NHS, strikes, governmental BS, Twitter hack and two American brainwaves

7 January 2023

What a joyful start to 2023!  There is no crisis in the NHS.  And there was I thinking nurses are striking because there is one.  But no, our cuddly prime minister has assured us that, even though the NHS is under “extreme pressure”, it has the money to needs to cope with the winter surge in demands for their services.

Dr Vishal Sharma, the chair of the consultants’ committee at the British Medical Association, responded with amazement to this, saying “No 10’s refusal to admit that the NHS is in crisis will seem simply delusional … [and] is taking the public for fools.” 

One of Rishi Sunak’s spokespeople produced the rather feeble claim that “We are confident we are providing the NHS with the funding it needs, as we did throughout the pandemic”, carefully refraining from making any reference to the repeated reductions in the real value of funding for the NHS in the previous 10 years since the Conservatives came to power and believed austerity would cure all ills.

So, with the ever increasing number of staff vacancies, they’ve been able to close cottage hospitals and reduce the number of rehab beds.  This means that patients who no longer need acute care but aren’t yet well enough to go home have to block beds in acute units instead of being transferred into rehab units which can have just two staff on overnight, and a GP on call.  Austerity also meant they had to reduce the costs of maintaining buildings and equipment by not bothering to do any and relying on strategically placed buckets to collect water dripping through the ceilings.

How lucky we all are to have the option of getting private healthcare without having to wait.  All we have to do is marry a billionaire or rob a bank or two.  The only problem private patients have to overcome is emergency care – if a scalpel slips, or the anaesthetist gets stuck on 12 across, while you’re having an operation in a private hospital, they will usually transfer you to the nearest NHS emergency unit, knowing that they’ll still get paid even if you die.

Sunak’s attempt to distract people from the not-crisis was to make maths lessons compulsory until A level.  Why?  I took A level maths (and, naturally, failed) and have since used the basic skills of multiplication / long division, geometry and trigonometry that I did in the earlier years but I’ve never once needed calculus.

And nurses are going on strike because the government refuses to discuss how much the real value of their pay has been whittled down over the last 12 years.  Despite the government’s frantically blaming the strikers, nobody’s fooled and several recent polls show the majority of people realise the strike is the government’s fault, not the nurses’.

The government’s response seems unlikely to improve things (but when has this ever stopped any government doing something stupid?):  they’re going to limit unions’ powers to hold strikes.  Sheer brilliance.  Anything to avoid dealing with the problems that cause strikes.

The anti-strike law will define “minimum service levels” in key sectors including health, education, fire and rail.  They plan to allow bosses to fire staff if minimum service levels aren’t met and to sue unions former damages.  Tougher thresholds originally wanted by Jacob Rees-Mogg have apparently been taken out for fear of challenges to their legality. 

I could perhaps understand their wish to do this if they limited the powers to essential services provided by the state but so many of these services are no longer state-owned but are run by, or contracted to, companies which, under established ‘rules’ of capitalism, provide their ‘customers’ (forget old-fashioned words like ‘patients’ or ‘passengers’) with the minimum levels of service necessary to maximise what they pay to their shareholders and directors.

I’ve mentioned one of the more heinous breaches of faith before, when the Conservative peer Michelle Mone pressurised the Department of Health and Social Care to award PPE Medpro, a company with close ties to her family, a £122m contract in June 2020. They duly supplied 25 million sterile surgical gowns which were rejected because their technical labelling was “invalid” and “improper”, and they “cannot be used within the NHS for any purpose”.  The Department is now seeking a return of the full £122m in public money plus £11.6m for storing and disposing of the gowns, plus interest.

Mone, founder of the lingerie brand Ultimo, was appointed to the House of Lords by David Cameron in 2015.  I wonder if Cameron was been gifted a lifetime supply of crotchless Y-fronts.

This inevitably (well, it seems inevitable to me) reminds me that more than 200m email addresses have been hacked out of Twitter and posted on an online hacking forum.  According to a LinkedIn post on 24 December by the Israeli cybersecurity monitoring firm Hudson Rock, the breach is likely to lead to a lot of hacking, targeted phishing and dox(x)ing (no, me neither, but it means releasing identifiable personal information to people who aren’t entitled to it – a gift to stalkers and others with equally dubious motives.) 

Twitter (aka Elon Musk) hasn’t yet commented.

Musk has lots of money and lots of idea, some brighter than others, but seems to have the attention span of a gnat.  While I’d love to go into space, I’m not sure I’d want to go up in one of his rockets because the Which? magazine award for the least reliable used car is currently held by Musk’s hugely expensive Tesla Model S.

As food inflation in the UK jumped from 12.4% in November to 13.3% in December and the Government thinks a 2% pay increase is ample, a Citizens’ Advice survey showed more than a third of UK adults would find it difficult or impossible to cope if their monthly costs increased by £20.

Recession?  What recession?

While homeless people in America are facing similar problems to those in Britain and many states are passing anti-homeless laws, Missouri has come up with a novel scheme to help them by making it a crime to sleep on state property.  This means that homeless people can sleep on the steps of the local courthouse, get arrested and, if they’re persistent offenders, they’ll be fined up to $750 or, if they haven’t got it (and how many homeless people have?), they’ll get 15 days in prison where the state will provide them with a roof over their heads, a warm bed and free meals for a fortnight.  Recidivists unite!

It’s not clear whether the law will also penalise people dozing off in senate meetings, school classes or libraries.

However, there are more than 2,500 community-supported agriculture schemes in America which support both the farmers and the consumers.  Customers make regular payments in return for fresh produce but the clever bit is that the price they pay is based on their finances so people who rent their homes or are on benefits or have large debts, pay less.  We should start something like this to supplement foodbanks.  I’d join.

While I was scanning the website of a large supermarket (which I won’t name to save Waitrose’s blushes), I saw an offer on minced lamb which said “Our fresh lamb is always British and kept happy with room to frolic and graze”.  Until somebody hits them on the head with a hammer and cuts them up into little pieces.

Widespread celebrations, Snake Island, a book on Putin, politics in space

10 July 2022

Well, Boris Johnson is going at long last, with the normal abuser’s “look what they made me do” defence of his record as prime minister.  He blamed ministers he’d appointed and disloyal Tory MPs;  there was no sign of repentance or regret or even an apology.

Now some poor sods are going to have to strip off The Wallpaper and remove all his kitsch furnishings.  Perhaps they could be given back to the man who paid for them for immolation at his bonfire party in the autumn.

(Interestingly, some people blame the media for influencing his party’s MPs by reporting his latest stupidity rather than themselves being influenced by the stupidity itself – remember the Greeks would kill the messenger who brought bad news.  The implicit inspiration for this belief in the culpability of the media is clearly that, if an MP’s misdemeanours are never mentioned in the press, other MPs can safely ignore them.  Even my Conservative friend has criticised even me for drawing too much attention to Johnson’s peccadilloes, wantonly careless of the peccadilloes themselves.  Beats me.)

My wife had to go for a routine service on Thursday morning and the GP hadn’t heard Johnson had got the boot.  When we told her, she suddenly sat bolt upright with eyebrows raised and a huge smile on her face and said “At last!”

One of his predecessors, John Major, condemned Johnson by saying he thought it would be “unwise” for him to continue acting as PM until it’s known who’ll take over.  What a pleasure to hear proper parliamentary language from a serious politician again after so many years of a posturing narcissist.

I always rather liked the sound of Major;  he came over as a thoroughly decent man, despite what I thought were his somewhat dubious political views.

And Ukrainian forces have re-taken Zmiiny (aka Snake Island).  The Russians said they’d pulled out as “a gesture of goodwill” despite having reportedly dropped incendiary white phosphorus on weapons and ammunition they had to leave behind as they fled made a tactical withdrawal.  They then attacked a block of flats and a recreation centre in Serhiivka, near Odesa, killing over 20 civilians including two children, an act condemned by Kyiv as revenge for the loss of Snake Island.

Being fascinated by the motivations and paranoia / psychopathology of Vladimir Putin, I was interested to read a critique of a new book by the former BBC correspondent Philip Short:  ‘Putin:  His Life and Times”.  I haven’t read the book yet, just the crit, but it’s described as a “meticulous biography” of a man many believe is a monster, and attempts to show how Russia sees the ‘the west’, and why.  I have cribbed much of what follows from this.

Claiming that Putin is challenging “the American-led world order that has kept the peace since the end of the cold war”, Short pictures Putin watching American interventions in elections, its encouragement of the break-up of Serbia, the invasion of Iraq on a tissue of falsehoods and the overthrow of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi without any UN resolution.  Putin’s later comment was “Those of us in the KGB were children compared to American politicians”.

In the KGB, he came over as “a cautious operator, shy and unreadable, but with a startling streak of brutality.”  He called himself a bureaucrat not a politician and networked widely, making many friends.  Originally a liberal nationalist, he developed into the autocrat who now condemns “the so-called liberal idea”.

He grew up in post-war Leningrad.  Russia had, of course, fought with Britain and America during the war and lost some 20 million of their people in the process, which led to a lasting belief that Russia was part of Europe*, but the iron curtain created after the war, to separate the Warsaw Pact countries from the Nato countries, introduced a division between ‘East’ and ‘West’.

Putin’s own Damascene moment came with glasnost and the break-up of the old USSR in 1991, a union that had stretched from Poland in the west to the Pacific ocean in the east.  Putin – and many other Russians – never understood how a country that they believed had saved the world from fascism in World War II could have disintegrated so quickly, with countries such as Estonia and Georgia being nibbled off the edges and gaining an independence that Putin sees as an outrage to Russian nationalism.  He also fears the loss of a buffer zone between Russia and Nato that seems to make him feel safer although, with modern weapons that can take the eye out of a mosquito at 5,000 miles, this seems a triumph of optimism over reality.

However, we must remember that after 9/11, he defied his own military advisers to offer to work with America in offering a joint front against radical Islam and it was America that rejected it.

He might originally have seen Ukraine’s invasion as a genuine military exercise on one of Russia’s ‘lost lands’ but we can only hope that the atrocities committed by Russian troops and the ferocity of the Ukrainian resistance will convince him that Ukraine does see itself as an independent sovereign state.

The problems he faces with his own people is the generation that has grown up with internet access to international social media and the ability to travel freely outside Russia.  His own acolytes educate their own children in Britain and America and own property and yachts outside Russia. 

The Russian anti-corruption campaigner and opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, spoke publicly about the need to loosen the reins and ended up going voluntarily back to Russia where he expected to be, and was, immediately incarcerated for disagreeing with Putin.

While Short’s book talks about the vast wealth accumulated by his loyal friends, it doesn’t offer much comment on the wealth Putin has himself reputedly stashed away, which seems likely to upset a lot of ‘ordinary’ Russians and raise questions about his motives in wishing to unite ‘the Russias’ again.

Interestingly, a British pot called a Russian kettle black when Johnson was interviewed by German media after the G7 summit and said “If Putin was a woman … I really don’t think he would have embarked on a crazy, macho war of invasion and violence in the way that he has … If you want a perfect example of toxic masculinity, it’s what he is doing in Ukraine.”  Psychiatrists might be tempted to call this the ‘projection’ of one’s own faults onto others.

Sadly, the war seems to have got into space where Russian cosmonauts on the International Space Station were pictured apparently holding the flags of the self-proclaimed republics in Luhansk and Donetsk.  I always thought that the ISS was an international enterprise where politics and other differences were put on one side to achieve a greater good.

I also used to think this same applied to sport and have been saddened to see Russian players excluded from international competitions for which people used to qualify by ability, not by the accident of where they were born or their subsequent political or religious conditioning. 

The British police have come up with a novel way of dealing with convoys of demonstrators driving very slowly and holding up traffic on main roads and motorways;  not as you might expect by explaining that protesting against high fuel prices is not best achieved by driving at less than optimum speeds and using up even more fuel, but by arresting them for driving too slowly.

On 26 June, I mentioned that our usual milk had increased from £1.15 to £1.35 at Sainsbury.  It’s now £1.45.  If that doesn’t frighten those on the breadline, nothing will.

*          I’ve always wondered – if Russia is part of Europe, where does Asia start?

Enfeebled PM, gambling, the monarchy, greedy pigs and one of the ungreedy

12 June 2022

The greased piglet is bacon.  Maggie Thatcher and Theresa May both faced ‘no confidence’ votes and got off considerably better than Boris Johnson did this week but they both gave up fairly shortly afterwards.  Jacob Rees-Mogg kindly explained that one vote is enough to win which is, of course, technically correct but completely ignores the political implications of losing the confidence of some 40% of your own MPs.  When May’s vote showed much more confidence in her, Rees-Mogg described this as “terrible” for her.  Well, why should we expect consistency from our politicians?

Even the ultra Conservative Daily Telegraph headlined the result “Hollow victory tears Tories apart”. 

Elsewhere, the law firm Harcus Parker (what a pity the other partner wasn’t called Parkus because then they could have been magicians) has filed a bunch of claims exceeding £18m from 1,500 investors who believe Link Fund Solutions* failed in its duty to protect investors who knew their capital was at risk.  Another law firm, Leigh Day, has already filed a claim on behalf of some 12,000 other investors.

The fund that went bust had been managed by Neil Woodford (see my blog of 30 June 2019).  For many years, he had been seen as a star stock-picker and was championed by the investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown.  Woodford himself isn’t the target of the action because he was fired when even his bosses realised he had made some remarkably stupid decisions and had no particular skills, it was just his luck had run out.

What’s interesting about all of this is to look at who actually made money out of the debacle.  Peter Hargreaves, who helped a friend set up Hargreaves Lansdown in 1981, is now a billionaire;  Neil Woodford is a multi-multi-millionaire;  and the lawyers are going to make a mint.

Investors don’t see themselves as gamblers but the only real difference is the people who risk their money.  Investors are people (and organisations) with too much money who want more.  Investors use vehicles like investment funds who buy things with other people’s money, hoping to get lucky, taking fat fees for the themselves on the way whether or not they’re successful;  gamblers are people who are so poor they need a big win to survive but don’t believe how heavily the odds are stacked against them.  So the investment managers, agencies like Hargreaves Lansdown and the bookies are the only ones who end up rich.

I asked my Conservative-voting friend recently if they still thought Johnson was a good prime minister and the right man to lead his party and the country and they said ‘yes’ (note tactful absence of exclamation mark).  Following Monday’s no-confidence vote, I asked how they felt about the result and my friend said they felt no sense of either relief or disappointment at the result.  I thought this rather went against their earlier claim that Johnson was the best person to be prime minister, but who knows?  Maybe they actually don’t care who runs the country and have just been trying to wind me up.

The latest plan to encourage people to vote Tory is to let occupiers of social housing buy their homes at large discounts blatantly ignores the social and economic problems caused by Maggie Thatcher’s first bash at doing this which transferred almost 2 million units of social housing into private properties.  A 2017 survey published in Inside Housing magazine found that 40% of the former social housing was then being rented out by private landlords who were charging more than twice the rent charged by local authorities and average property prices were twelve times what they had been in 1980.

Only 5% of the stock sold off by Thatcher has been replaced, which is why we have an ever-expanding vicious spiral and some very rich property developers.

Turning to the equally disastrous policies of gun control in America, I recently learnt that the Washington Post humourist suggested a “Gun Control Plan” back in 1976, which would have required everybody’s trigger fingers to be amputated at birth.  He said “The constitution gives everyone the right to bear arms but there is nothing that says an American has to have ten fingers.”

I was talking to another friend this week about the monarchy after my comments last week.   They’re staunchly republican but, as we talked and I thought about it afterwards, I realised I get much more exercised by the distribution of wealth than about whether we have a monarch.  Royals do of course cost us money but only on a tiny scale compared with the money stashed in the mangers of very rich dogs who want to defend them against the people who actually need it to stay alive.

(Prince Charles himself may have swayed people’s feelings about the monarchy this week when, in a private meeting, he apparently described the government’s decision to ‘process’ asylum applicants in Ruanda as “appalling”.   Of course he was right but, until now, royals have never commented on political matters so this may be the beginning of the end.  Or possibly a move towards taking more power into the monarchy which, with the frightening things Johnson’s government has done, from removing rights to peaceful demonstrations, to refusing to make the rich help the poor, to increasing police powers, to immigration generally, to breaking an international law that has its own signature on the bottom, to cronyism and corruption, to its clear wish to move power from government into the hands of the prime minister, might not be a bad thing.)

So this week’s Fat Cat / Greedy Pig awards go to Dominic Blakemore of Compass, John Pettigrew of National Grid, Simon Roberts of Sainsbury and Steve Rowe of Marks & Spencer.  Blakemore was given £3.2m, Pettigrew £6.5m, Roberts £3.8m (triple the previous year) and Rowe £2.6m plus shares worth, at today’s share price some £4.1m that he can cash in over the next few years.

However, M&S showed their magnanimity by increasing their shop workers’ minimum pay to £10 an hour in a year when it made a pre-tax profit of nearly £400m, equivalent to more than £25 per hour for every single one of their employees worldwide. Ummm.

But worms are turning.

Morgan Curtis is a scion of a wealthy family descended from first and early settlers in what wasn’t then called New England.  In her mid-20s, she realised that her wealth and privilege were “inextricably linked to what has been stolen from the labor of enslaved African people, the rights of workers, lands of Indigenous people and the health of ecosystems” and decided to do something about it to help build “a more just world”.

After deciding she had a moral obligation to redistribute her wealth, she gave her money to grassroots social movements and now lives at Canticle Farm in “occupied Ohlone territory (known as Oakland, CA)” where she works to build “communities and movements in service to justice, healing and reconciliation”.

Morgan my hero, I love you.

*          I decided years ago that any business incorporating the word ‘solutions’ in its name wasn’t to be trusted to solve anything.

Horrors of Putin’s war and insiders’ views

10 April 2022

Putin’s war has dominated everything this week and no words can describe my feeling of sheer horror on hearing and seeing reports of Russia’s activities in Ukraine.

It seems that the Russian forces fall into one of two groups with differing motives:  conscripted young soldiers who actually believed they were taking part in “military exercises” and didn’t even know they were no longer in Russia;  and the mercenary Russian Wagner Group, trained and ruthless killers who had previously demonstrated their viciousness in Syria.

According to Der Spiegel, German intelligence services have intercepted radio conversations between soldiers chatting about themselves.  One of them says in a matter-of-fact way, “Firstly you question the soldier, then you shoot them”;  another claims to have shot somebody on a bicycle.

At least one photograph of the devastation inflicted by Russian forces shows a dead body lying by a bicycle.  Other pictures show corpses left lying in the street, some of them having been run over by tanks, and at least one huge mass grave has been found.  While the actual numbers are unknown, it’s clear that the Russians have killed thousands of Ukrainian civilians, including women and children, some with their hands tied.  Some have been shot in the back of the head, some killed by rocket attacks.

The Kremlin has denied responsibility for any of the killings that various western leaders have described as “war crimes” and has repeatedly claimed that the scenes were staged by the Ukrainians in an attempt to discredit Russia.  One particular such ‘staged’ picture showing a body in the street has also been linked to a satellite picture of the same street, showing the body in the same position and location, which was taken while the Russians were still in control of that area.

We have a friend who spent much of her life working in Russia and she is still in touch with people she knows, one family in St Petersburg and one in Ukraine.  Much of the following is taken straight from her emails.

As context, she explained the complicated history of the eastern borders of Russia / USSR during the 20^th century and the optimism that followed Gorbachev and perestroika in 1989, when people thought there could now be ‘socialism with a human face’.  These hopes faded in the next decade as Boris Yeltsin allowed people to make a lot of money and they became so rich they were then dictating to the government.  Many people in Russia – no longer the USSR but just the largest of its republics – felt deeply humiliated at its loss of power on the world scene.

They believe that Ukraine isn’t just Russia’s back yard, it’s part of what Russians back in history thought of as “All the Russias” – Great Russia, Little Russia (Ukraine) and White Russia (Belarus). Putin might be trying to restore this vision.

When Putin came to power in 2000, he was going to be a new broom and show the oligarchs who was in charge but, of course, we now know that Putin and his cronies have milked their country and acquired huge fortunes.

On 15 February, nine days before the invasion started, the friend in St Petersburg said “Here everything is calm, there is no mood of hysteria and in Russia no one is planning to go to war” and “Don’t worry, I am sure that reason will prevail and everything will be all right”.

On 5 March, the friend in Ukraine said “It is just so terrible to discover that some of my close acquaintances are entrenched Putinists.  I can’t talk with them, it has spoiled all our mutual memories and connections.”

At the same time, the friend in Russia was sent some links to news from the BBC and the Guardian and their son replied “I almost switched off from the news, it is hard to believe any information. I have high respect for BBC journalism and I am sad that people and children are suffering. Around me people are talking about leaving the country.”  He later added “Russia will need more than a decade to recover. Ukraine was a failed state, now they will be a failed state in ruins with a humanitarian catastrophe.”

Another of her friends, a wealthy businesswoman, philanthropist and Putin supporter, quoted an article in Faktxeber, which seems to be an online paper from Azerbaijan.  This claims that the whole thing is a highly successful ploy that’s earned Russia $20bn and allowed them to buy back foreign interests in the state’s oil and gas companies at rock-bottom prices.

The Ukrainian friend commented separately “The only super-accurate weapon in Russia is the TV. It hits the brain, even when there is none.”

The final word can go to a poem circulating on the internet, translated by our friend (with no attempt to make it rhyme):

Verses from a Russian Soldier.

Mum, I’m a prisoner, but don’t you cry.

They’ve cobbled me up, I’m as good as new now.

A doctor from Kherson treated me,

Weary, stern and grim.

He treated me. Listen, mum,

I was hitting the town with rockets, 

and half the hospital was in ruins,

But he treated me: “It has to be done”.

Mum, I am a monster, forgive me.

We lost our way in the floods of lies.

For the rest of my life I must carry this cross.

Now my eyes are opened.

They took us past the places

that had been reached by our missiles.

And we couldn’t believe our eyes:

What had we done to Kherson!

The hospitals are full of the wounded.

Here every one is cursing the Russians.

A father, white as a sheet,

Is rocking his dead child.

Mother, I am a monster, an executioner.

And, mama, there are no terrorists here.

Here there are only human groans and tears

And we are worse than fascists to them.

Mum, they sent us to be slaughtered.

Our battalion commander had no pity for us.

But a man from Kherson here shouted “stand still!” to me

and “on the ground, laddy!” and then a lot of swearing.

He didn’t want to shoot me.

he is a Man, and I am a Murderer.

he carried me out of the battle! Listen, mum,

Me, a murderer, a shedder of blood!

Mum, I’m a prisoner, but don’t you cry.

They’ve cobbled me up, I’m as good as new now.

A doctor from Kherson treated me

Weary, stern and grim.

he was doing his duty as a doctor,

While I was thinking as I burned with shame.

For the first time I had the chance to wonder

Just who needs a war like this?

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.

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.

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.

Hobby horses, international news, singing fish, outrage and a dog blanket

9 January 2022

Somebody left the stable door open and several of my hobby horses cantered out this week.

Figures released by the Office for National Statistics show that the richest households in the UK have at least £3,600,000 while the poorest 10% have £15,400 or less, and 40% of those are actually in debt so have negative assets.  What’s wrong with the people who could do something about this and don’t?

On the first anniversary of the Trump-inspired attack on the Capitol, Joe Biden accused Trump and his allies of holding a “dagger at the throat of American democracy” and there are real fears that Trump’s actions could lead the country into another civil war.  Some elected law enforcement officials are already breaking federal laws and some states are using their powers to make new laws that defy them.

But a judge in Georgia has sentenced three white men to life in prison after they’d hunted down a black jogger, Ahmaud Arbery, and murdered him in cold blood.  Only one of them will be allowed to request parole, and then only after 30 years.

Meanwhile, groups of potential revolutionaries are forming armed militias and spreading their creed through local radio and TV stations, working on the Lewis Carroll’s claim (in ‘The Hunting of the Snark’) that “What I tell you three times is true”.

Fox News naturally leads the way and has been pushing conspiracy theories that the FBI or the Capitol police or Black Lives Matter were the real instigators of the 6 January riot.  One of their far-right hosts, Sean Hannity, called Biden a liar for claiming that Trump did nothing to stop the riot and seems unfazed by the texts he sent at the time urging Trump to intervene.

Even some Republican members of Congress and the Senate who had previously shown commonsense are now unwilling to alienate people and risk losing their jobs at the mid-term elections.

In Kabul, a bunch of Taliban officials emptied barrels containing about 3,000 litres of alcohol into a local canal.  Fifty metres downstream, a shoal of rebel fish were heard singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

I can understand why the Taliban think intoxicants are bad but I don’t understand why they don’t also shut down the opium fields that occupy large areas of ‘their’ country.

Over the border in Pakistan, a woman judge has been nominated to the country’s Supreme Court for the first time, another small step for womankind worldwide.

In Fukuoka prefecture in south-west Japan, Kane Tanaka, the world’s oldest person has celebrated her 119^th birthday saying she is determined to live another year to raise the record.  To the disappointment of Japanese dentists, she allegedly has a weakness for fizzy drinks and chocolates.

In Israel, the 2018 ‘nation-state’ law alienated Israeli Arabs (who account for 20% of Israel’s population), Palestinians, liberal American Jews, and many Israelis who denounced the law as racist and undemocratic.  Now the actor Emma Watson has been accused of antisemitism after she posted a message of support for a pro-Palestinian protest but we must remember that antisemitism and antizionism are two completely different things, and that it’s in Israel’s interests to conflate the two.

In California, deputy district attorney Kelly Ernby, a vocal anti-vaxxer, has died of Covid;  Axel, her husband, said “She was NOT vaccinated. That’s the problem.”

Elsewhere in America, Bob Dylan’s lawyers have formally rejected a lawsuit filed last August from a woman calling herself JC claiming child sexual abuse over a 6-week period in 1965 when she was 12.  Last week, her lawsuit was amended to refer to a period of “several months”.  Both Dylan’s lawyers and Clinton Heylin, a music writer and Dylan expert, have said this wasn’t possible because he was touring and recording and writing.  Dylanologists spend their lives obsessively picking through every minute of his life so it’ll be interesting to see what proof JC has other than that they might have been in the same city during that period.

Here in the UK, Boris Johnson has admitted he forgot to give Lord Geidt’s inquiry into the source of funding for the work some texts that had asked Lord Brownlow for money to refurbish his flat.

Having seen the ‘missing’ texts, Geidt wrote to Johnson on 17 December saying that their omission was “plainly unsatisfactory” and “I doubt whether I would have concluded, without qualification … that ‘at the point when the Prime Minister became aware, he took steps to make the relevant declaration and to seek advice’”.  On Thursday, Johnson offered a “humble and sincere” apology for omitting the texts.  Cynics still have some difficulty associating Johnson with either of those two adjectives.

The four people who admitted relocating Bristol’s statue of Edward Colston, one of Britain’s most notorious slave traders, into the harbour have been found ‘not guilty’ by 11/12 of a jury after the defence had successfully argued the presence of statue was so indecent and potentially abusive that it constituted a crime in itself (a plaque on the plinth had described Colston as “one of the most virtuous and wise sons of the city”).

Suella Braverman QC MP, Attorney General for England and Wales, supported by fellow Tory MPs and others on the far-right declared themselves outraged by the verdict and claimed it was “a vandal’s charter”;  they were supported by the Daily Mail who derided the group’s post-verdict remarks as “woke* platitudes”.  Where were these outraged enforcers when Jimmy Saville’s grave was vandalised?

It now appears that the Conservative peer Michelle Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman, were connected with a company she recommended to the Cabinet Office for the supply of masks and surgical gowns at the start of the pandemic, some weeks after the company been set up but a few days before it had even been registered.  The company, PPE Medpro was awarded more than £200m in government contracts in May and June 2020.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, got nearly $100m last year, 1,447 times the median employee’s pay of $68,254.  In 2015, he said that, having provided for his (now 16-year-old) nephew, he planned to give all his wealth to charities.  Ah, if only we all knew when we were going to die. 

Stella McCartney’s fashion company claimed more than £800,000 in 2020 under the government’s furlough scheme.  McCartney herself took almost £2.7m out of the company.  All perfectly legal, just immoral.

As Covid numbers continue to increase and more NHS staff aren’t able to work, 999 call-handlers in some areas are telling people having a heart attack to make their own way to hospital.  Down here, there’s an hourly bus service on weekdays (none on Sundays), followed by a 20-minute walk to A&E from the bus stop.  I think I’d rather die at home where it’s warm and comfortable than on a cold pavement in the middle of nowhere.

Stephanie Matto used to bottle her farts and sell them, reputedly making $50,000 from them, but had to stop after she ended up in hospital with problems caused by eating too many high-fibre foods.

The reduction in healthy microbiomes in western diets can lead to problems with our physical and mental health.  One of the treatments for a depleted microbiome is the use of faecal transplants which have proved effective in the treatment of some intestinal conditions, including C difficile.  Researchers are now working on the production of the same stuff in easily edible pellet form.  (Did you see how carefully I worded this paragraph?)

And finally, Grga Brkic, an injured hiker in the Croatian mountains was kept warm for 13 hours by his dog, an 8-month old Alaskan Malamute, who lay on top of him until rescuers arrived.   If Malamutes are anything like Labradors, I hope its snoring didn’t keep Brkic awake.

*          Rhian Graham, one of those on trial in Bristol, defined ‘woke’ rather well:  “Woke is actually a colloquial term for being aware of social injustice – it’s been appropriated by the right as a way to demonise young people who care about equality and making the world a better place.” 

Dylan v Springsteen, Boris humiliated, trade deals and carbon emissions, good(ish) news, a pome and kindness

19 December 2021

Bob Dylan wuz robbed. 

Last May, he sold his song-writing catalogue for $300m while Bruce Springsteen sold his for $500m last week.  I’m not saying The Boss hasn’t written some great songs – about as many as Dylan in total – but I discovered Dylan before Springsteen and know more of his work.  Perhaps all of Springsteen’s songs are good – Dylan has written some utter crap in his time.

Still, I suppose Springsteen is some 7 years younger than Dylan so he’s got to make the money last for longer and it seems more sensible to get a lump sum instead of annual income as death looms on the horizon like a raven with a broken wing.  (Boris Johnson’s reluctance to admit how many children he’s fathered – he admits to seven but might have forgotten some – pales beside Dylan who’s so pathologically private nobody’s even quite sure how many wives he’s had.)

Given the choice, Johnson would probably have been happy to miss last week.  More of his lies about illegal parties last Christmas kept crawling out of the woodwork, Sir Simon Case had to hand over his independent investigation of the parties after he was discovered to have hosted one himself, 99 Conservative MPs voted against the government’s Covid Plan B proposals which were only passed because Labour MPs had undertaken to support sensible government proposals on Covid and kept their promise, and then the Conservatives were humiliated by the North Shropshire byelection and lost the seat for the first time in nearly 200 years, after a 34% swing to the LibDems.

Since Proportional Representation remains a pipe-dream, why don’t all the opposition parties agree who stands the best chance of beating the Conservative and just put up one candidate who would stand as Labour / LibDem / Independent / whatever and describe themselves as “The Not-Conservative candidate”?  (Curiously enough, after I’d written this, I saw a TV pundit say something very similar this morning about opposition parties working together to oppose the Conservatives.)

The most interesting thing about the Conservative revolt was that the Plan B vote wasn’t actually that significant but it was a wonderful opportunity for Johnson’s own MPs to show the leader they elected just what they thought of his lying and narcissistic self-satisfaction.  Nor did he do well at PMQs and some of the less sycophantic papers published pictures of him actually snarling in parliament (the more sycophantic papers just used a smaller type-size in the headlines commenting on his failures).

Johnson suffered another blow yesterday evening when Lord (David) Frost resigned from the Cabinet, not because he’s a great loss (which of them would be?) but because he’s yet another who’s realised Johnson is an increasing liability to the party.  Mind you, Frost had also been forced to make concessions over Brexit, leaving the European Court of Justice as the ultimate decision-maker over trade rules in Northern Ireland, and ‘our’ government failed to support his threat to suspend parts of the trade deal he’d previous agreed with the EU.

Johnson now seems to be on a final written warning from his party.  He took responsibility for the byelection disaster but said it was actually the fault of the public (aka voters) and the media for looking at “politics and politicians” instead of the real issues, which encapsulates his problem rather well.

But the UK and Australia have signed a new, post-Brexit trade deal which will allow them to send us their surplus camels in exchange for our criminals, all tariff-free.  At least, that’s what it probably says – I haven’t actually read it.  Anyway, the International Trade Department reckon it will save British households £1 per year on all the Australian products they buy in British shops and could add 0.08% to the UK economy over 15 years.  There’s comforting.  Next, a new trade deal with Tierra del Fuego, sod the two difficult North American countries.

(I wonder if the carbon costs of transporting stuff to and from the antipodes have been factored in.)

While an enquiry has been looking into opening a new coalmine in Britain, Joe Biden chose to auction 80m acres of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling, just four days after the UN climate talks.  Donald Trump bought himself a can of Nehi to celebrate.

Since this is Christmas week, let’s finish with some random bits of good news.

On the other side of the world, China, South and North Korea, China and America have agreed “in principle” to formally end the Korean war, in which the fighting finished in 1953.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that South Korea thinks talks are being impeded by North Korea which has objected to “US hostility” and said this must end before peace can be declared.

I don’t know whether China has any reservations but they may be too busy killing, sorry, re-educating Uighurs to have found time to consider this yet.

Prof Adam Winstock, the founder and director of the Global Drug Survey, an independent research company based in London, reports that a 2021 survey shows there’s been a shift during the pandemic towards recreational drug users microdosing on psychedelics to improve their mental health, either to supplement or replace psychiatric drugs.  (The longer-term effects obviously aren’t yet known.)

Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial continues and she seems to be losing the optimism she had at its start as the prosecution destroys her defence witnesses.  One of them, Cimberley Espinosa, worked from 1996 to 2002 in Jeffrey Epstein’s office in New York.  The prosecution witnesses said nothing had ever happened there and much of their abuse took place in the Palm Beach house he shared with Maxwell.  In cross-examination, the prosecution asked Espinosa if she’d ever been to Palm Beach.  “No,” she replied.  “No further questions” said the prosecution.

Now an epic pome about my troubles for people who can’t read my writing (which often includes me):

‘Tis a week before Christmas, my cards are still on the shelf

The only one to arrive in time will be the one I send to myself.

The actor Susan Sarandon has said ‘I tell my kids the most important thing is to be kind.’

If somebody is kind to you, it doesn’t mean you need to return the kindness to them, just say thank you and, if you want, pick a daisy for them.  Then, when you get the chance, be kind to somebody else.  Spread it around.

Doing voluntary work is always good, especially at Christmas when a lot of people feel especially alone so I hope that, when you’re not working, you have a relaxing time, celebrating whatever you normally celebrate around now.

With love to you all, and hopes for a peaceful new year.