd think that fundamentalist Islamist terrorist movements might have something to say about Israel advancing deep into their newly gained lands, wouldn't you. But anyway. Now things are starting to look not quite so rosy. Just a little warning was given when I heard one commentator saying that while during the day, people were apparently happy and free to move where they will, at night the atmosphere was apt to become a bit more ominous. Check points were springing up and people being stopped. Evidence that the different groups that have joined in a temporary union to topple Al-Assad are starting to look askance at each other is mounting and trouble between them is only a thin whisker away.

But at home, Deputy PM Angela Rayner is full of praise for the success of HTS. She applauds it. Let's be clear. She supports the violent take over of unpopular regimes by gun-toting jihadists. Odd position, you'd think, for a woman in one of the most despised governments that has ever sat in Westminster, but let that rest. That there's no more liklihood of this turning out well for the benighted people of Syria than there is of her own government turning out well for the people of the UK is by the by. She supports it. Israel will take a swath of Syria for its Greater Israel project. Turkey will take the other half and Syria will be no more, and everyone will be happy. (Nb. Turkey becoming a gas and oil hub for Europe and reducing the latters dependency on Russian energy couldn't have had anything to do with this of course. That would be ridiculous conspiracy thinking wouldn't it.)

And a last comment on the Americans.

I've heard some pretty heavyweight pundits commenting oh how little the American public are allowed to know about what their governments are up to behind the scenes. Judging from what I read over in the Ur-Tank of the 'Governing Council' I'd have to believe this. Not being funny, but the guys need to get out more. What gives in this world is not going to be presented to you wrapped up in a bow - you've got to go out and dig. The main stream media has long abrogated its responsibility as an even presenter of news as a public service. It now serves the requirements of the few and presents a sanitised facsimile designed to maintain the status quo. What content does find its way in between the celebrity and showbiz candyfloss is spun and pinked up in comparable fashion.

And so no. I think to put the events before the movers and shakers is to put the cart before the horse. Okay - I'll buy that the politicians are opportunists - but there's more to it than that. The planning and manipulation goes to a much deeper level than mere skimming for personal gain. Deep plans for our future lie in back of it all. And I suspect that the nature of those plans, if spelled out, would not be to our liking.

Hundreds of tractor driving farmers brought central London to a standstill again yesterday.

Don't suppose any of them will finish up in prison like the climate activists who stopped traffic on London Bridge. Different set of people - landowners vs hippys - you see.

Never let anyone say that the law isn't applied with an even hand in the UK.



Also, I referred above to the sudden switch to the news of the conviction of the parents of murdered schoolgirl Sara Sharif, and the perverse pleasure that the media seemed to get from providing all of the atrocious details of her suffering.

I suggested that the story was a good diversion tactic in terms of deflecting attention from perhaps the Syrian story, which was not unfolding with quite the sweetness and light which our media and government had implied it would.

It occurs that the concentration on the terrible details of the Sara Sharif case might also serve another purpose.

Her parents were of course Muslim Pakistan dual citizens. At a time when anti Israeli feelings are intense and support for the Palestinian cause uppermost, might it have been thought of as a convenient opportunity to give things a nudge in the opposite direction?

I simply can't believe that anyone would have thought that presentation of the horrid aspects of the treatment of this poor child can have served any purpose in terms the public good, and if these are the genuine leanings of the public in terms of interest then I suggest they should not be catered to by the main stream media purely in obeisance to the God of viewing figures.

peter wrote: ↑Thu Dec 12, 2024 7:28 amAnd so no. I think to put the events before the movers and shakers is to put the cart before the horse. Okay - I'll buy that the politicians are opportunists - but there's more to it than that. The planning and manipulation goes to a much deeper level than mere skimming for personal gain. Deep plans for our future lie in back of it all. And I suspect that the nature of those plans, if spelled out, would not be to our liking.

I think you give them too much credit. While those plans may (nay, will), have significant negative consequences for people, Occam's Razor reminds us not to multiple entities unnecessarily. Regardless of how they might be achieved, the intended outcome of even some deep plan is the same...money and power for the few, and to hell with anybody else. I mean, how much deeper is it possible to go?

Terry Pratchett wrote:It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, then what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

--A

I think that 'confirmation bias' is a very real danger one has to work hard to avoid Av, and am absolutely cognisant that it might be figuring way too highly in the conclusions I sometimes jump to when I suspected this or that spin is being put on a given piece of news.

Let's look at the Sara Sharif story.

Fact. Both the BBC and Sky news bulletins of the evening spent much of their broadcasts describing the case in detail, rerunning the footage of the police going up the stairs of the house she was found in, replaying the taped phone call with her father and showing his written message found near her body. The gruesome catalogue of injuries was described in detail - the broken bones and burns, bruises and beatings. The implements of her torture were shown, labled and tagged as presented to the court, metal bars and table legs. Court drawings of her parents shown and descriptions of their demeanour given.

In both cases this coverage took fully the best part of half an hour, for what could have been dealt with in minutes.

This is in no way to reduce the terrible importance of her sad story, but I put it to you that the editorial decision to devote so much coverage to the gruesome aspects of the story was both conscious and deliberate and I ask why?

Possibility 1. That the editorial teams are subject to external influences, and that those influences are aware that the (sad to say) morbid fascination with the macabre that the general population exhibit can be used in order to misdirect their attention away from things that the powers that be would rather that they weren't giving too much attention to. In this case that might have been the events unfolding in Syria (such as the Israeli land-grab, the looting of the central bank, the appearance of the 'black-flag' of Isis, the rumored killings and atrocities that might have already begun etc). Or it might have been a way to 'nudge' sympathy away from the Palestinian cause by reminding the use of a subconscious association of what had happened to Sara, with the fact that her parents were Muslim. Indeed both aims were not mutually exclusive, and the excessive coverage of the Sara story could equally well serve both at the same time.

(As an aside, you might ask, why would our state not want us to be seeing the reality of the Syrian situation? Well, it isn't so difficult a leap to make the connections between ourselves and what has happened in Syria. We (the West) have long been publicly advocating for the fall of Bashar Al-Assad and were heavily involved in the earlier attempts from 2011 forward until 2013 or 14 to unseat him. Turkey as a prominent Nato member has an intimate involvement with the group that now claim control of Syria,and the USA has a similar involvement with a different faction in the north. The preparations for this event could not with absolute certainty been carried out without Western involvement, and proof of this could not be concealed for any length of time. Thus the fall of Assad must be presented as a positive thing, for the good of the Syrian people, and the negative aspects (such as our support/financing/training of an essentially Al-Qaeda/Isis terrorist group in the process) covered up or distracted from.)

But this is the confirmation bias aspect of the question, so okay, let's look at the non confirmation bias, the non-conspiracy orientated reason for the excessive coverage of the Sara killing.

Purely and simply ratings. The turning of our news outlets - including the state run and funded one - into nothing more than viewing figure generating machines. And the turning of the dissemination of news away from the importance aspect of a given story and towards its entertainment aspect. And the content or nature of that entertainment matter mattering not. No matter how base the nature of the latent grotesque and morbid fascination in the public interest it services, the figures will be chased. A modern day alternative to public executions and the burning of nets full of cats (a popular entertainment in medieval times).

So tell me. Which is the case? Do I see wrongly if I suspect that the former is the more probable explanation than the latter. Or is there another explanation. Perhaps it is me that is at fault here? It's me that is excessively sensitive to the lurid detail of the Sara case. That they should be laid out in their full awful detail for public consumption and it is I that should not find this so repellent? That I should be able to listen to the details of the brutal murder of a child without finding the need to cover my eyes and ears almost undeniable.

Truly I have no idea. I'd like to believe my belief in the confirmation bias theory (which would make it not confirmation bias at all of course - just a plain seeing of what other people might have missed) but I'm by no means confident. The second theory - that of the viewing figures explanation - I find just nasty: a revelation of a dirty place we have come to in our society which is worse in some way than just the already nasty truth that we have these fascinations in our nature - that our institutions are now prepared (for money or whatever reason) to pander to them. The third, that it is a fault with me, is one I can live with. I hope that the day never comes that I am a different person, such that a story like Sara's will not make me want to run away and hide. If this makes me different from other people, it's a difference I can live with.

Earlier this year I saw (a couple of times) the extraordinary film The Zone of Interest in which the life and drama of living inside the Hoss household on the perimeter of Auschwitz Birkenau was depicted, and in which a surreal atmosphere of ignoring what was transpiring just a few short feet away on the other side of the fence was maintained, despite the sounds of the nightmare being constantly and readily heard at all times day and night.

Haaretz journalist and author Gideon Levy, speaking from Israel to Owen Jones in a YouTube post, was quick to denounce parallels between what is transpiring in Gaza with the Holocaust (he didn't believe they were either accurate or helpful) but said that the situation in towns and cities nearby did remind him of the film, insofar as life was able to be continued in an oblivious and entirely normal (Western) way, but a few short miles away from where the horrors were proceeding apace behind the wall.

The indifference of the citizens of Israel, he said, to the plight of the Palestinian people beyond the barriers, was almost total and complete. How this could be he struggled to comprehend, but it was he said, a fact nevertheless. He recalled a time when he had been a regular visitor to Gaza, going there by car an hours drive away, on a weekly basis. There was he said, something almost magical about the place - it's absolute difference to the Israel he lived in, a culture rich in Arabic history and resonance, that existed in sharply demarcated contrast, to the westernised existence he was living, his short car ride away. The people he remembered as a wonderfully open and welcoming group, eager to talk and trade and do business, and kind and non judging, despite the already hard conditions of their existence.

This sudden transition from one culture to another is something I have personal experience of. I remember crossing from Algeceras to the North African enclave of Ceuta, and thence over the land border into Morocco, and being staggered by the immediate and extreme change in the culture. Suddenly, in a few short miles, I was in a different, almost biblical, world. I sat in a cafe in the northern town of Chefchaouen and soaked it up, hardly believing I wasn't dreaming. Suddenly people in western dress had been replaced by men in long gowns, the buildings blue and whitewashed, the streets bustling and vibrant - it was indeed, a different world. This must I think, capture something of what Levy speaks of, in his remembrances of the Gaza of old.

Now that is gone forever. The Syrian overthrow has dealt Gaza a deathblow from which it cannot recover. Not that it ever could have anyway, I suppose. But now it is explicit. All that remains to be seen is how Netenyahu will handle his victory. I saw one commentator saying that the only thing that stood between him simply opening the borders at Rafa and driving the two million remaining Gazans into the Sinai was his (minimal) concern as to how this would be perceived by the rest of the world. According to Levy, it would cause no problem within Israel itself, the people being completely inured to the suffering of the Palestinians, no matter what form it came in. Odd that a people so used to having persecution meeted out on themselves could be so indifferent to seeing it heaped out upon someone else. But there you have it.

But this tragic indifference would not, said Levy, be soon forgotten by the world. It would he said, hang over the people of Israel for generations to come - a blight on their future. It's now almost a given that the West Bank will be annexed and settled as well, and with the additional territories it will aquire within what was Syria, it's project for a greater Israel will be that much closer to realisation. The domination of the Middle East by Israel is now a virtual certainty, and no doubt the atmosphere in both Tel Aviv and Washington must be one of deep satisfaction.

Well okay. It is what it is. But history will not forget what has been done here, and neither will the West be allowed to forget the part it has played in the destruction of a people. I will personally never be able to think anything but with disgust on the part which my country has played, and will not be, will never be, alone in this. No politician who has not stood in the House and called this out for exactly what it is - an ethnic cleansing - will ever be seen with anything other than contempt in my eyes. Lower than snake-shit and half as valuable to our country.

Israel has a right to defend itself? I think I've heard that one enough.

Let's have a quick look at the Saturday papers.

A spat has broken out between ex Labour leader Ed Milliband and the current Health Secretary Wes Streeting, over Milliband's 'failure' to back the then PM David Cameron's desire to launch UK air strikes on Syria, back in 2013.Had he done so, says Streeting, the Assad regime could have been brought down years earlier.

As things stood, we bowed out and ultimately Russia came to the beleaguered President's aid, preventing him from falling.

Needless to say, Milliband doesn't agree with Streeting's assessment.

General coverage in most papers of the association of Prince Andrew with some Chinese businessman who has been denied an entry visa to the UK on the grounds of suspicion about his being a spy.

Whether he's thought to be a national security style threat or more of the industrial espionage type, I can't say, and to be frank, I can't be bothered to find out. This is just filler story that has all the elements - giving Andrew a kicking, giving the Chinese a kicking, deflecting attention from the serious issues effecting us (like the warning Putin gave us yesterday about continuing to fire missiles into Russia etc) - of nonsense that I simply can't be doing with. Move on.

The 'i' reckons that smart gadgets are getting more intrusive, telling us that even air-fryers can be used to record our conversations. Why anyone would think to question why an air fryer should be fitted with the capability of recording a conversation beggers me. I mean - seems perfectly reasonable to me. Why wouldn't you want your air fryer recording your conversations. Have you got something to hide?

Ed Milliband, back in the Star for a different reason, reckons that Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch should give sandwiches a chance. Very magnanimous for a man who's career was destroyed by a sandwich, but personally I don't give a flying fuck about Badenoch's food preferences. A good sandwich is a thing of beauty in my mind, but each to his own (or her in Badenoch's case). Still, good to see that the Star remains grounded in its approach to news dissemination and at least I can look at this story without seeing any underlying purpose in its presence. It's no more than a damn good excuse to get that picture of Ed Milliband eating a bacon sandwich onto the front of a paper again, and who can argue with that?

Finally in the Telegraph, Professor Sir John Hardy reckons that Alzheimers drugs should be "prescribed like statins" to people in the UK, to stop them from forgetting to get dressed before they catch the bus into town in the mornings. Well (ala Christine Keeler) he would wouldn't he. I'd like to see his bank statement over the next few months - either that or to have a look at his share portfolio as we speak. If he hasn't got a pecuniary incentive for giving out this recommendation, then I'm a monkey's uncle.

Right, I'm swinging off to bed for a bit more kip and Inshallah, I'll see you tomorrow.

Richard J Murphy is a clever guy.

He's Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a regular YouTube presenter on his own channel.

He has nailed down the dilemma facing Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves in a recent posting and it goes as follows.

She's screwed.

Months before the election people were scratching their heads and asking what Labour's policies were, what they were actually about, and no-one seemed to know. It was put about that the Masterplan must be being kept under wraps, that it would be revealed in due course when Labour eventually secured the election win that everybody knew was coming.

It didn't happen. It turned out that taxation was going to be walloped up - everybody and his mother knew that was an inevitability, come a Tory or Labour win - and the usual stuff was going to be in receipt of increased funding, the NHS, schools, roads and infrastructure, etc, ets, etc, on the back of the growth that Labour was going to create.

Labour knew that it would probably enjoy a post-election honeymoon period in which growth would get a boost by increased consumer spending on the back of a 'feelgood factor' as a result of public optimism about having a new government. Again it didn't happen. Labour were so downbeat, Kier Stamer and Chancellor Reeves so gloomy, that any feelings that we were about to turn a corner were snuffed out like a newborn kitten in a bucket of water. They told us how bleak things looked, how the Tories had left us up shit-creek without a paddle, and proceeded to immediately cut the winter fuel allowance and tell every government department that it had to reduce its spending by five percent over the lifetime of the parliament.

Then came the budget. A tax grab on businesses that threatens to leave them reeling in April, and can do no other than make them pull their horns in and reduce the scale of their operations.

So consumer spending was squashed out. Government spending was reduced (itself a contributory part of growth calculation). And business confidence was crushed. All in a matter of weeks. And now Reeves is "disappointed" that the newly released figures on GDP show no growth. What in the name of God's good earth did she expect?

There is no arguing that growth was flatlining before the Labour Party came to power those seemingly long months ago, but the released figures show absolutely zero trend towards a change of direction, and why would they. Nothing but nothing has been done to stimulate any growth. No inward investment has been drawn toward us - people and places who look to investment like to see a potential return on their dollars and they ain't seeing it here. No increase in trade with the EU can be brokered because Labour are hidebound by their absolute decision that under no circumstances will any of the freedom of movement restrictions of Brexit be relaxed, even for students, and nothing is happening domestically that would in the slightest way encourage anybody to expand and produce more, employ more.

And here's the nub. Without growth, Labour has no money to do any of the things it said it would in its election pledges. Without growth it has nothing to offer whatsoever. Reeves is a busted flush mere weeks into her Chancellorship. And she knows it.

She has absolutely nothing to fall back on and the emptiness of Labour's plans are exposed. Those behind the scenes cunning plans don't exist and they never did. The whole house of cards was based upon the gamble of that post election boom that never happened - because they killed it themselves. And now, like the emporer with no clothes, Reeves stands exposed like Barbara Windsor on the set of Carry on Camping.

That's not to say that there is nothing that she can do. The potential for redistribution of wealth in the UK is significant. The disparity of wealth, of income between the haves and have nots in our economy has become so huge that it is ripe for the plucking. The rich, as Murphy points out, are rich precisely because they don't spend their incomes, their wealth. Take some of that wealth and put it in the hands of the poorer people, and they'll spend it, bringing about some growth just in the so doing.

Or she can double down on spending cuts. That is on another round of austerity. It's already in play with her 'five percent ' instructions, but it could be extended further. What the effect of carving more meat away from the already stripped carcass of our public services would be is anybodies guess (well okay - simply an even faster decline into third world status than is already happening I suppose) - but it could still be done. Ot there's the third option of digging in and burying her head in the sand, and this (in combination with a bit of austerity) is what Murphy thinks she will do. She will, he says, stick to her narrative that all things will come to he who waits, and do nothing. She definitely won't go for wealth redistribution - he says she's way too wealth orientated for that, and having long said that this is effectively the Tory Party Mark II I'd have to agree with him. So pretending that she's got a handle on things and waiting to see what happens (and in this world it could be anything......war is always a possibility and that's always a boost to growth) will be the order of the day. And with Trump looming on the horizon and the Russians and whatnot, there'll always be plenty of other things to blame her failure on when people start asking the awkward questions.

So it's business as usual in declining Britain. Call it managed decline if you want to. I call it a fucking skip fire.

Nice to know that our government is setting up diplomatic contacts with rebranded Al-Qaeda in Syria and sending them money for humanitarian aid, while at the same time stopping winter fuel payments for pensioners in the UK.

Add to this their continued support for the murderous campaign of ethnic cleansing being carried out by the IDF in Gaza and you might see why I question the very legitimacy with which they sit in our parliament.

The ICC has issued arrest warrants for the Israeli leader for putative war crimes committed in Gaza, the evidence of the breaking of international law on an epic scale is overwhelming, and our own government has been complicit, continues to be complicit, in this outrage as I post. As such they place themselves and us as a nation in the direct firing line in terms of any subsequent widening of the net, with regards to collaboration in the crimes, and arraignment therefore in the future.

We do not elect governments in order for them to trash the reputation of this country on the world stage. We do not elect them to support, aid in, or commit crimes against humanity in our names. We do not place these individuals in positions of power in order for them to strike up deals with whatever murderous groupings they see fit, purely in the interests of crushing out the legitimate fight for their rights of a people we so grieviously wronged a hundred plus years ago, when we gave away their lands without so much as a second thought about the consequences we were laying down for history, for the people, and for their descendants.

And so I ask, how and where should this legitimacy be challenged? Is it even possible? We have a Prime Minister and foreign secretary who are both on record as saying that they believe that the witholding of food, water and medicines for the population of Gaza were appropriate tools for use by the Israeli forces in the defeat of Hamas. This was not Israel defending itself: it was collective punishment and illegal under international law. It is enough in itself to render both Stamer and Lammy illegitimate to prosecute their roles as officers of the state. It is time that we turned our attention to the role of our governments, our politicians in the ongoing atrocity of the plight of the Palestinian people, not on the streets where it is so easily twisted by cod accusations of antisemitism and Muslim extremism, but in the Courts where such decisions on international law and legitimacy are made. If necessary to the very United Nations itself.

Surely there must be a machinery in place for representation to be put forward to, when you believe that your government has lost legitimacy? If not, then the term has no meaning does it? Surely if a government is found to be in contravention of international law, then it looses de facto its legitimacy? Isn't it time we started looking to the wider 'Rules based International Order' to bring those guilty of abrogating their responsibilities to us as their electors, to confine their words and actions to those which remain within the bounds of international law as recognised by the leading Courts of the world?

Of course it isn't going to happen. You know that and so do I. If for no other reason than that the people simply aren't that interested in what their representatives get up to. Like sheep, they get out, they vote (a few of them), they forget about it. It's too boring, to dull to compete with whatever garbage they are fixated on on their phones, on Netflix or Prime. The legitimacy, or its squandering thereof by their government, is beyond their thinking capacity. The pain and destruction that we play an absolute role in allowing, if not actively facilitating, is of no interest to them. There's a quote along the lines of all it is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Another that says it isn't evil men that result in genocidal scale atrocities being perpetrated, because their simply isn't enough of them. It's the indifference of the masses that allow such events to occur.

Sure I can do nothing. But let at least these pages record that I wasn't one of the ones who remained silent while my government commited crimes in my name. That I at least cried foul, when those elected to represent me were negligent of their responsibilities to maintain and uphold the honour and rectitude of our country.

It's a weak and pathetic response, ringing through with self-pity and ineffectualness. But it's the best I can muster. I'm not a mover and shaker of this world, but at least allow me the small recognition as being seen as a worm that turned.

This legitimacy thing is complicated.

I suppose in the US where they have a written constitution, what a government may do (and conversely what it may not) is more fixed than here in the UK where we do not.

I've heard it said that a British PM with a good majority in the House of Commons has virtually unlimited power. In a situation such as the present one the failings of this system become manifest. We have no power, except through the ballot box next time round, to exert any real constraint on our government's behaviour. When a politician or political party simply chooses to lie about what it will and won't do in office, then we are powerless to do anything about it. The old excuse of 'circumstances change' covers a multitude of sins and has us over a barrel, like it or not.

But still I wonder how it is that we seem to have taken a step backwards into the bad old days. Days where we looked on with indifference as to what our government was doing, where we turned a blind eye to the slaughter of other human beings in our names. The evidence of the wrong being perpetrated in Gaza is so egregious, so overwhelming, that you'd have thought that we'd be protesting in our millions by every legal means at our disposal, to demand change of our government policy in respect of what Israel is doing.

I see that the Netenyahu government has closed its embassy in Dublin, accusing the Taoiseach and his administration of antisemitism, their support of the Palestinians as reprehensible.

I'd like to quote Taoseach Simon Harris's response, which he began by saying that Ireland had consistently supported Israel's right to defend itself within international law, and describing Netenyahu's decision as "the diplomacy of distraction." He continued

You know what I think is reprehensible? Killing children. I think that's reprehensible. You know what I think is reprehensible. Seeing the scale of civilian deaths we've seen in Gaza. You know what I think is reprehensible. People being left to starve with no humanitarian aid flowing.

How are we unable to vote in a government that will take this kind of moral approach to the worst atrocity of modern times unfolding before our eyes?

Yet our blindness and even willful stupidity on the subject beggars belief. Take the situation in Syria for example. Many and many are the people who would wring their hands over the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, who would give the Palestinians their own state yesterday were it possible, but who simultaneously, with some kind of cognitive dissonance, applaud the take over of Syria by HTS, who our government are now (following the USA poodle like as ever) at pains to strike up diplomatic relations with.

Don't they get it? This is the end for the Palestinians. The two state solution is dead. Face down in the water. The toppling of Assad was never about anything but placing Israel as the apex power in the Middle East and the crushing of the two state solution. Yet people like James O'brien and others who would champion the Palestinians having their own state, see no problem in the chief bulwark of support for the Palestinian cause being swept aside overnight. At the US and Israel's behest. The level of self delusion is incomprehensible. Sure Asad was a bastard - but he was simultaneously the provider of the small chance that the Palestinian people had of realising justice. And now it is gone. And if it weren't for the Americans failing to rein in Israel, which they could do tomorrow if they chose, then it wouldn't have been necessary for the Palestinians to rely on support from such an unpalatable quater.

And now the ethnic cleansing will proceed apace in both Gaza and the West Bank. The pace of settlement will increase, land grabbed by Israel will never be returned (Netenyahu said as much in a speech referring to the Golan a day or two ago) and the plan for the greater Israel will be unstoppable. It remains to seen whether Israel will be emboldened sufficiently to take on Iran, but it must surely be on the cards. America and Israel are effectively joined at the hip,and Iran being the only country left on the infamous 'list of seven' that remains untoppled, it must be a sure-fire bet that its days are numbered. What will the Russians and Chinese do about this? Difficult to say. People are reading all sorts into the failure of Putin to support Assad, little realising that they had long been begging him to get the Syrian house in order (having helped him turn the tide against his being toppled once already). They had become frustrated at his failure to rein in the corruption and chaos in the heart of the Syrian state, and had reached a point where they could not turn away from their commitments in Ukraine in order to provide him with support that would probably have been wasted anyway.

But all of that is academic. The situation is what it is.

But here's a little conundrum for the Stamer government, and shrewish little Home Secretary Evette Cooper in particular to think about.

Shamima Begum.

Now we are effectively hand in glove with the guys that she ran off to join in Syria (or was trafficked as a minor to do so, depending on how you see it), doesn't that mean that she's now free to return to the United Kingdom and reclaim her citizenship (which in my opinion should never have been stripped from her in the first place). It looks like this could actually happen - Borders Minister Dame Angela Eagle has demured from saying that this will not be allowed, so it seems that at least some consistency on the part of the UK government is being maintained.

But that's for the future. Me, I'm not holding my breath for anything good coming out of the rising fortunes of the Western hegemony in the Middle East once more. Seems that the Arabs will remain puppets of the West for the foreseeable future, and the expansion of Israel will continue apace choose whether they like it or not. There is great similarity between Trump and Netenyahu. In both cases they don't run for power - they run to keep ahead of going to prison. There's a new film out on Netenyahu's corruption called The Bibi Files in which the strategy of the Israeli PM is laid bare, ultimately leading to the response to October 7th which came, almost as a gift beyond asking for this deplorable man to exploit. It is unmissable viewing by all accounts, and I shall certainly be looking out for it.

There has been much speculation about how the Assad regime in Syria crumbled in such spectacular fashion, and the story behind it is complex in the extreme.

But it essentially comes down to three things.

I'm going to outline what they were in a simple and straightforward fashion, simply because you will not be able to find this done anywhere else. It's taken hours of listening to various commentators, all of whom presented parts of the picture, but none whose assessment encompassed the whole.

The first strand of the collapse of Syria - because this is more than the collapse of the Assad regime itself - was the hollowing out of the economy over many years by the sanctions imposed by America, the 'theft of its oil and agricultural revenues by the Kurdish and American presence in the wealth producing regions of the country, and the resultant failure of the administration to be able to meet any of the financial obligations (such as proper and prompt payment of its service and civil-service personnel) that support the maintenance of a stable state. This undermining of the fundamental structure of the state apparatus and the military hierarchy left the country weakened and vulnerable to collapse, as happened in conjunction with the other two elements. It should also be noted that the failure to pay the army officers and enlisted men proper wages (they were being paid a fraction of that being earned by their opponents in the Turkish army and even that of the 'terrorist' fighters that finally overthrew them) left them vulnerable to bribery - a situation where they were effectively just paid to throw down their arms.

The second strand in the collapse was the support, financing, arming and training of the irregular militias that ultimately came together to execute the uprising. This was carried out in the main by Turkey (with the sanction of the US) but also by the US itself in a different region of the country. If I have it correctly, the Turkish efforts were chiefly in the region around Aleppo known as the Aleppo governate. The US activities were in and around the oil rich regions, and the rebel groupings they trained were not the same ones as the HTS brigades being prepared by the Turks. It had not been uncommon in fact for the different groupings trained by different outside interests to actually be fighting against eachother, never mind the Syrian army, such was the confused state of the conflict of the ten plus year civil war. In fact, ridiculous as this sounds, one commentator said that there was even a point where Pentagon trained fighters were pitted against a different grouping trained by the CIA. Nevertheless, these various groupings were ultimately cobbled together with sufficient cohesion that the recent uprising could be coordinated. HTS undoubtedly forms the biggest and most organised of these factions, and it is doing much work to shed its former uniform of an Al-Qaeda/Isis affiliated offshoot. It is this grouping that the Turks have obviously put most effort into promoting and building up, and they have now clearly stepped into the dominant role in the country. Whether this will last or whether the fragile 'peace' will shatter and descend into chaos is anybodies guess. I'd go for the latter, but I'm ever the pessimist (and I've got the Iraqi, Afghanistan and Libyan examples to back me up).

The third reason for the collapse was down to the Assad regime itself.

There was a formal agreement between Russia and Turkey over their respective Syrian policies and unfortunately I forget the name that it was given. Needless to say, it was designed to support the Assad administration who the Russians had so recently prevented from being overthrown by the Obama instigated insurgency of 2011 (a covert operation run by the CIA if I have it correctly). But despite Assad managing to retain power, he did not control the entirety of the country and was being crucified by the loss of revenue from the oil and agriculture rich parts of Syria, as well as the American imposed sanctions. Over the years he was offered financial assistance, both from Russia and Iran, but refused these offers in view of the conditions that might come - would definitely come in fact - alongside the acceptance of them. All of the while, the American supporting Arab states of Saudi Arabia and Quatar (and the Emirates I believe as well) were chipping away at Assad, telling him that the way out of his economic woes was to turn to the West, to eschew his alliance with Russia and Iran, stop allowing the use of Syria as a conduit of arms from Iran to Hezbollah and Hamas, and to embrace America and Israel as his allies.

By accounts he had resisted these overtures for years, but still trying to maintain Syrian independence by not allowing himself to become too close to either Iran or Russia. Then suddenly, not so long ago, he began to waver. The promises of the Arab states began to look more enticing, the worse his economic situation became, and he began to talk to them with a serious intention of switching allegiances. This effectively sealed his fate in respect of either Iran or Russia coming to his aid and the Turks saw their opportunity and took it. The rag tag of fighters cobbled together included allsorts - Ukrainian drone operators, Uyghurs from central Asia, multiple factions of Islamist fighters from across the region and the large contingent from the failed caliphate of Isis. But together, with Turks and quite likely a good bit of support from American and Israeli air cover, they pulled it off. The Russians will be furious with the Turks, but the latter, still smarting from their recent refusal of membership at the hands of the BRICS summit in Kazan in Russia, have clearly decided that it is in alignment with Israel and the West that their interest lies. This could however be tricky. The Kurdish territory in Syria will remain a bone of contention for them, and they will not happily sit back and watch the Kurds retain it (since it would form the nucleus of a Kurdish state run by the PKK which would ultimately go after territory which is currently part of Turkey, and this, up with they would not put!). But would the Americans tolerate the Turks driving out the Kurdish forces, with whom they have deep ties (since the Kurds were key to the defeat of Isis and have also been key American allies in Syria itself. Trouble quite possibly brewing there then.

And Israel tied together with the Turks? Pragmatically you'd have to question how long such an alliance could hold together. Already Israel is pushing its luck, grabbing territories including Mount Hermon, the highest point in Syria and a valuable strategic asset from its dominant position on the Syrian-Lebanese border. The HTS leader is already showing signs of frustration with Israel and one also has to wonder how comfortable Israel will feel with a hardline Islamist state on its doorstep. Again, you'd have to have almost Pollyanna levels of optimism not to forsee the potential for trouble there.

Anyway. That's about it. This breakdown might not be correct in every detail, but in the main it will suffice. It pretty much sums up how it was that the order of the Middle East was overturned (to everyone's suprise) in a few short days. Turkey didn't expect the Syrian army to fold as it did. In likelihood, they expected at best their forces to gain some territory and weaken Assad further. They can never have expected the complete implosion and deflation of the state as occurred. It's even questionable now if Syria will continue as a single unitory state. One commentator said that Israel will want to see it broken down on ethnic and religious lines into a number of smaller statelets. Christian, Druse, Islamic groupings, each with their own designated territory. This would serve two functions. Firstly they'd be easier to dominate. And secondly, it would take the spotlight off Israel as being the only unicultural, religious based state of the region.

Who knows. Could happen. A case of watch this space.

(Edit: As an aside, I'd have to add that the timing of the uprising with the Israeli ceasefire in Lebanon cannot have been a coincidence in the Turks decision to mount the offensive, and this also cannot have been done without Nato approval (de facto US approval). Also the involvement of American and Israeli air support shows beyond doubt that they were at least 'in the loop' if not the driving forces behind the uprising when it happened. Everything I've said about how it happened so quickly - those three elements working in tandem - doesn't take away one jot from the underlying fact that the overthrow of Assad was a longterm American/Israeli goal, and this remained the dominant reason why Turkey was allowed to pursue this path to its conclusion (the routing of the Kurdish forces from their Syrian territories being one of their chief objectives).)

Wow - that was a bit of a long haul (I've tried to edit it today to make it more readable), but in essence it is probably as close to the truth of the situation as you are likely to get.

Remember: three strands. 1. The hollowing out of the economy by Western sanctions and the theft of resources. 2. The financing, training and equipping of rebel groupings within non-Assad held territories within Syria by the Turks, the US and the UK. 3. The refusal of Assad to accept fully the support of Iran and Russia in recent years, and his beginning to look at offers being proffered by the gulf states in terms of switching allegiances. Finally add the opportunism of Turkey in its desire to see the Kurdish territories within Syria cleared from its border and the timing of the Israeli-Lebanon ceasefire.

Enough said.

-----0-----

Neoliberalism isn't working is it?

Over the decades since Regan and Thatcher introduced the ideology that the market knows best and can always provide services more efficiently than the state, we've seen declining services, declining living standards, and declining wages and working conditions across the greater number of our populations.

At the same time we've seen the wealth of a small section of society increase beyond all proportion, to the point of almost meaningless levels at its upper ends. (Elon Musk, to cite just one example, has seen his wealth increase by over a hundred billion dollars since Donald Trump was elected.)

Yet our new Labour government is as wedded to the ideology as ever in as gross a subversion of the original reason for the Party's establishment as ever there was.

Labour: the party of the working man. Formed to look after his interests in a world dominated by capital. To fight for his wages, his working conditions, his pension. Labour: now champion of capital and wealth, and indistinguishable from the Conservative Party that traditionally held that role from time immemorial.

And conditions get worse and worse. And the wealthiest in our societies get richer and richer. And we watch as an election is fought between two parties between whom you couldn't slip a sheet of tissue paper, and who both espouse exactly the same policies of neoliberalism that have brought us to the very pass we find ourselves in, with no credible alternative option in sight.

And we wonder why the country is turning to the far-right alternatives of the Reform Party (or the Afd in Germany, or the National Rally in France, because the same phenomenon exists there as well) as an alternative. Where else is there for people to turn that does not follow the neoliberal doctrine? There is no social democratic alternative from the left. No democratic socialist option. Only the far right offers anything other than simply more of the same. More of exactly the same policies that people have watched erode their lifestyles and life-chances for decade heaped upon decade.

It's absolutely critical that the left get its house in order in this country: we are sunk without it. Either that or we watch as a far-right party takes power, either in the form of an Elon Musk financed Reform Party, ot a Conservative Party shifted way to the right of anything we have ever seen before. Because the neoliberal policies of this lot currently in power have nothing to offer us. Nothing except further eroding of everything we work for, everything we dream of for our children.

We don't need a Kier Stamer who sits further to the right of Tony Blair when he came to power - further to the right, some say, of even David Cameron. We need a new Labour Party under a new leadership. A social democratic Labour Party that has the original purpose of the party still firmly fixed in its mind. Not a New Labour, but a True Labour.

It's a real hodge-podge of news today, some of it in the papers, some conspicuous by its absence.

I don't see any mention of Trump's refusal to lift the 10 million dollar bounty on the HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharra (formerly known as Abu Mohammed Al Jolani - take your pick; it'll be Jolani if he starts being a naughty boy and goes back to his old head-chopping tricks, ot Sharra if he can be westernised and gotten into a suit). Neither is their mention of the Trump speech in which he reiterates his insistence that the Ukrainian war must end.

I suppose that neither of these things chime with the UK government position that HTS must now be dealt with and that the meatgrinder in Ukraine must be fed new fodder daily ad infinitum until either Russia is defeated all the Ukrainian people are dead.

Interestingly as an aside, the BBC website is beginning to climb down from the ridiculous euphoric response to the fall of Bashar Al-Assad and actually get real about what has replaced him. Chaos. There are worrying signs that even while UK diplomats are over there breaking bread with HTS, the latter are beginning to show their teeth as the hardline Islamists they are. al-Sharra recently refused to have his picture taken with a young Syrian girl until her head was covered and there are disturbing reports of calls for revenge against the ex Syrian army members from his more hardline associates grumbling in the background. Also reports of increased Daesh activity and a strong possibility that thousands of IS fighters held in Syrian jails and camps will soon be freed, not by HTS itself, but by IS supporting factions who helped in the regime change.

Why the BBC is using its website to bring about this subtle shift in the tone of its coverage is interesting. Is it being instructed to do so by a government that is trying to cover all of the bases. Or has the Corporation just seen that the writing is on the wall and that descent into chaos in Syria is inevitable? And it doesn't want to look stupid in the light of its nieve coverage in the first heady days of the overthrow (when it was obvious to anyone with a brain that what had replaced Al-Assad was going to be a major step back towards Islamic fundamemtalism, whatever else it was. The presentation of HTS as a moderate grouping was just plain silly).

Anyway let's move quickly on.

The sentencing of the defendants in the awful Gisel Pelicot case obviously takes center stage and is predictably being used in the Telegraph to take a swipe at France and its "ingrained misogyny". Never mind the woman and what she's been through eh Telegraph? Stick to the program of getting a jab in at the French.

What else? Israel has had a pop at the Yemen with the third lit of air-strikes it has carried out this year? Striking power plants and whatnot in that country is about as useful as swatting a rhinoceros with a lettuce leaf in order to get at the lice in its hide. These guys live in air-strikes. They can't sleep without them going on outside.

Zelensky saying in the FT that without US military aid, Ukraine is screwed. I'd say (personally) that with it, it's screwed. He acknowledges what we all know, that without the USA Nato is nothing. The EU cannot begin to supply the Ukrainian needs in terms of supplying its war effort. I agree with Trump. The killing must stop and the talking must begin. I said so at the beginning before 600,000 Ukrainians were dead, before the Russians had seized great swathes of Ukrainian territory. I say it again now.

Peter Mandleson touted as UK Ambassador in Washington. Trump and Mandleson. There's a combination to turn milk sour if ever there was one. Perhaps the Times is just trying to piss Farage off (though I suppose as a sitting MP, the latter would now be excluded from that job). Incidentally, Andrew Marr ran a piece on YouTube asking if Farage could be the next PM. Not likely, but neither impossible. He's a damn site closer than he was 12 months ago, and with Elon Musk's backing (and money).......

And finally, a chart topping parody of the band Mud's It'll be Lonely This Christmas, restyled as 'It'll be freezing....." is being blacklisted from BBC radio playlists. A pointed swipe at the government's decision to cut the winter fuel allowance for pensioners, the BBC as the state organ of communication is having none of it. Because you buy the single doesn't mean we have to play it, is clearly their attitude. Okay - I didn't like the song anyway and I surely don't want to listen to it beaten to death for the next thirty years as well. And exactly how much time do you think I spent listening to BBC radio.......

American participation in the training, equipping and financing of irregular forces that participated in the overthrow of Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad puts the final nail in the coffin of the idea of its being the 'world policeman' dedicated to the rule of international law and the primacy of the rules based international order.

On the contrary, looking at the list of countries in whose internal affairs the US has involved itsel, and which have descended into chaos as a result, it becomes clear that far from being the said protector of order, the country has been and remains a very menace to any attempts at establishing international cooperation to ensure a better and safer world for us all to coexist in.

Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sudan, Ukraine and now Syria (and that's making no mention of the scores of countries whose internal politics have been interfered with via the covert meddling of the cia).....the list goes on showing that the West (and this essentially means America, for when did any other country have any real say in decision making vis-a-vis Western foreign policy making) has become the Lord of Misrule and Chaos in its actions on the World stage.

Disagree?

The United Nations. The International Court of Justice. The International Criminal Court. When these bodies make decisions that America agrees with, they are fine and get full and vocal support. (eg. When Vladimir Putin is branded a criminal, then the authority of the court must be respected.) When America doesn't agree, for example in the similar case of Benjamin Netenyahu, then the Court's are biased, ridiculous, have no jurisdiction and can be ignored. The rules based international order is for other people, not it.

So as spreaders of international confusion and turmoil, destabilisers of peace in order to maintain it's hegemony, and wilful ignorers of the very machinery of the international rules based order when the decisions made do not suit it, how then can we see America and its influence on the Western liberal order, as anything other than pernicious, and view that country as anything other than an agent of chaos in the modern world.

Donald Trump is calling for the countries of the West to up their defence spending to five percent of GDP. He'll settle for 3.5 they say. To what end? To participate in sabre rattling and actual conflict where this proves insufficient, in order to bully and throw weight around in a world that has no place for it. To deal with manufactured threats about bogeymen that do not exist: a Russia bent on marching westwards through the capitals of Europe; a China whose sole purpose is to see the entire world subjugated and sinicised in its own image. It's all nonsense. The world has moved on and has neither need nor place for such antiquated perceptions of geopolitical relations. This looking at the world through the barrel of a gun is a relic of the past, and yet America cannot get beyond it.

And this is why we must disassociate ourselves from it. Better if it does retreat into isolationism, and we take our place alongside Europe in forging relationships with a world ready to move on from suspicion and fist-waving.

The piles of bodies grow ever higher in Ukraine, in the Middle East. They threaten to grow exponentially in both regions as the joined at the hip policies of Israel and America become reality. And we trot, poodle like, behind them. I saw a left wing Jewish academic the other day saying that Margaret Thatcher had a real sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people - and this was no small concession from an individual of his background. Would that our current leadership could summon up such independence of thought, for she would have been in no illusions as to the nature of what we in the so called liberal West have become and what our relationship with America going forward should be.

I have fond memories of my childhood Christmases, in which my family gathered together for as traditional a get-together as could be imagined in the beautiful rural setting of the Cornish countryside.

But I cannot pretend that even back then, some sixty years ago, there was much actual religious thinking behind our activities.

We might have made a passing glance at a carol service on the television on Christmas morning as we passed, but we certainly none of us attended 'midnight mass' (with the exception of somewhat later, when I have a vague recollection of going to one very drunk after falling out of a public house). But as a child - no, never.

Now as an old man, I'm saddened by this. I wish I had a memory of what Christmas was really supposed to be about to look back on. I'm guessing that to previous generations the nativity would have featured largely in their celebration of the day, and I imagine it would have been the much richer an experience thereby. I'm not a deeply religious man even now, but the total and complete coopting of Christmas by the commercial interests of the nation I find something distasteful about. How can an advent calander have not a single reference to the nativity, and still qualify as an 'advent' product? The clue's in the name. It's about the advent of Christ. Yet we sell dozens of them, all different shapes and sizes, with never a picture of a single donkey, a cradle or stable scene, a wise man, to be seen. It's just a shame is all. I can't say particularly why - it just seems that way to me.

I'm not going down the 'Christmas is too commercialised' route here (it is though). It's more that we have somehow....lost something..... Something that was in a background sort of way, quite lovely. Certainly reassuring and in some way a sort of anchor, a grounding in our lives, that made us who we were. We didn't go to church, and we still did the occasional bad thing - but we were Christian, and when the chips were down that defined us. When the chips were down, we'd do the right thing.

And it isn't like that anymore is it? (Or at least it doesn't seem that way to me.)

Now, we'll look to our own interest and devil take the hindermost. We still give to the various appeals that the BBC throw out - Children in need, Comic Relief, that sort of thing. But only because we're too shallow to resist the 'herd instinct' demand made on us by our ever incessant media - the glitzy glam of be involved today and move on tomorrow (to I'm a Celebrity, or Strictly, or whatever the next tv 'event' is. When it comes to the suffering of people that we ourselves could influence, that we could exert pressure on our administrations to change their behaviour over, we have no interest. It's dull and we want none of it.

It's like the Gordon Gekko mentality of greed is good has taken root, somewhere deep within our souls. Not even greed per se. More....a sort of venal indifference. A shallow self-obsessed narcissism that puts the 'I' and 'me' always at the front of the queue.

I don't know: maybe it was always like this, but I just didn't see it? Or maybe the 'rose tinted glasses' of hindsight are fooling me into a memory that just wasn't. But even if this is true, then at least I know that my vision of the way things were is better. And that in itself gives me something to strive for. It's late in the day in my case, but hey, better late than never. I can't say that I'm going to start going to church or to begin running marathons for charity. But at least I can start inside my own head, by trying to give the better part of my nature a leg up. It's that old adage: inside every man are two wolves. The wolf of goodness and the wolf of the bad. The question is, which one will you feed?

The other day I was listening to a track on YouTube - a beautiful song I'd not heard in a long time. One of the comments was from a guy who's mother had taken her own life and he was listening to the song in her memory. There were thousands of replies from total strangers responding in sympathy to his loss. Total strangers, en masse, moved by nothing other than shared humanity to reach out and touch.

Thus can one's faith in humanity be restored. We are all still in there and that's a queue we should all strive to put ourselves at the front of.

The rise of Reform UK as a political force in the UK is one of the big political stories of the last 10 years.

Essentially a right wing populist party, it was founded in 2018 as the Brexit Party, advocating at the time for a no-deal exit from the EU. This having been achieved (though more by virtue of Boris Johnson's involvement in negotiation of the exit deal than by any input from the Brexit Party itself) it still saw a role for its continued existence, insofar as monitoring the progress of Brexit and prevention of any 'slipage' back into a closer relationship with its old 'enemy' the European Union.

Always something of a single personality driven entity, the leading voice has been Nigel Farage who, credit where credit is due, must be considered to be the single most powerful driving force behind the entire project for leaving the European Union. A gifted speaker with a singular knack for taking the rhythm of the 'popular national pulse' (as opposed to the Liberal establishment intelligentsia pulse, if you get me - the two are rarely in step with each other) Farage, despite his undeniable influence on the course of the nation's modern history, has been repeatedly sidelined and kept away from the centre of the political establishment, only in the last election finally securing a seat in the House of Commons as a sitting MP.

Having finally on his 7th attempt secured this platform, his political star began to immediately rise. Reform UK, commonly abbreviated to simple Reform, had secured only 5 seats in the election earlier this year, but had come close second in some 90 others. They had secured some 15 percent of all votes cast in the election, but in the first past the post system we operate, this had translated into only the small number of seats noted. Not to be daunted however, Farage entered parliament claiming victory for his up and coming party, and noting that the wide spread nature of his vote share provided a solid launch pad for a real strike at the two-party monopoly that has held sway in British politics for over a hundred years. Next time, said Farage, will be something else!

And it appears that he might have some serious backing on this front. For none other than the disruptor-in-chief of the US political system, billionaire Elon Musk, has apparently set his sights on UK politics. Our system allows for political donations only to be made from individuals resident in the UK - but does allow businesses registered in the UK from the point of view of profit declaration to make payments of this kind. Thus it would be simplicity itself for Musk to get around the legislative restrictions on political donations and, should he choose, make significant contributions to Farage's Reform UK.

And this, if Farage is to be believed, is exactly what he intends to do. The two were photographed together at Trump's Mar-a-Lago beach resort home recently and seem to have hit it off at once. Both disruptors, both heavily right-wing in their political leanings, they have much in common, and one cannot be suprised that flush from his success in the American political scene, the world's richest man might not view a foray into UK politics as a game that he might enjoy. Albeit that he's going to be somewhat busy in the US in the coming months, having been named as likely to enter the Trump administration in some capacity or other, he might still want a bit of r and r on the side and as I say, the UK as his personal political playground away from the USA might well appeal to him. He's child enough to see politics as an entertainment toy for himself rather than a deadly serious business which effects the lives of millions and within which every decision counts. His only interest in the USA will be what is in the interest of Elon Musk, and as this will tie in nicely with Donald Trump (who's only interest will be that which is good for Donald Trump). Being as how their individual interests (ie making more money) are aligned and affected in the same way by any given piece of legislation, they will have no problem agreeing exactly what should be done to secure these ends ,and you can be sure it will involve reductions in taxes.

Things in the UK will be somewhat different for Musk. He's fallen foul with Kier Stamer - the two exchanged insults during the election campaign and Musk has claimed that the UK is nearly a "tyrannical state" akin to the Soviet Union of old. He's traded insults with the PM and has said that the UK is near "civil war". He'd dearly love to exert his disruptive effect to its maximum potential within the UK - simply because he can. And if it throws shit in the face of Kier Stamer at the same time, we'll so much the more fun it will be. He's a child looking for entertainment by pulling the wings off the British fly.

And he's got people rattled. No doubt about it. For the first time the political establishment is starting to realise that a Farage shaped wolf is circling around their cosy clubhouse, and this time it's looking to have clout. Even complacent establishment commentator Andrew Marr posted an upload on YouTube suggesting that a Farage Prime Ministerial term was a rising possibility. And it is a given here just as in the US, that money buys political power. And in today's press Reform treasurer Nick Candy (another billionaire as it happens) claims that Reform has a number of donation ready billionaires in the pipeline, all raring to unleash a tsunami on the established British political system.

So things are looking 'interesting'. And you know what the old Chinese adage - the one that isn't actually Chinese at all - says about politics being interesting. When it comes to politics, interesting ain't good.

I'm finding it harder and harder to dredge stuff out of the news than I find interesting. And that's strange because (to continue a theme from yesterday) we surely live in interesting times.

Today it's all about the economy. Growth flatlining, the Chancellor saying that it's a long game (what about all those election promises to have the fastest growth in the G7 Rachel?) - you know, the same old story slubbered up from some figures from the Office for National Statistics, some commentary from the Confederation of British Industry or from Paul Johnson, whoever the fuck he is (the head of some economic think tank actually).

And something about a law suit between two characters, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. I don't know - apparently they're actors and he tried to slip it to her on set or something. Sounds like a dog bites man story to me. Who the fuck are these people anyway? What have they ever done that I should know them? I watch films all the time and I've never heard of them.

Similarly Gavin and Stacey. Gavin and Stacey? Who the fuck are they? I'm guessing it's a tv show that I've never bothered with (being as how I don't bother with any tv shows), but from the media footprint they have you'd think they'd just been voted in to replace Charles and Camilla on the Buck House thrones. Which incidentally I've seen.....(gaudy).

What else. King's Christmas message blahdy blah. Peace on earth and unity and hope etc etc. Heard it all before. Scientists seem suprised to discover that we think at only a fraction of the speed at which computers process information. Yes dears; take this on board. They're computers - machines processing bits of information (just actually bits....you know - on/off bits). We're humans - using brains. Flesh and blood. Thinking. Using (get this - I'll say it slowly) words. Woorrddss. They take time to use - even if you are only thinking with them. Mystery solved: now start doing something useful like curing cancer or explaining how an entire nation can be gotten to vote for an orange fuckwit.

7 people in 10 (we're told in the Mirror) want a bank holiday to remember the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war. No, 7 in 10 people just want a bank holiday. They don't give a fuck for the reason. In University Challenge recently, someone answered the question, "Which airforce hero led the defence of Britain against the luftwafa in the Battle of Britain", and the answer given was General Haigh. Not being funny, but most young people learn all they know about the two world wars from bastardised versions as presented in the recent film Blitz. In this travesty, the British men are without exception presented as racist bully's. The women and non-whites people are all good and kind. It's such a twisted and simply wrong representation of how things were (when most people had never even met a coloured person, and if they did were far more likely to treat them with polite interest than anything else). The people of this country refused to adopt the segregation rules that the American forces officers said should be maintained in UK public houses, as they still were in the States. That our young people will take their understanding of who we are from this twisted version of the truth is depressing. The director should be ashamed of himself.

And lastly the Star reckons the internet could crash on Christmas day with all the traffic of people streaming and downloading the crap on the tv. Good riddance to it I'd say. I'm addicted to it as badly as anyone else, but at least I'm aware of how unhealthy it is for us. Half the people you meet can't maintain interest in anything that lasts longer than a couple of minutes; they simply can't hold attention on anything for any greater length of time, unless it's a film or other entertainment product. Serious long term thinking is beyond them. And rabbit holes! Don't even get me started. I had a conversation with a family member yesterday who believed that nothing but nothing wasn't AI generated false news. He'd gotten this as a takeaway from listening to Jo fucking Rogan and didn't even get the irony of that situation.

God help me and Happy Christmas to you all!

peter wrote: ↑ God help me and Happy Christmas to you all!

Well, He won't, but merry Christmas nonetheless.

--A