What Do You Think Today?

Free, open, general chat on any topic.

Moderators: Orlion, balon!, aliantha

User avatar
wayfriend
.
Posts: 20957
Joined: Wed Apr 21, 2004 12:34 am
Has thanked: 2 times
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by wayfriend »

peter wrote:Harry, the fucking idiot, either was too stupid to think further than the use of the salacious tittle tattle as a means to sell more copies of his book, or he just didn't give a fuck about any feelings, or indeed repercussions it might cause to the woman.
Boy, that's a lot of spin. Does your knee-jerk reaction to disparaging anything Harry does go so far as to defend rapists? Yeesh.
.
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

Rishi Sunak will be less than pleased to see Boris Johnson popping up again in the papers today, saying that he is "sure" that Sunak and Hunt will make the necessary reductions in tax upon which the Tory chances of winning the next election are dependent.

Johnson knows full well that the PM and Chancellor's policy of high tax and low spending is about as popular as a fox in a chicken coop with both his backbenchers and their traditional voter base, and he is simply rubbing it in, in order to chip, chip, chip, away at Sunak's position, in the hope of brining him down prior to the next election.

But Johnson, irritant that he is, will most probably have to take a backseat to Sunak's more pressing problems as he moves beyond his '100 days' watershed and into the period when his 'honeymoon ' (if he ever really had one - its been a pretty horrible 100 days) is well and truly over.

You might think that the current wave of industrial unrest would be looming large in his thoughts as he considers his next moves as PM, but I don't think so. He is making good capital with his voter base in their seeing him as (like Margaret Thatcher before him) 'standing up to the unions' - probably the only place where he is succeeding to please them - so he won't see any reason to change his hands-off approach to involvement with the disputes (or on the face of it anyway).

No, his major tasks in the weeks and months ahead will be to try to get beyond the factional fighting within the parliamentary party (because the Tories are, as Labour, essentially a coalition of a number of different parties with a common basic belief, but not much commonality beyond that) that is undermining his ability to do anything. As the next election draws closer his position may become more assured, but currently he can neither move this way nor that, for fear of starting a revolt that might bring him down. The major fault line is of course his tax policy, but there are many others, not least of which his Brexit stance.

In this respect he has a serious issue working its way to the fore as we speak, in the form of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill which is currently in its report stage, prior to its third reading in the House of Lords. Following this, it will return for passage through the Commons before being signed off by the King.

The bill, which essentially gives the Commons the power to change specific aspects of the Northern Ireland Protocol (but doesn't actually do so in and of itself) is contentious. Some in Europe claim that the simple act of passing the bill is illegal itself, under international law, simply because it allows for the unilateral breaking of an international treaty. Others say that only at the point where changes to the protocol itself were made, would any law be broken. On the UK side, our government argue that under an article within the protocol itself, they are entitled to act pertaining to some particular consequence that was unseen at the time of drawing up of the treaty, and are not thus breaking the law at all. Its a pretty thin defence at best, and for other reasons does not stack up (briefly because the article referred to refers to small and limited changes being allowed, but what we are proposing would be large and widespread), but be that as it may.

No. One of the most pressing of the problems that this raises for Sunak concerns not this potential legal confrontation with Europe (though this is very much on the cards), but rather than problems in terms of the domestic governance of the Province that it causes.

Devolved power in Northern Ireland hangs upon the sharing of power between the unionist and republican groupings that fought so bitterly during the times of the troubles. It has been one of the huge successes of the Good Friday Agreement, that the various factions of the struggles were brought together under one roof at Stormont, in a power sharing arrangement that saw an end to the bombings and killings.

Now the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill would seem to be threatening that hard won peace. Basically, since the Johnson withdrawal agreement was signed with EU, there has been an effective border down the Irish Sea which, according to the Unionists, puts their trading with the mainland at a disadvantage and effectively stymies free movement of goods between the province the rest of the UK. This, they say, weakens their link with the mainland, and up with it they will not put. So in order to pacify them, the government has come up with the Protocol Bill in order that the checks on goods which the Protocol demands, may be halted. This has however pissed of the republican side of the NI devolved government, principally Sinn Fein who recently won the NI elections to the chamber to currently nold the seat, who say that the Bill would weaken their links with the South as border checks would inevitably then, have to be done when goods pass from the North to the South. They will not, they say, continue to sit in Stormont, if the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill is passed. The unionist side, led essentially by the DUP, say for their part, that if the Bill is not passed, they will not continue to sit in Stormont - and so power sharing in the province, the lynchpin upon which the Good Friday Agreement hangs, is effectively at an end.

This is the problem which Sunak faces - the legacy of the Boris Johnson withdrawal agreement which everyone and his mother saw coming - that he might be the PM in situ when the troubles return to the province of Northern Ireland.

It's a prospect to turn your face ashen even if you aren't the PM. God knows ows how you sleep at night if you are. The piecemeal unravelling of the Northern Ireland peace process and a return to the troubles. Boris Johnson's legacy to Rishi Sunak. That is the barrel of the shotgun that Sunak is staring into. He has cause to be afraid. Very afraid.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

As Sunday Telegraph leader stories go, the Liz Truss relaunch piece is about as whining an example of snivelling self-pity as even that server up of self-serving tosh and right wing propaganda could slubber up.

As always expected, Truss has at last crawled out from under the rock beneath which she has been hiding, blaming everybody but herself for the debacle that was her 44 days in office. She wasn't given a chance. Nobody told her that her policy of unfettered borrowing and give away to the richest people in the land would spook the markets to the point of threatening another 2008 style banking crisis (let alone leave millions of Brits struggling to pay their mortgages and the housing market on the verge of collapse) - and even if this was so, it was failure of nerve and support that drove her out of office before her policies had time to take effect. Yes, she had made some mistakes - minor miscalculations that would or could have been evened out - but she was never given a chance!

Yes, yes, yes, Liz. We know. It's everybody's fault going right back to the teacher who tied your laces on your first day at school, but you took no part in it. And as for what you think of what is happening right now - well that gets a line or two of uninspired repetition of what everybody else is saying, and then back to the key point (watch my mouth) ....It's....Not.....My.....Fault!

And the reason that the Telegraph chooses to entertain this self pitying drivel (aside from the fact that they backed her from the start and were the loudest of cheerleaders for her kamikaze mini-budget before it went tits up like a sow at farrowing time) - they know that their readership always wanted Truss over Sunak, always wanted her tax cuts on their incomes, and see her as the best chance of undermining him now, before he gets into electioneering mode and becomes unshiftable. They don't realistically expect Truss to return as PM or anything, they just want a focus for anti-Sunak coalescence within Westminster and are prepared to accommodate her attempts to rewrite her historical legacy (Liz of the 44 days, who like Lady Jane Gray before her, was cruelly done by) in attempting to facilitate this.

Sunak, for his part is not lying back. He knows that he's as popular as dog crap, as far back on the ropes after 100 days as most PM's are after ten years, and has got zilch going for him. That is except the one thing that can always be relied upon to draw the Tories and racists into the Conservative ballot booth lager - immigration!

So there it is, in the Murdoch owned Sunday Times, regular as clockwork, "65,000 immigrants coming to these shores this year alone!" And Sunak is of course, going to deal with it! He's going to "push legality right to the edge" in his plans to curb the invasion (his Home Secretary's word - not mine), and if the European Convention on Human Rights stands in our way - why, he'll just leave it and kick the buggers out anyway!

It's a Times readership wet dream and it's the only card Sunak has left to play. His party has screwed the economy, screwed the public services, left people struggling to live and at risk of loosing their houses - the country is a burning skip. The only thing left to fall back on is our inherent xenophobia, racism and hatred of the EU. And this plan has it all. Get the public fired up about immigration and then promise some draconian plans to make them suffer. And put the boot into the European Court at the same time. With Suella Braverman at his side and the right wing press baying for asylum seekers blood, the impossible might still be worked. Today's Sunday Times leader is the first salvo in this rearguard action to salvage Sunak's election chances. It's a cynical and cruel tactic, designed to bring out the worst in the people, and push him over the line back into Number 10. And given the nature of the English people, it has a pretty good chance of working. On the back of this bullshit, they could well re-elect the party that has overseen the destruction of their lives, the dismantling of their futures, like turkeys voting for Christmas.

What a clever people we are.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

HM inspector of constabularies Matt Parr said on the Sophie Ridge show yesterday that it wasn't "fair that anyone with a blemish on their record should be barred from policing".

Why not? It seems to me that given the number of cases of serious of police misconduct that have been reported of late, stretching from the murder of Sarah Everard to the most recent unveiling of a serial rapist, both the perpetrators having a history of sexual offences and complaints lodged against them in their background, it is exactly right that entrants into the force should have a clean criminal record in order to qualify for consideration.

It has certainly been the case in the past that entrance to the judicial service has required nothing less than a whiter than white history - even relatively minor driving offences such as speeding could disqualify a prospective candidate - and I see no reason why the same high bar should not apply to those who would seek to administer the law of the land over the rest of us. To be a police officer is to hold a position of unique trust and respect within our society and we the public have a right to expect only the highest of standards of those who are admitted into the ranks. That the inspector of constabularies should openly concede that as many as one in ten of the random sample of officers that his study looked at should not have been admitted to the forces they were serving in is a disgrace, and will do nothing to restore public confidence in an institution already reeling from the bad publicity that such high profile and tragic cases of error in admissions have generated.

Parr went on to say that there were not sufficient monitoring processes in place to maintain a "watch" on individuals of potential risk who had been given entry into the force. Again, in my opinion this is misguided thinking. There should be no need to keep a watch on such individuals because they shouldn't be in there in the first place. And conviction of anything other than the most trivial of transgressions should, in my opinion, result in a serving officers immediate expulsion from the force. Those who would expect to hold others to account with society's blessing should be exemplary in the example they themselves set and it should be understood from day one that no exceptions from this high standard will be tolerated. Certainly a watch must be kept on all serving officers at all times to ensure that they do not abuse the position of trust that they hold with the public, but there should be no need for a special watch to be necessary for 'high risk' individuals, because there should be none.

End off.

----------0--------
The 'i' newspaper has a helpful pointer on its top corner this morning, for a piece in its consumer section. "How to drink less alcohol" it reads.

I don't need to go to the article in order to tell you the kind of bland and obvious stuff that will be in it: drink beverages with a lower alcohol content, add more mixers to your drinks, have singles rather than doubles in cocktails, that sort of rubbish - but I can save you the trouble and cost of reading and buying the paper at all, by cutting straight to the chase.

How to drink less alcohol? It's easy. Drink less alcohol!

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

More money won't solve the NHS crisis, says the man appointed by Boris Johnson to carry out a review of the service in this morning's Telegraph.

As expected he talks in terms of productivity and value for money, but simply fails to get something that James O'Brien pointed out with clarity a day or two ago, and that bears repeating here.

How, asked O'Brien, do you put a value on something that cannot be expressed, be quantified, in monetary terms. How do you put a value on care, on life, on service and compassion?

This is something that individuals like General Sir Gordon Messenger (the man who carried out the review) will never get. It is something that Boris Johnson will never get. Nor Rishi Sunak, nor the reemerged manifestation of Liz Truss. That service like that provided by the NHS to the nation is beyond quantification. (Defence is another area, but in a different way.) You spend what you have to in order to make it work. Once having reached the level of civilisation as a society to realise that health should always - always - be looked at as a right and not as a privilege, then there is no other way.

Healthcare is not, cannot be, can never be, a business. No society that does not get this can hold itself up to be anything other than a brute collection of individuals living in a state where, although cloaked in a false sheen of civility, in truth the law of the jungle still pertains.

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

After the Truss article in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph, the daily version tells us that this week she intends to give a series of interviews on camera, the first on the YouTube Spectator site, in which she will challenge the PM's stance on China, saying it is nowhere near robust enough in its denial of the authoritarian regime.

This intervention is timely in terms of the spy balloon that has just been shot down by US forces over the country, but will only serve as an irritation to the PM, as he not only contends with the public disagreement of the former incumbent of his position, but also of the one before that as well.

You have to feel a bit of sympathy for Sunak as he struggles to keep his backbenchers in tow and has both Truss and Johnson simultaneously sending out broadsides on what he is doing. Politics in the UK has become a case of the Conservatives first, the rest nowhere, as all opposition to the government seems to be coming from its own side and the official opposition seems to have all but disappeared. This is nice for Kier Stamer - its a risk free gift from the Tories that relieves him of the need to say anything, offer any alternatives, that may be put under critical scrutiny - but it can't go on. Sooner or later Labour are going to have to unveil their own vision, to in some way make a distinction between themselves and the Tories - no easy task when in truth they effectively hold exactly the same base position, that of subservience to corporate interests that effectively pay the bills, and take precedence over responsibility to the people of the country at large.

Certainly Stamer will at some point make the attempt, will come out with some paper-thin superficial standpoints which he will play to the hilt, holding up as fundamental ideological differences, but in truth voting for him will be simply voting for more of the same. For my part, I shall be looking for something entirely different and if I can't find it then I probably won't even bother. We have truly reached a point where the old joke, it doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always wins, is really true.

We don't need to worry about falling under the yoke of a one-party state - we already have.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

God speed to those who lost their lives in the heart-wrenching natural tragedy that has struck Turkey and Syria. Estimates of the number of lives lost vary wildly, even in the current tally, and heaven only knows where the final figure will lie. I've seen figur3s as high as 10,000 cited, and given that almost double this number were lost in the 1999 quake, the figure is probably not unrealistic.

I confess to a sort of 'numbness' when contemplating tragedy on this scale; I feel an almost guilt at not being able to comprehend this level of suffering, to translate it into personal horror, but I recognise that this is simply an effect of scale. We are simply not geared to be able to process destruction of life and property at this level. It's almost as if the very certainty of the physics which underlies our existence is temporarily ripped apart. Briefly, and in a place, the certainty of the earth beneath our feet is quite literally shaken.

But our hearts cannot but go out to the ones lost, to their families and those struggling in the ruins to save those who remain trapped and injured. We must thank God, or fate, or whatever ordering principle we bow down to, for every human soul pulled from the wreckage, and whatever our belief or lack of it, join together in a collective willing that no soul that may be saved will be missed.

We are as nothing against the merest twitch of nature when it occurs - but we have hope and humanity and valiance. We abide.

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

As I move around, walk down the street or drive about in my car, I am always fascinated by the number of people I see who are completely absorbed, even as they walk, by the mobile phone that they have in their hands.

My family members come to see us, and they spend their time absorbed (or at least half so) with their phones. The people I work with, even as they pursue their duties, surreptitiously keep their phones at hand, continuously glancing at them, and occasionally forgetting that they are at work at all, in order to type in some message or rejoinder to this or that post or site.

What they are doing of course, unbeknownst to them, is providing the data, scraped off the top in the form of behavioural surplus, upon which the secret algorithms of Google and Facebook work to make ever increasingly accurate predictions of our collective future behaviours, which they then sell to any and every bidder prepared to pay the price, irrespective of the use for which they intend to put this powerful tool for mass manipulation.

This is surveillance capitalism at work before our very eyes. I'm doing it now, even as I post. Providing the raw data upon which, en masse, predictions can be made, strategies developed, via which we can be made to buy what we buy, go where we go, love and hate what we love and hate. And yes, vote for who we vote for. And all without awareness that our choices are not our own, but are the choices rather of unseen directors who look down on us from above, rather as scientists look down on rats in a maze, and manipulate the paths they will take, without the first comprehension of the rats that their decisions are not freely made.

And the most frightening thing of all is that we don't care. I have no mobile phone. To me this fixation with a screen in front of you - and it's an addiction, let's call it out for what it is - is anathema. And I read. And see the truth in what I read. But still I return to my tablet each day and contribute my bit of data, cede my bit of my soul, my freedom, to the invisible ringmasters of the 'Google and Facebook Triple-Ring Extravaganza'.

Tell people what is happening and you get a wall of blank indifference, of neither acceptance nor denial, as though you speak only to a half-person, an entity whose decision making faculty has been sapped, and who is perfectly happy with it.

So is this where we are? We trade our freedom to decide, to determine our own course, the course of ourselves, our nation, our world, willingly and without question, to those of whose intentions we know nothing.? And we do this in return for what - the narcotizing effect of the small screen in front of our eyes? Communication? The power to opinionize? We sleepwalk into a market led totalitarianism, willingly and happily, where the numbing effect of lives dedicated to the pleasure of a few additional hits, likes, hearts, is exchanged for our ability to self-determine, to feel, to be masters of our own destiny? For this? To become an effective slave army of half zombie shamblers, as innervated and insensate as a pithed frog on a vivisectionist's slab?

Wake up people. Wake up!

Edit: The question must be, who buys all of this data, or rather the predictive modelling that Google and Facebook etc develop in such tightly held secrecy in consequence of it, and for what purpose?

Initially one can be sure, it will be 'the state' - or rather the various states of the world, Western, Chinese, Russian - for the purposes of monitoring and guiding of our behaviour in the various ways that they deem opportune to their own particular desires and ends. It is a given that it will always be in the interest of states to 'know their own people', to be able to shepherd them and corral them where they will. If nothing else, the security services will have use for such modelling. Then we must assume that large scale corporate interest will want a piece of the action. It must seem like mana from heaven, to be able to know the people's desires before they even know them themselves. To be actually able to direct those desires and make them go where they will, must seem like all of their Christmases and birthdays rolled into one.

But is any of this actually threatening to our freedom - and does it matter if it is? Is our so called (and much vaunted) freedom so important? If we can all exist in a panacea of pleasure and simplicity, like some inhabitants of a Brave New World existence, does it really matter? On the face of it we recoil at such an idea, but in reality we seem curiously indifferent to it. During the recent lockdowns of the covid era, we seemed to take to the idea of being instructed how to live, of what 'decisions' to make, with a remarkable degree of indifference, even relief, in some quarter's. It makes life simpler. It's easier if the big decisions incumbent with life are taken from us. We can absolve ourselves of responsibility, of agency, and concentrate on simply enjoying the pleasures and benefits that are handed out, like therapeutics at the end of the day in a mental ward, to us. Don't worry about the nasty things like politics or fairness or deep and difficult thought. Simply pass the buck and pick up the tablet cup.

To live in such a world of abrogated responsibility is not so bad is it?
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

It's the hypocrisy of the thing that grates on me, so let's call it out for what it is.

Neither our administration, nor the US government (or any other of the European coalition leaders against Putin for that matter) give a flying fig for the people of Ukraine. None of this is about saving that tragic people, restoring their country to them. Rather, it's about boxing the Russian administration into its corner (in the first instance) and ultimately bringing about regime change in that country.

And why?

Because Putin is not someone that they can work with. That greedy self interested kleptocrat has no more interest in the Ukraine other than as an extension of the area he can rinse for himself and his cronies - and neither do we. Sure, we are not going to go around invading other countries and putting them under our yoke, but let's face it, none of this is done for or in the interests of the people, any more than the individual countries themselves are run in the interests of the people.

In all cases, its all done for the small elite at the top of the pile, the one percent, who like the arrangement that they have in their own respective countries, and are damn sure that they are going to keep things just the way that they are. And if some numb-nuts like Putin threatens to extend his rinsing capabilities in a manner that could impinge, or does not gel with the interests of our kleptocratic elite (or God forbid even threaten them), why, then he must be stopped. The arrangement of the one percent interest standing head and shoulders above that of the ninety nine percent that pertains must be maintained. And it isn't that Putin threatens that - he has no more interest in the interests of the mass of his people than our elites do in us. It's just a case that he's in a rival gang (as it were). If Putin's interest could have been aligned to that of the Western elite interest - our own grubby brood of kleptomaniac elites - they'd have been doing business, shaking hands and signing documents in front of the press, for years.

But somehow Putin's capitalism does not gel with ours. Their interests became disalighned. And so what could have been an arrangement for mutual enrichment of the one percents of each side, instead has generated into a brawl, with Putin making an invasion into territories that the western elites have earmarked as part of their own club, and the western cabal responding with anger and aid.

But it has nothing to do with the ordinary Joe in the street, whether it be in the Ukraine, the UK, Russia or the US. Wars are made by governments in the interest of governments, and governments are run in the interests of the top slice of the populations of the countries they govern. This has been the way since the dawn of time - will probably always be the way.

Instead of the people of the West looking East and the people of the East looking West, it would behove us all to begin looking upward.

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

The front page of the Telegraph tells us that "Basil's Back!"

John Cleese is apparently going to reprise his role as the irascible Basil Fawlty with a two series production centred around how Fawlty might negotiate the modern world. He will star alongside his real-life daughter and will be involved in a boutique hotel project that she is setting up.

I was never a massive fan of the original serious - it was all a bit too slapstick and maniacal for me - but millions did love it, and Fawlty has gone down in history as one of the great comedy creations of the small screen.

I'd have thought that reprising the role would be a very risky venture from Cleese' point of view. The times are different now and the Zeitgeist that made the original series great is no more. It seems to me that the reputation of the original can only be damaged by this - or at least the likelihood that it can be in any way preserved or enhanced is minimal. It would take a completely new take on the character, one where in essence Fawlty would no longer be Fawlty, to make it work.

I suspect that he'll be presented as an irascible old man who is stupid, but in a not stupid way. Knowing Cleese' pretty right wing views, its likely to be pretty 'anti-woke' and to ruffle a few feathers on release, particularly if he uses it as a vehicle for expressing his criticisms of the current cultural agenda of 'cleaning up' the perceived wrongs of yesteryear. If alternatively Fawlty is presented as bowing to the influence of the modern politically correct environment - well, he simply ceases to be Fawlty, or becomes a sad broken version of him that will be an unhappy thing to see.

Let's face it. It would not be in Basil Fawlty's stars to end happily in our society in respect of the direction it has moved in. Like Alf Garnet before him, we laughed at the character, but there was nothing really funny about him. Certainly not beyond the confines of the television box that was his world. Bring him out of that onto the stage of the real world and you see him for what he was. And that was nothing like funny.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

James O'Brien said yesterday that he couldn't understand what had made Rishi Sunak appoint controversial Conservative MP Lee Anderson (aka 'Thirty P Lee' for his comment that he couldn't understand why people were visiting food banks - you could make a meal for 30p if you put your mind to it) to the role of deputy party chairman of the Tory Party.

The problem with O'Brien, like many of his Guardian reading compatriots who support the Labour party, as long as it is their kind of Labour party where the workers are the best, until they start asking for things then they suddenly become crap, and who believe that Jeremy Corbyn was the next thing to Satan because he wanted the party to be what it was formed to be and not simply a pale shadow of the Tories.....the problem with these guys is that they just don't get it.

They had been labouring under the naive belief that because Rishi Sunak was an Indian, because he was about as far from Boris Johnson as it was possible to be (in their eyes, which of course failed to get that he was a product of the same entitled and elitist milieu that had produced the blonde bombshell himself), he would have to be a nice guy.

They were soon disabused of their mistake. Appointing Suella Braverman as Home Secretary six days after her resignation for sending government secrets in open emails, keeping serial bully Dominic Raab in the government while under investigation and appointing Nadhim Zahawi as party chairman (serial tax fiddler who previously held the position of Tax Master General under said Johnson), it became rapidly apparent that Sunak was no more the man of "professionalism, honesty and integrity" that Johnson had been, that his ethnicity did not give him special access to possession of an honourable character any more than Johnson's gave him automatic possession of a deviant one.

And now it seems, one of the preeminent political presenters in the country cannot understand why Sunak has appointed a coarse bullying populist to the deputy chairmanship of his party?

Let me remind you James. There's this thing called the 'red-wall'. It's where your predecessor by one, was able to get a whole load of traditionally Labour voters from the North to vote for him by promising to "get Brexit done!" These Labour voters, whose racism and hatred of the EU far overrode their support of any party, were the fulcrum upon which Johnson was able to swing his eighty seat majority, a majority that he miraculously was able to spaff up against the wall by behaving like a right ***t while he was in office, and which the devastation of the economy and total failure of said Brexit (never mind the crash and burn debacle of the Truss mini-budget) has merely served to wither away further.

So Sunak finds himself in the abject position of actually polling lower in terms of public support than Johnson did at the time of his exiting - and significantly so. (For the record I believe Johnson was trailing by six points at the time of his departure, Sunak now trails by twenty five.)

So Sunak is basically fried. He's lost the support of his parliamentary party; not that he ever really had much - he was, remember, second choice to Truss when they voted for a new leader. He's failed to turn around the falling poll results and has even see them get worse, and yes lost the support of the northern voters who lent their votes to Johnson and never wanted him to go (especially to be replaced by a brown fellah).

So Sunak has done exactly what would be expected of him. He's appointed exactly the kind of brash individual, a Northener of boorish temperament who will appeal to the blue collar Northern Tories (that odd rump of the working class that always vote Conservative, irrespective of how it flies against their interest to do so) and the left wing brexiteers upon whose votes the winning of the next election could rest.

In other words, this is a signal to the people who voted Tory in the north of the country that they have not been forgotten. It's a ploy by Sunak to prop up his ailing support in the North and try to reverse his decline in the polls. It won't work, but that's what it is.

As an aside, I was interested to hear Owen Jones, a left wing pundit who appears now and then on the political shows and has his own YouTube channel, make the prediction that the Tories would have Sunak out and Boris Johnson back in situ as Prime Minister before the end of the year.

He rationalised this on the following. Sunak's disastrously falling poll ratings will spook those Tory MPs who intend to fight their seats in the next election. He's dead in the water and they know it. They have little or no chance of winning the next election and no one to replace the ailing PM with. Except that is, the larger than life Alexander Boris de Pfeffel.

Even if there were a candidate (said Jones) that could take up the mantle, that would mean four different PMs since we had an election and neither the media nor the public would wear it. At leat with Johnson, they'd be able to reclaim his mandate from the people to lead, and avoid an immediate election. This would give him time to rally such support as he could, and try to pull off the kind of stunt that he did in the last election. It's a thin hope, but the only one they've got.

This makes Jones think that a Johnson return to the premiership is an almost dead certainty before the end of the year.

Who said politics is boring!

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

Interesting to read that God is being given a gender makeover in any future liturgies produced by the Church of England, so that he/she/it (help me here, will you) is given no gender weighting.

I wonder if the same will be done for the Devil, or does he remain exclusively male?
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

Dominic Raab feels that he "behaved professionally at all times".

The guy has got twenty four ongoing accusations of bullying against him currently under investigation. In what world does this suggest that he was behaving professionally in respect of his conduct of behaviour towards his staff? He is in today's Telegraph defending himself and saying that demanding high standards of your staff does not constitute bullying.

And in fairness, the guy might have a point.

When you actually look at the accusations, many of them seem a bit trivial, couched in terms of 'micro-aggressions' or simply "staring too hard".

The thing is that we tend to imagine that all of the staff are in parliament, buzzing away at their jobs and being professional and all (though why, given partygate we should believe this beats me), but the truth is that it is most probably not a lot different to my work place or yours. The bulk of people are at best only half interested in the work they are supposed to be engaged in. They are more interested in chatting with their colleagues, reading and posting on their phones, and generally larking about rather than getting on with their work. Do you suppose that parliament is any different. Get a boss that tries to get a grip on this half-arsed culture and sure, he's going to ruffle a few feathers.

And what exactly is a micro-aggresion when it is at home? I mean really? Is it just some aspect of someone's behaviour - anyone's behaviour - that you don't like? If you get as high up the food chain as Dominic Raab, you are not going to do it by not being a driven individual. And these are high pressure jobs in a stressful environment. Some tension and confrontation is surely to be expected. Certainly this should not go as far as people being in tears and being sick into toilets before meetings (both of which have been reported), but surely being 'stared at in a sinister way' is taking it a bit far. Surely we can expect a bit of toughness within the staff of these important governmental departments?

So one wonders how many of these so-called acts of bullying are rather reflective of the seemingly paper thin skins of today's people, fostered on a diet of expectation of never offending, never being offended, that simply does not reflect the reality of normal human intercourse?

People don't like being told what to do, either at work or anywhere else. They will always be resentful of anyone who tries to do this and given the intelligence of the individuals at this level of our workforce and the stifling cultural atmosphere we have fostered in our society, it would be surprising if there were not occasions of friction that resulted in complaints. How many are justified, how many spurious - that remains the province of the investigations to ascertain.

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


Amazing how this government seems to be able to find money to pay for just about anything except giving our nurses and other public service employees a fair pay settlement commensurate with the work they do.

Quietly, and before the parliamentary recess, the government has paid a whopping 2.3 billion in fines to the EU, for transgressions we committed while still members, in respect of allowing cheap unrecorded goods from China to illegally enter the common block and undercut home produced goods.

This money alone, reports the Times, would have financed a 3.3 percent wage increase for nurses for a year.

And then there's weapons to Ukraine. Tanks and missiles by the boatload, as fast as we can produce them, running to the tune of billions of pounds. And talk of up to 100 fighter jets in the future. The cost to our economy is staggering, some would say ruinous.

And yet when it comes to giving the nurses a pay rise, the teachers or civil servants, it's nothing that's available. There's simply no money says the Chancellor. It would fuel inflation.

I'm not saying for a minute that these payments, these supplies are not important - most certainly they are. But our government also has the responsibility to address domestic issues, like maintenance of our public services, and payment of our public workforce. This too, is part of their remit. This business of stepping back, turning away from their responsibility, outsourcing it to these arms length pay review bodies (who, despite the government's ascertations of independence, are only so in so far as the budgets available to them as starting points for their recommendations are set by government itself) will not do.

Time to step back and look at our priorities when it comes to largesse with our public monies, stretched as they are, more so than at any point in our recent history.

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

Here we go. It was always going to go with the particular lot of right wing politicians who have taken up residence in the top tier of our administration. Lee Anderson, the controversial new deputy chairman of the Conservative party is a supporter of the death penalty. I'm betting that Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary will be as well.

With the Tories tanking in the polls and the Prime Minister about as popular as a dog-turd stuck on the sole of the collective national shoe, the old debate on the reinstatement of the death penalty was always going to be brought out sooner or later in an attempt to pull the old guard Tory ranks back on side.

The old ones love it - it reminds them of their youth (has a rose tinted glow to it - the queen was on her throne, the joint was in the oven, Crippin was in his cell....that sort of thing) and the new breed are taking to it pretty well as well.

But take it from me. The last thing we need is a debate around whether Pierpoint should be called to reach for his rope again. It was a brutal horrible time and nothing good came of it. That is a macabre part of our history that we do not need to revisit, even in theory let alone in practice.

Let's hope that 30p Lee can limit his input to trolling on how those much poorer than himself should budget their lives and stay out of the debate on whether you can cure more than bacon by hanging it from a string.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

Are we on an inexorable path to full scale war in Europe?

I'm notoriously pessimistic about most things political - and by the famous dictum of Clausewitz war is but an extension of politics - and in this I find myself following my usual pattern. (Nb. The last time I expressed any optimism about anything political it was to hope that Liz Truss would turn out to be a much better PM than was expected, and see how that worked out. Hard experience where the political is concerned - over a lifetime of watching, not just my bruising over the Truss affair - has taught me that if two choices are available to politicians, they will unfailingly choose the worst one....call it Peter's Law [as distinct from the Peter Principle. I cite foreign policy since the fall of the USSR, Brexit, the dismantling of the welfare state, privatisation of the public utilities, the closure of the grammar schools, lockdown policy - the list goes on]).

But back to the original question, let's look at the trajectory as we stand. The war seems to have ground to a, not halt so much as a state of balance, where the belligerents are evenly matched in a state of attrition, with the West pouring arms and equipment, training and knowhow into the Ukrainian side, and the Russians for their part are matching this, by conscription and profligate use of manpower and scouring up weaponry from whatever source that they can.

From the Western side, there are announcements of increased sums of money from the Americans, supplies of much longer range missile systems that will be capable of reaching the Crimea (hitherto not included in active hostilities, while always a stated goal of Ukraine in terms of ultimate return of territory). Tanks are to be supplied after much deliberation and argument and the UK if no one else, seems to be going down a slippery slope towards the training of pilots and ultimate supply of fighter jets, almost as much for domestic political reasons as for any other. (On the latter, there seems to divergence of opinion developing between the Defence Minister Ben Wallace and the PM. PM Sunak had stated that jets would ultimately be supplied to Ukraine in pursuit of a broader objective of supporting the nation as a bulwark against future Russian expansionism, and the defence minister had quickly put out a 'clarification' that such supplies would not be being made until all current hostilities between Ukraine and Russia have ended. Sunak for his part had seemed to be responding to Boris Johnson's goading to send in jets immediately, if somewhat ambiguously by his implication that such provision would not be part of the offensive strategy of the current conflict. The Ukrainians have somewhat drawn the teeth of the UK delaying tactics of saying that it would take years to train Ukrainian pilots to the requisite levels of ability in order to fly modern fighter jets, by replying that they have pilots who could be ready to fly combat missions within mere months.)

So although hostilities continue, albeit at a slightly lesser level because of the current winter conditions, they still remain in progress across the various fronts of the war, if more in terms of sporadic hit and miss attacks coming from one side or the other. Russia for its part, seems still to be concentrating its attentions on damaging the Ukrainian infrastructures of power and water supplies, and rumours have it that they are gathering for a 'spring offensive' once the cold winter weather has finally broken. It is the Ukrainian hope that by the time of this putative offensive, the promised tanks and missile systems will be in situ, with the fighter jet capabilities well on the way to being provided. To this end, the very photogenic and charismatic leader has been doing the rounds in Churchillian style, giving impassioned speeches before a packed Westminster Hall before going on to the EU parliament for more of the same. Zelensky's former training as an actor is certainly standing him in good stead in this ambassadorial round of support rallying: he knows exactly how to deliver a speech to maximum effect, even to the point of using his slightly precarious grasp of English to his advantage. Nb. I make no criticism of him for doing whatever is absolutely necessary for him if he is to maintain the support, both actual and rhetorical, to maintain the flow of Western aid upon which his defence of his country is dependent. (In fact, he needn't worry too much. America and the Western European coalition have no intention of allowing Ukraine to fall to Russia and place it in a situation where it might have to defend it's own NATO member states in a case of further Russian aggresive expansion. Much better to use Ukraine as a bulwark, and supplying and maintaining a proxy war, than being forced into fighting an actual one by a Russian agressive move against a NATO member state.)

But from the actual situation as it is developing, it is hard to see anything that would indicate that this war is doing other than escalating. The Russians will mount their spring offensive, the West will supply Zelensky with just sufficient aid to (it hopes) stop the offensive from succeeding, but probably not enough to allow it to see a prospect of actual victory. In a sense we are playing the same game as we did in the case of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980's, except in that case we were arming both sides at need, in order to prolong the conflict (in which we saw their mutual damage by attrition as to the Western advantage). Here we are only arming the one side, and for different reasons, but the balancing tactics are the same. Certainly, we'd love to see the Russians whopped and Putin thrown into the dustbin of history - and were it not for a few things that have to be taken into consideration, we'd have provided the means to achieve this yesterday.

Firstly, even if Putin were to be pulled down and replaced, there is no evidence that the administration that would take his place would be any better. In fact they could quite easily be even worse, and this time without a lunatic to actually make them less effective in their actions. The second reason why we cannot just give Zelensky what he needs to win (as opposed to merely hold) is China. They are the big unknown. Will they stand back and watch Russia defeated, and particularly defeated via Western help. This is not some tinpot out of the way territory we are talking here. We're talking about regime change in the biggest country in the world (in terms of area). The Chinese are not going to sit back and watch American and Western forces do this without a huge degree of consternation. "If them," they will say, "Why not us?" And if China are galvanised to step in in support of Putin, well the sky's the limit. (Aside - the clever money at the moment would surely be to tone down the rhetoric against the Chinese, but none of our politicians seem minded to do this. As I said above, Peter's Law.)

And now we are down to the real meat of it. Suddenly all of those big red buttons all around the world are looking a bit more shiny than they have for the past few decades. (Remember the prophetic Stranglers lyric, "And who gets the job, of pushing the knob? That sort of responsibility you draw straws for, if you're mad enough.") China, Russia, America, the West. Suddenly the pieces are in play for the 'mother of all wars' (remember that guy? He must be looking up at us and laughing.)

So (if you're still with me) forgive me my pessimism (or better, tell me that it's bullshit - I've got it all wrong, as I did with Truss). I'm afraid I don't at present see this thing going any place but a worse one. The only way, in the words of the song, is up.

Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me that right now might not be a good time to start talking about all of this. Yes Putin is a ****. We know this. But he's a **** with a fistful of other ****'s behind him ready to take his place. And he's a **** with a nuclear arsenal at his disposal. And a **** that other ****'s won't be happy if we cut the legs out from under.

Churchill said it. Jaw Jaw is better than War War. Maybe it's time to start thinking the unthinkable and start looking for a table to sit around. Either that or maybe cancel your pension payments. They might not be such a clever investment as you think, given your future prospects as I write.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

There are going to be a lot of very worried people in this country at the moment.

Housing figures show that already for the month of January, repossessions are running at double the rate that they were last year. Tens of thousands more will have abandoned their hopes of owning their own homes voluntarily and put their houses on the market before the axe fell.

And we are not even at the bad point yet. With the government imposed cap on energy costs due to end in April adding insult to injury, huge numbers of 'just about managing' households face steep increases in their mortgage costs when their fixed payment mortgage arrangements come to an end.

The housing market in the UK is already an effective bubble waiting to burst, with years of unrealistic hikes in the price of bricks and mortar pushing property values way above where they should realistically be. Instead of using their property as homes, people have used them as money stores in replacement of savings, pensions and the like. The situation has been exacerbated by the buy to let schemes that have not only become the preferred way of saving wealth for many (housing always being viewed as a sound investment), turning 'landlordism' into a sideline hobby for many and in the process artificially pushing property values even higher and beyond the means of the bulk of young people entering the work market. These youngsters find themselves in the trap of forever paying for the mortgages of people who have fistfuls of houses, and never being able to either save the deposits for houses of their own, or qualify, or indeed pay, for mortgages of their own at the artificially inflated costs of the market as it stands.

But all of this might be about to change. Already the increased repossession rate and numbers of houses coming on to the market are causing house prices to begin to fall. In areas where they are not actively falling already the increases in value (that people have come to expect almost as a right) are slowing down or stagnating. This will only get worse as more and more people fall out of ownership and more and more hoses flood onto the market. Suddenly people who have built house-of-cards style mini property empires will find their 'investments' becoming a liability, costing them money instead of accruing it for them, and they will try to cut their losses and cash in their portfolios. And the bubble will be set to burst.

Sitting on this disaster in the making (in their eyes at least) the Tory government will not be happy bunny's. They have done everything in their power to prop up property values - in fact it was the Thatcher right to buy and buy to let schemes that started the whole boom in the first place, which (with a few hiccups here and there) has seen property prices go up and up since the day she introduced them. In the process the housing stock of the nation has been shifted from public to private ownership, as social housing projects have almost ground to a halt and council houses have passed into the ownership of the former tenants who occupied them. This was (and remains) grist to the Tory mill. House ownership being one of the key psychological indicators of 'middle-class status' in people's minds, the shift from social housing tenant to owner-occupier status was accompanied by a shift in political allegiance in favour of the party that had made it possible. The Tories have fought like demons to maintain this advantage, and will be keenly hurt to see it damaged, as it will be, by the resentment people will feel, who have lost their 'investment', or more importantly, their actual homes, to the worsening economic circumstances they find themselves in.

While the effects of this will be devastating for people who loose their homes (sorry - I can't bring myself to feel much sympathy for those who have paid for their pensions with the work of people less well fixed than themselves) in the longer term, it may be for the best. Housing is way too important in my view to be seen as an investment opportunity. It is the bedrock of a stable society. If house values were to fall to a more realistic level, reflective of the actual worth of the land, bricks and mortar (plus a bit for the labour) then in my eyes, so much the better. Anything that brings our housing back within the reach of anyone who is prepared to put in the forty hours of a good weeks work, has to be a good thing in my opinion. My personal belief is that the right to buy aspect of the Thatcher revolution in housing was a fantastic development - it was the buy to let system, made possible by the Housing Act of 1988, that screwed things up. Legislation to prevent the accumulation of housing property in the hands of the few, not encourage it, should have been the order of the day. With the old system of building societies offering only one twenty five year product to any one individual/couple, and any further purchasing of property having to be financed by bank loan, this pressure toward single owner/occupier ownership was inherent in the system. But all this changed with the Financial Services Act of 1986 which effectively allowed any financial product to be offered by any of the service providers (mortgages by banks, insurance by building societies, pensions by insurance companies etc, etc) where previously these products had been limited to the particular service providers of the given area in question. This liberation of the financial services not only paved the way for the development of the buy to let mortgage schemes (via the above Housing Act) but also allowed for the mixing of the private and investment arms of the high-street banks, and ultimately to the financial crash of 2008.

But back on point, it is not being unduly pessimistic to say that nothing seems to indicate any swift resolution to the economic situation, such that the house price tumble can be avoided, and as such, it is a fairly certain thing that the Tories will go into the next election with a huge reservoir of stored resentment against them from those who have lost out in the turbulence.

Small comfort for those who will face hard times in the months ahead, but it will come right in the long term. A readjustment in the housing market that brings the whole thing back into a more realistic place can only be in the public interest in the long term. Our youngsters have been excluded from this most important of steps in most people's lives - that of purchasing your own home - for too long. This must change for the benefit of all society and until it does, we will never be in a position to start rebuilding for the future again.

----++++-----

:lol: Lovely story in the Observer today about a secret cross-party conference held over the course of two days this week, in which ministers and politicians from both sides of the Brexit divide met to discuss the failure of the project, and ways in which it could be made to work better.

Big names in attendance were the Tory levelling up secretary Michael Give and Labour's shadow foreign secretary David Lammy. They were accompanied by a host of former ministers and prominent Leave and Remain campaigners, together with leaders of industry and the business community.

That such a meeting had to be held in secret tells you everything. They fucked up with Brexit and they know it. Rather than having the courage to step out and tell the public the truth, fear that such an admission would lead to an undermining of faith in our political masters (and it would, rightly so) leads them to sneak about, having under the radar talks as to how to salvage something from the wreckage of our economy, our society, our lives, that this misguided enterprise has brought about.

Well take it from me guys - it's too late. The egg is scrambled and there ain't no unscrambling it now! The best we can hope for is that someone in the political milieu has the courage to step up to the plate and say publicly, that we need to get back into the single market and customs union post haste. The clever money would have been for us to leave the EU in small steps, gradually moving away from membership proper to increasing points of distance until we found the optimal position that gave us the best deal for satisfying the requirements of the referendum mandate, but still gave us quality trading arrangements from which our business and economic interests were equally satisfied.

Too much to ask that this could have been handled by our bungling administration, so now at least, perhaps they will start the process of our inching inwards to (hopefully) reach the same position from the other direction. I suppose if nothing else, the collective madness that was allowed to proliferate in the whole leaving saga will, now that we have satisfied ourselves of the inviability of the project, dissipate, and saner viewpoints will once again begin to rise to prominence.

One can hope I suppose, but never forget Peter's Law - that if two choices are available to politicians, they will unfailingly pick the worst one - it will always rule the day.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

Small shareholders in the nation's water supply industry - H2Owners - that was what we were told we were going to be when the water companies were sold off to private ownership in 1989.

Now, three and a half decades later it transpires that seventy percent of our water utility is in the hands of foreign ownership, and (irony of ironies) a significant proportion of that actually held by foreign states such as the French and Chinese.

And since we left the EU and are no longer under their rules as pertain to environmental protection (those pesky rules again) it has served the interests of those water company ownerships much better to pump huge quantities of sewage into our rivers and coastal waters rather than go to the trouble and expense of treating it in sewage plants that are costly and troublesome to operate. (I mean why wouldn't they; it's not their rivers and beaches that are being polluted, not their natural environments that are being poisoned, not their children who are getting sick swimming in sewage polluted waters.)

But Secretary of State for the Environment Therese Coffey thinks that the fines that might be levied for such deliberate environmental breaches (when they are determined to have overstepped the much more elastic limits that we impose compared to the EU) are too swingeing and is proposing to reduce proposed the upper limit as suggested by her predecessor in the role.

Currently set at a miserable 250,000 pounds - not enough to make the odd Caymen Islands investor or Chinese State official even raise his eyebrows, let alone turn off the pump churning our raw sewage into a river - it had been suggested that the upper limit should be raised to a much more attention grabbing 250 million. Coffey however thinks that this is too much. Seemingly unable to grasp the idea that (take this slowly Therese) it doesn't have to be the actual full fine that is levied on every occasion, Coffey thinks this upper limit should be brought down to a more realistic figure. Like one that doesn't actually deter the private investment funds and secret interests behind this dumping activity from doing it you mean?

Coffey says that she fears that raising the upper limits on the fines that can be levied to the suggested levels could deter the investment that the vital infrastructure utility is so desperately in need of (about 56 billions worth of upgrades are needed), not seeming to get that if these investors were going to spring the money on upgrading the system they would already be doing it. It is inherent in the privatised system that the investors will want the profits payed out in dividends rather than put back into the system in upgrades, and this is exactly what we are seeing. Money will only be spent on upgrades where it actually increases the return for the investor. In the case of the water companies, customers have no ability to change supplier as each region is served by only one, and so there is no incentive for the companies to invest. Like a landlord whose tenants can not move from the property they occupy, why is he going to spend money that could be in his bank account on improving the property? He'll do this only in the extreme places where his own investment is damaged if he doesn't, not in places (like wallpaper, or say rivers and beaches in another country) where it isn't.

But these fundamental flaws in the ideology behind the privatisation incentive are simply too much, have always been too much, for the tories to grasp. With water, the infrastructure behind its supply simply doesn't lend itself to there being a host of different suppliers. God knows - it barely even works for electricity and gas, where it can just about be done; look at the state of those privatised services. Thus all you have is a group of private regional monopolies, each of whom have no incentive to invest, and every incentive not to.

Okay. I'm going to say this slowly Tories, so see if you can get it. It's an essential utility that doesn't lend itself to the privatisation model. You were told so before you did it, but did it anyway. Now that the evidence is before your eyes you need to take it on board and reverse it. Renationalise this essential utility and get it back under state ownership, where the same people who have an interest in clean rivers and safe beaches, control the operation of, and investment into the utility that is central to all of our lives.

How hard can it be. You make a mistake. You set it right. This is how the world works.

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

Fluctuating energy prices and increased demand on limited storage capacity (which our government wisely reduced to near zero at some earlier stage iirc) have meant that there has been significant risk of supply failures and power cuts this winter, so the clever money, you'd think, would be in increasing storage capacity I time for next winter when the situation could easily be as bad, if not worse, than this year.

But no. The government, so tells us the Financial Times today, has decided to gamble on prices being significantly lower next winter and supplies being easier and cheaper to maintain. In its wisdom, it has walked away from talks with Centrica, who are contesting the level of state subsidy which they maintain is not high enough for them to justify increasing storage capacity at the Rough storage facility, saying that storage is a matter for Centrica, it will concentrate on finding new sources of supply and increasing security of service provision.

For a country that imports fifty percent of its gas (and three quarters of that from Russia) this seems like a pretty casual attitude if you don't mind my saying so.

And wait for it - let's get this straight. Our supplies of gas in the winter - what the elderly and vulnerable need to potentially keep them alive, and the rest of us to make our lives every passable in a modern world sense - is dependent upon a negotiation over money with the (wait for it) privatised industry into which we have placed as important a control as the amount of energy we store (and indeed import in the first place). And this is good policy for our government to be following? That rather than ensure we have sufficient storage capacity to see us through the next winter, when we have just experienced a bruising nail-biting supply close-shave in the last one, they decide to gamble that it won't happen again. When we are totally dependent upon a continuous supply of incoming gas in order to keep the country's electricity generating capability up and running, to keep our industry functioning, our homes warm? That a single privatised company gets to say, "Well if you want us to store more gas, then you pay us to do it - and if you won't, we won't."

Well there's a pretty pass. And yet another example of privatisation working at its finest. That we are held to ransom - and perfectly understandably so under the capitalist doctrine - in terms of both our energy storage capacity and our policy in respect of sourcing - by private interests whose objectives might be, are, entirely different from our own...... And in an area of such national and significant, indeed fundamental, importance?

I mean, c'mon! How much more evidence do you need? Two stories in one day. Water and energy. I bet that if I keep going (I'm only three papers down the list of front pages) I'll find another story of similar magnitude of national importance about the rail network, or the telecommunications industry.

Just when, when, when are these people going to get it? That certain things are of too much national importance to be left in the hands of a globalised market. And that is I guess, the difference. When these things were previously in the hands of private business, before the nationalisation program of the (what) Atlee government, it was not a globalised ownership; it was an ownership by the same people you rubbed shoulders with in the Pall Mall clubs after dinner, smoked cigars with in the drawing room. They had the same national interest as you. That's why the privatisation failed as much as anything else. Because the buyers were not the same people as whom the utilities were purchased from in the first place. They were different, had different interests; interests not related to the stable and secure continuation of the nation. They answered to different masters, danced to different tunes. And it's a tune that doesn't gel with the national one - tunes from which no harmony can be made.

Our leaders have to be made to understand this - or if they will not, then we have to assume that they are willingly not doing so. And if we decide this, then we must equally assume that the reason is because their interests do not coincide with our interests, with the national interests, either. And once realising this, we are in an entirely different game altogether.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

There was a rather chilling little piece relating to all of this Chinese balloon stuff we are being pelted with by the media at present.

I can't remember which paper it was in, but essentially it said that the suggestions by the Chinese themselves that these could be weather balloons of theirs that have blown off track - pinch of salt time - could be in part true. The weather balloon part that is, not the blown off track part.

The point was, as made in the piece, that the balloons seemed to be always in the vicinity of missile storage and launch facilities. And that, if the Chinese themselves were ever considering strikes against these sites with their own missiles, then in-depth knowledge would be required in respect of terrain and prevailing weather conditions and patterns around these sites, such that this information could be factored into the AI flight systems, trajectory calculations etc, of the launched missiles.

I don't know if anybody actually read my piece above in which I commented that Chinese observation and responses to what is currently happening in Europe were a big unknown in determining what we could or could not do in helping the Ukrainians, but to anyone who did this addition to the thinking in respect of the spate of balloons (or whatever they are) cannot but fail to set off a warning light.

This has the ominous look to me, not that the Chinese are preparing for an attack (I don't believe that for a minute) but that they are at least getting their ducks in a row in case of further developments in the Ukraine conflict that they are not happy with.

Meanwhile, huge numbers of Americans believe that the balloons have originated from outer-space, necessitating a Whitehouse spokeswoman to assure people that this is not so, that there is no suggestion of 'alien involvement'. Quality thinking guys.

In today's UK press, PM Sunak has said that our airforce and navy are ready to shoot down any suspect devices found over our territory in the same way that those over Canada and the US have been shot down. My guess would be that the balloons are continuously transmitting their data back to their country of origin and that they are coming in sufficient numbers as to have a built in failure expectation (as with say, drug traffickers) such that their intended purpose is satisfied if even only a small number achieve their goals.

(One also has to consider the possibility that these balloons are an entirely fabricated story by our governments in order to whip up anti Chinese sentiment. I'm sorry, but I have lost faith in our administrations even to the degree where I consider them capable of such a fabrication. Truly do we live in the world of 1984 now.)

But I'm still minded to ask, why are our leaders doing this? I mean all of this belligerent propaganda against other nations, in particular China, that can only serve to destabilise the world. Do they do the same in China apropos the West? I'm sure they probably do. Is it the case that capitalism is failing? That the absolute necessity for sustained and continuous growth, of expansion into new markets with new products is stalling, and that the age old solution of war will once again be called upon to reset the clock and get the line going upwards again?

Or is it perhaps, that the US sees its hegemony under threat (from all sides). That it is determined not to go down without a fight, to surrender its place as top-dog in a world order where economic rivals with entirely different political systems are fast closing on it from behind? Or are we truly the only bastions of good in a world beset by evil? Surrounded by almost alien peoples with whom we can have little in common, in thought or in deed. I have to say, I work with a Chinese woman who would not lead me to believe that this is the case.

And I find it telling that, in the same paper that is running a headline warning us of the "threat" posed by the use of Chinese made equipment by our police forces, that such equipment can be used to "spy on us" by the evil menace from afar, to the side of the same front page their is an advert for an article inside the paper that reads, "Famous mini-me. This year's 'must-have' fashion accessory is a pretty daughter."

Now there's a ringing endorsement of the quality and depth of the society we have created for ourselves if ever one was needed. Perish the thought that such cultural richness should be exchanged for one where different priorities might pertain.

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

I have no idea what the NHS thought it was doing screwing around with kids development (using puberty blocking drugs and irreversible treatments in respect of gender transitions) on kids as young as 10 years old. I mean WTF! Any kid coming in with issues of this nature should certainly have been treated with all sympathy and respect, listened to and councilled, given whatever help was necessary and most importantly, examined for other possible reasons why they might be seeking gender reassignment such as autistic spectrum conditions or subclinical depression/anxiety etc.....but never, never, never should anything irreversible have been performed on them before they had reached an age whereby any plasticity in their psychological assessment of their own gender could be guaranteed to have disappeared. In other words, they were beyond the point (and you would certainly need to be eighteen or above) where they might change their mind. But it seems that those who operated within the now notorious Tavistock Institute considered it entirely appropriate to ignore the need to investigate other possible motivations as to why a person, basically no more than a child, might decide why they were in fact a gender other than the one to which nature would seem to have allocated them, and that their physical attributes and parents would seem to indicate that they were.

Like other 'treatments' developed by the psychiatric profession (think prefrontal lobotomies and the widespread use of 'shock theapies' etc) this period in the history of our medical practices will go down in infamy, will be viewed by history as the running amok of an arm of the medical establishment who became so entangled with the ideas of what they could do, what they might do, that they lost all perspective on whether they should do it - whether it was right, or desirable, or ethical to do it.

And as a result of their activities, numerous people who might have been going through a transitory phase are condemned to spend their lives in a limbo, a neither one nor the other existence, from which they can never escape until the day they inevitably pass on to another place or no place at all. Shame on them!
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
wayfriend
.
Posts: 20957
Joined: Wed Apr 21, 2004 12:34 am
Has thanked: 2 times
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by wayfriend »

peter wrote:This has the ominous look to me
You are misconstruing things if you think that the Chinese are ramping up something.

These "balloons", whatever is their purpose, have been in use for quite some time -- it's just that we've started noticing them. (In a weird twist, the reason we started noticing is the new surveillance we are doing to detect UFOs. Yes -- UFOs.)

IOt came out that several similar balloons were detected during the Trump administration. But the ball was dropped somewhere. And they probably were there to discover prior to that, but they went undiscovered.

In short: think about this as discovering a long running operation which the Chinese had, quite correctly, considered to be completely undetected the entire time.

What -I- am concerned about is whether there is a connection between the spyware China inserts into equipment it manufactures and sells to the US, and these balloons. They may be a "mothership" that they beam things up to.
.
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

Mmm.......

I'm not saying that the Chinese are "ramping up" so much as (to use my earlier expression) getting their ducks in a row. Certainly this balloon thing may be ongoing - we can only know stuff as our media reports it, and I don't dig deep enough (I'm the first to admit) to pick up on every smaller defence related story as they might have appeared over previous months and years.

But it seems to me that the country is very much playing a waiting game to see how things all pan out between Russia and the West (because despite our genuine anger at the invasion of Ukrainian sovereign territory, this is about much more than the Ukraine - it's a much broader geopolitical issue at heart, which is why we are prepared to throw so much money and resources at it).

But the truth is that it is beginning to hurt. Contrary to popular belief, said one pundit on last night's news, we have not got the stockpiles of armaments available to keep supplying Ukraine at the rate we have been doing so, and still maintain our own adequate defences. In short, both the US and UK are beginning to run short of ammunition to supply Ukraine with. Neither do we have the industrial production capacity sitting idle to immediately start churning out more. This is (to an extent) in contrast to the Russians, he said, who have huge reserves of shells with which to supply their guns along the extended fronts.

The Financial Times reports today that there is evidence of the Russians moving their fighter jets and battle helicopters to regions close to Ukraine, the implication being that they could be preparing to start throwing their pretty formidable airpower into the fray (in order to give a boost to their stalling land offensive. There is no indication that this is imminent said the FT, but it is clearly on their minds as an option. To this end, the West is keen to get as much air defensive equipment to the Ukrainian forces with all possible haste.

But to return to the Chinese situation, a high profile visit by the Iranian leader, Ebrahim Raisi yesterday - the first for 20 years - is a visible (and deliberately so) reminder of the formers maintenance of a neutral (but guardedly so) position in respect of world affairs generally. The Chinese do not openly support Russia in the Ukrainian conflict - they have I believe (if a little unenthusiastically) condemned the aggressive invasion of Ukrainian sovereign territory - but neither do they fully support the Western involvement. It is significant that they should be holding a high profile and trumpeted meeting with the Iranian leadership at the very time that both the UK and US have cancelled visits by high level Foreign Office politicians in the wake of the 'balloon crisis'. It does seem that the world is fracturing along a very definite Eastern-Western fault line and into two clearly discernible camps. This hasn't of course happened quite yet - but it does look as though things are going that way.

You'd have thought that the twentieth century would have taught our various leaders of the absolute folly and wastefulness of war. As always, it's the people who bear the costs of our leaders stupidity and it's an absolute given that we should run a mile from any politician who advocates anything other than a de-escalatory position and a rapid reigning in of this madness that threatens to snowball out of control, despite our best efforts to prevent it.

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

The Dept of Work and Pensions has come up with a great ruse to deal with the labour shortage problem caused by people not returning to work following the pandemic and Brexit...... Force people to work when they are sick.

I kid you not.

Today's Telegraph reports that there is to be a crackdown on the issuing of sick-notes by doctors as part of proposals to "reinvigorate the economy". Rather than sign people off, doctors are to be told to 'explore possibilities' as to how people can continue to work through their conditions.

I mean, this is just wrong on so many levels. Ignoring the moral and ethical position of pressuring doctors to act against their better professional judgement as to the fitness of an individual to work or otherwise, there is the simple practical consideration. The waiting times for a doctors appointment are higher than they have ever been, sometimes running into weeks, and the idea that they should suddenly find time to sit down and explore possibilities with each and every attendee who requests a sick note (which UK rules say you must provide if you are to be absent from work for more than seven days, or face disciplinary measures or the sack) is simply ludicrous.

It's hard enough to get a doctor to sign you off as it is - many are reluctant to sign sick notes even for really poorly individuals, simply because they have fallen into the trap of believing that everyone is a malingerer - and this can only make things worse. But the signing of a sick note (or otherwise) is not a thing that most doctors take a great deal of time over. Requests tend to come in over the phone and the doctors are by and large skilled enough to recognise those who are genuinely in need of time to recover from illness and those who might be swinging the lead. Fair do's. But the idea that genuinely sick people, who the doctor would normally have no hesitation in releasing from the need to work for a period, should be cajoled back into the work place despite their illness...... why this was the policy of the concentration camp, the labour camps where every last drop of useful labour had to be squeezed from the unit before it was discarded.

And to come out with it brazenly as part of a programme for reinvigorating the economy. The bastards! The absolute died in the wool, one hundred percent says it on the tin bastards! Shame on the fucking lot of them!
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

That the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon as leader of the Scottish National Party is a significant boost to the chances of Sir Kier Stamer leading the country after the next election cannot be denied.

Sturgeon, scuppered by falling support in the polls for Scottish independence, a financial scandal involving missing money and (above all); the ridiculous mess she has made with her ill thought out trans legislation, has thrown in the towel with no obvious successor. And whoever the party choose, they simply won't have the public recognition or momentum to stop the drain of voters in (most obviously) the direction of Scottish Labour over the course of the next few months. A return to anything like the days of old when Labour used to dominate the political scene in Scotland, and Stamer's chances of getting the top job are virtually assured.

And he himself, has been in the news as well. Flush with the Labour Party's being taken out of 'special measures' by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (a non governmental public body in the UK), Stamer gave a speech in which he said that the stain of anti-Semitism had finally been lifted from the Labour Party and though much work remained, the party would never go back to the way it had been under his predecessor. He said (in bullish mood) that if any of his parliamentary backbenchers or indeed members of the Labour Party, were not behind him in his program, well, the door was open for them to leave. Asked about his former boss, he said that Jeremy Corbyn would not stand as a Labour candidate in the next election.

Strong words from the man who stood alongside Corbyn, piggybacking on his popularity until it became clear that the media campaign against him had worked the oracle that they had so long been searching for (Corbyn was pro-IRA, didn't stick, pro Hamas, didn't stick, a Russian spy, didn't stick, an anti-Semite, Bingo!), and then he jumped ship. Since this time he has courted the media and publicity by shamelessly endorsing the government and Conservative Party portrayal of Corbyn as the next thing to Satan, and ruthlessly pursuing a witch-hunt of McCarthite proportions of any support for the man, and more broadly, of the left-wing of the party. This purging, that has been practiced upon the parliamentary party behind the scenes and with little publicity, has also been carried on apace with respect to the selection of Labour candidates to stand in the next election. It is a sobering thing to understand, that had Micheal Foot, Harold Wilson, Tony Benn and (believe it or not) even the current deputy leader Angela Rayner (never mind either Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonell) been putting themselves forward for candidacy roles in today's market not the one of them would have been selected. Any Union connection, any membership of a left wing socialist group deemed even remotely radical in its thinking, and you are out. The candidacy lists at the constituency levels have been purged of anyone with even the slightest of left wing leanings. Former candidates from the left and constituency party workers from the radical socialist background have been either dropped or driven out in a purging that has been bottom up as well as top down in the ruthlessness of its implementation.

That the claims of anti-Semitism within the party were used for political reasons against the Corbyn leadership, by the media and the right of the party is now well documented. Corbyn's claim that it was exaggerated has been vindicated time and again, but he remains barred from the whip (ie he cannot sit in parliament as a Labour MP, but has to occupy the independent benches) and has now been removed from the candidacy list for Islington North (for which constituency he has stood as MP for 20 years) as well. Stamer, in his fear that the same powerful forces that brought down Corbyn might be turned upon him were he to so much breath a word of support for his former boss, has instead used him to demonstrate his right wing credentials to anyone and everyone who will listen, by savaging him at every turn. Like that most zealous of things when it comes to persecution, a convert, he has (like Pritti Patel and Suella Braverman in their own way) tried to demonstrate his dependability by overcompensation, by being the most assiduous of critics, the most enthusiastic when it comes to weilding the whip, in front of the right wing masters of the party who now call the tune.

But it does not stop here.

By conflating the definition of anti-zionism with anti-Semitism, by making any criticism of Israel the same as a criticism of the Jewish people as a whole, Stamer and his leadership have managed to proscribe some of the very people themselves, who he stood up and made his public pronouncements concerning, in his speech of a few days ago.

Because we certainly didn't hear about the 35 Jewish members of the Labour party currently under investigation for anti-Semitism because they happen to believe that the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people is an abuse of human rights, an apartheid of the modern world (and described as such by such recognized groups as Amnesty International and investigatory panels from the United Nations), of the hounding out and proscribing of groups such as the Jewish Voice for Labour, for no other sin than that they stood up for Jeremy Corbyn and said that what was being done to him was a travesty. We heard nothing of the dozen Jewish Labour Party activists who have already been thrown out of the party.

Or 80 year old holocaust survivor and party activist Stephen Kapos, who quit the party after being threatened with expulsion if he accepted the invitation to speak of his experiences on Holocaust Memorial Day at an event organised by the Socialist Labour Network, a group proscribed by the Labour leadership. No. We heard nothing in the Stamer speech of him.

Get that right. A holocaust survivor threatened with expulsion from the Labour Party for agreeing to speak about his experiences on Holocaust Memorial Day. This is Stamer's Labour Party. A party where any connection with the union movement, any past comment or post that might be considered reactionary, even to be a member or have a whiff of working class background about you, will bar you from standing as a representative. A party that will sell its soul, become the very thing it was formed to fight against, in order for the all consuming desire for power, for electoral success to be realised....

I will have none of it. I would rather vote for Nigel Farrage than give one iota of support to this travesty of a Labour Party, this turncoat organisation that cares nothing, contributes nothing, to the struggle for the fair and equitable system that has been denied to the people of this country for ever and a day. This whining miserable specimen of humanity, this flyspeck on the history of a Labour movement that he is unfit to sweep the floor of the lowliest office thereof. Listen not to one word that falls from his miserable dissembling lips. Stamer is a living personification of everything that is wrong with our society and the sight of him makes me almost physically sick.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

Sunak has slubbered up some kind of a deal with the EU in an attempt to sort out the issues with the Northern Ireland Protocol and many are much less than happy about the way he has gone about it.

Rumours have been flying around for weeks that there is some kind of big announcement in the offing, but a spokesman from the DUP, the party fron the province with most objections about how the protocol is currently functioning, said that they had not even been consulted about any alterations to the existing deal which, he said, he found "strange".

Others who are disquieted by what they are hearing are the pro-Brexit ERG wing of the Tory parliamentary party, who as with the DUP, said that the secrecy with which the talks had been carried out was not something that made them confident about what was being discussed.

From what we can gather, the proposed arrangement will include something along the lines of the 'red lane - green lane' passage of goods into the province, whereby goods guaranteed to remain within the province will bypass many of the checks and enjoy facilitated passage across the Irish Sea 'border' (the border that never was). Goods that might find themselves travelling further into the South of the island would pass through the metaphorical red lane, whereby they would be subject to the full gamut of checks.

Such a system would be highly dependent upon trust, somewhat like going through the nothing to declare lane in an airport, and there would inevitably be transgressions. It is here that the problems start to arise. The DUP and ERG are absolutely adamant that there can be no European Court of Justice (ECJ) involvement in any dispute or transgressions process and the EU are equally adamant that they must be. In order to get the EU to accept the changes to the Protocol that the DUP are demanding (they essentially want it scrapped because they feel that it carves off the province from the mainland proper and puts a wedge in place that could ultimately broaden into the reunification of Ireland) - the free unchecked passage of goods between the UK mainland and the province - the UK government has had to accept some ECJ role, but will try to sugar the pill by saying to the ERG and DUP that it will only be after referral by the UK courts that any case will reach the ECJ. There will be no direct involvement of cases going straight to the European Court before preliminary hearing in the British.

It's not likely to work.

The business community is desperate to see the situation resolved, because as things currently stand trade between the province and mainland is being quite severely effected, but the involvement of what they see as an external third party exercising law with UK sovereign territory is anathema to the right wing of the Tory party and the DUP, and there is by force going to be a kickback when the plan is formally announced (on Tuesday next it is thought).

It's a huge gamble for Sunak. It could blow his already tenuously held together party apart, and certainly be a major risk to his continuance as PM, which is a continual balancing act between all the different factions of his party, loss of support of any one of which, could potentially bring him down. The Tory right wing (of whom the ERG form a significant part) have not gone through all they have just in order to hand back jurisdictional control to the European Union. It won't happen, and if Sunak tries it he will be toast (in their thinking).

So he's got some heavy lifting to do between now and next Tuesday; Belfast today and then back over to Munich to speak with the EU's Ursula von der Leyen, and if all goes well, the formal command paper set before the House of Commons chamber on Tuesday. This is probably the hardest thing he's done since taking office, and the most dangerous. It's a real test of his quality as a PM. I'm afraid that the rumblings coming out of it do not sound very hopeful at present.

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

I've been watching the tragic coverage of the unexplained disappearance of Nicola Bulley with increasing disquiet as the weeks have passed.

Just to recap, the mother-of-two disappeared over two weeks ago, while walking her dog by a lonely stretch of river, and shortly after completing a telephone call with her employers, which was still in an open state when her phone was found on a bench close to the spot of her disappearance.

Frantic searches and calls for information had revealed very little useful information, but the police were sufficiently confident to say that they did not believe that there was any third party involvement, and speculated that she may have fallen into the river, perhaps in attempting to catch her dog (which was found running near the spot) or retrieve the ball she was throwing for it. In the line of this thinking, the river, a fast flowing and deep one, was begun to be searched, with the range being extended over the course of days as no sign of her was found. Finally the search reached beyond a weir and down into the estuary where the river enters the sea, but still no trace was found.

Various statements from friends and family were made on television and in the press as all of this was ongoing, and as the time ran on without any significant discovery as to Nicola's fate, it became apparent that the tone of the reportage was changing. Both the family and friends, and the press themselves, seemed unconvinced that the theory of her having fallen into the water was the correct one. One imagines that from the family point of view, desperation to find their loved family member would lead them to grab at any chance of her still being alive, but the media in their need for prurient coverage were clearly not satisfied with the idea of a tragic but mundane accident.

"Stained gloves" were found and seized upon as grounds for speculation. Friends were hauled in (and Nicola's partner) to say that they were unconvinced by the police explanation, and press speculation continued. Finally, a couple of days ago, in response to mounting (if unspoken) scepticism of the job they were doing, they released some information that has resulted in their being censured by the Home Secretary in this morning's press. They revealed that Nicola had significant alcohol issues as a result of menopausal difficulties, and that her disappearance had immediately flagged up as a significant risk upon it's being reported for this reason. They had, in fact visited the Bulley household ten days before her disappearance as part of a social services visit pertaining to her troubles.

Now the police find themselves on the back foot, damned if they do and damned if they don't, and in the firing line from the Home Secretary for revealing personal details of a disappearance victim. Their justification that they were simply trying to dampen down unhelpful speculation around the case is cutting them little slack, as most of the media seem to think that the revelations were made simply in order to justify their seemingly casual acceptance that she must have simply fallen in the water (sort of, "Oh well - she had issues. What can you expect?" style of thing).

But I have great sympathy for the police in this. They are trying their best to carry out an investigation under difficult circumstances. The media speculation, and clear desire for this to be something more sinister, more gripping as a story than a simple tragic accident, has whipped the whole thing into an unpalatable frenzy in which the private grief of the family and professional duty of the police have been severely affected. Once again our media has exerted a baleful effect on the progression of events by attempting to create sensation out of simplicity. Now everybody is lessened by what would have been far better as a simply reported and minimally covered tragic set of circumstances. The course of the investigation is hindered as police must contend with distracting issues where they should be concentrating on finding Nicola (if it can be done), and the public are encouraged into a prurient level of speculative excitement where they should be feeling simple respect and sympathy for the grief of a family undergoing a tragedy that, God forbid, could have happened to any one of us.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

The test I've set myself is that we protect Northern Ireland's place in our internal market, protect the Belfast Good Friday Agreement, resolve the practical issues that the Northern Ireland Protocol is causing families and businesses and, crucially, address the democratic deficit. We have not got a deal yet.
You can say that again. From the response of the ERG and the DUP, you ain't gonna get one either.

Because what Rishi Sunak has said in that quote, is essentially a paraphrase of the old brexit trilemma, the circle that couldn't be squared, and has dogged the entire process from day one (since the referendum result came in - no-one seemed to see it coming during the actual campaign itself).

Until Boris Johnson got his deal across by essentially lying to the British people by saying that he had solved the paradox - there would be no border either down the Irish Sea, on the island of Ireland and that the integrity of the European single market would be maintained - and then slapped a border bang down the Irish Sea, this fundamental impossibility was recognised by all who had anything to do with the negotiations.

Now it has come back to haunt Sunak, and we have the very likely possibility that yet another UK PM will founder on the rock of Europe. But this is of course as nothing to the possibility of a return to the troubles of the province, increasing with every day that power sharing in the province remains sacrificed upon the anvil of brexit.

The noises that came out from the DUP yesterday were initially encouraging as their leader stepped out to say that progress had definitely been made (the red lane, green lane part of the deal). But he was cautious, he said, about saying that a deal could be struck, and would like to see the final text before committing his opinion to anything.

That was the warning part, and of course referred to the involvement of the ECJ in the administration of disputes or transgressions of goods entering the province. By the evening however, spokespersons for the party, who currently refuse to sit in the Northern Ireland assembly with their republican counterparts Sinn Fein get the issue, were being more blunt. It wasn't good enough, they were saying. The hard line brexiteer rump of the Tories, the ERG immediately said that they were "in lockstep" with the DUP on the issue, and that any involvement of the ECJ on law administration within the sovereign territory of the United Kingdom was simply not acceptable. Hardly surprising: it took them years to get out of the EU and they'll be damned if they are going to concede an inch of the gains they have made in order to satisfy either Sinn Fein or the EU itself.

And so the brexit trilemma is back, and looking like it might claim another scalp. A commentator for the ERG said last night that if Sunak tried to give away ground on the issue in order to secure his deal, that he would be finished. I believe him.

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

Interesting little story in today's Weekend FT, to the effect that the AI system that made a splash some years ago by beating a human at the game Go has been beaten in return, and beaten fairly easily, by an amateur player who simply identified a weakness in the AI system of play, and then exploited it in a manner that the program seemed unable to deal with.

Essentially, the man just used a diversionary tactic that the computer seemed unable to ignore, while he strung together a winning set of pieces elsewhere on the board.

The report said that it was possible that he had identified a flaw in virtually all of the AI systems that have been developed to date, and that it was entirely possible that we have been labouring under a misapprehension when believing that our AI is on a par with human intelligence when it comes to problem solving. It has, it appears, flown to high on borrowed wings.

This doesn't surprise me, I have to say. Very often people get carried away with the belief in the capabilities of the things that they have developed, and I see no reason to believe that our attempts to replicate the human ability to think creatively in the solving of problems would not suffer with the same kind of overconfidence.

You simply ain't going to build an AI capable of replicating the human capacity for inventive thought overnight. Mimicry, yes. That an AI will be good at. But like a fake Leonardo, something will always be missing, something simple will be the Achilles heel upon which the thing will fail.

Computers are and will remain essentially big pocket calculators for a long time to come.

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

The shortlisting of only the most anodyne of candidates for seats in the Labour shortlists is surely about as anti democratic and backwards a thing as it is possible to be?

Surely the idea, in a representative democracy, is for the people to choose the representative of their choice that will stand in parliament for them. That 'of their choice' is important. If the candidate list they can choose from is enforced by a top down approval system, then doesn't that erode the notion that the people have had true choice at all. Surely it becomes a bit like Henry Ford's car - you can have any colour you want as long as it's black (might be a poor analogy given today's cultural climate, but you get what I mean I hope).

Okay, there might be an argument that this is a party issue; that the party has a right of veto on any candidate who it considers not to be within the range of its political bandwidth, but if that veto begins to be applied in a manner that entirely changes the nature of the party, becomes unreflective of the range of views that have traditionally been part of the franchise of that particular party - then where does this leave you?

Because that is what Kier Stamer has done. People with traditional Labour views, those who represent the more socialist end of the Labour spectrum (and you cannot pretend that these people have always been welcomed into the party, indeed were the people who formd the party) have been excluded from the long list of candidates, irrespective of whether they have stood in for selection previous or not.

Now surely the idea of a representative democracy has inbuilt into it, that the candidates, even within a given party, be selected at the constituency level?

Or am I wrong about this? In fairness, the giving of 'safe seats' to established parliamentarians etc has always been part of our system, and Stamer's earlier claims that he would take candidate selection away from the Labour NEC and put it into the hands of the constituency offices (yeah - right!) implies that the central party apparatus has always had the running of candidate selection?

Okay. Maybe. But all this aside, the Stamer initiative that only the most centric of candidates may stand for election when the country next goes to the polls absolutely ensures that whatever Labour government is elected (assuming one will be elected) will be a poor shadow of the Tory one it replaces, devoid of ideas, devoid of vision, and will be dispatched after one term, to disappear into the history books as nothing more than a lost opportunity, a wasted period of no vigour and no legacy to speak of. Because in purging out that radicalism, that true socialist thinking in which the fertility of the Labour soil is fermented, Stamer's Labour Party becomes a sterile environment in which the capacity to evolve, the stimulus to test and hone ideas is extinguished, and what remains is a mimicry of the Tory model in which the pursuit of power is given complete precedence over the holding of principle. And no-one worthy of the name of Labour would stand in it, and no-one worthy of the name of a Labour supporter would vote for it.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

There is a very definite sense of rebellion against Rishi Sunak gaining momentum from within the Tory ranks this morning.

His attempts to sort out the mess that he has inherited in respect of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and new that he is 'close to a deal' with the EU are unraveling with unnerving pace as I post, with criticism coming in from all quarters.

His first problem would seem to be the action of suspending passage of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill through the House - the bill prepared by the Johnson administration that allows for the tearing up of parts of the Withdrawal Agreement as they pertain to the Northern Ireland Protocol (a section within the larger treaty). This has bought Sunak some good will with Brussels, but has enraged the pro Brexit parts of his own parliamentary party for whom the Protocol is anathema because it puts a border down the Irish Sea. One is tempted to ask why they ever bought it in the first place - a question I asked at the time - as it was so obviously inimical to their desires. One might remember at the time that it was suggested that Johnson had told them in private that he intended to renege on this part of the treaty as soon as it was finalized, and that it was this that had bought their cooperation. Clearly they did not expect him to be chucked out of office before he had gotten his reversing legislation through the House, and Sunak's decision to suspend passage of the Bill and pursue a different (more conciliatory) course must have come as a bit of a shock to them.

But whatever, they are finding their voice now and it will make for uncomfortable reading for Sunak in this morning's press.

The DUP, for their part, after their initially quiet reception of the Sunak plan, are now becoming more vocal in their objections, and it won't have been helped by one of the top negotiators from the EU side having returned to his offices "boasting" that they now had ECJ involvement in the UK law hardwired into the process.

On an entirely different flank, the Sunday Telegraph reports that the PM is facing a major rebellion on his plan to increase corporation tax by six percent. He has been sent a letter by a number of influential backbench Tory MPs, together with business leaders from different groups, advising him to drop the intended increase and instead focus on a pro-growth strategy and adopt a fresh approach which focuses on securing inward investment. The Bank of England has calculated that since the referendum result, at which point investment into the country virtually ceased overnight, the cost of lost investment has been twenty nine billion pounds a year. Examples are the recent decision of Astra Zenica not to build a planned facility in this country, but to relocate the plan to The ROI instead, and the news that the computer chip giant Intel intends to spend 80 billion pounds building a series of plants across European cities in the next ten years, but has said that it will not do so in the UK "Because of Brexit".

But between them, and along with the already mounting disquiet over the Sunak-Hunt plan of high tax, low growth budgetary policy for the duration, there is mounting opposition to Sunak from within his own ranks that doesn't bode well for his future. When you see him standing alongside other world leaders, as he was with Kamala Harris yesterday in Munich, he does not look comfortable or confident in his role, and has none of the braggadocio of Johnson. The Tories must be looking at him from all sides now and wondering what they have done. If Sunak goes ahead as planned and releases his new agreement with the EU on Tuesday or thereabouts, then their could be a mighty kickback from his parliamentary party. Already there are signs that he is loosing his nerve, as evidenced by his row-back yesterday on how close a deal was to actually being done. "Lots of work left to do," he said, "No deal finalized yet," in an attempt to turn the heat down on the pot of criticism that was showing signs of boiling over.

I think he is in, way out of his depth, and if this goes the way it is looking, then Owen Jones' seemingly wild suggestion that Boris Johnson will return to lead the Tory Party before the end of the year could actually have legs.

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

Not so long ago, I found a book by Enid Blyton in a charity bookshop that I had loved as a child. I bought it in a fit of nostalgia and that evening, began to read it. (Hey - I'm an old man! Cut me some slack for wanting to return to the simplicity of my days as a child will you!) I soon realized that what I held in my hands was far from the book I had read all those years ago, but rather had been sanitized to within an inch of it's life, the text 'upgraded' and modernised, any cultural stereotyping or difficult referencing removed, and the whole thing rendered into a dull and boring sludge of words that no kid worth his salt would ever bother with.

Now I read today that the same thing is planned for the classic Roald Dhal books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I mean, come on! What is the point of having great children's literature, literature of any kind, that was written in another age, when perhaps sensitivities were different, if you think that the youth of your own kind will be 'corrupted' by it, will not be able to sort the wheat of artistic excellence from the chaff of outdated cultural tropes.

Cut our kids some slack. Give them credit to be capable of making these judgements for themselves. They are not stupid, do not need to be wrapped in cotton wool. Leave the works alone and let The Witches be enjoyed, warts and all.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

Ex about ten different jobs in the government, but currently on the backbenches, Sajid Javid has said that "Social media media bosses should be forced to open up children's accounts to their bereaved parents so that they can understand why they died." (Quote from this morning's Telegraph.)

Wrong. They should be obliged to make all the accounts of children available for scrutiny by their parents all the time. It should be part of the minimum terms of agreement for a junior to use the service, and that's as a bare minimum.

In preference to this - and this is what I believe fundamentally should be the case - use of the internet point blank, excepting in controlled environments such as within a school or perhaps on public library machines and under supervision, should be age limited to eighteen.

The internet is simply too unsafe an environment for kids to be given free access to. It's hard enough for parents to keep tabs on the often cruel world of children's interaction with each other when only dealing with their face to face activities. In the open environment of social media, it becomes an impossibility, and this is not to even consider the dangers to them from imposters and predators, or the impossibility of preventing their trawling in places that they should be nowhere near in a million years.

Common sense tells you that no kid should be given access to the internet until they reach adulthood, and until this sensible move occurs tragedies such as deaths resulting from bullying etc will continue to happen. One such death should be too many. Change the law now. End off.

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

Anthony Blinken, US secretary of state has warned the Chinese that there would be serious consequences of they were to increase their involvement with Russia in respect of moving from the supply of non lethal aid to the country to that of lethal (ie armaments and equipment of potential offensive use).

Now I don't know about you, but if I were the Chinese premier I would be somewhat miffed at being told what I could and could not do in respect of my dealings with a third party - in fact I'd consider it to be impertinent, and especially so from a person whose country considered themselves at liberty to supply whomsoever they wished, with equipment of the very type that they were telling me I could not consider supplying.

I'm not suggesting that the supplying of Russia with weaponry would in any way equate to that of supplying Ukraine - the Russians have clearly carried out an illegal invasion into the sovereign territory of a third country - but more the diplomatic look of the thing, the seeming high-handedness of it, from the perspective of the Chinese leader. I don't think that Xi Jinping will take the slightest notice of Blinken - in fact I think the comments are likely to be counterproductive rather than otherwise, in influencing Chinese activity in this area.

Blinken's remarks are illustrative of the whole situation in terms of the poor diplomacy that has been practiced by the West from start to finish in this affair. At the present their seems to be no appetite for anything that involves any kind of dialogue that is not escalatory and aggressive in tone. Extending this into the exchanges with the Chinese is simply not going to help matters. For their part, the Chinese have said that they are not interested in the conflict in any terms other than bringing it to a rapid and satisfactory end for all parties concerned. This is diplomatic language and worth a hundred of Blinken's silly and ineffective warnings (not to mention downright rude).

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

Now that the Nicola Bulley tragedy has come to the almost inevitable conclusion that it was always going to, expect the disappointed media - in terms that it turned out not to be the stuff of prurient and macabre sensationalism that their low grade readership thrives on - to turn on the police for making the revelations about Nicola's private life that they themselves (the media, that is) made it necessary for the force to make.

Had not the media been pushing, pushing, pushing, for an alternative explanation than the one that the police were correctly giving as the most likely probability, then none of the so called revelations would have been necessary. Already the criticism has moved into the area of how long it took the police divers to find poor Nicola's body. It as in deep, fast flowing and murky waters, stretching over a distance of potentially miles in length. What do they expect?

No. The poor lass was not done in by her partner, spirited away by some psychotic lunatic, didn't run away with some lover or whatever. Instead she fell, or God forbid took her own life, in what turns out to be a domestic tragedy of the mundane kind that alas, simply does occur in this world. How boring it must be for our sensationalist obsessed press to have to acknowledge this, so now in their fury, they will turn on the police, who's behaviour and efforts have been exemplary from start to finish in this tragic tale.

I'm for one, glad that it is nearing a resolution for the bereaved family and friends of the lady. May she rest in peace and may her partner, parents and family find some relief that the questions are now nearing an end.

From our point of view, it is the media role in this that should now concern is, not engaging in a finger pointing exercise at the police and led by the very people who turned this tragedy into a circus in the first place.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
User avatar
peter
The Gap Into Spam
Posts: 11489
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:08 am
Location: Another time. Another place.
Been thanked: 4 times

Post by peter »

Joe Biden makes a suprise visit to Ukraine to see President Zelensky and (suprise suprise) makes an announcement of another half billion dollars to be spent on weaponry and ballistics to support the Ukrainian cause. Clearly better value for money than the cost of the telephone calls that could get the negotiating process up and running which might actually end this thing.

"We will stand by you until the end", he told Zelensky, which is likely to be a long time away since at no point is he actually going to provide any material assistance that would actually end this conflict in the Ukrainian favour. One assumes that this would be the pushing of Russian forces out of the country, with the agreement that they would not return (signed by Putin?) - but would this include the Crimea, or just back to the lines of one year ago? Does anyone know? The latter, fine. The Crimea, the Russians will never swallow and the war continues ad infinitum until one side or the other is totally destroyed (or perhaps the world).

But is this going to be enough for the West (read the Americans, because let's call a spade a spade, they are running this show, the Western show, and have done since the end of WW2; that's what hegemony is). Are we going to be satisfied with a return to the fragile status quo of a year ago? I don't think so. Remember that conflict had been grumbling on in the Donbas for years prior to the Russian invasion, not perhaps against Russian forces proper (as opposed to Russian backed Russo-Ukranian ones) but certainly as a constant problem for the Kiev based administration of the country. I suspect that Zelensky will at least expect to get a resolution of that fly in the Ukrainian ointment out of this, if nothing else. I think he's unlikely to want to stop before Russia is out of the Crimea either.

But what about regime change in Moscow? Will the West see this as the ultimate goal. Is this why they will keep fueling the stalemate, in the hope that as a result of the attrition, Putin will loose support at home and be toppled. Were this to happen, the thinking is amongst pundits that his replacement would be unlikely to be much of an improvement and could well be a whole lot worse.

The Chinese have reacted pretty much as I said they would in response to Blinken and Biden's warnings about supplying Russia, saying that they would never accept American finger-pointing and even pressure on Chinese-Russian relations. In other words, go and take a running jump!

But one wonders just how long this pouring of money and resources into this war can go on. America has put in 24 billion dollars, the UK around 3 billion pounds (with the same pledged for this year). How long are the public in both countries going to swallow this level of expenditure when their own needs remain so pressing and yet starved of resources? Both the UK and US administrations have elections in the not so distant future and at some point, some accounting to the people for all of this expenditure is going to have to be made.

But closer to hand, President Zelensky has said that if China were to begin supporting Russia militarily, then this would essentially be the start of WW3. Strong words no doubt, but difficult to deny. Everything that is happening in this conflict and the talk around it seems to be escalatory in nature rather than de-escalatory. At home, Truss and Johnson are in today's papers urging PM Sunak to send fighter jets to Ukraine. Truss for her part (a bit like Braverman with her Rwandan dreams) "Cannot wait to see jets arriving in Ukraine!" Well, we all know about Truss's judgement and so I'm not sure Sunak will be listening to her very much. Johnson describe sending jets as "cutting to the chase" and giving Zelensky what he needs to beat the Russians. Yes. Okay. But that might also be cutting to the chase of instigating a third world war or even a nuclear holocaust. Perhaps we should think about that before we act on any advice from Johnson.

Besides, both of these failed PMs are only saying what they are because they know that they can do so with impunity. They are piling on the agony against Sunak (who they both hate) in the hope that when he falls some of the political chaos will fall out favourably for them. But the risk is that Sunak for his part may actually be goaded into a stupid response for the same domestic political ends that Truss and Johnson are working for. He might feel the need to exemplify the same hawkish persona - strong in the face of aggression stuff - and be minded to actually perform some destabilising act in consequence. So the future of the world could hang on the balance of the words of Truss and Johnson, neither of whom give a toss about anything other than their own petty interests. Great!

Call me a weak vacillating appeaser if you wish, but is it not time for all those concerned - Putin, Zelensky, Biden, Xi and Sunak (and all the rest) - to sit down and start to look for a way out of this madness? I mean, c'mon - how hard can it be? This conflict ends with dialogue and compromise, or it ends with worldwide conflagration. There will be no other 'win' for anyone coming out of this.

But anyway. That's it for today. Have a good one and, God willing, see you tomorrow.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
Post Reply

Return to “General Discussion Forum”