Racism, wealth, sewage, rodent stoners and soothing radio

3 December 2022

A lidy dun wot she din oughter this week.

Before I go any further, I should explain that the most difficult word in that sentence for me to write was ‘lidy’.  I come from a family with a number of linguistic hang-ups which included an abhorrence of ‘toilet’ (it’s a lavatory), ‘serviette’ (napkin),’pardon’ (instead of ‘what’), ‘dinner’ when it wasn’t at school or a black tie affair (lunch, tea – occasionally high tea – and supper for us), and a conviction that, unless they had a title, female people were always women and never ladies. 

Incidentally, does it still take a man to make a lady either by his being knighted or having a daughter? 

Anyway, Lady Susan Hussey, widow of Sir Marmaduke Hussey (there you go), the late queen’s lady-in-waiting who was recently appointed one of ‘the ladies of the household’, was unspeakably condescending, racist and rude to the founder of the charity Sistah Space at a reception in Buckingham palace. 

Ngozi Fulani said she had “never felt so unwelcome or so uncomfortable” and Mandu Reid, leader of the Women’s Equality party, said she had witnessed the ‘prolonged interrogation’ which made her “reflect on the increasingly hostile environment of this disunited kingdom”.

The details of what happened have been widely reported and an American commented that, over there, if someone had moved a woman’s hair to read her name badge, they’d have been charged with assault.  Had it been me, I hope I’d have had the courage to do the same to her, then ask what she did – I’ve been in the palace a couple of times and chatted with various women there, even some ladies, but I’ve never been that impressed, except by one who fascinated me because she spoke without moving her lower jaw.

Hussey’s was an honorary position (which I’ve always understood to mean unpaid) from which she immediately ‘resigned’ after her behaviour had been made public.  Why was an 83-year old who is presumably not badly off (Marmaduke had chaired the BBC) still working?  Just so she could patronise lesser mortals I suppose.

The only thing I can understand is her asking about Fulani’s “people”, not because she should ever have said it but because my family (again) would talk about their people and mean their parents and family, not their tribe.

It reminded me of a recent email exchange with a friend who said “Just in case you have heard, as I have this morning, that Brexit is the cause of our shortage of doctors, nurses and carers in the NHS, a quick look at info available shows, quite clearly, the European countries have similar shortages.”

I responded by saying “What are the numbers for Europe, and what’s your source?” and he replied “Why don’t you just accept what I tell you instead of treating me like a suspect in a trial.  Just because a fact does not gel with what you would like it to be does not mean that it is incorrect.  Try asking Mr Google and you will find multiple sources as I did.”

Needless to say, we each think the other is biased!

We also disagree about the equity of the unequal distribution of wealth so I was interested to see a recent article written jointly by Winsome Hill and Julia Davies.  They started by saying “The two of us are from very different worlds.

“One of us is a millionaire investor [and a member of campaign group Patriotic Millionaires], the other a care worker and trade union member. We have totally different experiences of the economy, but we share a fundamental belief that it is broken – and the government in its autumn statement did nothing to fix it.

“The cost of living crisis affects all of us, but it doesn’t affect us equally. One of us struggles to afford the spiralling price of the weekly shop, while the other can shop as before, unaffected by rising food prices. One of us fears turning on the heating to keep her house warm, while the other can heat her home and travel for some winter sun without a second thought.”

They went on to say “This isn’t how an economy succeeds. The argument of the last prime minister – that the only route to economic success is to allow inequality in our country to grow even greater – is simply wrong. Wealth does not come from the top and trickle down, it comes from all of us. There is no route to prosperity through increasing inequality.”

It was comforting to see the extent to which they agreed and their joint conclusion:  “Let’s start with taxing the seriously wealthy – people with wealth of more than £10m. A wealth tax of just 1% or 2% on their stocks of wealth over £10m would give our country the investment it desperately needs to see out the hard winter to come.”

Another classic case of chutzpah came to light this week when it was revealed that England’s water companies blamed the government for their continuing pumping of raw sewage into our waterways.  The gist of their letters was “you haven’t yet taken any action to pass laws to stop us and we’re buggered if we’re going to increase our costs and reduce our profits voluntarily so we’ll carry on pumping human excrement into rivers and onto beaches as long as it’s legal to do so”.

The situation is of course complicated because at least 72% of the water companies’ profits, or those that are left after the directors have helped themselves, go to 17 foreign countries, which have their own rivers and seaside beaches which aren’t contaminated so why should they care?

Many of them have other companies interposed between the English water company and the ultimate owner, which makes it difficult to find out who is actually taking the money out rather than repairing and replacing sewerage systems.  For example, while South West Water is directly owned by Pennon Group plc, a UK-quoted company, there appear to be 10 intermediaries between Southern Water and its ultimate owner, Greensands Holdings, a private American investment firm.

Back in 2019, Jacob Rees-Mogg said of Brexit: “I can see the opportunities of cheaper food, clothing and footwear, helping most of all the incomes of the least well-off in our society.”  Earlier this year, he spent a short time as minister for Brexit opportunities and, as far as I know, failed to identify a single opportunity.

The 2011 census statistics now released show “that England is no longer a majority-Christian country [and] have sparked calls for an end to the church’s role in parliament and schools”.  Interesting that the Daily Telegraph should have chosen to highlight this in their report!

In response to the reported changes in Britain’s ethnography, Nigel Farage has reappeared and said that the next census won’t include questions about country of birth or racial identity.  Absolute rubbish of course but the Brexit bus casts a long shadow.

In India, they blame rats.  A court in Uttar Pradesh state asked to see the 200kg of cannabis that had been seized from dealers and was being used as evidence against them but the police said it had been eaten by rats.  In 2018, Argentinian police blamed mice for the disappearance of half a ton of cannabis from a police warehouse.  When I was younger, the dog ate my homework.

Our local doctors’ surgery issues occasional newsletters, the latest of which finished with some particularly helpful guidance:  “Call 999 immediately if you’re experiencing … collapse with loss of consciousness”.

And here’s a date for your diary:   Radio 3 will be broadcasting the sounds recorded by a microphone hung round the neck of a reindeer.  We’re promised the sound of hooves treading softly on the snow, coupled with the distant tinkling of reindeer bells while the herd eats and sleeps in its natural habitat.  Sounds quite wonderful.  Christmas Eve, 9 pm.

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.

Heatwaves, politicians and badgers, Scandinavian gods and assisted dying

24 July 2022

Last week saw the end of the UK’s heat wave with record high temperatures recorded all over the country and a number of houses in London destroyed by a fast-moving grass fire.

Travel was also disrupted.  Asphalt on roads has always softened in hot weather but last week was hot enough for local councils to send out gritters full of sand to stabilise road surfaces.  We stayed at home behind closed curtains but it conjured up pictures of being able to coat the windscreen of a car following too closely behind with a fine mixture of sand and tar.  (Those of us who lack charitable feelings for drivers who follow so closely you can no longer read their numberplate in the mirror make a point of driving through puddles and it always works:  the car will slow and back right off, especially if you can find a really muddy patch.)

Railway lines used to come in short sections with a one-centimetre (½ inch) gap between them so they wouldn’t buckle when they expanded on hot days – hence the distinctive ‘diddley-dee diddley dah’ sound that trains used to make as their wheels crossed the gaps.  Nowadays, they use welded rails that are hundreds of miles (well, metres) long and travel is much quieter, but they were only designed for normal UK temperatures and last week there was a risk they could get hot enough to distort and derail trains so many services had to be cancelled or run more slowly.

With its customary dedication to impartial and unvarnished truth-telling, the Daily Mail reported on Monday that “snowflake Britain had a meltdown” on a “sunny day” and somebody called Stephen Robinson, who describes himself on LinkedIn as a “speechwriter and consultant [for] companies operating in the energy sector”, condemned the Met Office (which he described as “woke” and “alarmist”) and the BBC for becoming an “all-singing, all-dancing amen choir for the climate alarmist ‘Blob’” and saying “In Africa, real men would wear shorts and safari jackets and hydrate by ordering another few beers”. 

Its editorial view went further and said “Listening to apocalyptic climate change pundits and the BBC, you’d think Britain was about to spontaneously combust”, thereby neatly encapsulating much of the paranoia of the right wing about climate change alarmists, the socialist bias of the BBC, and those ghastly ‘woke’ people.

By Wednesday, the Daily Mail had moved on a little and was talking about “a near post-apocalyptic scene with gutted houses and burnt-out vehicles”.  Always open to new ideas the Mail, at least if their preference for long-held prejudices over facts is so suddenly exposed.

Then, on Thursday, they reported that Boris Johnson “crushed his puny critics with customary wit and eloquence in what could be his final Commons appearance as PM” after a particularly egocentric, repetitive, irrelevant and untruthful speech saying “we got Brrexit” done in the face of the known contribution of tariff barriers and the bureaucratic delays it caused to trade that have contributed to increases in the cost of living, the Ireland problem and traffic gridlocked at Dover.

When a prime minister makes their last appearance in the House of Commons, it’s customary for everyone on both sides to stand and cheer them out but Johnson has been so unrelentingly disastrous a PM that nobody on the opposition benches stood. Theresa May did, but very slowly, and didn’t clap.  I suddenly found myself warming to May for the first time ever.

Now we find ourselves waiting for paid-up members of the Conservative Party to elect our next prime minister from a list of two, their MPs having kindly reduced the list from 11 to make the choice easier for Bears of Little Brain.  I said last week that there were 175,000 of them but this week’s estimate is 160,000.  And falling?

The party is unsurprisingly cagey about the demography of its membership but educated guesses are that our next prime minister will be chosen by 4 out of every thousand people (0.38%) eligible to vote in general elections and these will be primarily male, pale and stale:  70% are men, 97% are white, almost half are over 65, and 55% live in London and the south.  (Their average age is 57 but the average age of Labour party members is 53 so perhaps the whole idea of any party membership is less attractive to younger people?)

The inews website said the choice was between “batshit and the billionaire”.

The two contenders are now trying to woo voters.  Rishi Sunak criticised Liz Truss saying you can’t fund tax cuts by borrowing although he had done precisely that to fund his “whatever it takes” approach to the Covid pandemic.

Truss herself has vowed to scrap all existing EU regulations within 16 months.  These include laws protecting employment and the environment agreed by all the EU nations and she will have to introduce new legislation to replace most of them even though the civil service has been significantly reduced in size.  Good luck with that.

She also remains committed to the mass slaughter of badgers despite a paper published in the Veterinary Record earlier this year that concluded the culling of badgers over the previous 9 years had no significant impact on bovine TB in cattle.  If new licences are issued, people who enjoy killing things will have to go back to killing peasants – sorry, pheasants – that have been bred just so their lives can be sacrificed to the worrying motivations of shooters.

One of those irritating little teasers popped up on my computer the other day when I was looking to see where my VPN had found an available processor that day because it told me it was raining;  the answer was Oslo where a forest fire advisory notice had been issued so perhaps the Scandanavian gods are more effective than ours, or maybe Thor was just having a strop. 

Whatever, the teaser’s headline was about a Bengal cat being hit by a celebrity and invited me to open a site called Daily Motion for the full story.  Yes, really.  Perhaps it specialises in today’s shittiest stories.  I didn’t open it to find out.

A EuroMillions jackpot of £195m has been won by a ticket bought in the UK.  Does anybody else think the maximum prize should be £1m, enough to change all normal people’s lives?  It would also increase punters’ chances of winning by 200 times and allow almost 200 tickets to win £1m.  Mind you, I know people whose life would be changed beyond recognition by ‘only’ £10,000 so why don’t they give a prize of £10,000 to each of almost 20,000 people?

But I have to end on a sad note.  Graham Mansfield cut his wife Dyanne’s throat while she was sitting in a chair in their garden and said he’d do it again to give her peace.  They’d been married for more than 40 years when they discovered she had terminal (stage 4) lung cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes and she asked him to help her end her life when the pain became too much to bear.

He then took an overdose of pills himself and tried to cut his own throat and wrists but woke 12 hours later and rang 999, saying he’d killed his wife.  When paramedics arrived, he begged them to let him die.

The police said they had to charge him with murder because she hadn’t signed the suicide note and there was no independent evidence she had agreed to it.  (As the law currently stands, it’s legal to go to Dignitas to end your life in Switzerland but nobody’s allowed to help you so, even if you’re unable to do it yourself, anybody who helps you buy a ticket will be breaking the law.)

A cancer specialist estimated Dyanne would only have survived between one and four weeks more.

In court last week, the jury found him guilty of manslaughter but not guilty of murder and the judge imposed a two-year suspended sentence saying the killing was “an act of love, of compassion, to end her suffering”.

Mansfield has said he’d learnt that, if you ever do something like this, you should make sure you video your agreement.

The general reaction of people commenting on websites shows a large majority in favour of changing the law to allow assisted dying in the UK.  Even the BMA supports this but politicians are scared of losing votes … 

Dear Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss, please amend this law as soon as possible.

Choosing a PM, a short history of UK politics, a moral gulf as described by Leonard Cohen and another greedy pig

17 July 2022

People who desire power are, by definition, unsuited for it.  Last week, 11 Conservatives admitted they wanted to be prime minister and have, within a week, been whittled down to five by those who know them best.  Three more will now get excluded, leaving two who will now have to wait for 7 weeks before they know which one of them the party’s 175,000 members vote think won’t do quite as badly as the other.

These 175,000 members are, of course, the same people who, last time they were asked, got the answer so terribly wrong and elected the worst prime minister in living history.

One of the things that worries me is that Boris Johnson filled his umpteen cabinets with incompetents so he wouldn’t look as stupid by comparison.  Wouldn’t it therefore have been more sensible to exclude anybody who’d ever been in one of his many cabinets from the process so there’s at least a chance of finding someone who can take a new look at the future?  (I realise this cuts both ways but could they do any worse that they have in the last 5 years?)

Anyway, of the 11 original applicants, three didn’t get enough support to enter the race.  Rishi Sunak was the clear winner in the first round with the support of 88 of the 358 Tory MPs who remain after various resignations, dismissals and by-election defeats.  This means that, if he does ultimately win the members’ vote, he will know that 270 of his party’s MPs didn’t actually want him as prime minister.

As I write, five people are still in the race but, by the time you read this, there’ll only be four, then two more will have been excluded by the end of next week, leaving just two to use their summer break to big themselves up and slag the other off. 

What a palaver.  Why didn’t they just put all 11 names on a ballot paper and let all party members put a X against their favourite?  Other elections are done on that basis and it would have let the Tory MPs blame the membership if they picked the wrong person again.  

(Isn’t it sad that, after Johnson, I don’t really care who wins because I don’t think anyone could do worse.)

Actually, I have a slight preference for Tom Tugendhat since he was apparently the only one of the five contenders at Friday’s debate who unequivocally admitted that Johnson tells lies (one of the others said he “sometimes” did and the others, including Rishi Sunak, just waffled).  And the bookies love it when an outsider wins so let’s keep our fingers crossed.

But no, I don’t think Tories have got the bottle for that, especially not for a person who’s willing to be that honest about the failings of another on the same side.

I rather like the name Kemi Badenoch, not because I know anything about her politics but because she accepted what sounds like a Scottish name from her husband.  They appear not to pronounce it in Scottish but say Bayder-Knock and 30-seconds of detailed research on the internet doesn’t show Hamish’s ancestors as having any links to Scotland – though ‘Hamish’ isn’t a common name in Merton – so the Wolf may not be one of his ancestors.

In order to understand why modern politics is so confrontational, it’s interesting to look back at its origins.

In the beginning – and I oversimplify things slightly for the benefit of those with short attention spans – anyway, in the beginning there were monarchs and barons and squires and serfs.  Then there were the Tories.  Then, in the 17^th century, there was trooble at t’ court and differences over the constitutional (or not) role of the monarch based, naturally, on religious differences, and the Whigs formed an opposition party which gained the upper hand in the ‘glorious revolution’* in 1688 and sidelined the Tories for more than a century.

As the Whigs’ original motivation became increasingly irrelevant, the party fell apart in the mid-19^th century and most members merged with the new Liberal Party, though some joined what became the Conservative Party.

So far, so good, but things got complicated by the industrial revolution that led to the creation of large-scale enterprises and the days when Lady Squire would do the rounds every Christmas, pat their estate workers on the head and give them a plum pudding faded into the already murky depths of the past.

As factories and mines and canals grew and James Watt invented the steam engine while preparing a cup of tea, the division between the people who ran them and those who did the work became increasingly obvious.  At about the same time, there was increasing pressure not to send young children down the mines to hack at coal seams by candlelight and some people came to realise that the profits are not made solely by the owners but depend at least as much on the people who processed the raw materials and that they too should get their fair share of the profits.

Having depended on slave labour, adults and children, both home-grown and abducted from other countries, the owners were none too pleased about this and, because there was (is) no way to measure the value of the labour force against the cost of the resources provided by the owners, refused to consider a fair allocation of total profits between the two.

The workers became increasingly pisst orff and restless and, at the end of the 19^th century, Keir Hardie started the movement demanding fair pay and conditions for everyone that became the Labour party.  This was of course at the same time as people were urging more representative government and ultimately gained votes for all men and, for the first time, women.

The Labour movement grew and became powerful enough to introduce things like the NHS and free education that were run and paid for by the state for several decades, until the Conservatives gained the upper hand and started selling public services and charging for university education.

Hence the confrontation we have to live with today. 

Politics is now polarised between those on the right, who think money is the most important thing, and how much profit is made is the only way success can be measured, and the those on the left, who believe people are the most important thing and success can only be measured by the well-being of everyone in society (including the bosses).

This is of course terribly over-simplistic but it illustrates the vast moral gulf between people who think underpaying staff, moving money and shares around to pay less tax and trousering as much money as possible are justifiable, and people who are happy to sacrifice income, give money away and pay more tax to make to make things better for those who don’t have enough money.

Leonard Cohen summarised the contrast neatly when he wrote “When it all comes down to dust, I will kill you if I must, I will help you if I can.  When it all comes down to dust, I will help you if I must, I will kill you if I can.”

Which inevitably leads to another Greedy Pig Award.  Prêt à Manger (which doesn’t use the accents in English) lost £255m last year despite demanding another £200m from its shareholders and being given £31m in rates relief and £100m in furlough payments by the government during the pandemic.  It also cut staff paid breaks in half so they now get 6% less for the same 8-hour shift.  All of which would have been OK if its chief executive Pano Christou hadn’t taken a 27% increase in his salary so, with a share bonus, he extracted £4.2m from the company last year.

I don’t know how he votes.

Meanwhile the Resolution Foundation, a charity (which means it must not take any political position), has found that the average British household gets £8,800 less than those in Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands.  Their report coincided with calls from the Confederation of British Industry and the Treasury select committee for the government to produce a coherent growth strategy, but who cares about them?

*          Never mind how many people died, it was definitely glorious

By-elections, Boris’s triumphs, more greedy pigs, Afghanistan, guns and choosing clothes

26 June 2022

The Tories were trashed at both this week’s by-elections.  Crocodiles are weeping salt tears all over the land.

Oliver Dowden, chair of the Conservative Party resigned saying “Somebody must take responsibility” in a carefully worded statement emphasising his continuing support for the party, leaving us to guess who doesn’t have his continuing support.

It’s actually hard to believe that so many Conservative voters changed their party allegiance;  it’s much easier to believe that many die-hard Tories have finally had to accept that Boris Johnson is the UK’s worst prime minister in living memory and it’s time for him to go.  (I’m sure that, by the time you read this, he’ll have accepted responsibility and stepped aside.  Not.)

My Conservative friend said on Friday he hadn’t yet “analysed the figures but I am pretty certain that in Wakefield, the turnout was low and the swing largely attributable to people not voting.”  He said he was disappointed that the winners attributed their victories to Johnson than to their parties’ policies and he “would have preferred it if more Tories had voted.”

He also doubts if Johnson will go and thinks he will lead the Conservatives into the next election and, unless the various opposition parties can get their act together, will win it.

One has to admire his unquestioning optimism in the face of party grandees urging Johnson to step down but those of us who believe the ‘Boris-effect’ did influence Thursday’s results are hoping his optimism is justified.

Politically, the two of us are on the opposite sides of the governmental midden, but he’s obviously upwind of it.

Johnson himself was in Ruanda at the time to prove that, given 4-deep security cover, the country is tremendously safe for people the UK doesn’t want living here. 

This week, he refused to deny having tried to get Carrie Symonds, who is now his wife, a job in the FCDO when he was Foreign Secretary and still married to Marina Wheeler and he’s now threatening to stay for a third term.

I mean, look at all his earlier triumphs.  Their happened to be some clever scientists in the UK who were first with an effective covid vaccine, which allowed Johnson to claim credit for this even though he’d caused an estimated 10,000 deaths by delaying the first lockdown until (quite coincidentally he has assured us) after his wife’s baby shower. 

And “We got Brexit done” he says.  What a man!  Apart from the problems caused in Northern Ireland, the disruption and delays at other borders and the extra paperwork, increases in the costs of shopping and fuels, lying to the queen about the legality of proroguing parliament, and being fined for breaking his own laws, he’s clearly the right man to destroy the UK’s international reputation;  and what a brilliant job he’s making of it.

The Daily Telegraph really did do well this week by getting its website blocked by Russia for “disseminating false information about a special military operation by the Russian armed forces in Ukraine”.  On 23 February, the day before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it published a report on Russia’s use of “mobile crematoriums” (crematoria?) that can incinerate troops killed in wars – sorry, special military operations – to conceal the number of soldiers killed.  “Ivan Ivanovich?  Nah, sorry missus, never ‘eard of ‘im”.

The consumer price index showed that annual inflation approached 10% in May, its highest level for 40 years and the highest in the G7 group of wealthy nations.  We’re lucky enough not to be scraping the bottom of the barrel yet but our usual milk has gone up from £1.15 at the beginning of the year to £1.45 now, which seems a bit excessive.  Perhaps we should all be buying supermarket shares since I’m sure their directors and shareholders won’t be sharing the pain.  

Which inevitably leads to this week’s Greedy Pig awards:  Simon Arora, chief executive of B&M who was given £5m last year, 270 times the pay of the average worker.  Despite B&M’s having a market capitalisation only ¼ that of Tesco, Arora got more than the £4.75 given to Ken Murphy, his oppo at Tesco (who also qualifies for an award).

What’s wrong with these people?

Independent experts, the Pay Review Body, are recommending that NHS workers should receive a pay rise of 4-5%;  the government has said they can only afford 3% and any more would break the bank.    Their message is clear:  money is more important than you and me. 

What’s wrong with these people?

In Afghanistan, the Taliban are appealing for international aid following at least two devastating earthquakes which have killed hundreds.  Should we ignore their appeals because Taliban men are really horrible, or should we help them because the people who are most affected are just ordinary people?

The week’s most devastating (but unsurprising) news was America’s Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade.  Although Americans may still consider themselves ‘free’, just six people (5 men and 1 sort-of-woman, all muppet Republicans, two of whom had recently said they would not vote against the precedent set by this case) ignored the wishes of 75% of the population and removed the right to choose abortion from the country’s 170 million women.

They also over-ruled a New York law that had, since the early 1900s, required people to demonstrate a need before they can get a licence to own a gun before they can carry one in public places …

What’s wrong with these people?

However, the Senate did approve a bill that goes some way towards curbing the licensing and sale of guns.  Softly softly catchy monkey?

Ukraine is withdrawing its troops from Sievierodonetsk, leaving Lysychansk the only city in the Luhansk region of the Donbas area still in Ukrainian control but its formal application to join the EU has been accepted.  The EU isn’t NATO of course but it’ll be interesting to see Vladimir Putin’s response in the light of the rumours that Russia’s lost very large numbers of troops and equipment.

There are reports that small groups of Ukrainian military are creeping into Russian-occupied areas and stealing their tanks.  Isn’t that wonderful!

Even more enchanting is an article I read recently on how fashionistas choose what they’re going to wear each day.  Some people decide the night before, others choose their footwear in the morning by the shape of their trouser (“A darker, slimmer leg calls for a more streamlined sneaker, whereas a wider pant in a lighter shade might match back well with a tan sandal or loafer.”)  Others start with a single piece of clothing and build everything else around it or “intuitively” choose colours that they feel suit the energy of the day, while others choose them by mood.

My wife and I once saw Karl Lagerfeld (well, she recognised him but then had to tell me who he was) in a shop in Paris.  He’d probably made a conscious decision about what to wear that day but he looked a right prat.

Nobody asked me how I choose what to wear each day.  After doing the washing, I put clean smalls in the back of the drawer and shirts on one end of a rack.  Then, in the morning, I take smalls from the front of the drawer and a shirt from the other end of the rack.  I don’t even have to turn on the light.  Footwear and outerwear depend on the weather but I’m generally barefoot in the house and garden when it’s warm. 

Some people would no doubt say this accounts for a lot about me but that’s their problem not mine.

There was a puzzling report from China this week that two people were killed when a Nio electric car, being developed in China as a potential rival to Tesla, fell from the third floor of an office in Shanghai.  The report details of various reactions to the crash, including a defensive statement from the manufacturer saying the accident was “not caused by the vehicle itself” (i.e.  it wasn’t the first recorded case of AI suicide) but the version I saw entirely failed to explain the obvious question:  how did it get up the stairs?

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.

Siberian Sunshine holidays, non-parties, non-doms, welcoming migrants, genocide and peregrines

17 April 2022

Boris Johnson, prime minister of a small archipelago off the EU’s north west coast, visited Ukraine last week and met Vlodomyr Zelenskiy in a vain attempt to show what a great leader he is, Johnson that is, we already know that Zelenskiy is.  Sadly for him, this was swiftly overshadowed by Downing Street’s confirmation that he’d received a fixed penalty notice and been fined £50 for infringing the Covid laws that he had himself introduced.  Rumour also has it that at least three more Penalty Charge Notices with his name on them are in the offing.

His defence against people claiming he misled parliament may be that he genuinely believed he wasn’t committing an offence but this would be tantamount to admitting (a) he’s stupid – he didn’t know what his own law said – or (b) he’s stupid – he thought a birthday party with a cake was a legitimate work-related meeting.

Vladimir Putin’s response to this blatant insincerity was to ban him and several of his cronies from ever visiting Russia and they’ve all had to cancel their Siberian Sunshine holiday plans.

This all led to what might be called mild dissatisfaction within his loyal band of supporters and Lord (David) Wolfson, justice minister, resigned following the news;  not only because of Johnson’s own conduct, he said, but also because of “the official response to what took place” and because so many people had “complied with the rules at great personal cost, and others were fined or prosecuted for similar, and sometimes apparently more trivial, offences”.

He might have been thinking of, David Wilson, a Blackburn restauranteur, who was fined £1,000 in May 2020 for hosting an outdoor party he believes followed the coronavirus rules.   He’s still contesting this but fears his family business will have to close if the fine is enforced.

Next time you’re caught speeding, say you weren’t, and if you were, it wasn’t intentionally, and you misread the speedometer, and anyway it was only for ten minutes.  That’ll do the trick.

Rishi Sunak, the money man, also had a bad week, collecting a PCN of his own immediately after it had been revealed that his wife, Akshata Murty, had (legally) saved herself an estimated £20m of UK tax on money received from her billionaire father’s Indian IT company.  Once her arrangements had become public, Murty decided to pay tax on all her worldwide income from April last year, saying her tax arrangements were not “compatible with my husband’s job as chancellor”, adding that she appreciated the “British sense of fairness”.  What a pity her tax arrangements only became incompatible with her husband’s job after they’d become public knowledge, and that she’s not back-dating it.

Sunak wrote to the prime minister asking for his own tax affairs to be investigated so he could be seen to be squeaky clean.  Followed by which, he admitted that he had a US green card (as has Murty) and had declared himself a “permanent US resident” for tax purposes for his 6 years as a UK MP, including his 19 months as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Even the Telegraph took a dim view of all these shenanigans but just said “People have the right to expect better”.  The front page of the Daily Mail ignored the Chancellor and tried to distract attention from partygate by shouting in large capitals “DON’T THEY KNOW THERE’S A WAR ON?”  Yes mush, but it’s not our war, and we’re already funding arms for Ukraine.

We’re also preparing for World War III by upgrading military bunkers so they can be used to store nuclear weapons for America for the first time since 2008.  This ensures that the UK will be a target for some of Russia’s bombs, leaving fewer to fall on American soil.  Anybody worried about surviving a nuclear war should move as close as possible to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk.

Mind you, Johnson’s latest brainwave beggars belief.  After Priti Patel, the home secretary, had flown there, Johnson announced that men seeking asylum here will be flown 4,500 miles to Rwanda for their claims to be processed and Patel hopes they will be so enchanted by the country, they’ll want to stay there instead (on their own).  A Downing Street statement described Rwanda as having “one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa which is recognised globally for its record on welcoming and integrating migrants” – no mention of its human rights record.

Rwanda?   What’s the first word that comes to mind when someone says “Rwanda”?  To me, it’s “genocide.”  Remember the estimated million Hutus and Tutsis who slaughtered each other in 1994? 

Luckily the outrage at this decision has been expressed by everybody from the UN to the Archbishop of Canterbury and right down to MPs.

In Moscow, an artist has been locked up and will be held on remand until 31 May.  Alexandra Skochilenko’s crime was to replace supermarket price tickets with small pieces of paper protesting against the war or, in the words of a new law banning fake news about Russia’s armed forces, publicising “knowingly false information about the use of the Russian armed forces”.

In court, she was smiling and made victory signs at the courtroom although, if she’s found guilty (if??? – this is Russia we’re talking about!), she could face a fine of up to 3m roubles (£27,000) or between five and ten years in prison.  Remember Vladimir Putin jailed Pussy Riot for singing.

On a lighter note (spoiler alert:  pun intended), a highway patrol in San Francisco pulled over a car for driving without its headlights on and found it was empty – one o’ them thar autonomous vee hykles.  It then sped off into the middle distance and the police lost it.  Why do I find that slightly worrying?

And a Korean doctor has been quoted as saying that people who haven’t had covid yet probably have no friends.  Although my wife had it, I didn’t so, if you’re in the same position, let me know and we can be friends together.

And Royal Mail last year received more than 1m complaints from householders, the most for 10 years.  To celebrate this unworthy achievement of a company that was privatised to save the government (i.e.  taxpayers) money, they have just increased the cost of a first-class stamp by 12% from 85p to 95p which, for those of us old enough to remember when all letters went for 3d, is 19/-; or for those who aren’t old enough, 76 times as much.  Just think of the work this is saving you:  back then, you would have to write to Uncle Mac 76 times to spend what you’d now have to spend to write to him once.

And I recently visited an ENT consultant who confirmed his diagnosis in a letter to my doctor.  There was a disclaimer on the end saying “elements of this letter have been generated using voice dictation software” but I was comforted to know that a fibreoptic nasoendoscopy had revealed “normal you station tube openings”.

And finally, more than half the peregrine chicks that fledge don’t survive their first year and those that do tend to stay within 60 miles of their birthplace.  However, Osmund, the only male chick born in 2020 on Salisbury cathedral’s tower, has been seen on holiday in Guernsey. 

Male peregrines are often called tiercels (from the Latin word for a third, because they’re about a third smaller than the females).  Peregrines are, of course, the fastest animals on earth when stooping:  they close their wings and drop from a great height to spoil the day of some poor unsuspecting rodent out for a stroll.  In 2005, an American peregrine falcon was clocked at 242 mph while dropping from nearly three miles in the air.

Their eyesight must be much better than mine, spotting a small snack from 3 miles away …

Horrors of Putin’s war and insiders’ views

10 April 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Verses from a Russian Soldier.

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

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

A doctor from Kherson treated me,

Weary, stern and grim.

He treated me. Listen, mum,

I was hitting the town with rockets, 

and half the hospital was in ruins,

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

Mum, I am a monster, forgive me.

We lost our way in the floods of lies.

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

Now my eyes are opened.

They took us past the places

that had been reached by our missiles.

And we couldn’t believe our eyes:

What had we done to Kherson!

The hospitals are full of the wounded.

Here every one is cursing the Russians.

A father, white as a sheet,

Is rocking his dead child.

Mother, I am a monster, an executioner.

And, mama, there are no terrorists here.

Here there are only human groans and tears

And we are worse than fascists to them.

Mum, they sent us to be slaughtered.

Our battalion commander had no pity for us.

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

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

He didn’t want to shoot me.

he is a Man, and I am a Murderer.

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

Me, a murderer, a shedder of blood!

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

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

A doctor from Kherson treated me

Weary, stern and grim.

he was doing his duty as a doctor,

While I was thinking as I burned with shame.

For the first time I had the chance to wonder

Just who needs a war like this?

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

20 March 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 March 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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