Carers abused, Sure Start and revenge

21 April 2024

There are some 5 million carers in the UK, about 1 million of whom claim carer’s allowance. Carers generally have had a lot of coverage in the press recently, encouraged by the revelation that the Department for Work and Pensions has been fining tens of thousands of people who have been claiming the £81.90 per week carer’s allowance (for a full-time carer, that’s just under 50p an hour with no holidays) while inadvertently earning more than the permitted maximum in part-time work. 

Even if the limit is exceeded by only £1, the entire benefit is disallowed (with no marginal or tapering relief, huge penalties build up very quickly)

The problem is that, even if the earnings limit is exceeded by as little as £1, claimants automatically lose the entire carer’s allowance. This results in a “cliff edge” repayment penalty unmatched in its severity in the benefits system despite an estimated 44% of its claimants classified as being ‘in poverty’.

The regulations that define how much a carer can earn without having to forfeit some or all of their allowance are labyrinthine and the benefit is means-tested so even a minimal infringement leads to the DWP imposing fines of thousands of pounds, with the risk of a prison sentence if the carer can’t afford to pay the fine. 

Brilliant isn’t it!  Somebody is giving care that would otherwise have to be funded by the state but they’re willing to imprison ‘offenders’ and put the cost of caring back onto the state.

(I must here disclose a personal interest:  I am a 24/7 carer for a severely disabled person but I do not claim the carer’s allowance.)

In July 2019, the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee, looked into overpayments of carer’s allowance and concluded that the vast majority of earnings-related overpayments were the result of “honest mistakes” by carers and that administrative failures by DWP allowed the overpayments to spiral, often a long time and many thousands of pounds later, before they told carers they wanted their money back.

The 2019 report said “The Department could, and should, have got to grips with the problems in Carer’s Allowance much more quickly” and urged the government to take action to limit the risk to claimants.

In the 5 years since the report was published, the Conservatives haven’t yet acted on the recommendations but, even though they’ve proved themselves highly skilled at choosing the wrong leaders and then replacing them, this is little comfort to poorer carers.

Earlier this week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies published new research into the long-term effectiveness of the Sure Start programme, set up by the Labour government in 1998 and regarded as one of its most successful policies.  Sure Start linked early years, health and family support services for poor children in disadvantaged areas.

The follow-up study showed that the scheme had significantly improved the life chances of children who had been eligible for free school meals and had access to a Sure Start centre:  they did three grades better at GCSE – like getting five Cs instead of two Cs and three Ds – when compared with similar poor children without access to Sure Start.

The study also showed that younger children with special educational needs were identified much sooner and their problems were identified when they were younger, thereby reducing the need for education, health and care plans later.

The Tories closed Sure Start down to save money.

If you believe the Guardian is written by the spawn of the devil, skip this paragraph because it’s just won a diversity award at the Press Awards after researching and publishing its founders’ links to the transatlantic slave trade in what the judges called “breathtakingly honest mea culpa”, adding that it was “a hugely thoughtful and comprehensive project that provides a groundbreaking example of how an organisation addresses historical links to slavery”.  How many other publications would dare to be this honest?

Certainly not Liz Truss’s book (Remember her?  Record-breaking prime minister?) which should have been called ‘Mea non culpa’ or ‘I was the only one in step’.  I’m ashamed to admit that I almost feel sorry for somebody who is so deluded.

Truss’s credo seems to have extended into the police force.  We’re being invited to elect a new police commissioner locally on the basis of their politics;  there’s no mention of experience of policing or justice.  How long before the police ask how you vote before deciding whether to arrest you?  I’m tempted to spoil my ballot paper.

Talking of delusion, Donald Trump, former president of the most powerful country of the world, a man with whom you’d feel as safe as you would if a two-year old had a tantrum while carrying a machine gun, you remember him, orange make up, starched and dyed combover, pouty little mouth, fancies his daughter, unfaithful husband and serial groper … anyway, he’s been in court while jurors are selected for his trial on criminal charges and he keeps been falling asleep.  His eyes shut, his head dropped forward and he drooled but he said he wasn’t asleep, he was thinking.  When he actually was awake, his expression was a sight to see:  Trump the Grump.

Dubai had 18 months’ rain in 24 hours earlier this week, which was described by a meteorologist as a “very rare rainfall event”.  We’ve had quite a few rainfall events here over the last 3 months but we call them showers or storms.

In the Middle East, Israel is still trying to kill all Palestinians in Gaza and, as a side show, recently arranged to launch a rocket attack on Iran so Iran naturally had to retaliate by attacking Israel with over 100 rockets and Israel promised to get their revenge with another attack on Iran, and so on.  When does revenge stop?

This is the way the world ends, not with a whimper but with a “he started it, no he started it, no he started it, no he started it … Ma, he’s throwing bombs at me.”

The origins of wars and Brits, heat exchangers and ESP in animals and humans

20 January 2024

If, like me, you’re getting confused about who doesn’t like whom in the Middle East, here’s a simplified version:

• Israel thinks it isn’t big enough so, years ago, it annexed the West Bank that had been Palestinian, forced out the people who lived there and built ‘Jewish’ settlements
• The Palestinians resented this and their continuing disgruntlement surfaced on 7 October last year when the military wing of the Hamas government in Gaza, launched a murderous attack on Israel
• Never happy to be embarrassed in public, Israel retaliated with massive reprisals, telling people who lived in the Gaza Strip to move south into refugee camps where they could be killed with a minimum of effort
• Israel then attacked Hezbollah groups in Lebanon
• America always likes confusing things so they then attacked targets in Iran
• Not to be outdone, Houthi rebels in Yemen started to attack random ships in the Red Sea, ostensibly to support … um, I’ll have to check that
• Followed by America attacked Iran-back militants in, er, Iraq, then somebody bombed Baghdad in Iran
• Iran attacked targets in Iraq that they believe have links with Israel
• Then the Brits joined America in attacking the Houthis in Yemen
• Iran bombed targets in Syria they believe to be linked to Isis-K
• Iran attacked Pakistan and Pakistan retaliated
• Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel won’t accept a Palestinian state after the war (but he’s already vowed to exterminate all Palestinians so there won’t be any need for a separate state)

I hope you now understand this because I’m buggered if I do.

Closer to home, Ukraine brought down two of Russia’s most important surveillance aircraft and, a bit to the west, Britain repeated “stop the boats” full of foreign people who don’t feel safe in their homelands any more, or their homes are now heaps of rubble, so who cares what happens to them.

Talk about pots and kettles.  Today’s ‘Brits’ are the result of interbreeding between African homo sapiens and European Neanderthals and Picts and Celts and Vikings and Anglo-Saxons, and people still claim proudly they can trace their family’s roots back to Norman the Conker, who was French anyway and crossed the Channel in a small boat.

It reminds me of The Merry Minuet, an old Kingston Trio song from the 1960s, which said (and I’ve only updated the words slightly): “The whole world is festering with unhappy souls / the French hate the Germans, Hungarians hate the Poles / Israel hates everyone, Belgium hates the Dutch / and I don’t like anybody very much … and we know for certain that some lovely day / someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away.”

Over the last few years, I’ve been increasingly wondering if the House of Commons would benefit from the installation of heat exchangers but I fear their installation might be the final straw for the building’s structure and bring the entire roof crashing down on everyone in the hall, which would probably not be a good idea.  On second thoughts …

Exmouth actually trialled such a system last year when Octopus Energy invested £200m in ‘Deep Green’, a green tech firm, and saved the council 60% of its energy costs by transferring heat from ‘data centres’ to a swimming pool.  It’s now planned to extend the scheme to other leisure centres over the country.

Perhaps the government could first think about extending Awaab’s law.  Awaab Ishak’s death in December 2020 from prolonged exposure to damp and black mould in his family’s home led to the introduction of the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 which applies to landlords who are registered providers of social housing.  It doesn’t apply to accommodation for asylum seekers who may be housed in hotels or property let by the private sector.

I find it immensely depressing to see the government’s priorities when it introduced a new law in just a few days proving that Rwanda, a country with a very dodgy human rights record, is “safe” and exempting Britain from international law while people are dying of damp and Grenfell Tower remains an empty tomb.

Extra sensory perception is something that many people have experienced but can’t be explained by our current understanding of science so it is often dismissed as coincidence or tortuously linked to memories of earlier events in our lives.  And yet we accept that migratory birds travel thousands of miles every year to return to the same nest they used last year;  some fish do the same.

This ability has been linked to the earth’s magnetic field and seems to show they have what we would call ‘memory’.  Which just goes to show how little is understood about how brains and minds work.  Remember it was only in the 1970s that autism and schizophrenia were officially accepted as different conditions.

Meanwhile, there are many recorded instances of the homing instincts of dogs and cats.  My favourite is Prince, an Irish terrier, whose ‘owner’ James Brown was called up in August 1914 and sent to France.  In November, Brown received a letter from his wife in west London saying that Prince had gone missing at the end of September.  Brown wrote back and reassured her that Prince was with him in the trenches having walked to the beach and then hitched a lift in a small boat.  Prince became the regiment’s mascot and champion rat-catcher with a record of 137 in one day.  Both survived to return home after the war.

Dogs tend to return to their owners while cats return to their homes (or former homes) but, given that the ‘ownership’ of some cats is claimed by several families, this probably isn’t surprising and we have to remember that “Dogs have owners, cats have staff”.  In fact it’s probably because dogs are pack animals and will submit to the boss dog while cats are loners and claim seniority because their ancestors were buried with pharaohs.

But why do we seem happy to accept these unexplained abilities in animals while, when humans experience something ‘unusual’, they’re rarely taken seriously.  Why don’t we spend less time and money on building bigger and more destructive weapons and more on research into what enables ESP? Or diseases? Or a million more valuable things?

Problems in search of solutions

2 December 2023

There’s been a short ceasefire in the Middle East and some hostages have been exchanged.  One family waiting to welcome hostages back home was reported as saying “I recognised my niece immediately” which, after only 8 weeks of separation, shows the anguish they’ve been suffering.

Now just imagine of horror of then having to tell one of the children that their mother had been murdered and their father was still missing.

It made me remember the words of a Suzanne Vega song:  “A soldier came knocking upon the queen’s door / he said ‘ I am not fighting for you any more … I’ve watched your palace up here on the hill / and wondered who’s the woman for whom we all kill / but I am leaving tomorrow and you can do what you will”. 

Why can’t people just stop killing and go home to their families to see what’s for supper?

But no, the ceasefire’s ceased and they’re all killing each other again.

The Covid inquiry drags on not (it has been emphasised) to find out who’s to blame but to identify mistakes made so they can be avoided in future.  So, naturally, all the big names have been telling us why they weren’t to blame.  Boris Johnson’s appearance next week is likely to follow suit – see how many “errs” you can count in any random five minutes of his replies.

What has become abundantly obvious so far is that the government was made totally dysfunctional by individuals who are convinced of their own overwhelming competence but surrounded by fools;  and to think that we (I use the word in its loosest possible sense) elected them.

Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch has claimed that the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, a cornerstone of post-Brexit “global Britain”, would benefit the UK economy by 0.08% to 0.1%. 

The Office for Budget Responsibility’s report that accompanied last week’s autumn statement estimated this deal would actually add only 0.04% to GDP in the next 15 years so Badenoch was only 100% out.  The report also estimated that two separate bilateral deals with Australia and New Zealand, both hailed at the time as new landmark trade agreements, “might increase the level of real GDP by a combined 0.1% by 2035”.

Despite the old saying that “many a mickle makes a muckle”, the OBR’s calculations recognise we’re going to need a lot more mickles to improve the UK economy which the OBR reckon will be 4% smaller by 2035 than if we had stayed in the EU.

To put this in context, the Daily Telegraph thinks the OBR is “a waste of money” (“Surprised are we not” spake Joda.)

But don’t get too depressed. Britain can now make its own laws, free from the shackles of the EU, and Rishi Sunak confirmed on Wednesday that he will be introducing a law that declares Rwanda is in fact a safe place to send refugees and asylum seekers and it has an impeccable history of human rights and it doesn’t shoot migrants at its borders.

With luck, he might now realise that, using the same argument, he could introduce a law declaring Ukraine the winners of the Russian war and saying that Israel should return to its kibbutzes and Hamas to its bunkers, and all shall be well.

Talking of bunkers and Israel’s belief that a major Hamas command centre is hidden under a hospital, despite the only evidence we’ve seen so far being unconvincing and unverified, Israel’s ‘Defence’ Force has surrounded the hospital chucked out the patients and medics and is rootling through the basement.  Why doesn’t it just identify the routes of the tunnels that must radiate from the centre by using ground-penetrating radar in a complete circle outside the hospital grounds?  They could then simultaneously destroy them all from open ground above each tunnel and wait for the terrorists in the control centre to surface (they couldn’t disguise themselves as medical staff if they’ve all been evacuated).

Nowadays you don’t even have to go abroad to get killed.  In America, the Department of Agriculture uses ‘cyanide bombs’, aka M44s, to kill wildlife, hikers and dogs.  In 2017, when he was 14, Canyon Mansfield was walking with his Labrador in the hills behind his home and accidentally triggered one which sprayed both of them with sodium cyanide.

After emergency treatment, Mansfield survived but the dog convulsed and died on the spot.

In Iran, you don’t even need cyanide, you just upset the government.  Last year, Iran executed 582 people, compared with 333 reported in 2021.

Research from the Office for National Statistics released recently shows that, based on information taken from the NHS, DVLA, Department for Education, other datasets and field visits showed that there were more than 1.5 million unoccupied dwellings just in England on census day.  90% of these were genuinely vacant (having no usual residents and not used as a second home or by visitors) and 10% were empty second homes.

Neither category accounts for dwellings that have no usual residents because they are used as second homes for more than 30 days each year. There are an additional 1.625 million of these in England alone.

The survey also found that the South West has the highest proportion of empty second homes in England and Wales and the highest proportion of unoccupied dwellings in use as second homes with more than 150,000 homes across the region entirely unoccupied and another 33,000 second homes that were unoccupied on the day.  Exeter alone has far more than previously thought with 3,100 second homes vacant or empty, 5.6% of the city’s housing stock.

The South West also has the highest concentration of holiday homes in the country.

And they say we have a housing crisis – sounds more like an ownership crisis.

9/10 of the law, flying flags, and encouragement for conspiracy theorists

14 October 2023

The militant group Hamas which controls Gaza suddenly launched an unprecedentedly murderous attack on Israel last week, rejuvenating the spasmodic violence that festers between the Jewish and Arab peoples in the region.  Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who is rather like an Israeli edition of Donald Trump but without the self-effacing modesty) first warned everybody living in Gaza to leave and then made it impossible for them to do so by closing all the borders and, in defiance of international law, said that Israel will no longer supply Gaza with power, water or fuel.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah, a militant Islamist political party which was formed after Israel invaded them in 1982, joined in by attacking northern Israel.  Then Iran saw a war going on next door …  (Anybody who saw the 1984 BBC TV drama ‘Threads’ and remembers how the nuclear war started might want to keep a spare pair of trousers handy.)

But why did Hamas carried out their latest atrocity now and, more generally, why do people who are probably very nice to their mothers suddenly become nutters when lines are drawn on maps?

It reminds me that Kurt Vonnegut once wrote:  “I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.”

The history of the region is complex and some people might argue the problems go back more than 2,000 years to a Jewish child who grew up into a holy man whose ministry gave rise to a new religion, and a later prophet introduced another religion.  Others might argue that the Jews feel they’ve always been looking for a land to call their own while ‘modern’ history could be claimed to have started after the First World War when the entire area came under British control. This remained the case until the United Nations voted in 1947 to partition what was then known as Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, leaving Jerusalem subject to international governance because of its religious significance to three different faiths.  This was accepted by the Jewish people (who got their own state for the first time) but the existing Arab countries rejected the proposal and declared an All-Palestine Government which claimed all the rest of what had been the British Mandate.

In 1967, Israel “defended” itself against possible attack (always a good ploy to get your ‘defence’ in first, before an attack) by invading Egypt, Jordan and Syria and occupying the Gaza Strip, the west side of the Golan Heights, the west bank of the Jordan river and East Jerusalem.  On the basis that possession is nine-tenths of the law, Israel then claimed squatters’ rights in these occupied areas and built Israeli settlements, displacing those that had originally lived there.  This pissed off a lot of people.

Both America and Britain have now offered help to Israel and it feels as if Gaza, and the Arab states generally, seem to have few supporters in ‘the West’.  Why?  Why we should support Israel (which has committed some really terrible crimes) and not ‘Palestine’ in its widest sense (which has also committed some really terrible crimes).

Then this week the British Home Secretary Suella Braverman wrote to British Chief Constables telling them that displaying a Palestinian flag may be a criminal office.  I know she’s not the sharpest pencil in the box but, even for her, this is pretty stupid.  I personally feel very uncomfortable when I see pictures of people wearing red and black swastikas but I don’t see why it should be illegal.  I’m tempted to get a Palestinian flag and pin it next to the Ukrainian flag on our fence just to see what happens, except I don’t want to associate myself with the murderous attacks Hamas made earlier this week.

Then Rachel Reeves, Labour’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer has said “Gaza is not occupied by Israel.”  The United Nations disagrees, claiming that Israeli controls over Gaza’s borders, airspace and waters as well as their ability to stop access to power, water and fuel amounts to de facto occupation.

Kenneth Roth, the former head of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, has criticised America’s support for Israel and said “It cheapens the concept of antisemitism – a real global curse – for defenders of the Israeli government to pretend that it is somehow antisemitic to hold Israel to the same standards of international humanitarian law as we use to assess Hamas’s conduct. A war crime is a war crime.”

Elsewhere, it’s almost 600 days since Russia invaded Ukraine in Vladimir Putin’s ‘special military exercise’ but we now have to search for news of its progress.  Let’s not forget what’s happening there and that, last week, a Russian missile killed 59 people last week attending a wake being held for a Ukrainian soldier at a café in Hroza.

There are still rumours that Vladimir Putin’s position is becoming weaker and dedicated conspiracy theorists might like to consider whether Gaza’s unexpected assault on Israel might have been funded by Russia to divert attention from Putin’s growing insecurity …

They might also like to wonder whether, now the UK Conservatives who have been in power for 13 years are implicitly admitting they’ve created the mess the country’s in, they’re deliberately doing stupid things so that, if Labour does win the next election, the Tories can blame them for it.

One of the more obvious examples of Tory incompetence is their confirmation that the HS2 line from Birmingham to Manchester will be cancelled but – here’s the clever part – the new HS2 trains will be shortened in Birmingham (because Manchester’s platforms aren’t long enough) and allowed to run on existing lines to Manchester.  They won’t be allowed to exceed 110 mph because, unlike the Pendolino trains that already use the line at speeds of up to 125 mph, the HS2 trains don’t tilt, so they’ll slow down existing services on the west coast main line.

By way of compensation, the prime minister’s office has sent a message to those of us living in the south west to assure us the region will be given money to improve public transport services between Tavistock and Plymouth.  I cannot begin to describe the joy this generosity brings to my heart.

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/

Another anointment, broken records, an underdressed climber and winning insults

23 October 2022

What a wonderful week for cynics – if you didn’t finish reading any day’s paper, you could put it out for recycling and go straight on to the next day’s paper because so much had changed again overnight.

What we tend to forget is that all MPs work for us as public servants and we pay their salaries and fiddled expenses.  They have no right to our respect, they need to earn it by doing what’s best for the country.  Which is not what they’re doing at the moment and why, when my wife called out “She’s gone!”, our cleaner punched the air and said “Yeah!”

By resigning, Truss can now claim two records by becoming Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister ever and by reducing support for the Conservatives to the lowest level ever seen in the polls.  At least she had confirmed to parliament on the previous day that the triple lock on pensions would remain, although she failed to confirm disability benefits would also rise in line with inflation;  which just goes to show the priorities of a government that relies on the geriatric (sorry ‘grey’) vote and couldn’t care less about people with disabilities.

Until she resigned, the shortest-serving prime minister was George Canning whose sole term lasted 119 days in 1827 but he at least had the excuse that he died of TB.  (The BBC website originally reported that “Canning had served for 119 days after dying in 1827” but, sadly, somebody spotted the error and corrected it.)

With their recent repeated failures in choosing competent leaders, even the Tories must now be beginning to wonder if there’s a better way to choose them.  It’s a pity their rules don’t have an emergency clause to cover the loss of a leader within (say) three months.  This would cover the sudden death of a newly-elected leader and could allow the person who came second to take over as prime minister.  It would also help avoid yet another undignified scramble for power.

Actually, a general election would be the fairest way of finding one that a majority of the electorate actually wants but the Conservatives daren’t do this because they’ve made themselves so unpopular that they might disappear up their own ballot boxes.  What they are doing this time, with their usual blithe disregard for everybody, including party members, is abbreviating the process to leave only three possibles, each of whom will know only that almost 75% of their MPs didn’t want them and voted for somebody else. 

With their backs to the wall and all polls showing the Conservatives would be obliterated at a general election, this would seem the ideal time to change the electoral system from ‘first past the post’ to proportional representation.  A PR voting system would almost certainly give Conservatives more seats than the polls are suggesting they’d get at the moment and it would ensure fair representation of Tory (and other) voters for the foreseeable future.

However, they’re now so desperate that there’s even talk, apparently serious, of resurrecting the compulsively deceitful Boris Mimi MiToo Johnson, the man who fractured the Conservative party, dithered throughout his term, made stupid decisions, abandoned some 50,000 people in Afghanistan, was ultimately fired for having been caught breaking the law and whose conduct is still subject to another investigation.  So he’s scuttled back from a beach in the Dominican Republic with indecent haste to round up the loonies.

May it please all the gods anyone can think of, don’t let them be so stupid as to let Boris loose again.  

The health secretary Thérèse Coffey has admitted (as she puffed on a fat cigar) giving leftover antibiotics to a friend and has been accused by one doctor of “monumental stupidity”.  Even I remember that we’re told to complete the course so how come she had any spare?

The only saving grace they managed to find this week was when Jeremy Hunt, the latest Chancellor of the Exchequer, was asked a reasonable question in parliament and just said “I don’t know but I’ll find out” before sitting down again.  What a brilliantly honest response, something even his greatest critics can surely accept as a point in his favour.  He’s not standing for PM but wouldn’t be nice if whoever gets the job feels able to show the same honesty?

Other news included Ghislaine Maxwell saying of Prince Andrew “I accept that this friendship could not survive my conviction. He is paying such a price for the association. I consider him a dear friend. I care about him.”  With friends like her, who needs enemies?

She then went on to complain about the service offered by her prison …

In South Korea, the Iranian climber Elnaz Rekabi shinned up a wall without wearing the headscarf ‘required’ by Iran’s male theocracy (who are so insecure they think they’d lose ‘their’ women if other people could see how beautiful they are).  She said her not wearing a hijab was “unintentional” but, on her return to Tehran, she was hailed as a hero by people demonstrating against the arrest of Mahsa Amini for being improperly dressed and her subsequent death in custody.  Rekabi’s friends and supporters now fear for her safety and her brother has been summoned to an intelligence agency office. 

British protestors from the climate action group Just Stop Oil blocked a motorway and were attacked by Suella Braverman, who was still home secretary at the time, who said “I’m afraid it’s the Labour party, it’s the Lib Dems, it’s the coalition of chaos, it’s the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating, wokerati* – dare I say the anti-growth coalition that we have to thank for the disruption we are seeing on our roads today.”  The patronising berk then had to resign after she admitted sending classified material from her personal email account.

Truss had invented and condemned an “anti-growth coalition” that she thinks lives in North London and takes taxis and Boris Johnson dissed the “Islington remainers”* in an attempt (which seems to resonate with many on the right) to blame Brexit remainers for failing to accept the vote and causing the covid pandemic and the economic chaos that helped him onto the slippery slope to dismissal.  All the remainers we know regret the stupidity of Brexit but accept we have to live with it and try to find ways of minimising the economic and political problems it’s caused.

How sad that senior Tories have to stoop to pointless soundbites in their attempt to regain popularity.

A letter in the next day’s Guardian asked if King Charles III might have more prime ministers than his mother.

Now, to take our minds off the Westminster shitstorm, here’s a thought for you:  I (and probably you) have more than the average number of legs for a human.

*          In the interests of full disclosure, I must say I have never voted Conservative, I read the Guardian, I like tofu, I once lived part-time in Islington and I voted remain.

Celebrations for a Grey Day

8 October 2022

As the Conservative party self-destructs, let’s look at the odd bits of cheering news that have surfaced recently.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies has calculated that the not-budget will give the richest households £2,290 more and the poorest £13 more, and Liz Truss has refused to raise the level at which we start to pay tax or to confirm benefits will be increased in line with inflation, thus making the poor poorer while the rich … er, no, hang on a minute, try again.

At the conference Truss wore a dress that appeared to be identical to the one worn by Emma Thompson in her role as Vivienne Rook, the fascist prime minister of the dystopian BBC drama ‘Years and Years’.  This comment has been criticised as an example of continuing misogyny in the media, except that the comment wasn’t about what she was wearing per se, it was about a comparison with a fictional fascist in a TV drama of which she might not even have been aware.

Anyway, The Woman in The Dress has reacted swiftly to allegations that one of her ministers was guilty of “serious misconduct” at last week’s Conservative party conference and has sacked him pending an investigation.  There’s a lesson for Boris Johnson there.

Encouraged, one suspects, by his lawyers, Elon Musk has U-turned again and reinstated his $44bn (£38bn) offer for Twitter.  Next, Musk will buy Tristan da Cunha, set it up as an international tax-avoidance state, build a rocket launching site and set up a company dedicated to denying the unreliability of Tesla cars.

Insulate Britain has gained a lot of media coverage with disruptive protests.  One of their spokespeople, Tracey Mallaghan, has said “I hate that to get media attention we have to disrupt lives.  But many people can see the sense in what we are asking for.”  One of my friends believes the demonstrators who blocked the M25 should be hanged drawn and quartered, regardless of the cause they were aiming to publicise;  others don’t.

George Kearsley Shaw (1751-1813), botanist and zoologist, founder of Linnean Society said: “The reasonable man [sic] adapts himself to the world;  the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”  (This argument could also, of course, be used to explain Truss’s apparent efforts to destroy the economy.)

For the first time in its history, the Royal College of Nurses, will ask its 300,000-strong membership if they want to strike, with the union encouraging them to vote yes.  If the strike goes ahead, the NHS will be severely disrupted this winter but which of us would deny their right to draw attention to how badly they (and the NHS as a whole) have been side-lined?

The day after Kwasi Kwarteng’s unfunded giveaways, the Bank of England stepped in to save a number of pension funds from going bust as the yields on long-term government bonds rocketed upwards.  What a good job we have a Bank of England and don’t just rely on the government.

The design of the new coins with the King’s head have been released and, as tradition demands, he faces in the opposite direction to his predecessor so we will have a King facing to the left.

In chess, there have been accusations that the 19-year-old, Hans Niemann has been cheating (he’s admitted to cheating in online games but denies cheating when playing in person) and one theory says anal beads were used.  Now I have to admit I don’t know what anal beads are or how they could help a chess player know which of 64,000 possible moves is the right one but I’m intrigued to know how anybody can sit still if something suddenly starts vibrating in their bum.

Since ‘we’ can remove the eye of a gnat with a missile fired from thousands of miles away and hit an asteroid with a multi-million dollar spacecraft travelling at 15,000 mph from millions of miles away, why can’t we find vaccinations that protect against cancer, circulatory problems, neurological conditions, mental health issues and indigestion here on earth?  Haven’t we got our priorities wrong?

Incidentally, what does 15,000 mph mean in space?  Speed is measured as relative to something else, like the ground over which a car is travelling.  So was this in relation to the asteroid it hit, or the earth (which was, by then, somewhere completely different) or alpha centauri?

Ondi Timoner, an American documentary film-maker, was shocked when her 92-year-old father Eli who had been paralyzed for 40 years by a stroke became bed-ridden and isolated by Covid and said he was “just waiting to die”.  With what was described as characteristic generosity and kindness, he gave his permission for her to record his last days and how his medically-assisted death affected his family. 

Ondi’s sister Rachel said of the film “I hope people get inspired to face the fact that they and everyone they love is going to die and if they have the courage to talk about it, and to plan for it a little bit, that they have a real chance to have a beautiful, good death.  And that that is a way for them to seize their lives.  It is a way for them to embrace their living.”  The film, ‘Last Flight Home’, is to be released in UK cinemas on 25 November. 

Vladimir Putin has said “We are working on the assumption that the situation in the new territories will stabilise”, thereby tacitly admitting the Russian losses caused by the Ukrainians’ fast and irresistible advance into occupied territory.  It reminded me of the Germans claiming in the (excellent) 1966 Czech film ‘Closely Observed Trains’:  “Our tactical retreat into Belgium has outpaced the Americans”.

In America, Joe Biden has pardoned thousands of people convicted of smoking a joint.  Nobody is actually in a federal prison for “simple possession” but the pardons correct the imbalance that has led to far fewer white smokers being convicted than people of colour despite skin colour not being an indicator of the prevalence of marijuana use.

And the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, has said he would “proudly support” legislation to overhaul rules for certifying presidential elections, bolstering a bipartisan effort to revise a 19th-century law and avoid any repeat of the January 6 insurrection, adding. “The chaos that came to a head on January 6 of last year certainly underscored the need for an update.”

In Iran, the mother of Nika Shahkarami, a 16-year-old who died after a demonstration over the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a woman who had breached the strict Iranian dress code for women, has accused the authorities of trying to force her to lie and say her daughter killed herself.  Amini had been arrested by the morality police in Tehran.  The morality police???  George Orwell is turning in his grave.

TikTok’s latest craze (meme?) is for ‘brown noise’ is a sort of textured ‘white noise’ that relaxes people and turns off their thoughts.  A short trial didn’t work for me but I guess those of us who live with tinnitus are used to thinking over its endless interference.

A similar (but negative) effect on our senses is that, when we’re in REM/deep sleep, we don’t respond to smells, but they can influence whether our dreams are pleasant or less enjoyable.  Those of us who sleep near a recidivist farter (not me, I hasten to add, my wife would never dream of farting) should be duly grateful for this.

As people get richer and buy more ‘second homes’ in tourist areas and rent them out through Airbnb or to longer-term tenants, local communities crumble and house prices go up beyond the reach of the local people.  The Welsh government is planning to tackle this by raising discretionary council tax premiums for second homes by 300%, introducing a licensing scheme for holiday homes and generally tightening the regulations.  Vote Welsh!

Covid testing, signing ‘HELP’, climate change, government sleaze, a bunch of good news and autocorrect

14 November 2021

It’s amazing where these mutterings seem to reach!  Having written a fairy story about Grenfell Tower last Sunday, the Housing Secretary (Michael Gove!) announced on Monday that he planned to “pause” government plans to recover cladding restoration work from leaseholders.  Giving evidence to a Commons committee, he said “I’m unhappy with the principle of leaseholders having to pay at all”.

A friend also pointed out that I’d omitted from the list of the culpable the building regulations people who approved the dangerous cladding.

On Tuesday, I had to go to London (for the first time in almost 2 years) for a medical appointment.  Despite being double-vaccinated and boosted, I decided to travel first class and keep my mask on for the whole journey.  Despite a lot of signs saying that masks should be worn and people without them might not be allowed to travel, about 60% of passengers weren’t wearing masks and even more weren’t in the crowded streets.  There’s nowt so queer as folk.

I’m now testing myself for Covid for another 10 days or so, not because I’m worried about getting Covid but because I’m a carer and can’t risk being incapacitated.

(Did you see that Jeff Hoverson, the Republican state representative for North Dakota, organised a rally to oppose vaccinations, and then couldn’t attend it because he’d got Covid-19?)

This is the first time I’ve self-tested so I read the instructions, something my wife claims I never do, and was taken by the bit that says “Open your mouth wide and rub the fabric tip of the swab over both tonsils … (use a torch or mirror to help you do this) …” 

“Or?”  Did they mean “and”?  Why don’t people get proof-readers to check what they’ve writted?

Much more usefully, I discovered there’s a discreet and unobtrusive “Help me” signal you can give if you’re in trouble, whether it’s abuse or harassment or anything, which will alert people who see it to call for help.  It can, for example, be discreetlyused during a video call or conference, or through the window of a house or a car.

What you do to show you need help is:

1 Hold your hand up with palm facing the other person

2 Tuck your thumb into the palm

3 Fold your fingers down over the thumb, rather like a peace sign.

Everybody should know this so they can use it if they feel threatened, and they can act if they see someone else using it.  What you should do if you see the sign obviously depends on the circumstances but ringing 999 is generally a good way to start.

It saved a woman in a car in America when somebody saw her sign and called 911; the driver is now in custody.  Tell all your friends if they don’t already know.

This week’s news has mainly been about the Cop26 conference on climate change.  Some sort of agreement was reached although China didn’t send anyone and India said it couldn’t reach the target in time.  These two countries together contribute 60% of the electricity generated by coal worldwide, and America produces another 11% (the EU produces 5%). 

But we all make their controls more difficult:   just think how much of the stuff we buy is made in China or India.  Should we boycott them and refuse to buy their goods?  What would this do to their economies?

Boris Johnson was stupid enough to fly 400 miles to the conference in a private jet.  In fact, of course, he had to do this because he absolutely had to get back to London for a booze-up with some old mates, but the outrage was so great that, second time, he went by train.

Other headlines exposed even more sleaze in the Tory party and Johnson was forced to reverse his plans to take over control of the independent cross-party group overseeing the maintenance of parliamentary standards. 

Even the Tory-faithful papers were outraged by his original proposal.  The Daily Mail’s leader said “So now we know the lengths to which a venal political class will go to protect its own” and the Times’ leader said “It would be good for parliamentary democracy if this time [the prime minister] were made to pay a price.”

Then we learnt that Sir Geoffrey Cox, MP for Torridge and West Devon and the former Attorney General, has been given nearly £6m for moonlighting (I refuse to say ‘earned’ – nobody can ‘earn’ that much), which included spending time in the British Virgin Islands where he’s been defending their prime minister and other government figures during an enquiry into claims of misgovernance and abuse of office.  Poetic eh?

(Remember that this is the man who included a 49p bottle of milk and £2 of tea bags in his expense claims in 2015.)

Meanwhile, Richard Ratcliffe’s hunger strike has gained a lot of publicity for his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s imprisonment in Iran for the last 5½ years, reputedly as a result of a comment by the then Foreign Secretary, one Boris Johnson, who had failed to read his briefing papers or just forgotten that she was actually on holiday visiting her family. 

Her confinement is, of course, linked with the £400m that the UK has owed Iran since 1979.  The good news is that the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, was officially authorised (when he was still a back-bencher) to write to Richard Ratcliffe to confirm the UK acknowledged that the debt had to be paid.  However, it still hasn’t been paid and Ministers and officials refuse to say why.

Then the Queen sprained her back and couldn’t attend the Remembrance Day commemorations in Whitehall this morning.  (One wonders how a queen can sprain her back.  Picking up corgi poo from the royal carpets?  Or sneezing perhaps?)

But there is more good news:

• Boeing has admitted responsibility for the crash of its 737 Max model in Ethiopia in 2019 after an investigation found faults in the sensors and that the new flight control software had not been explained to pilots;
• America has set a precedent with new defence for first degree murder:  the Pentagon has said that the US drone attack in August that killed 10 Afghan civilians was “an honest mistake” and no laws had been broken;  killers can now say “it was a genuine mistake, I meant to kill someone else”;
• Julia ‘Hurricane’ Hawkins has set a new record at the Louisiana Senior Games by sprinting 100 yards in 1:02:95 minutes, the fastest time for women aged over 105; 
• music can calm dogs frightened by fireworks and a study by the Scottish SPCA and the University of Glasgow found reggae and soft rock worked best; 
• the world’s youngest winner of the Nobel peace prize, Malala Yousafzai, who survived being shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 for blogging for the BBC about increasing Taliban activities in Pakistan, married her partner, Asser Malik, on Tuesday in a small ceremony in Birmingham – long life and happiness to them both.

And a final tip:  it helps if you imagine autocorrect as a tiny little elf in your phone who’s trying very hard to be helpful but is in fact quite drunk.

Multi-culturalism, political integrity (not), being British, wetlands, King Cnut

19 September 2021

After my piece on Emma Raducanu last week, I was shocked to see how many people were getting exercised about multi-culturalism.

Apparently, the US Open women’s finals was no longer about two brilliant players demonstrating outstanding tennis skills, it was about a Brit with a Romanian father and a Chinese mother playing a Canadian with an Ecuadorian father and a Filipino mother.  Raducanu’s Twitter bio apparently says “london|toronto|shenyang|Bucharest” or, in plain English “Up yours”.  I feel proud to live in the same country as somebody who answers critics so simply and unassumingly.

Predictably, Nigel Farage was one of the first out of his cage, picking on her Romanian blood to claim that Londoners would be “concerned” if “a group of Romanian men moved in next to [them]”.  We’d happily swap the man in the house behind ours, who is almost certainly of Anglo-Peasant stock, for a bunch of Romanians.

To be fair, Farage doesn’t seem to be pureblood racist:  his first ex-wife was Irish, his second German, he has some German and French roots himself, and he has always maintained he’s anti-EU, not anti-Europe or racist (apart from the Romanians of course).

Whatever, I wouldn’t want him as our neighbour.

(My DNA shows I’m of Anglo / Celtic / Scandanavian stock, something that inspires me with complete indifference.)

My only slight worry about Raducanu is that, at 18, she’s become world-famous overnight and won £1.8m.  The pressures that this puts on anyone must be immense but she comes over as being well-grounded and had enough insight to pull out of this year’s Wimbledon championships to deal with the stress rather than crash and burn in the tournament, so let’s hope she can return to as normal a life as possible.  She’s said she’s going to let her parents look after the money and hasn’t yet bought anything special, so she’s made a good start.

We can only hope she can live with people in the street recognising her but, if she’s seen the film ‘Hard Day’s Night’, she can use the John Lennon defence when people say “Aren’t you …?” and say “No, she’s six inches taller / shorter than me”.

On this week’s cabinet reshuffle, I can’t top Lucy Mangan’s wonderful summary:  “a variety of ministers are redeployed to stress-test the theory that things can’t get any worse”.

Other worries this week include two more rejections of promises in the manifesto on which the Conservatives were elected.  They’d already reneged on their foreign aid commitment and have now broken their pledges not to increase taxes and to retain the ‘triple lock’ on pensions.  This is on top of Boris Johnson’s pledge last year that there’d be a border in the Irish Sea over his dead body (another promise he still has to keep) while the deal he finally agreed with the EU effectively does just that.

I’d always thought that people voted for political parties because their manifestos said what they would do if elected and breaking such commitments has traditionally been considered a fundamental betrayal of voters’ trust.  Of course circumstances change but manifestos don’t include a clause in small print saying that none of this manifesto will be binding if they do.  Surely any honourable party would now fess up, admit the world has changed beyond their expectations and call a general election with new manifestos?

They’re also insistent on reducing universal credit by more than £1,000 a year on the grounds this was only intended to provide temporary help during the pandemic which they obviously want to believe is over, ignoring the medical experts who disagree.  This loss will plunge an estimated 800,000 more people into poverty (according to the Legatum Institute, a charitable think-tank set up by the Conservative Baroness Philippa Stroud “to create a global movement of people committed to creating the pathways from poverty to prosperity”) and has been condemned by the UN’s poverty envoy.  Johnson still has to explain how this is “levelling up” rather than down.

Shamima Begum has made another appeal following the removal of her British citizenship for a decision she made while still a minor and now regrets.  Why can’t we give her back her UK passport, allow her to return to the country of her birth and let the UK courts decide what should happen to her.  I, for one, have more faith in our justice system than in the judgement of our politicians?

Let’s also get back Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, another Brit the government has abandoned.  Her husband has already contacted the new foreign secretary but, since her predecessor achieved nothing positive and another, earlier predecessor contributed evidence (in Iranian eyes) to her support her original conviction, I’m not deeply optimistic.

And, while the Taliban men have taken one small step forward, Afghan women have taken a Great Leap Backwards and are now to be denied secondary education, presumably in case they turn out to have studied the Qu’ran and prove the Taliban’s oppression of women wasn’t actually ordained by Allah.  (Thinks:  why don’t we give all Afghan women UK passports and bring them over here?  That would finish off the Taliban within a generation.)

On a cheerier note, rewilding projects at Cwm Ivy on the Gower peninsula and the River Tamar have opened areas previously farmed behind embankments, allowing them to flood at high water and revert to sedimentary marshland.  Since the Gower project started in 2013 when it was decided not to repair a breached sea wall, the area has become rich in varied wildlife and attracts migratory birds such as passing ospreys.

So King Cnut was right and, 900 years later, the Victorians who built the sea wall were wrong.  Contrary to the story I first heard about Cnut being seen as weak (or stupid) because he couldn’t stop the tide coming in, it’s generally believed that he was showing people that not even a powerful king had any effect on the sea.  “Out damned tide, out I say”, he shouted at the waves, which didn’t affect them at all but did give Shakespeare a good line to adapt 500 years later.

The PM’s week, late-stage capitalism, executing teenagers in America, and wasps

2 May 2021

When you’re in the wrong, you should never lose your temper;  when you’re in the right, you don’t need to.

This old saw was proved all too clearly by Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday when Sir Keir Starmer asked some simple questions that Johnson was too embarrassed to answer and he got visibly angrier till he humiliated himself by losing his temper.  Even the pictures of him jabbing a finger at Starmer show clearly that Boris was stuck:  he daren’t give truthful answers to the questions and he daren’t lie to parliament.

Later the same day, Matt Hancock refused to answer questions about whether ministers who break electoral law should resign and volunteered that it doesn’t matter if Johnson resigns.  His actual words were “It is important that there are questions, and there were endless questions in the House of Commons earlier on some of the issues that you raised … but you’ve also got to concentrate on the big things that really matter.”

Johnson had a busy week:

• he refused to set up a public enquiry into his handling of the pandemic, despite pressure from the Institute for Government (the leading independent think tank on the effectiveness of government) and the King’s Fund (an independent health and care charity) who, for some reason, seem to believe it should be done now so we can learn lessons from it, rather than when it’s too late and even more people have died;  and the Lord Speaker, who spent 11 years in Conservative cabinets and is a former chair of the Conservative Party, is calling for a public enquiry to be set up “as soon as possible”.
• he inadvertently gave his reasons for refusing the enquiry when a small number of people near his office heard him shouting “no more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands”.  He has naturally denied saying this, knowing that ‘the science’ has estimated his delays in March and September last year have already increased the number of Covid-related deaths by 10,000-20,000 ‘bodies’.
• he now seems likely to be subject to an investigation by parliament’s sleaze watchdog for having reputedly spent £200,000 to stop his flat looking like “a John Lewis nightmare” (sounds good to me) according to a friend of his fiancée* or “a skip” according to Sarah Vine, a right-wing columnist who is also Michael Gove’s wife and, apparently, an expert on skips;  all he’s said is that he paid for it himself and refuses to deny rumours the Conservative party lent him £58,000.  By a strange coincidence, much of the paperwork which would show who originally paid for the stuff has gone missing. 
• he briefed various media that Dominic Cummings was behind the leaks and Cummings responded with a blog making new allegations about Johnson’s improprieties.
• his closest allies were accused of awarding government contracts worth millions to their friends and relations and we learnt that his predecessor had lobbied for funding for Greensill Capital, a company that then went belly-up.
• he said the government “would be working very hard” to secure the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe after she was sentenced to a further year in prison in Iran this week and he added “I don’t think it is right that Nazanin should be sentenced to any more time in jail.  I think it is wrong she is there in the first place, and we will be working very hard to secure her release from Iran … The government will not stop, we will redouble our efforts and we are working with our American friends on the issue as well.”.  What he forgot to say was that the secondary reason she’s already served 5 years (for a different ‘crime’) was because he told a parliamentary select committee in 2017 (when he was Foreign Secretary) that “she was simply teaching people journalism”, which the Iranians quoted in evidence against her, and Johnson had to apologise for the “distress and anguish” his comments had caused the family.  The first reason is that Britain is still refusing to pay the money it has owed Iran for decades.

So, not a good week for Johnson (in a good week, he just gets the skitters) without even mentioning all his earlier lies and deceits.  And he’s the man who was elected by his party members to ‘lead’ their party into a time of peace and harmony in the post-Brexit world.

In the world of late-stage capitalism, the case against two former executives at Serco collapsed because the Senior Fraud Office failed to disclose some evidence to the defendants and the judge didn’t allow the SFO’s request for the case to be adjourned to a retrial.  One of the accused, Simon Marshall, subsequently said “The allegations against me were entirely without substance, as is now clear”, which seems a rather over-optimistic interpretation of a case that failed because of a judicial technicality rather than his having been judged ‘not guilty’.

Serco had previously had to pay £12.8m to the Ministry of Justice as part of a £70m civil settlement in 2013 and £22.9m in fines and costs in 2019 after admitting three offences of fraud and two of false accounting on electronic monitoring contracts.

This week also saw publication of a report by human rights experts from 11 countries that describes the systematic killing of unarmed African Americans as a crime against humanity and holds the US accountable for a long history of violations of international law.

America’s approach is exemplified by the fact that capital punishment is still legal in more than half the states and only 40% of the people on death row are white while 72% of the population identify themselves as white.  The death penalty itself is not prohibited by international law but how it’s used gives a measure of the decency of the country itself and, in America, what are considered as “cruel and unusual punishments” proscribed by the Eighth Amendment.

It also allows reflection on the ages of those allowed to be executed.  In 1944, the 14-year old George Stinney was electrocuted in South Carolina after being found guilty of the murder of two children.  The case was based on circumstantial evidence, he maintained his innocence throughout and the verdict was subsequently overturned and he was pardoned.  Posthumously.  Better never than late.

It wasn’t until 1989 that a Kentucky case said there was a general consensus that people under 16 shouldn’t be executed and this has since been confirmed by the US Supreme Court.

However, many states under Republican control are still buying drugs used in executions from illicit dealers (pharmaceutical companies are not allowed to sell their products to be used in executions).  Arizona has, for example, ordered $1.5m worth of such drugs and said they must be shipped in “unmarked jars and boxes”.

And so to this week’s good news:  according to a report in Biological Reviews, there are about 100,000 wasp species worldwide but only a third of them sting, and they are all valuable plant pollinators.

*          I wonder why Carrie Symonds** is still his fiancée and not his wife.  She doesn’t look like someone I’d want to upset so perhaps it’s in case he discovers he’s inadvertently spawned yet another child with somebody else and wants to be able to walk away again.

**        Did you know her paternal grandfather was a former Labour MP, now probably spinning in his grave?