Putin’s war, Covid tests, lake stops leaking, BJ’s BS and e-scooters

3 April 2022

A month ago, I praised the Ukrainian border guard on Snake Island who said “Russian warship, go fuck yourself”.  Some days later, it was confirmed that Roman Hrybov had been taken prisoner with fellow guards but all were released last week in an exchange of prisoners with Russia.

A recording of Hrybov’s radio reply to the Russian warship’s warning was posted on the internet and quickly went viral, becoming a rallying cry for Ukraine’s defenders, and has, apparently, even been commemorated on a Ukrainian stamp.  Can’t see Her Majesty approving that design …

By the way, does anybody know what would happen if a sniper fired a bullet into the barrel of a tank’s big gun?  If there’s a shell in it, would it explode?  Or, if the breech is open, would the bullet continue into the cab and ricochet around?  And would it do sufficient damage as it bounced down the barrel to reduce the gun’s accuracy?  Might it be worth a try if one person could incapacitate a tank with a single lightweight weapon from a safe distance?

I worry about the cost to Ukraine of securing and feeding prisoners of war and had an idea.  Why don’t they remove conscripted Russian prisoners’ weapons and uniforms, tend any wounds, give them neutral civilian clothes and say ‘bugger off back to your families and tell everyone what we’re really like and what you’re doing to our country’?  There are some reports of Russian troops’ disenchantment with their mission and it would do no harm to raise doubts in their minds about what they’ve been told they’re doing in Ukraine.

Mind you, Joe Biden’s comment that Vladimir Putin is a “butcher” and shouldn’t be allowed to stay in power wasn’t entirely tactful and just feeds Putin’s paranoia.  The White House stepped in very quickly to deny that America had any plans to dispose Putin and this was just a personal comment taken out of context.

I wonder what it’s like to go through life in a permanent state of Putinesque paranoia, which leads him to rule by such fear that even his closest advisers daren’t tell him the truth about Russia’s failures in Ukraine.  In addition, people living so close to the edge (who include Donald Trump) are unable to process bad news or to consider helpful criticism, which inevitably means that they tend to make bad decisions based on incomplete information and increase the chance of accelerating a vicious spiral down into the bunker before they press the button that ends human civilisation. 

If Putin drops dead of natural causes or novichok, … well, watch the film “The Death of Stalin” (plot summary from Rotten Tomatoes:  “When tyrannical dictator Joseph Stalin dies in 1953, his parasitic cronies square off in a frantic power struggle to become the next Soviet leader … As they bumble, brawl and back-stab their way to the top …”)

Glenn S Gerstell, former general counsel of the National Security Agency and Central Security Service, has recently warned that “As they begin to lose, Putin may stray from what we think of as rational calculations of risk and reward” and “If his rule is threatened, all bets are off”.

Meanwhile, back in the battlefield, some of the thicker Russian soldiers were digging trenches in the Chernobyl exclusion zone when they started developing signs of radiation sickness and decided to leave the area and hand back control of the site to the Ukrainian state power company Energoatom.

But we have our own idiots in the UK who have become bored with the Covid pandemic and removed all restrictions so you don’t have to test yourself if you feel unwell and, if you test positive, you’re advised (not required) “to stay at home and avoid contact with other people” and “you can go back to your normal activities if you feel well enough to do so and do not have a high temperature”.

Unsurprisingly, the result is that the number of infections is continuing to increase – to record levels, with almost 5,000,000 people in the UK infected last week – and hospital admissions are soaring again (though not yet to the levels seen in the first phase of the epidemic).  The next step was obvious:  reduce the number of infections reported by reducing the number of people who can afford to test themselves by making them pay for test kits.

Still, with the UK’s poorest families facing average energy bills of more than £1,900, inflation at record levels, and the real value of state benefits reducing daily, what’s an extra £50 a week for daily tests for a family of 3?  (The latest figures from America show that if the federal minimum wage, which hasn’t changed since 2009 when it was set at $7.25 (£5.53) an hour, had increased at the same rate as Ball Street wankers’ bonuses, it would now be $61.75 (£47.08) an hour.)

Talking of horror stories, Mark Lawson wrote about his encounters with Jimmy Savile in yesterday’s Guardian.  Don’t read it late at night.  I almost wish I could believe there is a hell and that Savile’s in it.

The good news (if that’s what turns you on) is that cannabis is cheaper than it used to be and, in America, many households that were previously weed-neutral started using it while they were confined to their homes by the pandemic.  It’s always been a social drug and can be taken in a number of ways, from sweets / gummies to water-pipes / bongs, so the pleasures of anticipation can be as formal as you like.  Sadly, it’s still illegal in the UK.  Unlike alcohol and nicotine that kill more than all the other drugs put together.

In the west of Ireland, the water level in Lough Funshinagh used to stay at roughly the same level year in, year out, by leaking into the underlying strata but these have become saturated (or the Russians have stopped up the leak) and the lough’s surface area is now twice what it used to be, threatening homes and farmland.

The news from America is that Judge Alison Nathan refused to disqualify Juror 50 because he’d been abused as a child.  In her judgement, Nathan wrote “To imply or infer that Juror 50 was biased – simply because he was himself a victim of sexual abuse in a trial related to sexual abuse and sex trafficking … would be tantamount to concluding that an individual with a history of sexual abuse can never serve as a fair and impartial juror in such a trial. That is not the law, nor should it be.”  So Ghislaine Maxwell will stay in prison.

It’s not been a good week for Boris Johnson either.  A few days before his latest U-turn (another double) on a plan to drop a controversial ban on LGBT+ conversion therapy, he told parliament “We will take [P&O] to court, we will defend the rights of British workers … P&O plainly aren’t going to get away with it.”  Followed by, on Wednesday, transport secretary Grant Shapps admitted “The government are not in a position to take court action.”

And a headline caught my eye:  “Scientists creating universal e-scooter sound to help pedestrians detect them”.  Aren’t e-scooters supposed to avoid and give way to pedestrians?  Perhaps pedestrians should carry a loudspeaker that says “e-scooter, go fuck yourself”?

2 DVLA cock-ups, another government disaster and a capitalist admits breaking the law for money

27 March 2022

I’ve been driving an untaxed car!  I discovered this recently when I thought it was due an MoT so I decided to check the log book, only to discover I hadn’t got one.  So I filled in a form and sent it to DVLA with the slip headed “Do not sent this to DVLA” they requested and a log book arrived remarkably quickly – or, if you add in the two years since we bought the car, remarkably slowly.

I also decided to check when the road tax was due so I went online and found it was due on 1 January last year.  Heigh ho, I thought, and got to the payment page which would only let me tax it from 1 January this year, which I did.  Before some genius did away with them, you could look at the disc in the windscreen to see when your tax expired.  (No wonder the police say there are now so many more untaxed cars on the roads.)

The obvious thing to do then was to tell the police what had happened so I emailed them and told them the whole story in glorious technicolour.  The following day, I had a very helpful call from the police saying not to worry, I’d done all the right things and no action would be taken against me.

We also have another ‘car’ that’s been adapted so my wife can drive her wheelchair up a ramp into it and, last week, we actually had a tax reminder letter from DVLA.  Sadly, it was headed, in bright red letters, “Last chance”, saying “Tax it or lose it, we can always spot an untaxed car”, which was entirely misleading.  To somebody who, as a point of principle, pays bills on the day they’re received, the most irritating thing was the “Last chance” threat which should have read “first chance, reminder and last chance combined” and explained that they’re saving the planet by only sending a single reminder 6 weeks after the tax expires.

They also said they can take the car away because they can always spot an untaxed car.  Yes but.  In the other car, I must have passed hundreds of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras which would have registered the fact that it wasn’t taxed and I’ll leave you to guess how many letters, emails, phone calls, police tow-away trucks or threats of court action we’ve seen and how many times I’ve been stopped by Highway Patrols on motorways.

But my new passport arrived safely so I now have alternative photo ID to my driving licence.   I never used to care about my passport, though I was quite proud of my expired plum-coloured EU passports that allowed me travel all over Europe without having to queue with other aliens at borders.  My new passport is blue and has “British Passport” written across the top.  I find I’m now feeling ashamed to be so publicly identified as British and will have to attempt to talk French with a New Zealand accent next time we’re in France.

Vladimir Putin continues to lay waste to a country he thinks should be part of ‘his’ Russia.  Surely, if he really did believe Ukraine should be part of Russia, wouldn’t he want to keep it as pristine and complete as possible?

In China, the Carter Centre’s US-China Perception Monitor published a suggestion by Hu Wei, a Shanghai scholar, that China should sever its links with Putin.  This received over a million views but was swiftly rejected by the Chinese authorities and the author and the publisher’s websites were blocked in China.  In essence, the translation I saw said “China should avoid playing both sides in the same boat, give up being neutral, and choose the mainstream position in the world.”  While the sentiment is clear, let’s hope the translator is now taking lessons in English metaphors and their use.

The penultimate turf was laid on last week’s grave by the unrepentant extremist greedy bastard capitalist Peter Hebblethwaite, the boss of P&O, after he’d fired 800 UK staff without notice.  When asked on Thursday by an incredulous Darren Jones, chair of the Commons business committee, “Are you in this mess because you don’t know what you’re doing, or are you just a shameless criminal?”, Hebblethwaite told the committee that he had “absolutely no doubt we were required to consult with the unions. We chose not to do that.”

He later apologised and said “we will compensate everyone in full” but “I would make this decision again, I’m afraid.”  The replacement crew will receive an hourly rate starting at £5.15, except on the Larne-Cairnryan route between Northern Ireland and Scotland, where it’s bound by UK law.

Hebblethwaite told MPs he was “saving the business”.  He admitted he was paid £325,000 a year (approximately £1,500 per working hour) plus two bonuses.  New crew members working in international waters that aren’t subject to the UK minimum wage, would be paid £5.15 per working hour.  Hebblethwaite didn’t answer when asked if he could live on £5.15 an hour.  Arrogant pig.

The final turf was laid on last week’s grave by the Chancellor of the Exchequer who cut fuel duty by enough to take its cost back to last week’s level (if garages pass the cut on to customers), raised the threshold for making national insurance contributions and said that the basic rate of income tax would be cut by 1p but not until just before the next election in two years’ time (coincidence that, eh?)

I have two friends whose gain from the billionaire’s husband’s budget is that fuel will only cost 25% more than this time last year but heating will still be 3 or 4 times as much.  Neither of them pays NIC because one is retired and the other is an unemployed single parent of a 4-year old and has to scrape by on benefits, which will only increase by half the current rate of inflation.  It seems that both are too low in the heap for governments to care about.

I realise people voted Conservative because they wanted a Conservative government to favour the rich and make the poor pay for it but I can’t begin to understand how society decayed so badly so fast.  Shouldn’t we, however we vote, support those less fortunate than ourselves and, if that means taking money from those who have too much, so what?

Having vented my spleen on the evening of the budget, I was somewhat comforted to see that even the right-wing press felt his budget had blown Rishi Sunak’s credibility.  ‘Levelling up’ didn’t last long did it?

But what can we ‘normal’ people do?  Our answer is to do our best to help individuals and support charity appeals for things like the victims of Putin’s war; and pin a Ukrainian flag to our fence.

The only cheering things last week was Nazanin Zaghira-Ratcliffe’s press conference at which she slammed the government’s failures – six years, five foreign secretaries, how many does it take, she asked.  This led to a horrific outpouring of bile from people who thought she should be grateful it had only taken six years and five foreign secretaries, including at least one sexist misogynist, probably on the far right, who accused her of disloyalty to her husband because he had just thanked the government for getting her out.  Men who imagine women should be subservient still seem to exist – I wonder if you could slip a pill for that into their beer.

Another person summarised the problem rather neatly by tweeting “She doesn’t owe us gratitude: we owe her an explanation” but, sadly, this noble sentiment was rather undermined by the tweeter himself, who was Jeremy Hunt, one of the foreign secretaries who had failed to bring her home.

Pitying Vlad and Boris, poverty, Covid, peninsulas and abandoned Brits

20 March 2022

War criminal Vladimir Putin is pissed off at being called a war criminal.  How we all sympathise with him. 

Carrying out routine military exercises in a foreign country and killing civilians in bunkers for displaced people under theatres, women and babies in maternity hospital, patients and staff in psychiatric hospitals, families sleeping in their beds and carrying out a murderous terror campaign in Mariupol.  And they criticise Putin for that?  It’s just manoeuvres, target practice, tank parades, checking the efficiency of thermobaric bombs that can vapourise bystanders and cluster bombs that scatter lethal explosives over a wide area for children to pick up.  Armies need practice don’t they?  What’s the fuss about?  Leave poor old Vlad alone.  Until daylight.  Then hammer a stake through his heart.  Slowly.

The leaders of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia took a train to Kyiv on Tuesday, to show solidarity and discuss Putin’s war.  Ukraine has conceded that it will not become a member of NATO but it’s not known what concessions Putin is willing to make though Volodymyr Zelenskiy seems more hopeful that a negotiated solution might be possible.

With his innate insensitivity, Boris Johnson has likened Russia’s murderous invasion to the referendum when “the British people voted for Brexit, in such large, large numbers” to free the UK from the oppression of the EU (such “large, large numbers” that a 2% swing would have changed the result).  As Terry Wogan used to say, “Nurse!  The screens.”

300,000 computer nerds have signed up to the chat app Telegram to help Ukraine.  They’re working on hacking into and disrupting Russian communications and media, disrupting Russia’s propaganda websites as well as their banks and energy companies.  I’m waiting for them to access Russian military communication channels and send a message to all Russian troops in Ukraine saying “War over.  Turn round. Go home.”

One brave editor in Russia’s state Channel One television station interrupted a live studio ‘news’ broadcast on Monday by appearing behind the newsreader “Stop the war. No to war.” and holding up a sign saying: “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here.”

Marina Ovsyannikova had also published a pre-recorded video saying she was ashamed to work for a channel that broadcast lies and “Kremlin propaganda” and has since resigned.  France’s Emmanuel Macron offered her consular protection but she refused, saying she remains “a patriot” and will stay in her country.

The Bank of England blames the war for increasing inflation towards an estimated 10% so it’s raised its interest rate to 0.75%.  This will mean that, for average people, their mortgage and loan costs will increase as well as their ‘normal’ cost of living while people lucky enough to have savings will earn more interest.  Economists can no doubt explain how this benefits society but I’m not sure how it helps people already on the breadline whose costs will increase even more unless benefit levels are increased by 10%, which would the least the government can do.

Brits also need to prepare for yet another spike in Covid infections after the government released all restrictions.  There’s a lot of it round here.  My wife tested positive a couple of weeks ago (now negative again thank you for asking) and had virtually no symptoms;  I felt lousy for 10 days or so (still a bit feeble thank you for asking) but tested negative throughout.

Luckily, the health secretary, Sajid Javid, has reassured us we are in a “very good position” even though infection rates are rising and are expected to rise further.  This is presumably ‘very good’ in the sense of ‘not quite completely disastrous but pretty close’. 

Thinking of death, I was disappointed to see that the Conservatives in the House of Lords were instructed to vote against Lord Forsyth’s amendment to the assisted dying bill so it was defeated by 55% to 45%.  Given that 84% of the general public support the principle, it shows just shows what wimps the Conservatives actually are.  It wasn’t even a substantive vote on the principle, it just asked peers to commit parliament to a review of the current law.  Even the BMA had withdrawn its original objections some time ago so it’s just a few Tory MPs standing in the way.  Actually, it’s not even a few Tory MPs, it’s those in the Whips’ office and a lot of MPs and peers who are too scared to oppose them …

Elsewhere in this land of the unfree, a 15-year old girl was strip-searched (“bend over and cough”) at school without her parents, or their representative or even a lawyer present.  All because somebody thought she smelt of cannabis.  (Did anybody think to ask the somebody how they recognised the smell of cannabis?)  The girl concerned is now understandably suffering flashbacks and PTSD.  Naturally, the head of the school, the chair of the governors, the police officer who authorised the search and all others responsible for the child abuse will now all resign.  Won’t they?

And P&O fired all their UK staff by video which said “your last day of employment is today”.  How rude / insensitive can you get?  The government has warned P&O it could face an unlimited fine if it’s found to have broken the law.  The only consolation we can take from it is that, no doubt, all UK managers and directors will have received the same notice.  Won’t they?

Capitalism at its finest:  take at least £10m from the government during the pandemic for UK workers then fire them all when the funding stops so they can be replaced with cheap foreign labour not subject to the UK minimum wage.   Still, P&O are honour bound to return government funding aren’t they?  What am I talking about?  ‘Capitalism’ and ‘honour’ in the same paragraph?

P&O originally stood for Peninsular & Orient and I’d always wondered what the peninsula was.  It turns out to be the Iberian peninsula, comprising mostly Spain and Portugal, which seems to be a peninsula in the same way that Sweden and Norway might be.  Or Italy.

The best news of the week is that Iran has finally released Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori and, quite coincidentally, the UK has finally repaid the £400m it’s owed Iran since the 1970s when the Shah ordered and paid for a bunch of tanks and vehicles.  In the 1979 revolution, the Shah was ousted and the UK refused to complete the order or return the balance.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe was originally detained while visiting her family in 2015 and the then foreign secretary, one Boris Johnson, visited Iran a couple of years later to negotiate her release but failed to read his briefing papers and said she was training journalists, which she wasn’t, so she was detained for another four years.  We can only hope that neither the prime minister nor the foreign secretary will offer their apologies and not try to claim any credit for their release.

Ashoori has been detained since 2017 when he was visiting his mother but, on the day of his release, he suddenly had to find £27,000 in cash, which had to counted and authenticated, before they finally let him go.

Let’s now leave both of them alone to get used to being home with their families again.

That just leaves some 17 people with dual nationalities whose families in Europe and America can only hope that their release from Iranian prisons will follow.

And Shamima Begum who, despite being British born and bred, was stripped of her UK passport for associating with Syrian terrorists.  She’s said she’s willing to return to her home country and face charges for her actions (as a skillfully-groomed and abused teenager) but we’re not even humane enough to allow her to do this. 

Cognitive disconnects, naughty French words, nine-tailed vixen and simulacra

13 March 2022

A bunch of lorry drivers who had been demonstrating against the pandemic restrictions in Ottawa decided it was such fun that, even now the restrictions are being eased, they’ve broadened their demands so they can continue ‘demonstrating’ against other things and drove a convoy round the Washington beltway (ring road to English speakers).  Next week, they’ll be demanding free Hershey bars for overweight truckers.  I had a Hershey bar once and was very disappointed:  they’re nothing like proper chocolate.

We saw another cognitive disconnect in Vladimir Putin this week.  A lot of Ukrainians want to leave Ukraine because they don’t want to end up under Russian rule again.  Putin originally offered to protect escape routes but only into Russia and Belarus, thereby ensuring that all malcontents would be in ‘his’ country where they can cause problems for him.  Surely it would be more logical to let them out to anywhere except Russia or Belarus so there’ll be a border between him and the people who don’t like him?

But who does?  Ukraine claims Russian invaders have killed more civilians than soldiers and, over here, the Disasters Emergency Committee set up an emergency humanitarian appeal for Ukraine that raised £150m in its first week.

I loved the earlier reports of a 30-mile queue of Russian tanks waiting to invade Ukraine.  What idiot thought that was a good idea?  As we know from the M25, when the front vehicle starts to move, it takes a couple of seconds before the second follows, and so on down the line to the last vehicle that doesn’t start moving till next Tuesday (and the traffic jam moves backwards round the motorway).  It would have worked like that in Ukraine if the fourth tank’s battery hadn’t gone flat and held up the entire convoy.  Sheer logistical brilliance.  How did the people who thought this was a good idea get promoted to positions that allowed them to do it?

Did you know that the French have to transliterate his name differently because ‘Putin’ is pronounced like ‘putain’, which is, in French, a naughty word, so he’s ‘Poutine’ (which, in English, sounds a bit like a repository for solid personal waste, though I suppose ‘poutrine’ would be more obvious).

At the United Nations security committee on Friday. The Russian representative read a list of spurious accusations that Ukraine was committing all sorts of heinous crimes from developing chemical weapons in medical research laboratories and breeding more soldiers in maternity hospitals and kindergartens, and educating Russia’s next president in a psychiatric hospital, implying this justified bombing them.  Everyone, from the Albanians on, accused him of spreading false propaganda and, though I didn’t hear it, the French probably said “putain de merde”.

In America, Donald Trump suggested in a speech to Republican donors that the US should cover F-22 jets with Chinese decals, “bomb the shit out of Russia” and then say “China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it” and they could have a war of their own.  A sense of humour isn’t one of Trump’s more obvious qualities so we can only assume he thinks Russia wouldn’t say “oh look, here comes a fleet of American F-22 jets”, they’d say “hey, look at the decals, it’s China, let’s go and bomb the bastards”.

The appearance of dark forces is also being feared by more gullible people in Japan where a famous rock has suddenly split in two.  Legend has it that an evil, nine-tailed vixen (she’d have been a bugger to towel down after she’d been out in the rain) called Tamamo-no-Mae manifested herself as a beautiful woman, got involved in some sort of skirmish between local warlords and her spirit got imprisoned in this lump of volcanic rock which was reputed to kill anyone who touches it.  And it’s been conclusively proved that it does in fact do so since we all die sometime anyway and the legend didn’t include a time limit.

Boring old experts have pointed out that cracks had appeared some years ago, water would have got in, frozen and split the rock.  I prefer the beautiful nine-tailed fox theory.

I once found a simulacrum on a beach, a small black jagged pebble showing, from one angle, the face of a devil with a hooked nose and three small quartz intrusions for its two eyes and its mouth.  It was definitely spooky if you were ‘sensitive’ to this sort of thing but I no longer know where it is.  (I have a photo somewhere if anyone would like to see it.)  I have another of a friendly owl which is on a shelf here beside me.  No nine-tailed vixens though.

This week’s entry is mercifully short because I haven’t got Covid.  My wife has been basically OK but I’ve had the symptoms for her despite testing negative on lateral flow and PCR tests.  I feel like death warmed up – aching, coughing and subject to overwhelming lassitude.  (Q:  What happened to that raggedy old bone?  A:  Lassitude it.)  (For younger readers, Lassie was a dog in an old TV series.)

Ukraine good / Putin bad, good Russians, abusers and creating an autocracy

6 March 2022

The Hungarian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has joined my list of heroes.

I knew he’d been a comedian in a popular series on Hungarian TV and didn’t take himself terribly seriously, but I didn’t know till this week that he speaks Russian and Hungarian, was born into a Jewish family at a time when religious faiths were rather frowned upon, he was a multi-talented performer and won Ukraine’s Dancing with the Stars in 2006 and, when the film Paddington was dubbed into Hungarian, he provided Paddington’s voice. 

In April 2019, with no experience of politics, he was elected president with 73% of the vote and has become a national hero since Russia’s invasion, staying in the country and inspiring the Hungarian public to resist takeover by an imperialist warmonger.  In a broadcast to the Russian people, he asked them to question Russian state propaganda and why would he support a war against the country he loves, saying “To shoot who? To bomb what? … Lugansk? The home of my best friend’s mother? The place where his father is buried?”

We’re also hearing reports that large sections of the invading forces are demotivated and reluctant to fight, feeling they’ve been tricked into fighting a war they don’t want.  Some Russian soldiers have apparently abandoned their vehicles and are trudging back to Russia on foot.  One Russian officer captured by the Ukrainians said that everything they’d been told about what they were doing had been wrong.

There have also been reports that Russian warships refused to attack Odesa and returned to Russia after radioing Ukrainian forces to ask them to hold fire while they turned round and left.  Other reports claim that a lot of Russian troops are refusing to fight and some have turned over the vehicles and equipment to the Ukrainian forces and then stolen cars so they can drive home.

It appears that Valdimir Putin thinks he’s returning an abandoned country to the comfort of the Russian fatherland, reuniting the country.  Unluckily for him, the Ukrainians believe they’re a separate people and don’t want to be part of Russia.  The result is that Putin has met more resistance than he expected and is having to lay waste to a large country that he thinks is historically part of Russia so the Ukrainians left alive should be grateful to him for his generosity.

(Does anybody else think it … unusual … that a 69-year old whose face has been botoxed to complete immobility likes going topless when riding a horse?)

None of this is cheering Putin up and he’s said that sanctions against Russia are “akin to an act of war” and Ukraine is risking its independent statehood and “If that happens they will have to be blamed for that.”

In my mind, this immediately conjured up a picture in my mind of an abuser beating up their partner who is lying battered and bloodied at their feet and the abuser is saying “Now look what you made me do.”

Isn’t Putin, like Saki’s Waldo, “one of those people who would be enormously improved by death”?

For those of us who are fundamentally optimistic, it’s encouraging to hear that a slow but steady stream of Russians are crossing the border into Finland for safety, that some 4,000 people have been arrested in anti-war demonstrations in Russia and that more than 60,000 Ukrainians living abroad have returned home to fight for their country. 

According to the United Nations, more than 1.5 million people, mostly women and children (the men were told to stay to fight for their country), have already left Ukraine;  the EU estimates that the final total could be as high as 4 million and has said it will welcome refugees “with open arms” and grant them a blanket right to stay and work throughout the 27 EU nations for up to three years, and that they will also be entitled to social welfare and access to housing, medical treatment and schooling for children.

During the 1956 uprising in Hungary, some 200,000 refugees left the country and were taken in by western European countries.  Those who came to Britain were welcomed as heroes and were given money, housing, education and jobs as well as state benefits.

In 2022, all 27 EU countries have agreed to welcome refugees from Hungary but the UK’s home secretary, Priti Patel, has decided that, now that we’ve regained our sovereignty and independence, she will refuse full visa waivers to Ukrainians trying to stay alive.

The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, magnanimously announced that we’d take in 20,000 Ukrainian refugees but only if they had family already here.  According to the BBC, Boris Johnson has since said we could take in 200,000 if they are an immediate family member of a British national who usually lives in Ukraine and businesses will also be able to sponsor a Ukrainian to come here.  Perhaps Truss misread the decimal point;  or perhaps Johnson was making his figure up – no I can’t believe he’d do that …

Unfortunately, the Kyiv UK visa processing centre is closed but people can dodge the guns and go to the Lyiv office in the west of the country.

I have a cousin whose late wife was Ukrainian and her sister and family still live there.  Is that close enough for me to offer myself as a relation?

Johnson happened to mention on Thursday that he was leading the west in punishing Putin for invading Ukraine.  It’s not true of course – the EU, America and even Switzerland have targeted many more of Putin’s buddies and are more actively impounding their assets, including a superyacht seized by the French – but who has ever accused Johnson of telling the truth?

Still, quite coincidentally, the billionaire Roman Abramovich who was once the richest known man in Russia, has been flogging off football clubs and mansions like there’s no tomorrow.  Better to have cash in your hand than all that stuff but I was puzzled to hear he’s reputed to have made himself rich with proceeds from the sale of Russian state-owned assets after the fall of the Soviet Union.  If the assets were owned by the state, shouldn’t the state have got the money when they were sold?

I was also interested to see that Johnson’s speech was given in the Ukrainian catholic cathedral in London, a rather fine Waterhouse building which was originally built as the ‘new’ Kings Weigh House and opened in 1891 on a site in Duke Street offered by the Duke of Westminster.  However, few people know that the Congregationalist minister who was its pastor from 1880 to 1901 and was involved in its construction was one of my great grandfathers.

Down the road in Westminster, the government is trying to introduce two pieces of very dangerous legislation, the national and borders bill and the police bill.  The House of Lords voted for some sensible amendments but why should the Government worry about them.  My only consolation is that the civil offence for which I was arrested and fined £1 in 1961 will now become a criminal offence, so I can then say I have a criminal record.  All this at the same time as Johnson, an underpowered politician, is trying to grab the power to overturn decisions of the Supreme Court, a bunch of lawyers with decades of experience of all aspects of the law.

In 10 years’ time, England will invade an independent Scotland on the say-so of whoever is then prime minister and the king will be answerable to the PM for all crimes and misdemeanours of his extended family.

Bankers, dirty money, Russia’s war on Ukraine, Wordle, shooters and a right-wing dog

27 February 2022

My cynicism last week has been swiftly justified as British bankers are expected to collect the largest bonuses since the 2008 crash.  So much for the ‘we’re all in this together’ approach implicit in the Bank of England’s pleas to employers to keep wage increases to 3%.

Isn’t it curious how many of these greedy bankers ‘burn out’ from unbearable stress?  If they were on top of their jobs, they wouldn’t burn out, so it’s fair to assume they were appointed because they were good at interviews, not because they had any relevant skill or ability.

These divisive bonuses are being paid in a country which has now (post-Brexit) been freer to regulate itself so London is now up there with the best of the other places that turn a blind eye to investments and money-laundering by kleptocrats, drug barons and other criminals.

Coincidentally, a whistleblower has given a global journalistic consortium details of 30,000 accounts linked to Credit Suisse.  Credit Suisse has some 1.5m private banking clients so the leak is far from complete but, while some of the accounts go back to the 1940s, more than two thirds have been opened since 2000.  It isn’t illegal to hold a secret account in Switzerland but the sources of the money invested by some accountholders are questionable.  Not by Swiss bankers though.

I’ve always believed that one of the major reasons why Switzerland chose to remain neutral in the Second World War was that, because the secrecy of their banking systems was world-famous, they were taking money from both sides;  and, as capitalism and greed exploded post-war, even more money came in from the East.

Quite a lot of it still ends up in the UK where the lack of effective controls on banking systems has allowed vast amounts of dirty money to be invested here.  It’s recently been revealed that almost 30,000 properties in England and Wales, including a number of large properties whose owners are thought to be Russian, are registered in the names of companies based in the British Virgin Islands where details of the beneficial owners of companies are not public.  The government has promised to end the secret offshore ownership of UK property but hasn’t achieved much so far.

One of the difficulties faced in attempting this is that the ‘investors’ concerned are billionaires and the British legal system is extraordinarily expensive (compared with, say, France) and nobody apart from ‘Private Eye’ and a few patriotic MPs dare to risk defending a legal action whose costs would bankrupt them.  So some London lawyers make a lot of money from sources that are, at best, dubious.

Karl Marx talked about “from each according to ability, unto each according to need” as one of the founding principles of communism (although the phrase actually goes back to a 19^th century French philosopher) but the ruling kleptocrats in today’s Russia have clearly sacrificed communism to Mammon.

Anger caused by the Swiss banking leak has of course been overshadowed by Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.  At the beginning of the week, Violet Elizabeth Johnson was widely derided for his feeble announcement in parliament that, if Putin invaded Russia, he’d thcream an’ thcream an’ thcream till he was thick.  Putin was so terrified by this that he invaded Ukraine three days later.

By the end of the week, Johnson was joining America, Canada and key European countries by excluding “selected Russian banks” from the Swift (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) international payments system. 

Russian missiles have been targeting civilian residential tower blocks, presumably because of their clear and present danger to Russian troops, and Putin has put his nuclear weapons teams on stand-by.

A Japanese billionaire, Hiroshi ‘Mickey’ Mikitani, has promised to give 1bn yen ($8.7m) to the Ukraine government, liquor stores in the USA and Canada have taken vodka off their shelves in a show of solidarity, a Ukrainian construction company is removing road signs so Russians without satnavs can get lost, Russia’s ‘friend’ China abstained rather than backing Russia in a UN resolution condemning the invasion, border guards on Snake Island received a radio message saying “This is Russian warship … Lay down your arms” and replied “Russian warship, go fuck yourself”, Russian soldiers captured by Ukraine have been reported as saying they don’t know what they’re fighting for, Hungary has said it will back all EU sanctions against Russia, Turkey is understood to be considering stopping Russian warships from entering the Black Sea, a growing number of Russian celebrities have backed international efforts to stop the war, Germany (whose relations with Ukraine have been strained since the Second World War) is sending 1,500 anti-tank weapons and other missiles, all EU countries have closed their airspace to Russian aircraft and Britain’s foreign secretary, Liz Truss, is preparing a “hit list” of Russian oligarchs to be hit with sanctions “in the coming months”.  Guess which country hasn’t yet quite grasped the urgency of the situation (though, to be fair, Britain has pledged to continue supplying arms to Ukraine and the Ministry of Defence is working out how to get them there without their being intercepted by the Russians.)

Russia’s central bank has had to support the rouble as it fell to an all-time low against the dollar and, over here, BP has been criticised for its ownership of 22% of Rosneft, the Russian state oil producer and, having been publicly embarrassed, is now selling its stake in Rosneft.  In another encouraging example of nominative determinism, BP’s boss is called Bernard Looney

Talking of loonies, Donald Trump, ever a brown-noser when dealing with autocrats, described Putin’s decisions as “brilliant”, “genius”, “savvy” and “smart”.

Putin himself gave an address on TV that made it seem pretty obvious he’s psychotic and paranoid, not the best characteristics of someone with the power to destroy the world.  To younger generations, this must feel like the Cuban missile crisis did to us wrinklies.

Compared to Putin, Boris Johnson looks like a bear of very little brain and has just had his second formal reprimand in a month by the UK Statistics Authority for misleading parliament.  In typical Johnsonian fashion, he told the House on Wednesday that there were now more people at work in the UK than before the pandemic began.  In fact, he ‘forgot’ to mention that this is only true if you count people on payrolls because the number of self-employed people has fallen so far that, if they’re included, the total has actually fallen by 600,000. 

He’s also now being questioned under caution by the police.  Still, nobody now believes anything Johnson says unless it’s confirmed in triplicate by the Queen.

When the Queen’s positive Covid test was announced, Kier Starmer sent her a message that was read out by a BBC newsreader who pronounced “ma’am” as ‘marm’ although, as any fule kno, this should be pronounced ‘mam’.  High time we got rid of the BBC and its pathetic attempts to avoid bias and replaced it with news channels known to be biased.  RT News or Fox News would fit the bill, or Rupert Murdoch might have some suggestions.

In New Zealand, a young bull was swept away by floodwaters on the west coast, carried downstream and over a waterfall.  It was discovered some 50 miles away, snuffling around in a blackberry bush.

Wordle, the (in)famous word game, has been getting complaints since the New York Times took it over:  ‘humor’ annoyed a lot of Brits, ‘bloke’ annoyed a lot of Americans, ‘sha-e’ annoyed everyone who hadn’t already excluded the six incorrect consonants, and some people apparently didn’t know the word ‘caulk’.

Over here, people who pay to kill things were invited some time ago to stop using lead shot because of the damage done to the environment by the toxic metal.  Unsurprisingly, the request was ignored and 99.5% of the birds they killed last year contained lead pellets.  According to the shooters, they still use lead because steel pellets are lighter and don’t scatter as well and – you’ll find this hard to believe of people who slaughter birds for fun – you actually have to aim the gun rather than just point it up and pull the trigger.

In France, the daily paper Libération saw the confidential list of the 148,000 members of the right wing Les Républicains party and identified four dead people and a Niçoise dog called Douglas who could vote for Valérie Pécresse as their presidential candidate.

Stupidity of Post Office, a prince, NFTs, Trumps, politicians, TV police, HMP and CIPD

20 February 2022

The most shameful news of the week is that it’s taken 20 years to set up the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry after more than 700 post office workers were wrongly convicted of fraud, theft and false accounting.  Some of them went to prison, some lost their homes, families and friends, some went bankrupt and some died or killed themselves before many of the convictions were overturned.

What beats me is that the Post Office management was faced with a sudden increase in cases of false accounting and lots of workers complaining about it after they introduced the new Horizon IT accounting system (installed and maintained by Fujitsu) but they chose to believe computer geeks who’d just written a new system rather than people who’d blamelessly worked with them for years. 

Didn’t it occur to anybody to test it on some volunteer post offices or two for a year or so?  (Nobody who actually was fiddling the books would have volunteered so reports of irregularities would have led to a check on the new system rather than prosecutions.)

The biggest unsurprise of the week is Prince Andrew’s agreement to settle with Virginia Giuffre for a very large amount of money.  How can anybody say what amounted to ‘Yes, that’s me in the photograph but I don’t know whose hand that is on the waist of that woman I have no recollection of ever meeting’, and then agree to pay the woman he doesn’t remember meeting such a large sum of money.  I’m thinking of writing to him saying I have no recollection of ever meeting him but could he please send a cheque.

In the agreement, Andrew neither disputes the allegation of sexual assault nor admits it, which will probably have moved the decimal point in the amount he’ll be paying one place to the right.  He does however now claim he “regrets his association with Epstein, and commends the bravery of Giuffre and other survivors in standing up for themselves and others”, something he forgot to do while Emily Maitlis was letting him humiliate himself in their 2019 BBC interview.

But back to computers and gullibility.  Non Fungible Tokens seem to be the thing at the moment with Rupert Murdoch reported to be considering selling NFTs for front pages from his archives of the Times and the Sun.  Last month, Julian Lennon sold some Beatles stuff as NFTs.  What this means is that people pay money (often a lot of money) for a digital ‘token’ confirming that they ‘own’ the original work (and can sell it on), while Julian retains the original physical items.  Talk about having your cake and eating it.

By the way, if anybody’s interested in buying an NFT for some snake oil I happen to have, don’t hesitate to contact me at #IveBeenConned.

I don’t know how much energy is consumed creating an NFT but cryptocurrencies work in a similarly intangible way and their ‘mining’ use a lot to ‘produce’ something that doesn’t even exist except as a computer code which is so secure that one person reportedly threw away an old computer before realising it was the only place holding the code, and his bitcoin was lost.

In southern Montana, a coal-fired power plant had been failing for years, operating on just 46 days in 2020.  Then Marathon, a bitcoin ‘mining’ company, became the saviour of the plant / destroyer of the planet (your choice) and bought all its output.  In the first nine months of 2021, the plant worked for 236 days powering the new data centre Marathon built next door and emitting 187,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

But, no doubt, a lot of people will be getting rich so that’s all right then.

Thinking of which reminds me that Donald Trump’s legal troubles increase by the day (no sniggering at the back please), the latest being the discovery that he illegally removed historical records from the White House. 

In one of the financial cases against him, he and two of his children, Ivanka and Donald Jnr, have been ordered to appear for a disposition in the next three weeks.  Trump Snr’s response included the claim that “We have a great company with fantastic assets that are unique, extremely valuable and, in many cases, far more valuable than what was listed in our Financial Statements.”  Jimmy Kimmel, the American broadcaster, writer and comedian, said “Only Donald Trump would defend himself against charges that he overvalued his assets by re-overvaluing his assets.”

With parliament on its half-term break, the UK’s biggest problems this week were caused by two storms.  The second, fiercer storm was called Eunice, which is such a delicate and sensitive name it was surprising how violent it was.  We escaped scot-free except that my wife refused to let me pop down to the beach to look at the waves, or even to the top of our nearest hill to lean on the wind.

The most unusual (at least to me) beneficiary of the storm was a YouTube outlet called Big Jet TV that livestreams aircraft movements and sets up cameras by airports during storms so viewers can watch the skills of the crew in landing safely.  A record 200,000 people were watching at one point yesterday but not, I’m sure, hoping to see a plane crash in real time.

At this point, I must make a confession:  we do sometimes watch ‘fly on the wall’ police documentaries but at least they’re edited and cut out all the blood and guts involved in crashes. 

My favourite piece was when a Lamborghini (or a Maserati or a Ferlinghetti or some such overpriced car) was stopped for not having a numberplate on the front.  It was bright red with teeth and could take a short-cut under an average lorry.  The driver climbed up out of it and stretched.  The police officer asked if he was OK and he said yes, this car goes very fast and reaches 62 mph before breakfast time yesterday but it’s unbelievably noisy and bloody uncomfortable (I’ve paraphrased what he said slightly but you can get the gist of it).

We now have dashcams in both my wife’s wheelchair accessible car and the proper car and I’ve been surprised what comfort it gives me to know that what’s happening on the road is being recorded (police will prosecute dangerous drivers on the evidence of dashcam recordings if you send them in).

This morning, Boris Johnson was interviewed at a time when all sensible people are still in bed and said the world is apparently poised on the edge of the biggest conflict since the second World War.  However, he appears not to have considered the alternatives such as the whole thing is a massive wind-up by Vladimir Putin who’s got all his perceived enemies needing frequent trouser changes while he chuckles to himself about the success of his manoeuvres.  

Michael Heseltine, a former Conservative deputy prime minister, has come out as yet another of Johnson’s heavyweight critics.  Heseltine pointed out the gap between what the Brexit campaign promised and how little has actually been achieved while the new Brexit minister started by asking Sun readers what they thought he should do.  (65 of the first 68 replies said they didn’t care as long as he didn’t outlaw pictures of semi-naked women;  the other three asked what a Brexit was.)

In Lincolnshire, Paul Robson, who is serving a life sentence for attempted rape and indecent assault and is judged by the police to be very dangerous, absconded from HMP North Sea Camp, an open prison.  He was recaptured quite quickly but we still have to hear which idiot approved his transfer to an open prison.

According to a CIPD survey, there’s good news and bad news.  British employers are expecting to increase pay by 3% this year – good news for the NHS and teachers but bad news for bankers and directors.  Or might the CIPD’s sample have omitted to include any of these groups? 

If you now need cheering up, remember that yesterday was World Pangolin Day.

And that a new slogan has been offered for use on T-shirts in America:  “If you don’t need a mask because God will protect you, why do you need a gun?”

Rebooting, Brexit opportunities, the Met, Ukraine, snippets and more kindness

13 February 2022

I’m rarely shocked but this week I saw protestors threatening Sir Keir Starmer, and then posting death threats, and I remembered the murders of Jo Cox and Sir David Amess.

MPs from all parties blamed Boris Johnson who, last week, falsely accused Starmer of letting Jimmy Savile go free.  Johnson himself condemned the violence but refused to apologise, telling his spokesperson to claim he hadn’t said Starmer was personally responsible for the decision on the Savile case.  Another lie.

After some rats had abandoned the sinking ship, Captain Johnson’s only defence was to reshuffle what might loosely be called his ‘team’, saying he was “rebooting” Downing Street.  As Marina Hyde wrote on Wednesday “I love the idea that this full-scale meltdown can somehow be rebooted.  Like standing in the ruins of the reactor building at Chernobyl and going, ‘Have you tried switching it off and on again?’”

Thursday then produced an unprecedented intervention from Sir John Major, a former Conservative prime minister, who, in a speech at the Institute for Government, demolished any credibility the government still had.  He likened Johnson to people such as Donald Trump and said “ministers have been evasive and the truth has been optional”.

He went on to say “It was unprecedented when this government broke the law by proroguing parliament” and “the prime minister and officials broke lockdown laws”.  When asked later if a prime minister should resign if they broke the law, he said he was “not here to pronounce on the fate of any individual” but “That has always been the case.”

Nadine Dorries subsequently defended Johnson by saying she would still support him if he had broken the law but probably not if he “kicked a dog”.  (As the American comedian Joey Adams is supposed to have said, with friends like that, who needs enemies.)

One of the reshuffles moved Jacob Rees-Mogg from being Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council to become Minister of State for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency.  It’s not clear, at least to me, whether this is a promotion or a demotion.  Brexit “opportunities” should have been identified already – they’ve had 5½ years for heavens’ sake – and ‘government efficiency’ is an oxymoron, rather like ‘military intelligence’ and ‘civil war’.

What we know so far about the opportunities offered by Brexit seem to be limited to the effects on Ireland’s politics, some very worried farmers, new bureaucratic and tariff barriers to trade with the EU and the consequential delays at ports for goods lorries.  Destatis, the German statistical office, has reported that imports of UK goods fell by 8.5% in 2021 and the UK is no longer one of Germany’s top five trade partners.  Still, I suppose the missing 8.5% could still be in the 6-mile queue of lorries on the A20.

All of which raises questions for businesses about the viability of trading with EU countries.  The cross-party public accounts committee said this week that new border checks have increased business costs and suppressed trade with the EU and that “Much remains to be done to introduce import controls, and in particular to ensure that traders and hauliers across the 27 EU member states are ready as the [new] controls are phased in”. 

My right-wing friend is convinced all these problems are due to the remoaners but I’m sure JRM’s nanny will help him find a better answer.

The head of the Metropolitan Police, Dame Cressida Dick, has in fact now resigned after a chat with Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, despite announcing an hour earlier she was staying on and, after five years in the job, had “a plan” to put things right.  Some of us wonder why, having been so unsuccessful in dealing with the Met’s toxic culture of misogyny, racism, sexism and Islamophobia that two officers investigated for offences were subsequently promoted, she hadn’t already stepped down.

Grabbing at straws, Johnson is trying to win support by removing all Covid restrictions in the next fortnight, despite Sage’s January warning that lifting plan B restrictions could lead to another spike in Covid infections “particularly if precautionary behaviour, including testing, decreases as a result of reduced perception of risk”.  More sensible people are now asking for the government’s two most senior advisers, Professor Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, to hold a press conference to reveal what evidence there was to support the decision to end all pandemic restrictions.

To add insult to injury, “the Treasury” wants to charge people for routine PCR tests for most people with Covid symptoms.  The absence of Rishi Sunak’s name couldn’t be anything to do with his political aspirations could it?

Several American states are also lifting mask-wearing rules despite health experts’ warnings that this could slow the progress being made in the battle against Covid.

Elsewhere in America, the extremist Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, already renowned for making bigoted claims and spreading misinformation about Covid (and warning people about the dangers of space lasers) demonstrated the profound depths of her stupidity by referring to Nancy Pelosi’s “gazpacho police” who were spying on everyone.  I wonder if she was dropped on her head when she was a baby.

In Eastern Europe, Russia has moved more than half its armed forces to Ukraine’s borders.  America has threatened reprisals and NATO is getting upset, with American and the UK and other countries advising their citizens to leave.  The whole situation seems very confused and frightening which could, of course, be exactly what Vladimir Putin wants.

When Emmanuel Macron, the French president, met Putin last week, he apparently said “Russia is part of Europe”.  Really?  Wouldn’t that be a good thing, even if it’s a geographically dubious claim?  It would mean that Russia could apply to join NATO and the EU and we’d be left with what remains of the UK versus the world.

Surprise of the week is that BP has rejected calls for a windfall tax on fossil fuel companies to help poorer households with rising energy prices after its profits increased by about £3.5bn last year, most of the increase gained in the last quarter (whose profits were 35 times higher than the same quarter last year).  They think all that extra profit should be given to their shareholders (and, no doubt, their directors).  Makes you want to spit doesn’t it.

At the same time, Kirstie Allsopp (aka the Hon Kirstie Allsopp, daughter of Lord Charles Allsopp, 6th Baron Hindlip), who presents property-finding programmes, thinks that, if people can’t afford to buy a house, they should spend less on Netflix and gyms and move to a cheaper area.  In this day and age, how can some people stay so remote from reality (and so bad at maths)?

Other bits and piece that attracted me this week include:

• Protections for America’s grey wolves, removed by Donald Trump, have been restored in much of the US.
• In the UK, the government conservation agency Natural England, in partnership with Natural Resources Wales, has updated its guidelines for farmers and land managers, saying they should ask trespassers if they’re lost and point them to safety rather than shouting at them and shooting their dogs.
• In a Russian art gallery, a bored security guard added eyes to Anna Leporskaya’s ‘Three Figures’ which had blanks instead of faces.  This week’s competition is to suggest other famous works of art that would be improved by some simple additions.
• Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, named after the patron saint of lovers, epileptics, beekeepers and manufacturers of soppy cards.  The British Veterinary Association is urging greetings card designers to stop using flat-face dogs and cats that suffer from their contorted nasal passages.  If you want someone to know you love them, just tell them.
• I once got 14 Valentine cards and the postroom awarded me the prize for getting the most cards that year.  They came from all over the country in different handwriting but they’d all got one thing in common – they used the information on my business card.  Opening them made my secretary’s day.
• The recent death of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, has increased interest in his life’s work, which grew out of the basic traditions of Buddhism and other similar traditions.  What they share is a belief in the importance of kindness and compassion, equality of individuals with different beliefs, non-violence and the need to be wary of materialism.  Works for me.
• Talking of kindness, Dolly Parton (who has featured here before) has decided that her 25 theme parks will offer to pay for a college degree for all of their 11,000 full-time, part-time and seasonal employees, including fees, tuition and books.

And my wife came across another fine example of nominative determinism this week:  one of the UCL academics who have been studying extremism and violence is Dr Rottweiler.

75 years a queen, PM rebuked twice, incompetence and lies, Starmer’s failure

6 February 2022

HM has served 75 years as monarch today – well done Ma’am.  Most of us give up before we’ve done 50 years, and we go through several different occupations on the way, but you’ve stuck it out with unfailing grace and charm.  You’ve also been a source of inspiration around the world and even the most devout republicans have criticised the monarchy rather than the monarch.  What a pity our politicians don’t take their lead from you.

Some Tories still think Boris Johnson has been, and remains, a good prime minister and that he’s not risking damaging the Tory party.  One wonders what he’d have to do to risk losing such unswerving loyalty.  Cut off babies’ heads perhaps (this example for Dylan fans).

On Tuesday, Johnson was reprimanded by the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, for having answered a question from Keir Starmer about Downing Street rule-breaking with an accusation that Starmer was “a former director of public prosecutions, who spent more time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile”.  The Sun later quoted Johnson as having said “As far I’m aware, it’s fairly accurate” which translates as “I don’t actually know what happened”.

Five senior members of Downing Street staff resigned last week, including Munira Mirza, one of Johnson’s closest advisers for the last 14 years, who claimed his unfounded attack on Starmer was “scurrilous”.  (It is, of course, possible that some of the others resigned because they were at illegal parties and, unlike their boss, felt it would not be right to continue in post.)

The head of the official statistics watchdog also reprimanded Boris Johnson and the Home Secretary for claiming crime has fallen by 14% while forgetting to mention that this excludes the fastest-rising category of crime, fraud and computer misuse.  If these categories are included, crime has in fact risen.

Even his own MPs are losing faith and joining those who have already signed letters of ‘no confidence’.  One of the latest is Nick Gibb, MP for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, who the Daily Telegraph reported as having said Johnson had been “inaccurate” in his statements to the Commons and his constituents were “furious about the double standards”.

In fact, Starmer had never been involved in the Savile inquiry or the decision not to take any further action but subsequently, as the then Director of Public Prosecutions, he accepted that a good leader delegates decisions but not responsibility and apologised for the failings of his department. 

Some of Johnson’s own grief might now be delayed by the Metropolitan police decision that they will now investigate Partygate, just as Sue Gray’s internal report was about to be published.  Much of her report is therefore being withheld until the police inquiry is finished, which might buy Johnson a bit more time.  Was this coincidence?  Perhaps it was just that Sue Gray’s internal inquiry was uncovering so much they hadn’t previously known that the police felt it was better to change their mind so they aren’t embarrassed when Gray’s report is published in full.

Gray’s inquiry procedures were less formal than those the police are required to follow – they must, for example, warn people that they are not under arrest but are being interviewed under caution and they have the right to free legal advice.  This includes the UK’s prime minister we’re talking about, possibly being interviewed under caution … 

Some of us remember that Harry S Truman, president of the US from 1945 to 1953, famously had a sign on his desk saying “The buck stops here”.  Judging by his past performance, the odds against Johnson having the same sign on his desk are astronomical.

It’s understood that Gray’s report didn’t criticise Johnson personally but drew attention to “failures of leadership” within Downing Street and Johnson gave one of his non-apologies that even his closest allies find embarrassing.

Meanwhile, the integrity of the Met itself is in doubt after they promoted an unnamed police officer to sergeant even though he’d been disciplined for sending messages about hitting and raping women.

On Wednesday the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, told Dame Cressida Dick, the Met commissioner, she had to put things right quickly or he would withdraw his confidence in her.

Starmer also came off badly after Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP for Canterbury, said earlier this week she was “considering [her] future in the Party very carefully” after an anonymous Labour Party member had published an article Duffield described as “personal, libellous, nasty and fictional crap”.

The abuse had started last summer when Duffield said that transgender women who were born male should not be allowed into places like domestic violence refuges and women’s prisons.  I can see both why she said it, and why LGBT groups were upset by it.

Before the party conference last September, she spoke to Starmer several times and he assured her that the party’s policy was that there should be “a process for self-identification, but I’m equally clear that the equalities legislation applies, and that means that in certain circumstances there can be an exemption.”  (Yes, I know you have to read that twice but he is a lawyer.) 

Duffield claims that the Kent police, the parliamentary security team and the Speaker’s office had all been helpful but none of the Labour Party, its former and current leaders or its Whips’ office had offered her any help or support since “[she] unexpectedly became an MP 5 years ago.”

While I do wonder about becoming an MP “unexpectedly” (I can think of few things worse than waking one morning to discover I’d suddenly become an MP), her anger and fear are clearly things that Starmer hasn’t taken seriously enough to help her feel safe.

An online safety bill, intended to protect people from harmful content, is expected this spring and might help Duffield and others who are threatened online but there are worries it hasn’t been subject to proper ‘due diligence’.  It would inter alia introduce three new criminal offences (proposed by the Law Commission):  “sending or posting a message that conveys a threat of serious harm, sending a communication with the intent of causing psychological harm or serious emotional distress, and deliberately sending a false message with the intention of causing harm”.

Encouraging suicide is apparently one of the subjects that could lead to prosecution and the bill is intended to close sites that do this, some of which even supply the necessary drugs. A short (3:40 minutes) BBC video on one of these sites can be found at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-60236776).   However, it seems that they may not have consulted organisations like Dignity in Dying or Samaritans and the latter says the bill “isn’t fit for purpose”.

Government incompetence elsewhere has been highlighted (highlit?) by HMRC whose records estimate that £5.8bn of government money has been lost to fraudulent claims for furlough and other business relief schemes and that £4.3bn of this was stolen and is irrecoverable. 

The Treasury has since disputed this figure but Lord Agnew of Oulton resigned from his post as anti-fraud minister on Monday, saying oversight of the scheme had been “woeful” and that “schoolboy (sic) errors” had been made by the Covid loans scheme, like loans being given to more than 1,000 companies that hadn’t even been trading when the pandemic started, with many fraudsters claiming the support and then closing their businesses.

In his announcement to the House of Lords, Agnew said “Given that I am the minister for counter-fraud, it would be somewhat dishonest to stay on in that role if I am incapable of doing it properly.”

Agnew had supported Johnson through Brexit, donated large sums to the Conservative party, and been rewarded with a knighthood, then a peerage, before being made a minister.  In his spare time, he was also part-owner of an AI consultancy called Faculty which ‘won’ almost £1m of government contracts, some of which came through the ‘VIP’ scheme (which increased the chances of winning a contract tenfold) but this was, of course, not fraud, just capitalist chumocracy.

At least honour remains in a few small corners of parliament:  in the Southend West byelection caused by the murder of Sir David Amess, Labour, Liberal Democrats and other mainstream political parties chose not to contest the seat as a mark of respect so the Tory Anna Firth won with 86% of the vote.

A Gary Trudeau cartoon this week showed his Roland B Hedley Jr character, a long-time critic of Tucker Carlson (a right-wing anti-vaxxer Fox News presenter); Hedley tweeted “Encountered Tucker self-vaccinating in men’s room.  He swore me to secrecy, but that was after I sent out this tweet.”  Well, it made me laugh, but I like silly jokes, and those that need a second’s thought to appreciate.

The holocaust, wars, a suggested alternative and another example of kindness

30 January 2022

We put a candle in our window on Thursday out of respect for Holocaust Remembrance Day.  I do realise there are some rather difficult politics involved but I believe everyone should remember that 6 million Jews were systematically rounded up and murdered during the Second World War because the Nazi regime believed there was an ‘ideal’ form of human and the Jews weren’t it.  Actually Hitler himself was a short, plumpish man with a Groucho Marx moustache and hardly the tall blonde Teuton that they idealised, but they made an exception for him.

Despite the overwhelming publicity given to the 6 million Jews, we must remember that the Nazis actually murdered an estimated 12 million people but the other 6 million were Roma and Sinti, ethnic Poles, Serbs, people from other Slavic countries (including Ukrainians and Belarusians) and other ethnic and minority groups and homosexuals who don’t get the same recognition.

Estimates of the total number of deaths caused by the war range around 80 million, roughly half of whom were civilians;  and about a third of the total were from the Soviet Union.

After the Japanese invited America to join in, more Americans died and, by the end of the war, more American military than British had been killed, though America lost less than 2,000 civilians while the UK lost almost 70,000.  America also got the gold star for killing the most civilians with one bomb:  on 6 August 1945, an estimated 135,000 people, more than half of Hiroshima’s total population, died when America live-tested its latest weapon.  The exact number is unknown because so many people were vapourised by the explosion.

Six months earlier, on the night of 13 February, 800 British aircraft of the British Bomber Command flew to Dresden, a city with relatively few ‘strategic’ targets, and dropped 2,700 tons of explosives and incendiaries on it.  On 15 February, US Eighth Air Force sent 210 more bombers and dropped another 400 tons on Dresden.  The heat of individual fires was so intense it sucked the oxygen in from all around to become a firestorm and people who were, at that point, still alive probably died by suffocation before they were cremated.

Before the war, Dresden was called ‘Florence on the Elbe’ and was famous for its architecture and its collections of art treasures and ‘we’ destroyed almost everything.

Kurt Vonnegut (1992-2007), an American writer*, had been taken prisoner within a couple of weeks of arriving at the war and was in Dresden in time for its destruction (he survived with other prisoners of war in an underground meat locker).  In 1969, he published ‘Slaughterhouse Five’, a mordantly cynical novel combining science fiction with the horror of his experiences in Dresden, which is one of the two best anti-war books I’ve come across.  (Just in case you’re interested, the other is ‘Catch 22’, and one of my favourite anti-war songs is Suzanne Vega’s ‘The Queen and the Soldier’.)

It’s a good job we won the war and wrote its history.  If the Nazis had won, war crimes would have been defined rather differently and Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris would have been one of the first up against the wall.

I quoted Wendell Berry a couple of weeks ago in a different context but he also delivered “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam” at the University of Kentucky in 1968 that is relevant here:

“We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to ‘win the hearts and minds of the people’ by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the ‘truth’ of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. . . . I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.”

Why do people on making the same mistakes?  One of my favourite hippy posters just said “Supposing they held a war, and nobody came”.

Sadly, wars support Darwin’s theory that the fittest survive, except the people who commit to wars and survive them aren’t necessarily the fittest, they’re just the ones who sit in their offices and give the orders that drag normal people away from their families and send them out to be killed.  So the desk-bound killers live to fight another day while the reluctant conscripts die in ditches and the human gene pool shifts in favour of the killers.

Humanity needs to develop a new paradigm.

Research into historical wars suggests that the war is lost once a third of your troops have been killed.  If this is true, nobody needs huge armies and we could limit wars to a maximum of 24 participants, 12 from each side, give them guns and shut them all in a soundproof bunker;  and, once one side had lost four people, the other side would be declared the winners.  (They could of course limit participation to 3 from each side but this would leave too much to luck so 12 seems fair.)

If more than two countries wanted to take part there could be a knockout series of wars, a bit like Wimbledon but without the balls.

People who believe fighting makes life better can simplistically be divided into three camps:  countries that want to control other countries, groups that believe fighting will further their cause, and individuals who just enjoy hurting other people.  Countries would use the 24-participant system, groups would select 24 of their own members, split them into two groups of 12, and then follow the same rules as countries.

Individuals would be more complicated but would, in effect, be authorised to fight duels.  Pairs of people would be subjected to a long drawn-out and expensive process of form-filling and judicial assessment and, if the courts approved both parties as natural born killers, a duel would be approved and an amnesty would be granted to the survivor, if there was one.

Two more civilised countries have already found a new approach to border disputes, though the dispute is admittedly only over 1.3 square kilometers of uninhabited bare rock called Hans Island in Canada and Hans Ø in Denmark.  It lies in the middle of the Nares Strait which separates a Canadian island from the north of Denmark’s Greenland.  The border has been agreed where it lies through the sea but the two countries couldn’t agree about this lump of rock so, if a Danish ship is passing, someone lands, plants a Danish flag and leaves a bottle of Danish Snaps.  When a Canadian ship is passing, someone lands, removes the Snaps, replaces the Danish flag with a Canadian one, and leaves a bottle of Canadian Malt Whisky.  No shots have yet been fired.

And this week’s example of kindness.  Oliver Hitch, an engineer at Chappell studios, recorded Billy Bragg’s first album (‘Life’s a Riot’) which surprised him by selling in “enormous quantities”.  He wasn’t entitled to any royalties but, soon afterwards, Billy Bragg popped into see him and gave him a cheque saying “I thought you deserved something.”

*          My favourite quote from this book is “I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.”