Trump’s and Netanyahu’s rockers, racism, and a joke

30 August 2025

As another August fades into history, the world is still divided between people who think Donald Trump is off his rocker and those who never thought he was on it in the first place.

Trump’s recent achievements include announcing that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, could end the war with Russia “almost immediately” if he wanted to.  Of course he could:  all he has to do is agree with everything Vladimir Putin wants and the war will end as Russia secures its new borders and disenfranchises all Ukrainians.

At Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska, he was obviously confident when he welcomed Putin at the airport.  After the meeting, it was all too obvious that Trump hadn’t got his own way and his vanity had been punctured:  he sat slumped in his chair while Putin sat upright and inscrutable.

He also proved that surrounding oneself with unqualified sycophants is never the best idea when it was widely reported that one of his team had left confidential documents describing his brief for the meeting in a public area of an Alaskan hotel.

Billy Long, a loyal Trump supporting Republican congressman and previously an auctioneer, was appointed head of the Internal Revenue Service in June and has just been booted out.  His appointment at the time had raised eyebrows because Long’s previous experience of tax were limited to the promotion of a fraud-riddled tax credit scheme.  The next head of the IRS will be Trump’s 7^th appointment so far this year.

His stunning lack of self-knowledge (and ‘political’ nous) was revealed when the Norwegian media Dagens Næringsliv reported that he had cold-called the Norwegian finance minister Jens Stoltenberg to ask for a Nobel Peace Prize.

When one remembers that Henry Kissinger was awarded a peace price in 1973, this perhaps isn’t so unlikely after all.  Kissinger was awarded the prize together with his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho but Tho had the decency to reject it and was reported by the New York Times as saying “peace has not yet really been established in South”.

A ceasefire had been agreed in October 1972 but Kissinger then ordered a bombing raid on Hanoi in December and two members of the Nobel Committee resigned in protest at the award while a New York Times op-ed suggested it should be called the ‘Nobel War Prize’.

North and South Vietnam remained at war until North Vietnam took Saigon in April 1975 and united the country.

Nothing much has changed in the Middle East except that Benjamin Netanyahu (another rocker-free ‘leader’) has decided the best way to improve Israel’s image internationally is to target and murder the journalists reporting on what they do, even if they’re inside a hospital.  They’ve even added a subtlety of their own by killing a bunch of journalists and then hitting exactly the same target again 15 minutes after the first attack so the aid workers and surviving journalists who had arrived to help the wounded are also killed.

Despite tens of thousands of people, Jews and Arabs, joining demonstrations across the country calling on Netanyahu to cancel plans to attack Gaza City, Israel’s military is accelerating its preparations for the assault.

Critics, including relatives of hostages still in Gaza, say he is prolonging the war to extend his personal political career and further delay the courts hearing the criminal charges brought against him.

Even Trump said “I’m not happy about it”.

Numbers from a classified Israeli military intelligence database indicate that, by May this year, almost 9,000 fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were dead or “probably dead”.  However, Israel believed they had already killed some 53,000 Palestinians, thereby admitting that almost five out of six people they’d killed were civilians.

Earlier in August, the Israel Defense Force had even “claimed responsibility” for the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and admitted having targeted him.

(Have you noticed that bombers and other terrorists are always reported as “claiming responsibility” for such atrocities.  I once suggested to Jon Snow, then a Channel 4 News presenter, that they should say that bombers had “accepted the blame” for atrocities but he was surprisingly defensive and said that a lot of editorial thought had been given to the words used.)

All that Britain can offer is Nigel Farage who has taken advantage of other politicians taking holidays to produce headline-grabbing soundbites – lots of emotional fluff not too hampered by detail or facts.  (One journalist, possibly not a fan, pointed out that Farage grabbed headlines during the summer recess because he took his own holidays while parliament was sitting.)

His “Operation Restoring Justice” (no, me neither) proposes the deportation of “absolutely anyone” arriving in a small boat and the removal of the UK’s commitments to human rights.  He said he would leave the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act, disapply the 1951 refugee convention and the UN convention against torture as well as the Council of Europe’s anti-trafficking convention.  (His party has already promised to do away with all those rubbish policies on equality and diversity.)

The whole thing is so ludicrous I wonder if Farage would claim he’s just patriotic but I wonder when patriotism merges with racism and ill-considered beliefs in ‘racial purity’ (c.f. Hitler’s Germanic “Master Race”, which was to be achieved by murdering Jews, Russians, Roma, disabled people, and anybody who wasn’t tall and blonde – and that was just the women because Hitler himself was short and dark).

It reminds me of whoever it was who claimed they could prove that everybody was still anti-semitic.

 “Nonsense” said a friend, “I’m not anti-anybody.”

“Well, just think:  Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews.”

“That was 90 years ago.”

“But, in Germany today, there are still Nazi groups whose aim is to kill another 6 million Jews and 47 postmen.”

“47 postmen???”

“You see, not even you care about the Jews.”

No bed for Bacon, Brahms v Beethoven, UK’s back door, an unmanned(ish) ship, and assisted dying

9 March 2024

A friend said recently she was “sad about the state of the world.  I think I might ditch the news.”  I know exactly how she feels. 

I scrabble around each week to find some good news to help cheer everybody up but there ain’t much out there and I’m coming to the conclusion that we just have to carry on until we can’t take any more, then give up.  I’m thinking of taking out a subscription to Hello magazine so I can chuckle at the irrelevant and boring activities of people I’ve never heard of. 

I am actually cheering myself slightly at the moment by re-reading a book that makes me laugh:  No Bed for Bacon by Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon.  You probably need to know a little about Shakespeare and the times he lived in to get some of the jokes but it still makes me smile.  For instance, it explains in passing that the Elizabeth’s second best bed, which Francis Bacon wanted, was delivered to a cottage in Stratford.

There are quite a few books on my shelves waiting to be re-read (the ones I don’t want to read again go straight back to the charity shop) so I’m not sure why I picked this one, an old orange Penguin edition.  It might be because I remembered a discussion with a friend many years ago about the relative merits of Brahms and Beethoven;  she said she thought Brahms’s music was much more intellectual and I said that I thought Beethoven wrote better tunes, which just goes to show what a philistine I am.

One piece of good news this week came when the Daily Mail reported that David Neal, the UK borders inspector, reported that 10 private jets a week land at London City airport alone and let the passengers in the UK’s back door, without their having to go through any of those tedious passport checks that make life so difficult for drugs and arms smugglers, illegal immigrants, child slavers, politicians and other undesirables.  The government immediately took the obvious action and fired Neal.

But we must look on the bright side.  After the budget, Rishi Sunak praised the government’s successes in an interview on Thursday and said “we’ve got inflation down from 11% to 4%”.  I found myself squirming as I listened to this hypocrisy.  After all, wasn’t he one of the chancellors who had so dismally failed the repair the damage inflicted by George Osborne’s disastrous years of austerity and the later collapse of Trussonomics?  In fact, when the Conservatives were first elected, inflation was about 3% but saying “we’ve got inflation down from 3% to … er … 4%” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

A similarly cavalier approach to the truth was taken in the triumphant announcement that an “unmanned” ship is being tested in a Norwegian fjord.  It’s 78 metres long, is being controlled remotely by computer operators in Southampton and will only need a crew of 16 instead of 40 or 50 people.  Yes, I wondered that too.  16 crew on board = “unmanned”?  Perhaps they’re all women.

But National Insurance is going down by another two percentage points, from 8% to 6%, in April which means you’ll have to pay 25% less from next month in addition to the 20% reduction you were already given in January.  If you pay it, which the poorest and the oldest don’t …

The amount the government will receive from national insurance contributions will therefore reduce by 50% in a year and Jeremy Hunt promised to remove it entirely in due course.  What?  Where else are they going to get the money from, did you ask?  That’s being passed on to the next government to decide so if, as many people expect, Labour will win, they can take the blame for having to fill the hole Hunt has dug for them.

And look at the wonder of George Galloway who’s been elected as the Workers’ Party of Great Britain MP for Rochdale despite having supported more parties than Winston Churchill.  He seems to be on the left at the moment but he backed Nigel Farage campaigning for Brexit and voted Conservative in Scotland three years ago.

What chance does integrity have when it gets in the way of someone’s ego?

In response to another attempt to legalise assisted dying, the Ministry of Justice has reminded us that “the Government is committed to providing time to the Backbench Business Committee which gives MPs the opportunity to bring forward debates of their choice and MPs also have the option of introducing Private Members’ Bills which provide MPs with an opportunity to address public concerns and to change the law”.  Or, in plain English, no comment.

In the real world, there is increasing pressure for something do be done in England as its legislation lags behind outliers like Jersey and the Isle of Man.  It isn’t even a political matter and various surveys have shown that about 3 in every 4 people support the principle.  There are of course differing opinions about the various conditions that should be included and the extent of protection for vulnerable people but a change has been backed by an ever-increasing number of famous names including Jonathan Dimbleby, Prue Leith, Terry Pratchett, Esther Rantzen, Diana Rigg and Harriet Walter.

I rather fear a new law might be too late for many of us so I’m keeping my own inherited supply of pills (which I’m hoping haven’t lost their power in the decades since they came into the family) and I will take them if the need arises and, like my mother, die alone if the law hasn’t been changed enough to let someone hold my hand as I drift away.  My only problem is that I need to do so much tidying before I go but I naturally have an up-to-date Will and a DNR just in case.

(Ken Kesey said he wanted to die during an LSD trip.  Does anybody know if he did and, if so, was he able to communicate his feelings as he died?  “Wow man, just look at that!” perhaps?)

Overpaid CEOs, best-selling albums and kamikaze survivors

6 January 2024

Last week, I aired what I thought was a bright idea, that the Conservative and Labour parties should split in two.  A friend who listens to Times Radio has told me that they have already broadcast discussions about splitting about both parties and her father, a Tory councillor when he was in his 20s, doesn’t know who to vote for but she thinks he could find a left of right or a right of left that might satisfy him.  Come on people, let’s go for it.  Anybody know how we sell Christmas to turkeys?

One legacy of 2023 we need to change is the inexplicable inequity in how companies distribute their profits.  Latest figures show that, by lunchtime on the third working day in 2024 (last Thursday in England and Wales, yesterday in Scotland), the median pay for the bosses of FTSE 100 companies (£34,963) will have been the same as the median pay of UK workers for the entire year.  In James McMurtry’s song ‘We can’t make it here anymore’, it seems he shares my faith in CEOs:

“They’ve never known want, they’ll never know need
Their shit don’t stink and their kids won’t bleed.”

It’s just another brick in the wall dividing the rich from the poor, isolating them in different worlds so neither can understand the other.  It’s the difference between burning a £50 note in front of a homeless person and giving them a fiver. 

I know people who live on the breadline and try to help when we can but I’d love to see one of these CEOs bringing up a family on Universal Credit and having to present themselves regularly at a job centre to ‘prove’ they really have been looking for work, knowing that if they’ve been ill or can only work in term-time, the rules mean they may not even get that.

A happier legacy from 2023 was the list of the ten top-selling vinyl albums in 2023, which included three by Taylor Swift about whom I know very little but that she seems to be willing to use her power to defend lesser mortals.

In 2013, she told her management that a Colorado KYGO radio DJ called David Mueller had groped her at a photo op and they excluded him from all her future gigs.  Two days later, he was fired by KYGO after its own investigation.  In 2015, he then sued Swift, her mother and her radio promotions director for up to $3m saying the allegation cost him his job and reputation.

Swift responded immediately with a counter-claim for a symbolic $1 saying she wanted to serve as an example to other women who have been sexually assaulted.

At the trial, she said ““What Mr. Mueller did was very intentional … I am critical of [him] for sticking his hand under my skirt and grabbing my ass.”  A federal jury has found him guilty and awarded her the $1 she had asked for.  Mueller didn’t pay until the last possible moment, when he posted her a $1 Sacajawea coin;  these look like gold but have a copper core clad in a manganese brass coating and they have no intrinsic or collectors’ value over their face value.

Swift also previously become vocal about the pitiful amount artists receive from streaming services and later, after the masters to her early work had been sold from under her, re-recorded an entire album and issued it as “1989 (Taylor’s version)”, which became the best-selling album last year.

On a similar theme (geddit?), a letter published in the Guardian on Tuesday suggested our dirge-like national anthem could be replaced by the Archers’ theme tune and, on the following day, Rachel David from Sutton Coldfield said she agreed with the principle but the first writer had got the words slightly wrong:  “The first verse actually ends ‘ti tum ti tiddly dee’.  The second verse is the one that ends ’ti diddly tum.’”  What better reason could anybody need for reading at least the letters page in the Guardian?

What’s more fascinating in the list of best-selling albums last year is that two of them are antiques:  Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ (number 5) was first released in 1977 and Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ (number 7) was first released in 1973.

I’ve just finished one of Alec Guinness’s books of memoirs and was interested to read he’d been told by ‘Jack’ Profumo* that kamikaze pilots had dedicated their lives to the emperor which was equivalent to dedicating their lives to the country so, after Japan’s surrender, kamikaze pilots who had survived the war were forced to attend their own funerals and became officially dead, with no status, and their wives could remarry.

This struck me as somewhat unlikely so I checked it.  In the 12^th century, seppuku referred to honourable death by self-disembowelment based on Bushido, the code of conduct under which Samurai would sacrifice their lives to regain lost honour or to atone for crimes.  It means the same as hara-kiri except that it later stopped being limited to the Samurai.  While we Westerners call it hara-kiri, the word seppuku is still more commonly used in Japan.

Kamikaze reflects the tradition of an honourable death (it means ‘divine wind’ in honour of the two tempests that prevented the Mongols’ invasion of Japan in the 12^th century) and it came into common usage in World War II when Japan created a unit of pilots to fly suicide missions against America’s fleet.  Members of the unit had to be single and childless and not the oldest child;  some were conscripted but many volunteered because Bushido emphasised the importance of dying with honour rather than surrendering.

In fact, many did survive, either because their planes broke down or they couldn’t find a target or because they were never called on to fly a mission, and they were absorbed back into society and normal life;  there’s a short video online of two of them, then in their 80s or 90s, talking about their experiences.

So there Sir Alec.

*          Yes, that Profumo, who redeemed his indiscretions at Cliveden with genuinely valuable charity work for which he was awarded the CBE in 1975.  His wife was the actor Valerie Hobson.

Tabloid ethics, late stage capitalism and the Lord’s prayer

15 July 2023

The Sun newspaper hit the news last week with a very dubiously motivated story about a (then) unnamed senior BBC figure paying for “sordid images” of someone who had been 17 at the time.  My immediate reaction was “so what,” based on my belief that, when I was 17, I’d have felt able to make up my own mind about being paid for photographs and, if they produced enough money to feed a drug habit, it would have been better than stealing from my parents.

The presenter has since been named but I see no reason to humiliate them any more here because it seems potty that the two people concerned could have had a sexual relationship legally but sending photographs is illegal.

It’s a bit like the Illegal Migrants bill which is being forced through parliament.  This is a hugely important piece of legislation designed to sacrifice frightened and vulnerable people, victims of modern slavery, pregnant women and children (sorry, “small boats”) on the altar of the gods but the number of MPs on either side who could be bothered to attend the debate was pathetic.

I gather that not even Rishi Sunak could be bothered to take part, but he doesn’t seem to turn up for much for anything nowadays, not even PMQs, though he has finally accepted the recommendations of independent public sector review boards to allow 6% pay increases (but only if they cut budgets elsewhere).  The government can still afford huge, outdated aircraft carriers, refurbishing / rebuilding the Palace of Westminster instead of hiring a bunch of portakabins in Croydon and pouring good money after bad into HS2 (whose umpteenth CEO resigned last week), a railway line that is going from an old engine shed in NW London to … Scotland?  North Wales?  the north of England?  the continent?  … no, Birmingham, to cut 20 minutes off the journey time for any Brummies who might want to go to Willesden.

The MacAlister review of children’s social care on the care system published last year has found things are now worse than ever and that private care providers have been getting even richer by opening new homes in areas where housing is cheap, regardless of where they are actually needed.  So children and young adults may now be ‘housed’ more than 300 miles from their families and friends.

The report concluded that urgent changes were needed to transform a financially unsustainable system whose costs are already spiralling out of control:  some private children’s residential home providers are charging up to £30,000 per week per child and often still failing to meet the needs of those in their care.

But let’s not worry about this because moving them to cheaper areas produces more profits for the private care providers (and, with luck, more tax for the government.)

Perhaps all health and social care provision should be nationalised and the profits used to pay the staff properly and provide professional health- and care-related services. 

A further example of the shocking lack of integrity, professionalism and whatchamacallit of private businesses was demonstrated by Revolution Beauty.  At a shareholders’ meeting on 27 June, 75% of the shareholders voted to chuck out the CEO, the CFO and the chair. 

So far, so good, and out they were chucked;  after all, the shareholders own the company while the directors are the people who run it for them so they had the power to do this.  The shocking bit came when, after the meeting that fired them, an ‘independent’ director, Jeremy Schwartz, co-opted all three of them back onto the board.  Watch this space!

Other examples of corporate misdeeds were uncovered by HMRC who have fined 200 companies, including household names like Argos, Lloyds Pharmacy, Marks & Spencer and WH Smith, a total of £7m, as well as forcing them to pay almost £5m more as compensation to the workers they’d cheated.

Talk about ‘late stage capitalism’ which has totally lost sight of the ideals of ‘pure’ capitalism which accept that businesses need both money and people, with profits shared between the people who put the money in and the people who do the work, accepting that being a manager is less dangerous than digging out coal a mile underground.

Of course it never worked like this but, after a fashion, it survived until Maggie Thatcher, who never had family silver, started selling the government’s assets, not realising that once the proceeds had been spent, there was no longer an income stream to cover shortfalls.  Its ultimate failure came when regional monopolies with locked-in customers were privatised and ‘Thatcherism’ allowed water companies to charge consumers what they like and shovel shit into their swimming waters because their ‘customers’ can’t change supplier. 

After a 7-year €1.4bn clean-up project, the French are planning to open three bathing areas in the Seine in Paris, one of them close to the Eiffel Tower in central Paris.  Tests carried out last year showed waterborne bacteria at a safe level for swimming 90% of the time with the quality only deteriorating after heavy rain.  The water will be tested daily when bathing starts.

Insert your own comparisons with the English water companies here.

There’s also trooble at t’ church.  The archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, has upset some people by suggesting the start of the Lord’s Prayer might be perceived as sexist because it starts “Our father …”  Another clergyman has objected, saying (I paraphrase) “Well, the Bible quotes Jesus as having said ‘Our Father …’”

What worries me slightly (and I’m not a Christian) is that English versions of the Bible have been translated from other languages into which into which it had, over the millenia, been translated from yet other languages.  What’s the big deal?  Why don’t they just say “Our Lord …” or “Dear God …”?  Surely it’s the spirit of the thing that matters, not the actual words?

God has traditionally been portrayed as an older man with a flowing grey beard who looked rather like my great great grandfather but I haven’t the foggiest idea why he’s male (God, not my GGGF).  I’ve always liked to visualise God as a glowing light, like a halo, or aura, that doesn’t need a person underneath.

It was neatly summed up in the 1970s by a graffito that said “God is dead” and, underneath this, somebody had written “No she isn’t”.

Aggravated bigotry, House of Lords and octopuses

1 July 2023

A quick PS to last week’s blog:  in 1994, a group called Alliance Defending Freedom was set up in America with the express aim of stripping away the rights of LGBTQ+ and, more recently, those of trans people as well as people’s rights to same-sex marriage and abortions.  Sadly, the increasing paranoia of the far right about transgender rights and sexual orientation led to its income increasing by $25m between 2020 and 2021.

Amy Coney Barrett, the supreme court justice has spoken five times at an ADF training program established to push a “distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law”, clearly somebody whose ability to judge cases objectively and impartially would be widely respected within the confines of a padded cell.

Apart from the problematic use of the word “Christian” in this context, I’ve a feeling the ADF’s name is oxymoronic and it should change its name to Alliance Defending Bigotry?

One of my other prejudices is, as I might just have mentioned before, that there’s something very wrong with the distribution of wealth so I was delighted to see a recent article by Arwa Mahdawi.  She suggested that, instead of comparing the size of their space rockets, billionaires should boast about who’d paid the most tax that year.  Brilliant!

Talking of billionaires, isn’t there something fishy about the way Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group suddenly stopped on its way to attack Moscow, with Prigozhin being granted a free pardon before flying to Belarus in his private jet?  He started life as a criminal, became a buddy of Vladimir Putin, took up catering for a bit then became a warlord.  Let’s hope he doesn’t now start writing music*.

We’ve also been hearing a lot about Evgeny Lebedev, son of a former KGB officer, who was given a peerage by Boris Johnson.  Despite the warning in Exodus 20:5, I believe we are, mercifully, not responsible for the sins of our fathers, but Evgeny and his father co-own two British newspapers, the Independent and the Evening Standard (and Novaya Gazeta a Russian paper) so they’re both in it together.

But Lebedev the Younger is now in the UK’s ‘upper’ house which, unelected though it is, can influence the laws of Britain.

In 1999 the Labour government introduced the House of Lords Act which was passed by a comfortable majority in the Commons but – what a surprise – met resistance in the Lords.  It was nevertheless passed and disenfranchised a lot of peers whose only qualification was genetic, leaving ‘only’ 92 hereditary peers.

In 2007, further changes were proposed with the Commons supporting a wholly-elected chamber and the Lords favouring an all-appointed chamber – another surprise – and, since then, appointments have increasingly been related to the political allegiance of appointees.

Labour’s conflicted views go back at least as far as Michael Foot and have come through people like David Miliband to now, disappointingly, Keir Starmer and the party policy (if it has one) seems to involve mumbling about the need for a democratic upper house while saying its ramifications would make a change very difficult.  Even when faced with Johnson’s honours list, Starmer claimed to be scandalised by his stuffing even more Tories into the Lords but failed to mention the need for root and branch reform.

It’s even rumoured by cynics that Starmer would make things worse by elevating more Labour supporters to even the political balance.

Starmer also seems to be avoiding contentious subjects like Brexit, despite the latest YouGov survey showing that 58% of the electorate would now vote to rejoin the EU.  (Whether the EU would allow the UK to rejoin is a different question.)

Too many of us remember, 7 years ago, Nigel Farage, John Redwood, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the rest of their gang promising Brexit would give us increased prosperity, cheaper food, flourishing trade and a better-funded NHS and that we’d be free of all Brussels’ red tape, we’d take back control of our borders and nobody would have to worry about foreigners coming into the country.  After the vote, David Davis even promised our exit deal would “deliver the exact same benefits” as EU membership.

The British parliament used to be seen as a model of honesty, open-discussion and integrity but Johnson has put an end to any hopes of that with an independent committee (containing a majority of Conservatives) finding him guilty of contempt of parliament on five separate occasions.  The Commons supported these findings by 354 to 7.  (Sadly, Rishi Sunak couldn’t vote because he had what Oscar Wilde called “a subsequent engagement”.)

The government’s competence has been further undermined by the Court of Appeal’s ruling that Suella Braverman’s desire to export unwanted refugees to Rwanda was unlawful, concluding that Rwanda was not a “safe third country” even though assurances by the Rwandan government had been provided in good faith.  Not to be diverted by irritations such as the law, Braverman has said she will appeal to the Supreme Court.

Official estimates say it will cost £140,000 per deportee.  Some people have calculated how many nurses could be hired with the £14m that 100 people would cost.

I’ve just come across an article on somebody called Tuppence Middleton, an actor who was in Downton Abbey.  I once had a secretary called Pamela Halfpenny.  Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if they’d been born to each other’s parents so one of them could have been Tuppence Halfpenny (pronounced ‘tuppence hayp’ny’ in old money)?

I’ve also just come across another PS to something I wrote last month:  researchers in Japan have discovered that octopuses limbs twitch and there are rapid changes to the texture and colour of their skin while they’re asleep.  The scientists think it’s possible the animals are dreaming although they have suggested they might be just automatically refining their camouflage patterns while they sleep.  I’d like to think they’re dreaming.

*    Apologies to those who would actually enjoy wasting spending 18 hours listening to the Ring Cycle.

Lies, conspiracy theories and Intelligent Design

29 April 2023

“I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies
I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes”

Thus spake Bob Dylan in 1997 and, 26 years later, nothing has changed and conspiracy theories abound.

How to not-lie was demonstrated by Piers Morgan, a journalist I hold in about the same regard as I do Andrew Neil.  Prince Harry has claimed Morgan knew about the hacking of his mother’s phone while he edited News of the World which reported that Diana had once phoned Oliver Hoare “three times in 9 minutes and hung up as she heard Oliver’s voice”.  This seems remarkably precise a report to have been based on guesswork.  Also, the television presenter Jeremy Paxman, speaking under oath at the Leveson inquiry, said Morgan had once explained how a mobile phone’s voicemails could be hacked.

Morgan is on record as saying “I’ve never hacked a phone nor told anybody to hack a phone” which, without actually lying, carefully avoids saying he knew it was being done but, by avoiding a categorical denial, he seems to admit it.

America of course has Donald Trump who wouldn’t recognise the truth if it jumped up and tore his throat out.  Having been accused raping the advice columnist E Jean Carroll in 1996, Trump, the man who was recorded saying he could grab any woman’s pussy because of who he was, has denied it and said “She’s not my type”.  This probably wasn’t intended as a compliment but I’d have taken it as one.

His defence claims she’s only bringing the case to sell copies of her book What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal but still has to explain why, if this is the case, it’s taken her over 3 years to bring the case because the book was published in July 2019.  When Trump’s team tried to say it was an anti-male treatise, the judge had to explain that it was a satire referring back to Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay entitled A Modest Proposal. 

Another American liar, the far-right Tucker Carlson, has been fired from Fox News by the Murdochs for repeatedly lying about Trump’s having been robbed of the 2020 election.  He hasn’t yet said “I was only reading the autocue.”

Not all lies are quite as obvious, as we saw with last week’s resignation of Richard Sharp’s resignation from the chair of the BBC.  Before he applied for the job, he’d made donations to the Conservative party and discussed the possibility of applying for the job with that year’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, who was also the person who would ultimately make the appointment.  Later in the process, he helped Johnson find a guarantor for a loan of £800,000 because he’d run out of money but he forgot to mention these facts to the appointments panel and has now been found to be in breach of the governance code.

The problem is that, after 13 years in power, the Tories find it difficult to find anything that’s better than it was when they took over (yes, including Brexit) and are constantly replacing incompetent leaders and having to chuck out the bullies and tax-fiddlers they’d promoted.

I think it’s sad that Simon Case, who was for a while his Principal Private Secretary, said of Johnson “I don’t know what more I can do to stand up to a prime minister who lies.”

Lying and obfuscation have become part of everyday life and old-fashioned concepts like honesty and integrity have gone out of the window.  Of course we have all lied at some point, sometimes not even for the benefits of others, but most of us try to keep our honour intact.  My Conservative friend, for example, came out of his box at me recently because he thought I’d said something misleading but he then discovered I’d been right, apologised and made a fulsome apology.

The trouble is that it all gets conflated with group loyalties and conspiracy theories and people would rather support ‘their’ people than step back and take a fresh look.

We’ve been conditioned to accept all of this as normal, just as the truth has been hidden behind weasel words:  we’ve been repeatedly told that the Illegal Migration bill (which the Commons passed last week) is about small boats crossing the Channel.  It isn’t – nobody actually cares about small boats crossing the Channel.  What some of us do care about is the people in the boats who are desperately trying to find a better life.  Talking about turning boats back makes it sound less horrible.

The same thing happened to Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, who supports the Palestinian people.  This has upset Israel who have wilfully accused him of anti-semitism even though Waters himself has repeatedly said he “disdains” the state of Israel not Judaism, which are two quite different things.

The curious thing about conspiracy theorists, and people who can’t admit that a group they support can ever be wrong about anything, is that better-educated people are more likely to believe in cover-ups and dubious motives.  This may be because they tend to be more prevalent at times of stress, national and international, economic and social, when the more intelligent people are wondering how we got here.

Our gullibility may also be affected by our decision-making styles.  At one end of the spectrum are people who do things because it seemed a good idea at the time while, at the other end, are those who don’t do anything until they’ve gathered and judged all the evidence.  Most of us are somewhere in the middle and would love to believe in, say, having a guardian angel but find it difficult to believe that alien civilisations have travelled vast distances to live in a cave under the Andes.

If they’re repeated often enough, false views of ‘reality’ can become more attractive until they become embedded in our belief systems which then refuse to consider contradictory evidence on the grounds that the evidence was fabricated, or due to bias;  and, in the case of conspiracy theories, evidence may be seen as further proof of the conspiracy, invented by people who are part of the plot.

In the absence of evidence for either view, its very absence is itself proof of the conspiracy.

Consider the ‘Intelligent Design’ theory which posits that some sort of intelligence was behind the creation of the universe because the whole thing is too complex to have arisen by chance or, in nature, by Darwinian ‘natural selection’.  Others believe in ‘creationism’ (which is different from Intelligent Design in that it tends to start from religious beliefs) but both believe in the existence of a Creator.

Most scientists tend to believe that the universe just grew, pretty much at random, with explosions and implosions, and life on earth developed from the first dandelion that crawled out of the ancient seas and evolved into Boris Johnson as it travelled round the world on continents that separated and collided.

William of Ockham’s view, 7 centuries ago, was that the most likely explanation was the one that involved the fewest variables (I paraphrase) so Intelligent Design seems less convincing because it requires the addition of a Creator.  But who knows?  There’s so much going on that science can’t yet explain, perhaps the answer really is 42 and we will, as we evolve further, begin to understand why.

Games people play*

11 March 2023

A wonderful week for people “never meaning what they say, never saying what they mean”*.

The most significant – and cruellest – is the Illegal Migration Bill being discussed by parliament.  One assumes it was named by somebody with a sense of humour because Suella Braverman had already told the Tories that it was “more than 50% likely to be illegal” under the European Convention on Human Rights.

One report on this said “Previous plans to deport those entering the UK by small boat to Rwanda have been rejected by the court”.  I read this as saying people would be deported in small boats to Rwanda, a landlocked country, and had to re-read it. 

This was matched by former health secretary Matt Hancock’s complaints that Isabel Oakeshott had ‘leaked’ to the Daily Telegraph the WhatsApp messages he’d given her so she could write a book for him. 

Hancock’s reaction to the leak was predictably stupid.  He said he was “hugely disappointed and sad at the massive betrayal and breach of trust by Isabel Oakeshott” and he was “also sorry for the impact on the very many people – political colleagues, civil servants and friends.”  No apology for the incompetence revealed in them. 

Oakeshott had signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement but she fell out with Hancock when he disappeared without warning onto ‘I’m a Celebrity’ and, after she’d finished writing his book, she said “My responsibilities, having finished that book with him, are now to the public interest” because they shed a new light on how the government had responded to the pandemic.

This is, of course, the same Hancock whose reaction to being filmed while he was getting personal with his aide Gina Coladangelo was neatly summarised by his subsequent exchange of messages with Damon Poole, his special adviser.  “How bad are the pics?” he asked.  Told it was a “snog and heavy petting”, he replied “How the fuck did anyone photograph that?”.  Not worried about having done it, just about having been caught.

More evidence of Hancock’s stupidity:  this took place in a government minister’s office where, of course, nobody would dream of installing security cameras.  He finally had to resign, explaining that Boris Johnson had assured him he could carry on but had been forced to step down because his colleagues didn’t defend him.  No embarrassment or remorse about what he’d done.

He even said he’d only gone on ‘I’m a Celebrity’ to show people what a nice person he is and his fee (£320,000) was irrelevant because he was giving it to charity.  So far, he has only donated 3% (£10,000) of this to charity.

Johnson himself has surfaced again as we learnt that he’d spent £130,000 of government money on legal fees in an attempt to undermine the Partygate enquiry.  An interim report from the Commons privileges committee, a group of seven MPs, four of whom are Conservatives, said that “There is evidence that the House of Commons may have been misled” and goes on to list four examples, each backed with detailed footnotes.  Johnson himself has consistently denied any wrongdoing despite having reportedly said at a packed gathering in Downing Street in November 2020 at the height of the lockdown “this is probably the most unsocially distanced gathering in the UK right now”.

The latest scandal involves Johnson’s resignation list recommending honours for a former MP with a record of domestic violence and other inappropriate behaviour to women, known to Johnson himself as “Dad”.  His list also has a second go at putting Paul Dacre, editor in chief of DMG, owner of the Daily Mail, into the House of Lords despite his having been rejected by the appointments watchdog last time Johnson proposed him.  It makes one wonder what Johnson owes Dacre.

(Rishi Sunak gave reporters a rather clever response when asked if PMs should nominate family members for honours:  “For me, a big success is remembering to get my dad a card on Father’s Day, so that is probably about my limit of it”.)

Old leaders used to fade into the back benches and not interfere with what their successors did because they’d had their chance and blown it, but not Johnson.  This week, he’s been critical of Sunak’s worthy attempts to join the search for a solution to the Northern Ireland Brexit problem and is trying to torpedo everybody’s efforts to clear up the mess he made when he was in charge.

The only consolation is that his intervention has led Keir Starmer to offer Labour’s support for the government in getting a vote through parliament.  Wouldn’t it be good if the different parties tried to find ways of working together to find solutions instead of trying to belittle the other side’s suggestions.

Nevertheless, similar behaviour was seen this week when 5 square metres of a rugby ground above where the HS2 tunnellers were working erupted into a pool of brown bubbling foam.  They believe their tunnelling work under the field intercepted an old borehole and the slurry was forced up it to ground level.

Property developers of course are happy to build high-density housing estates anywhere and wouldn’t be deterred by an old borehole even if the homes were subsequently invaded by homeless rats as their ground floor filled with slurry.

On 11 February, I said that the government had said it was committed to extending the HS2 line to Manchester and that HS2 trains will definitely start from central London.  This week, ministers confirmed that these plans will be delayed by another two years.  The High Speed Rail Group has complained that “This will only add to the total cost.  The cheapest way to deliver HS2 is quickly”.  The HSRG represents suppliers to the project who stand to make large profits from it but still expect us to be sympathetic to their members.

The BBC is suffering from similar problems.  For 100 years, it has been respected worldwide as a source of reliable and objective reporting but, in the last decade, the paranoid on the right have come to believe it biases news towards woke lefties.  Isn’t it curious how people who don’t share your views think you’re biased and offer their own views as facts?  And that they only seem to complain about UK news being biased?

In order to make it clear that the BBC really is absolutely impartial and unbiased, the government appointed as chair of the governing body one Richard Sharp, a donor to the Conservative party and a close friend of Johnson whose application for a £800,000 loan he supported. 

The most recent abuse of the BBC’s impartiality is a private tweet by Gary Lineker that criticised the government’s immigration policy (see above).  He’s been suspended because BBC staff aren’t supposed to talk about their personal beliefs;  this immediately led to his two fellow presenters, Alan Shearer and Ian Wright, pulling out of the programme in sympathy and others are following, leading the BBC to apologise for the disruption of scheduled sports programmes.

I can understand that the BBC should say something like “Reports are critical of the prime minister” rather than “Reports show that Boris Johnson screwed up yet again by delaying the covid lockdown and holding illegal parties and lying to parliament”.  But, for heavens’ sakes, this is just sport.   Match reporters aren’t going to say “… and antiwoke fascist Smith has just done a dirty tackle on Labour-voting Jones who loves animals”.

This is going to run!

Others attempting to conceal the truth include Harbour Energy, the North Sea’s biggest oil and gas producer, which has announced a 700% increase in profits to $2.5bn but has set aside $1.5bn in case it might have to pay windfall taxes in the next 5 years so it didn’t really make that much profit after all …  Luckily, despite the need to set aside $1.5bn that may never become payable, it will still be rewarding shareholders with a $200m share buy-back and a final dividend of £100bn.  Thay haven’t yet confirmed that they’re awarding their workforce similar increases.

Surprisingly, there is a small bit of good news from the BBC.  In ‘Wild Isles’, David Attenborough presents a series that includes footage filmed on Skomer.  Because bird flu had been found on a neighbouring isle, they didn’t let our national treasure get too close to the resident shearwaters which are apparently not good a taking off and some of them would have climbed up his arm and onto his head to take off.  It would have been a wonderful shot but we must take care of St David.

*          Thank you Joe South for these lines.

Football, police, hemp, more government mistakes, and the OED

26 November 2022

Some of the most fascinating news this week comes from the world of football (and that’s something I never thought I’d say).

Apart from the disappointment some have felt over the World Cup being hosted by a country that thinks human rites are eating and sleeping, the banning of the sale of alcoholic drinks by one of the competition’s major sponsors, and FIFA (which stands for Fédération Internationale de Football Association – isn’t Franglais wonderful!) ruling against the wearing of OneLove rainbow armbands by players who believe consenting adults should be able to do what they want (but not necessarily in public).

The FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, also said he feels “like a migrant worker”.  Poor old sod.  He’s only getting about £2.5m this year while actual migrant worker security guards at the stadium appear to be getting as much as 35p an hour, which is almost £7,300 a year!

FIFA even went so far as to threaten the German side (and six other nations) with a yellow card if they wore the armbands.  So the Germans lined up with their hands over their mouths to show they’d been silenced, and wore rainbow-coloured laces in their boots and the supermarket chain REWE dropped its planned advertising campaign in protest.  (I’m sure you already knew that REWE stands for Revisionsverband der Westkaufgenossenschaften – no concessions to Deutslisch there.)

Even more courageously, the Iranian players bowed their heads and didn’t sing their national anthem to show their support for the people back at home protesting against the government’s rules proscribing what female people can wear in public.  However, they then got postcards from home so they sort of sang it before their next match, but they sang with such a lack of enthusiasm when compared with the Welsh male voice 11 that it was at least as impressive a protest as their earlier silence.

As one commentator put it, “Standing up for universal rights, for tolerance and freedom, matters far more than 22 people kicking a ball around”.

Here in England, we don’t seem to have any understanding of tolerance or freedom.  In Hertfordshire, police unlawfully arrested four journalists reporting on the climate protests that closed the M25.  All because a senior officer sitting somewhere in a comfy office said “Arrest the nosey bastards” (I paraphrase).  Whatever you think about the ‘Just Stop Oil’ protests, it’s worrying that the police were authorised to arrest everybody because it hadn’t occurred to the idiot cop who wrote the policing plan that the media might be there. 

The official review (requested by the Herts constabulary and carried out by the chief superintendent of Cambridgeshire constabulary) condemned the police action and said “there is evidence to suggest the potential for the arrests to amount to an ‘unlawful interference’ with the individuals’ freedom of expression under article 10 [of the European convention on human rights]”.

The government already seems to be joining international shifts towards fascism by increasing the power of the police to ‘Stop and Search’ people.  I was SASsed once coming off the top of an escalator at Kings Cross Station when a uniformed police officer asked if I had a moment to spare.  I said yes, as long as I could get a train which was leaving in eight minutes, so he asked me a few questions, looked inside my briefcase, got me to sign a form and let me go.  I was convinced he just wanted a middle-aged white person to help balance his statistics and, had my skin been less pasty, my treatment might have been rather different (“Up against the wall, kid, spread your legs, no I’m not pleased to see you, this is a Taser”).

Luckily the UK still has a way to go to catch up with post-Trump America where going to school or a club is getting to be as dangerous as raising a finger at a highway patrol.  The Los Angeles police killed more than twice as many civilians in 2021 as they did in 2020 and, all over the country, there are mass shootings almost daily by people who believe the second Amendment empowers them to do this.

Scientists believe that growing hemp could be even more effective than trees in absorbing and locking up CO₂, not least because it grows much faster than trees.  Its fibres can be used in the production of a range of materials from textiles and medicines to concrete and building insulation.  BMW is even using it to replace some plastics in their car parts.  The other good (I suppose) news is that modern varieties of hemp don’t contain enough of the relevant chemicals to be of any use as narcotics.

More good news came from oop north this week when Rochdale Housing Association, the landlord of the child who died from respiratory problems caused by the mould in his flat, admitted the incorrect “assumptions” they made about his family’s lifestyle were “wrong”.  They don’t seem to have commented on why they thought they had the right to make any assumptions about their tenants’ lifestyles rather than improving the ventilation and keeping their properties in good condition for everybody.  We can now just hope we see the landlord charged with corporate manslaughter.

As in quite a few other areas, Scotland’s legal powers to control rogue landlords and protect tenants is way ahead of England’s while, as I mentioned last month, the Welsh government now allows councils to penalise second-home owners by increasing their council tax by up to 300%.  Gwynedd council is planning to impose a 150% premium next year to help the number of homeless people which had increased by nearly 50% over the last two years while almost 10% of properties were second-homes and unoccupied for most of the year.

Might we also hope for justice for Shamima Begum?  Born a British citizen and raised and educated in east London, she and two friends left England to join the Islamic State when she was 15 (old and mature enough, according to the Home Office, to make such decisions, but not old and mature enough to vote).  There she was further radicalised, desensitised to extreme violence, married and subsequently gave birth to three children, all of whom died. 

She finally broke away and was found in a Syrian refugee camp.  The Home Secretary at the time, Sajid Javid, then revoked her British citizenship.

Now 23, Begum is challenging his decision at the special immigration appeals tribunal.  Her lawyers are arguing that, although she is also a citizen of Bangladesh because her parents were born there, she would face the death penalty if she was sent there so she is effectively stateless because Javid didn’t properly consider the consequences of his decision.

I’d be more than happy if she moved into the house next door (which is actually on the market at the moment).

Last week, I referred to the Conservatives as “traditionally bastions of honour and integrity”, only for this to be proven over-optimistic, this time by the Tory peer Michelle Mone who, unlike football sponsors in Qatar, expects a return when she does favours for friends. 

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the government created a “VIP lane” so companies with political connections could be prioritised when they awarded government contracts;  Mone recommended PPE Medpro which was subsequently given £200m of government contracts (don’t ask whether the stuff the provided was any good) but she failed to declare this in the House of Lords register of financial interests.  She has defended her silence on the grounds that “she did not benefit financially and was not connected to PPE Medpro in any capacity” but leaked HSBC documents show that, five months after her recommendation, her husband received at least £65m from PPE MedPro …

By the way, lexophiles have less than a week now to vote for the OED’s word of the year – go to https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2022/

Making jam, a new PM, greedy pigs, Gorbachev, Finnish woman and Bob Dylan

4 September 2022

I’ve just made jam for the first time in my life.  Twice.  First with our figs and once with the damsons. 

Regular readers will know that cooking isn’t even in the top 100 things I can do even passably well so I thought I’d tell you what I learnt:  do not follow the recipe.  I googled recipes and chose the ones with the fewest ingredients (I wasn’t convinced fig jam needed chilli or garlic).  The first said I should simmer the mixture gently until all the sugar has dissolved but failed to say that burnt sugar will coat the bottom of the saucepan while it’s simmering. 

The second said, when the sugar’s dissolved, boil fast until the right temperature is reached in 10-15 minutes and DO NOT stir the mixture until the setting temperature is reached, but failed to say that burnt sugar will coat the bottom of the saucepan while it’s boiling.

We now have 4 jars each of caramelised fig and caramelised damson jams and both are edible, though the latter is most easily eaten with a knife and fork.

I’m going to have one more go when I’ve got the saucepan clean, or bought a new pan, and if that doesn’t work, soddit, I’m going to stew all fruit in future, I can manage that.

Tomorrow, we’ll know who’s going to be our new prime minister.  Last Wednesday’s efforts to gather votes by the last two people standing was widely reported to be underwhelming and even the ever-faithful Daily Telegraph could only headline “Truss hints she may axe motorway speed limits” – talk about damning with faint praise.  I know who I don’t want to get the job, and I know who I definitely don’t want to get the job.

As she has campaigned, Truss’s ratings have fallen dramatically according to a new poll by Opinium.  At the beginning of August, 49% of people who voted Conservative in 2019 saw her as a potential prime minister but she’d talked herself down to 31% by the end of the month.  Still, all is over now bar the rending of clothes and the new PM will be hustled onto a train to Balmoral tomorrow (well, I’m sure they wouldn’t add to the climate’s problems by flying would they?)

This Truss is, of course, the Truss who (according to the National Audit Office) slashed £235m from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs budget in 2015 while she was environment secretary, including a £24m cut in the grant for environmental protection.  In the following 5 years, spills of raw sewage doubled and it’s been discovered this year that one in four sewage overflow pipes at popular seaside resorts are either unmonitored or the monitors are faulty.

English water companies also replace mains pipes at a record rate, compared with the European average of 0.5% a year.  England’s best performers replace 0.2% and the worst 0.03% of their pipes each year with an average of 0.05% or, put another way, it’ll take these companies 2,000 years to replace all their pipework while even modern PVC pipes are only expected to last between 50 and 100 years.   But the shareholders still get their dividends and the bosses still extract huge amounts of money, which means it must now be time, for the sake of future generations, to renationalise the bastards.

According to their published accounts, the 100 largest UK companies’ CEOs were given median average of £3.4m each in 2021, an increase of 36% over the previous year, and trousered 109 times the pay of the average British worker.  Top executives took a total of £720m out these companies.  And they’re complaining that the workers (who get a median average of about £31,000) are striking for more money than they can afford to pay.

The energy sector, which is pocketing vast windfall profits has added insult to injury by suggesting the government should lend them money to stop further price increases and customers would then repay the loan through a levy on their future bills.

Can anybody spot the flaws in this proposal?  Like what happens to the loans to companies that go bust anyway?  And why should customers (that’s you and me) repay money that’s been lent by the government to energy firms to give to shareholders and top management?  It’s like Parent 1 lending money to Parent 2 and expecting the child to repay them.  I despair of the wiles of greedy pigs.  The hell with international complications, renationalise the bastards.

It’s high time there was a legal limit to the multiple of the average worker’s pay that bosses could award themselves.  I’ve heard that the Green party suggests 10 times, which seems a good place to start.

Back on the leadership front, the one thing that seems to have come out of it is that no country that calls itself democratic should ever appoint a prime minister without asking all voters.  Particularly since it seems Boris Johnson believes Tories will call him back to mend the party he broke.  He does, of course, have at least twenty years of form in spurious beliefs:  in a 2002 article in the Spectator, he wrote that the African continent “may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience … The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more”. 

Well, I mean, why should slavery, genocide and arrogance be a blot on our conscience?

I’ve always suspected that Vladimir Putin was motivated by fear as much as by arrogance and, as his failures mount up, he’ll be feeling increasingly defensive and the west would do well to leave him some sort of escape route to avoid cornering a rat.

Mikhail Gorbachev, one of his more illustrious predecessors, died last week and an impressive array of world leaders paid tribute to his achievements.   For all it gained, he seems to have seen the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a disappointment;  he’d have preferred to keep it together while still ending the cold war and allowing east / west barriers to fall with all the benefits to both sides that followed but he refused to intervene militarily and, shortly before his death, he urged Putin to “an early cessation of hostilities and immediate start of peace negotiations” over Ukraine.

As a leader, Gorbachev has been described as “decent”, “charming and modernising”, and – that lovely Yiddish word – “mensch”.  His friend Alexei Venediktov, former head of a radio station whose reports on the war in Ukraine led to its being shut down, said “We have all become orphans. But not everyone has understood it yet.”

Within Russia, the mourning is more muted;  many Russians never forgave him for having upset decades of what they saw as stability but the more liberal Russians still grieve for the freedom he had allowed, both internationally and by allowing people to express uncensored opinions within the country.  Under Putin, the state has returned to an oppressive autocracy that’s been compared to Stalinism.

Putin has decreed that Gorbachev will not be given a state funeral but it would have “elements of a state funeral”.  Putin himself took some flowers and invited some photographers to picture him by Gorbachev’s open coffin but he’s too busy to go to the funeral itself.  (Can you imagine the Queen, health permitting, being “too busy” to go to such an important funeral in Britain?)

Meanwhile, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland have published their analysis of satellite measurements in the journal Nature Climate Change which indicate that the melting of Greenland’s ice cap is now inevitable.  The estimated 110tn tonnes of ice will raise sea levels by 27cm and, if the Paris agreement isn’t implemented, they will rise by 78cm by the end of the century.

What the report didn’t mention is how much Greenland itself will rise once the weight of the ice has gone and how the earth’s tectonic plates will react to the reduced load they bear, particularly under Antarctica which is so much larger than Greenland.

Two other reports this week that disappointed me were:

• two Air France pilots had a mid-air punch-up in the cockpit of a Geneva-Paris flight in June and had to be chaperoned by a member of the crew for the rest of the flight;
• the media published pictures of the Finnish prime minister, Sanna Marin, dancing with friends at a private party in her spare time and she then felt obliged to take a voluntary test (which was negative) to prove she hadn’t been taking drugs;  hundreds of other Finnish women have used social media to post films of themselves dancing in support of Marin’s right to a personal life.  I wonder if there’d have been the same reaction if she’d been a man?  I can think of one prime minister who spent his spare time having affairs and babies and nobody turned a hair.

But the good news is an 81-year-old crooner with a broken voice has added three more dates in the UK to his Rough and Rowdy Ways Worldwide Tour and will now play 12 gigs in October and November.  I’ve always felt Bob Dylan’s studio recordings were much better than his live performances but, while I’ve been to a few awful Dylan concerts, I’ve also been to some inspired ones.  And he’s still writing some good songs.     

Guns, diluting standards, Elizabeth line and typos

29 May 2022

19 young children and two primary school teachers have been shot dead, and three more young children orphaned when the husband of one of the dead teachers had a heart attack two days later.

The murderer was a teenager who wasn’t old enough to buy alcohol but had legally bought and registered two automatic weapons, practised by shooting his grandmother.

This was at Uvalde’s Robb elementary school in south west Texas, 10 days after another teenager had killed 11 people at a supermarket in Buffalo NY.

The school itself is said to have established and practised safety responses – locking the door, turning the lights out, hiding under desks and everybody staying very quiet – but this wasn’t enough.

Gun violence is of course endemic in America and, while a small majority of people believe gun laws should be tightened, the National Rifle Association spent almost $5m last year trying to convince people they are already too restrictive.  It’s also, of course, complicated by the lack of any federal law which restricts everyone, so states make their own laws.

In the UK, a murderer shot a lot of children at a primary school in Dunblane in 1996.  In 1997, the successive Conservative and Labour governments under John Major and Tony Blair passed a law banning the private ownership of handguns despite active opposition from the gun lobby and many on the political right (including one Boris Johnson) who argued that owning guns wasn’t the problem, even though the one thing that all such killers have in common is they own a gun.

Since then, gun crime in Britain has fallen significantly, fatal shootings are mercifully rare and these have almost all been individually targeted rather than mass murders.

International comparisons also show that the more households that have guns, the more gun-related deaths there are, and records of shootings in America show that having a gun in the house actually makes it more likely that a member of the household will be killed by one.

The laws vary widely between different American states, from Massachusetts where gun ownership is fairly tightly controlled (by American standards) to Texas where there are few controls.   Many who support gun ownership quote the Second Amendment to the US Constitution but others argue that these people either haven’t actually read the amendment or failed to understand its purpose and that the ‘founding fathers’ of the United States would be horrified to see how their intentions are being misinterpreted.

Just as worrying is the lack of any control on the sale of ammunition.  In a recent documentary, a British journalist asked one dealer how much ammunition he could buy.  The answer was “How much money have you got?”

I wonder how many gun owners are male and how many female.  My own prejudices make me feel that you’re more likely to see a man with a big penis-substitute in a holster than a woman with a Saturday night special in her handbag, but I could be entirely wrong.

The trouble is that the problem has been linked – probably by the NRA – with politics so, broadly speaking, Democrats want more gun control while Republicans want more guns.  The gun lobby thinks the answer is more guns, and teachers should be armed so that, if a gunman (I’m sticking with the sexism) enters their classroom, the children can watch a real-life shooting match in which real people get hurt and killed.

Their argument is that guns aren’t dangerous, it’s people with guns that are dangerous but ignores the fact that the country has conspicuously failed to educate gun owners so far.

Other suggestions include

• incorporating the NRA’s safety rules in federal law
• banning automatic weapons and extended magazines
• perhaps even allowing only guns that fire just one bullet before they need to be reloaded
• limiting gun permits to hunters
• increasing the minimum age for gun ownership to 21
• more background checks, including mental health histories
• requiring a gun permit when selling ammunition and only selling cartridges for the gun in the permit
• limiting the amount of ammunition that can be sold to any one person
• requiring owners to be insured and responsible for all damage caused by a gun registered in their name
• rewriting the second amendment to make it clear that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State” is the prime reason for “the right to keep and bear Arms”.

Jacinda Ardern gave Harvard’s annual commencement address this week and was given a standing ovation after describing how New Zealand had tightened gun laws after the 2019 shootings in the Christchurch mosque.

Let’s hope Americans have the courage to make changes.  

The UK can do it: Boris Johnson rewrote the rules on Friday to remove the duty of ministers to resign after breaching the code of conduct and deleted the words “honesty”, “integrity”, “transparency” and “accountability” from the foreword, thereby exempting ministers from four of the seven (Nolan) principles of public life (adopted in 1995).  All this in an attempt to save the skin of a congenital liar who probably can’t even spell integrity and who believes being open about and accountable for one’s actions are for lesser people from cheaper schools.

The good news is that, after five months of pressure from the Labour party to introduce windfall taxes on serendipitous profits, the chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, has finally accepted they are necessary and done a U-turn, though actually he’s not imposing ‘windfall taxes’, he’s imposing a “temporary targeted energy profits levy” which is, of course, quite different.

Anything to divert attention from the details in Sue Gray’s report on ‘partygate’.

And, in another amazing coincidence, this week saw Johnson claiming credit for the opening of nearly all of the short central section of London’s Elizabeth line which was described by one commentator as being “true to the finest traditions of British infrastructure … years over deadline and billions above budget”.

I can remember Crossrail’s route being discussed in the early 1990s and, after years of negotiations, building work officially started in 2009.  While this was shortly after Johnson had been elected mayor of London, claiming credit for it seems to be rather less than truthful – good job he’s no longer required to be honest.

The only real success in the story is that some 3m tonnes of soil dug out from under London was taken to Wallasea Island on the Essex coast, creating a new wetland sanctuary for birds.

Back in the days of typesetters and hot lead, the Guardian contained so many typographical errors that Private Eye always referred to it as the Grauniad but the editors always took it in good spirit and apologised when necessary.  A columnist in yesterday’s paper repeated what she described as “the greatest correction of all time”:

“A caption in Guardian Weekend, page 102, November 13, read ‘Binch of crappy travel mags’.  That should, of course, have been ‘bunch’.  But more to the point, it should not have been there at all.  It was a dummy which we failed to replace with the real caption.  It was not meant to be a comment on perfectly good travel brochures.  Apologies.”

And the week’s other major event was Bob Dylan’s 81^st birthday.  Never let anyone tell you that excessive use of drugs will shorten your life.