Sexist sports, South Park’s apology and free speech

2 August 2025

My sport-free existence was this invaded by the news that the England Women’s National Football Team beat Spain on a penalty shoot-out to win the UEFA Women’s European Championship trophy and their manager Sarina Wiegman took a lot of the credit. 

I accidentally watched part of one game and was surprised how by skilful both the teams were but it was clear they’d never watched proper men’s football because nobody seemed to fall over in agony, screaming for the ref, then getting up and carrying on as if nothing had happened when they realised nobody had seen them.

Nevertheless, I was interested to see that good old English class distinctions still prevail in sport:  female footballers are ‘women’ while female tennis players are ‘ladies’.  I wonder if this might be linked to the football trophy’s resemblance to an oversize and somewhat kinky dildo whose owner had accidently sneezed while experimenting with it while the Wimbledon trophy just looks like a plate whose user would need bread to mop the last traces of gravy out of the engraved surface.

This week also saw Keir Starmer give a somewhat lacklustre performance at his meeting with Donald Trump on Monday but I wondered whether he’d done this on purpose to allow Trump to look his usual stupid self, without needing somebody to feed him ammunition, because Starmer announced the following day that the UK would be following in France’s footsteps and would recognise the state of Palestine in September.

Trump had naturally been taking his presidential duties seriously and had played two rounds of golf at his Turnberry golf course.  A cousin of mine passed the entrance to Turnberry at about the same time and said there was “a sweet old lady”, who he thinks spends much of her time there, holding up a sign saying “Trump is a C*nt” except she doesn’t use an asterisk.  He said he would have joined her but he still had a long way to drive that day and didn’t want to get embrangled.

Trump’s latest revelation is that he doesn’t employ staff, he owns them.  He admitted this by claiming Jeffrey Epstein had “stolen” staff from his Florida club.  The word ‘poached’ is more commonly used in such situations but it reveals how Trump thinks and, to be fair, he’d probably have said anything that might distract people from demanding the release of “the Epstein files”.  Back in 2002, Trump told New York magazine “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy.  He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Another of his former BFFs …

Those of us who are less than charitable hope it’s only a matter of time before the files are released and he is suitably embarrassed by the addition of more crimes to his charge sheet.

A couple of weeks ago, he was parodied in the American animated series South Park which showed a picture of his head on an animated, explicitly naked body climbing into bed with Satan.  They also showed a hyper-realistic, deepfake video of Trump stripping off in a desert with a suggestion that Trump’s genitalia are small.

It is of course gratuitously offensive so, if you’re of a sensitive disposition, don’t click on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afetnw70S04 and watch it.  Can you think of another American president in recent times who has been so widely ridiculed?

By the way, the penis was given eyes so it became a character in its own right because the producers had threatened to blur the image if it was just a penis.  To make everything clear, the clip is marked “Altered or synthetic content.  Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated.” (just in case people thought it was real) and the makers prefaced the show with an explanation that “All characters and events in this show – even those based on real people – are entirely fictional. All celebrity voices are impersonated … poorly. The following program contains coarse language and due to its content it should not be viewed by anyone.”

In response to an angry complaint from the White house, South Park co-creator Trey Parker said “We’re terribly sorry”, followed by a long, deadpan-comic stare.

Wouldn’t the world be a better place if there were more South Parks and fewer Trumps.

Which is but a short step to the most recent demonstration of the far right’s hero Tommy Robinson’s stupidity.  A video posted online last week shows him standing by a prone, apparently unconscious figure in a London station saying “He come at me bruv.”  So, as a tru-Brit, he naturally went with the police and explained it was self-defence.  Not.  What he actually did was flee the country and he’s now believed to be in Tenerife.

He’s used various other names in the past, one of which was Wayne King.  Isn’t that brilliant!  Perhaps he used to have a dirty raincoat and frequent public telephone boxes.

But, putting aside violence and mickey-taking, I’m glad I live in a country where we are free to say what we think, however stupid other people may think we are, and I was glad to see that a high court judge has just reaffirmed our right to do this.

Huda Ammori, co-founder of Palestine Action, had challenged the legality of the Home Secretary’s decision to use anti-terrorism laws to ban the group and a high court judge has ruled that the ban risks doing “considerable harm to the public interest”.

In his ruling, Sir Martin Chamberlain KC referred to a demonstrator, Laura Murton, who had been threatened with arrest for holding a Palestinian flag and a sign saying ‘Free Gaza’, and said he thought this could infringe the human rights of people “wishing to express legitimate political views”. 

Perhaps some over-zealous police should visit Turnberry.

Lies, conspiracy theories and Intelligent Design

29 April 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/

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

9 January 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19 December 2021

Bob Dylan wuz robbed. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Broken promises, Taliban, sleazocracy, UK dictatorship, Scottish coal, guns, camels and kindness

12 December 2021

My Brexiteer friend objected to last week’s reference to his defensiveness and said he “could say that a defensive remainer friend of mine still refuses to take positive action by starting a movement to rejoin the EU”.

I replied that, while I’d love the UK to rejoin the EU, the pandemic should be focussing countries’ efforts elsewhere and, anyway, I would be worried that “any request to rejoin would now be met by a refusal … because we are apparently a chumocracy riddled with sleaze, corruption, lies, U-turns and a refusal to honour a legally binding document.”

The worst broken broken promise was to the “tens of thousands” of Afghan soldiers, politicians, journalists, civil servants, feminists, aid workers and judges who we’d promised to evacuate after the Taliban re-took control.  A whistleblower has blamed bureaucratic chaos in the Foreign Office and, in the end, we only managed to bring back a planeload of dogs and about 15,000 people (filling an aeroplane with dogs instead of people was allegedly cleared by the prime minister).

America gave such short notice of their withdrawal that the FCDO didn’t have enough time (or, apparently, the will) to deal with thousands of applications and, when the then Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, was asked to give his personal approval of individuals, it took him “several hours” to get down to it but, when he did, he delayed things further by demanding that the files be reformatted because their presentation was “not quite right”.  Quite?  He had the power of life or death over real people and very limited time and he thought the formatting wasn’t quite right.

When challenged last week about why so many had been abandoned, Raab said 15,000 was quite a lot of people, which was a huge comfort to the friends and relatives of all the people who were no longer alive enough to cheer him because the Taliban had, as promised, amnestied them and freed them from reprisals but they had then died suddenly of a bullet in the back of the head.

One of Johnson’s better reactions was to demote him.  Raab has since justified his downgrading by saying the police wouldn’t investigate an illegal party that took place a year ago.  People who actually know about these things say there is no legal reason to prevent prosecution and it was the Metropolitan Police who decided not to investigate.

A former head of the Met said the police seemed to be acting as judge and jury which is, of course, exactly what the government wants as it tries to introduce a law that would allow the government to overrule judgements of the Supreme Court.  Still, we could save a fortune on lawyers and just get the prime minister to decide who’s guilty – it works in Afghanistan and Myanmar – though I’d rather cases were judged by experienced lawyers and not the government.

Johnson’s own problems include the 2020 Christmas party in number 10 and the still unanswered question about who paid to redecorate his flat.  He actually offered parliament his apologies at PMQs for the party that he said didn’t take place and Keir Starmer went for the jugular, to Johnson’s obvious annoyance.  If only Starmer could be so forceful for more of the time, Labour might win some more seats, particularly with their current showing in the polls and Barack Obama’s help.

In the North Shropshire byelection next Thursday, the Conservative candidate has been ordered not to speak to the media because he lives in Birmingham and knows very little about the area.  His attempts to replace Owen Paterson, who resigned after being outed as a member of the sleazocracy wing of the Tory party, might not have been helped by the Conservative MP for Walsall North, Eddie Hughes, saying how the people of North Staffordshire should vote for him.  Well, Salop, Staffs, what the hell, they’re both north of Watford.

A number of less traditional candidates are also standing, including one for the Official Monster Raving Looney Party and Drew Galdron, a Johnson impersonator, who is standing on a ‘Boris Been-Bunged, Rejoin EU’ platform.  An amusing 2:19 minute interview with Galdron, dressed in the union jack and little else, has been tweeted by Richard Hewison of the Shropshire Star.

Thank heavens there are still some people willing to lose £500 to entertain others.

The redecoration problem has been going on for months but Johnson’s now accused of misleading his own ethics adviser, Lord Geidt:  he sent a WhatsApp message to Lord Brownlow asking for more money for the refurbishment and later said he didn’t know who had given money for the work, which lie could lead to his suspension from the House of Commons. 

After the UK’s commitment to cut carbon emissions, Nicola Sturgeon pressed the button that demolished Scotland’s tallest freestanding structure, the chimney at the former coal plant in Longannet, Fife.  The power-generating plant had been closed in 2016, but the tower’s destruction symbolically ended of the nation’s coal age.

South of the border, England is still havering over opening a brand-new coal mine in Cumbria!  The Planning Inspectorate’s report hasn’t yet been published but the final decision will be made by the Communities Secretary, Michael ‘The Shiv’ Gove.  To his credit, Boris Johnson said at the Cop26 climate conference that he is “not in favour of more coal” but one wonders how much Gove needs his support.

Another problem has been voiced by Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, who said recreational drug users, such as casual users of cocaine, are “the final link in the chain” fuelling the international criminal business.  He then announced an additional £780m of funding (over ten years) for the drug treatment system.  Presumably, police will now go round busting middle-class dinner parties offering lines of coke bought with bankers’ bonuses.  Punishments being considered include removing their driving licences (seems sensible) and passports (well, it’ll stop weekend tours of the poppy fields of Afghanistan).

But there’s good news from America where the last president has finally admitted he’s “very stupid, or very corrupt” or, of course, both.  In a statement last week Donald Trump said “Anybody that doesn’t think there wasn’t massive election fraud in the 2020 presidential election is either very stupid, or very corrupt!”  (His exclamation mark, not mine.)

And the usual bad news.

According to a National Public Radio study of deaths per 100,000 people since May in 3,000 counties across America, people living in counties that voted for Trump by at least 60% are 2.7 times more likely to die of Covid than those who voted heavily for Joe Biden.  Keep it up you Democrats:  if you die, you take three Republicans with you.

Shortly after a 15-year old in Michigan shot and killed four teenagers and wounded seven more, Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, tweeted a Christmassy picture of himself and (presumably) his family in front of a decorated Christmas tree.  All seven of them are wearing happy smiles and cradling automatic weapons;  the message sent with it says “Merry Christmas! PS: Santa, please bring ammo.” 

I’m not alone in finding this frightening:  Bob Dylan wrote almost 60 years ago “I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children” …

Priorities are different in Saudi Arabia where more than 40 camels were disqualified from a beauty contest because they’d been botoxed.  Why do I find seeing ‘camels’ and ‘beauty’ in the same sentence as disconcerting as I do seeing ‘Boris Johnson’ and ‘integrity’ in the same sentence?

But there are still kindnesses in the world:  the actor Michael Sheen has said he’s now a “not-for-profit actor”.  He founded the End High Cost Credit Alliance to help people find more affordable ways of borrowing money in 2017;  two years later, he organised the Homeless World Cup in Cardiff and, when the £2m funding fell through at the last moment, he sold his own houses to pay for it.

Sheen told the Big Issue he’d be “paying for it for a long time” but he realised he could do things like this and still earn money from acting.  A new hero.

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.

A fairy story and an invitation

7 November 2021

Fairy story

Once upon a time, the companies who build houses and blocks of flats discovered it was cheaper to use cladding and other materials that they knew were combustible.  This let them make more profit and pay their directors more.  They were also able to pay their owners dividends. 

When the buildings needed more heat insulation, these inflammable cladding panels were used.

One day, the cladding on a big building called Grenfell Tower caught fire and a lot of people were burnt to death.  The landlords, the Royal (!) Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, had already been warned that fire precautions inside the buildings were inadequate but had done nothing except threaten the complainers with legal action.

It’s not our fault, said the companies who’d made and sold the cladding they knew was dangerous.  It’s not our fault, said the companies who’d built the flats and used the cladding they knew was dangerous. It’s not our fault, said the landlords, the Royal (!) Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, who had already been warned that fire precautions inside the buildings were inadequate but had done nothing.

They all said they’d followed the rules.

So everybody was happy except the people who lived in similar properties.  Their friends and relations weren’t too pleased either.  Nor were a lot of other people who wanted similar materials removed from all other buildings;  and force-fed to the manufacturers and developers and landlords.

When they started to count all the other buildings with similar cladding, the companies who had manufactured and installed the faulty materials and managed the properties ran out of fingers and lost count and said it would cost a lot of money to make them all safe. 

So they said it wasn’t their problem.  They thought the government should pay.  

They all had public liability insurance but the insurers said it wasn’t their problem.  They thought the government should pay.

The government didn’t want to pay because their money comes from innocent people known as Taxpayers whose votes keep them in power.  And anyway, the government had already spent its money on new railway lines and border controls and new Brexit bureaucracy so they didn’t have any to spare.

In the end, they all agreed that the people living in the flats should pay for the greed of the companies and councils and their managers who had kept the money that could have protected them.  So they sent these people very large bills.  Some people living in dangerous buildings in Salford were asked to pay £20,000 each. 

Nothing happened for a very long time.  People still had to live in dangerous flats which they couldn’t sell because nobody wanted to buy a flat that might kill them.

While nothing was happening, even more people needed ‘affordable’ housing. 

(‘Affordable’ means smaller properties which are cheaper to buy even though property developers still make the same profit per square foot as they do on larger properties.) 

Then the developers had A Good Idea.  They told the government they couldn’t afford to build as many cheaper properties if they were forced to pay for their mistakes.    The government knew that if they didn’t let developers build more cheaper properties, the families who need them might be unhappy and not vote for them again.

But people got bored and hoped that, if they ignored it, the problems would go away, so nothing happened for another very long time.

Property developers continued to choose materials by price, not safety or suitability, because they thought money was more important than other people’s lives.  The government continued to give ‘help to buy’ money to developers instead of directly to people buying their first house.  At least one developer publicly said that next year would be even more profitable because the government scheme was continuing.

Luckily, a good fairy will appear to give this story will have a happy ending.  All the companies who manufactured and built and owned and managed the properties will have to pay to make buildings safe.  And they will have to return the money intended to help buyers to the government.

This may bankrupt some of them but this only matters to poor people who will lose their jobs who will be given token benefits and payments by the government.  As long as they’re not foreigners or immigrants or refugees.

All the very rich people in all the companies will be made to sell everything they own privately to pay for the repairs.  Then they will spend a long time in prison for corporate manslaughter and the rest of us will live happily ever after.

Epilogue

Unfortunately, this is a fairy story and there will be no happy ending because there are probably no fairies.  However, in grossly over-simplified form, it illustrates the vast chasm between people on the political ‘right’ who support companies and those on the political ‘left’ who support people.

Because the companies involved are ‘limited liability’ companies, they can go bust with impunity:  shareholders lose the money they spent on their shares but keep the dividends the company’s given them since they bought the shares, and the directors and managers keep the salaries and bonuses they paid themselves.  (The people who actually did the work also get to keep what they were paid but this is a tiny proportion of the total payments and wouldn’t make any difference.)

Perhaps the law on ‘limited liability’ needs to be changed in such cases so that directors and managers should have to repay all the money they took from the company that exceeded a fixed minimum, selling houses and yachts and other stuff they’d bought, to make up any shortfall;  and shareholders (some of whom are often the same people) should refund all the dividends they’d been given by the company.  Then the company could pay the people who’d actually provided the money given to the directors and shareholders, the suppliers, tax authorities and all the others who lost money in the bankruptcy they’d caused.

Even so, the people who died will still be dead.

Disclaimer

This is obviously a grossly over-simplified summary of a very complex world involving laws and regulations that were introduced centuries ago but, by reducing it to the absurd, the basic inequities become clear.  I know many people will disagree violently but all I’m trying to do is highlight the fact that, in business, equity and humanity are only relevant if they increase customers’ goodwill and the business’s profits.

I’d just like people to think about whether there can ever be any connection between being honourable and believing pounds, shillings and pence are the only measure of success.

(Complaints and corrections to me please and, if they’re interesting enough, I’ll include them in a future Muttering).

Football, racism, “levelling up”, foreigners, goldfish and Britney Spears

18 July 2021

Before last Sunday’s football match, an England supporter wedged a flare into his bum and lit it, to the delight of his mates (and a wider internet audience).  What a good job he inserted it the right way round.  On the other hand …

In the event, Italy won the 2021 UEFA European Championship after extra time and a penalty shoot-out.  If two teams have drawn after all that time, it surely says that they were evenly matched and both teams played equally well so it seems very unfair to pick five members of each team to kick a ball to decide the result.  Why they don’t they replay the match later (didn’t they used to do that?) or just accept it’s in the lap of the gods and toss a coin, or agree they’re both the best and share the prize?

Imagine how you would feel if you’re one of the ten kickers and miss and your team then loses;  wouldn’t you feel you’d personally let down your six team-mates who didn’t have a go, and your manager, and the club, and the fans, and your country?

What was so sad about the aftermath was the reaction of a certain senior politician who said that, if footballers kept out of politics and stuck to footballing, they’d play better*, and a small minority of bad losers tried to assign the ultimate loss to something about the players that had nothing to do with their footballing skills.

In a different context, the irrelevance of these types of prejudice was neatly encapsulated by Lucy Mangan in a review of the recent Channel 5 series ‘Anne Boleyn’:

“Holding it all together they have a superb Anne [Boleyn] in [Jodie] Turner-Smith … Turner-Smith’s casting caused a stir because she is of Jamaican descent.  If you are someone who is bothered by that, well then you are probably the kind of person who is always going to be bothered by that and we need not detain you here.  For what it’s worth, I am aware that Anne Boleyn wasn’t black, but I’m also aware that she wasn’t Claire Foy, Merle Oberon, Helena Bonham Carter or any of the other women who have played her over the years, and my brain is not unduly upset by any of it.”

Then, on Thursday, Boris Johnson addressed the nation and I watched part of his speech until I became so incensed I had to leave to burst into tears somewhere quiet. 

It was obvious from the speed with which he flipped over the notes he was reading it that it was written in very large type so even he couldn’t ad lib his way through the smaller print (why don’t people just push sheets to one side instead of flapping them up and over – it doesn’t matter what order they’re in after they’ve been used does it?).  And it was still so toe-curlingly feeble that even his front-benchers had to turn their faces to the wall.

There was even a reference to recovering like “a coiled spring”.  Have you ever seen an uncoiled spring?

It’s roughly two years since Johnson announced his “levelling up” policy so he’s had about 730 days since to decide the detail of how he will achieve this but all we got was political soundbites about rich areas not getting poorer, more support from government, more to encourage businesses, more jobs and more opportunities, more power to local government and other vague improbabilities.

I thought one journalist who described his speech as being “light on detail” was being over-generous but I was more worried about the things he didn’t mention, like how to fund the recovery; or the reducing state benefits;  or people who are unable to work because of medical conditions or family commitments or lack of local opportunities;  or homeless people;  or his broken promises about foreign aid for people (foreigners) starving to death overseas;  or increased powers to reject refugees (foreigners) seeking safety in the UK and to deport those who have been here for decades (foreigners) to countries they’ve never even seen.  I wonder if those who came over on, say, the Windrush and have since died (late foreigners) will be exhumed and returned to their country of origin, freeing up more space for jerry-builders to throw up cheap, nasty micro-houses on tiny plots which can be sold as “affordable” because cheap, nasty materials make even more profit for them.

Transparency International, an organisation whose mission is “to stop corruption and promote transparency, accountability and integrity at all levels and across all sectors of society” works “in over 100 countries to end the injustice of corruption”.  They recently reported that the Conservatives have an “unhealthy financial reliance” on property developers and more than 20% of their income in the last decade came from the residential property sector.

This obviously doesn’t prove that their policies were influenced by these donations but the report makes the point that such reliance on housing-based donations creates “a real risk of aggregative corruption” but it could of course be sheer coincidence that the government is now supporting the construction of housing estates on SSSIs, AONBs, ancient woodlands and floodplains.

As for the NHS, education, the global climate emergency and trying to rebuild relations with our neighbours (yet more foreigners) after Johnson was/is so dishonourable and/or incompetent about the Brexit deal he signed …

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent research unit, NHS funding increased by an average of 6% a year while we had a Labour government, and National Insurance contributions were increased by 10% to help pay for it.  Since 2010, the Conservatives have refused to increase raxes and limited NHS funding increases to just over 1% despite a survey by the King’s Fund in 2016 showing that 70% of us are willing to pay more tax if the extra revenue was ring-fenced and spent only on the NHS.

Unfortunately, the government has this delusion that private companies, particularly those who once poured a senior politician a beer, can do things better so there’s no need for competitive tendering or probing too deeply, and certainly no need to ask why companies claim money from the government under the furlough support scheme but then give it to their senior management and shareholders.

What’s most surprising is that quite a few of the intelligent Conservative MPs feel that’s it’s more honourable to support and be loyal to their elected leader than to call out his continual lies and failures;  the only consolation is that quite a few even more intelligent Conservative MPs are becoming willing to stand against his more extremist ideas.

Witness the government’s approval of the Nationality and Borders Bill, although this could actually be a worthy attempt to ensure that England keeps its reputation for low-IQ, drug-fuelled English football ’fans’ unsullied by closing its borders to foreigners who are just trying to find somewhere they can live and work and stay alive.  (According to some specialist lawyers, the Bill is apparently worded so badly that RNLI lifeboats could get prosecuted if they’re found in coastal waters saving people from a sinking ship.)

Still, I gained some small comfort from the fact that we still have enough freedom to set up a new right-wing TV channel under the leadership of Andrew Neil, the man who converted me from the Sunday Times to the Observer when he became the former’s editor all those years ago.  I was even more encouraged by its initial impact and viewing figures – hardly anybody watched its lunchtime programme on Wednesday and Neil’s own ‘flagship’ show has disappeared while Neil disappears for a holiday in his main residence in the south of France and other executives have resigned.  To recover these losses, they’re now bringing in two beacons of undoubted objectivity and integrity:  Nigel Farage and Piers Morgan.

Our new health minister, Sajid David, has tested positive for Covid so the entire Cabinet including Johnson will now presumably have to self-isolate, along with all the top people at the Department at Health who actually do the work.  Let’s see if we miss them.

The fascinating leak of Russian documents confirm that, in January 2016, they assessed Donald Trump as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex” and they apparently confirm that the Kremlin possesses potentially compromising material on him.  Their conclusion was that “It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate [Trump’s] election to the post of US president”, predicting that this would lead to “the destabilisation of the US’s sociopolitical system and see hidden discontent burst into the open”.

How right they were.

The world can only hope that enough of the umpteen charges now being levelled against Trump both corporately and personally will prove enough criminal malfeasance to merit a prison sentence that would prevent him ever standing for president again.

Interestingly, it appears that owners of fishponds and aquariums in Minnesota have been transferring surplus goldfish into local waterways where they grow huge and destroy local ecosystems.  They remain bright orange and immensely stupid but latest reports imply that none of them are planning to stand for president in 2024.

And finally, I have to admit that I know next to nothing about Britney Spears or her father but her recent attempts to be freed from her father’s control, which extended even as far as contraception, did make me wonder if the courts would have allowed a 39 year-old man to be so controlled by his mother.

Anyway, she’s finally won and has said she’s happy to work with the other conservator, which – in my ignorance – pleases me no end.

*          How I wish some politicians would stay out of politics and just play football

Dubya comes good, The Giving Pledge, greed and sleaze, NFAs, small ads and PD Hogan

9 May 2021

George W Bush has resurfaced on the right side.  When a replacement for a Texas member of congress who died of Covid was to be elected, Bush was asked if he agreed with the “more than 50%” of Republicans who think the election was stolen by Joe Biden.  “No,” he said “I guess I’m one of the other 50%.”

He then went on to say “By the way, I’m still a Republican, proud to be Republican. I think Republicans will have a second chance to govern, because I believe that the Biden administration is a uniting factor, and particularly on the fiscal side of things. So, you know, we’ll see. But I know this – that if the Republican party stands for exclusivity, you know, used to be country clubs, now evidently it’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, then it’s not going to win anything.”

His grasp of maths and his fluency in American English are as impressive as ever but his heart’s obviously in the right place.  Interestingly, Barack Obama says in his new book that, while he disagreed with almost everything Bush did while he was president, he liked him as a man, something that was obvious from their brief interactions at Bush’s father’s funeral.

The announcement that Bill and Melinda Gates are to separate drew attention to ‘The Giving Pledge’ that they set up in 2009 with Warren Buffet.  It invites other billionaires to join them in pledging to give at least half their wealth to charity and more than 170 of the world’s richest people have so far signed up to it.

Four of America’s five richest have made the commitment, the missing one being Jeff Bezos of Amazon even though, since his divorce in 2019, his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott has promised to give away all her fortune and gave away almost $6bn dollars last year, thought to be the largest amount ever given in a single year.

Bezos himself is facing new questions over Amazon’s accounting and tax arrangements.  The latest accounts show that the income of both Amazon EU and Amazon US increased by more than 50% and crowed about the increase in their sales in the UK but signally failed to say how much UK corporation tax it had paid on its profits on UK sales. 

Joe Biden has already tabled proposals to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to overhaul the systems exploited by multinational companies and has called for a minimum corporation tax rate.  His suggestion is basically that large technology and corporations should pay taxes to the country in which the sales were made regardless of where they are based.

Bezos actually welcomed Biden’s proposals and said Amazon was “supportive of a rise in the corporate tax rate” but, as far as I know, he hasn’t commented on whether he supports the idea that tax should be paid to the countries where sales are made rather than transferring them to another country where tax rates are lower.

At the Yorkshire Building Society’ AGM last week, ten times as many people voted not to approve the directors’ remuneration policy as voted to accept last year’s report and accounts (which is just a technicality).  And, at Rio Tinto’s AGM (remember them – blew up some 46,000 year-old rock shelters that were sacred to Indigenous Australians, fired their CEO and then gave him bonuses of £2.7m?), 61% of shareholders voted against the company’s remuneration policy.

There is, of course, an element of hypocrisy in this since so many of RTZ’s shares are held by fund managers who don’t stint when paying themselves but, never mind, we have to start somewhere. 

Talking of fund managers, did you see that Neil Woodford who screwed up a couple of years ago and lost a lot of money for a lot of people (not himself naturally), is trying to set up a new fund and do it all over again but his plans have been greeted with less than unbridled enthusiasm.

Who was it who described investment managers as people who charge you fees for investing your money until it’s all gone?

With the government now being pressed by the Good Law Project to release details of which 17 private healthcare companies got from the £2bn paid for Covid-19 contracts, and how many of them have given money to the Conservative party or have ‘related parties’ in government, perhaps the sleaziness of our current government will be even more obvious than it is already and something will have to be done.

Thursday’s elections results don’t seem to show this but maybe people just take it for granted that greed and sleaze are now normal for Boris Johnson’s gang and have stopped caring.

The growth of interest in Non-Fungible Assets is fascinating;  they don’t have any intrinsic value, and are basically chunks of data stored in a digital ‘ledger’ that assign ‘ownership’ of, say, a photograph, which is different from owning the copyright in the photograph.  Other people can still access and copy the image, but they don’t ‘own’ it, which could give rise to some interesting court cases in due course.  I am yet to be convinced of their worth and prefer things I can (a) understand and (b) funge.

Meanwhile, French fishing boats have been blockading Jersey’s fishing port and France is threatening to cut off Jersey’s electricity supply so the UK government has sent in two patrol boats with guns.  It’s sad that the EU, which grew from the Common Market, which was formed primarily to avoid further intra-Europe wars and, within months of our leaving it, Jersey’s fishing community is saying the blockade is “pretty close to an act of war” and the UK is sending out ships that can blast unarmed fishing boats to kingdom come.  Why don’t they just skip all the foreplay and send the SAS in to annex Poland?

This week, the Guardian newspaper celebrated its 200^th birthday and included a facsimile of the first issue.  The front page was covered in small ads, as was also the case with later broadsheets (the Times didn’t put news on its front page till 1966), which show just how much advertising has changed over the years.

The first advertisement reads “A BLACK NEWFOUNDLAND BITCH, any person having lost the same, may now have her again on describing her marks, and paying all expenses …”  And further down. “JAMES NUTTALL, BOOKSELLER … returns his most grateful thanks to his Friends and the Public, for the repeated favours conferred on him, and earnestly entreats a continuance of that kindness …”

For some reason, it reminded me of an advertisement I saw in the ‘Personal’ small ads in one of London’s free papers (‘Nine to Five’) in the 1980s:  “English male aged 36 single and lonely seeks female for friendship and marriage any nationality colour, interests walking in the countryside, landscape photography and spanking.”

The Guardian also devoted two full pages to errors of judgement it has made over the years;  I wonder if the Telegraph would dare do that.

Back in the old days, when these ramblings were emailed and not blogged, I enthused about a group called Police Dog Hogan who play “an exuberant fusion of country, pop, folk and rocking bluegrass”.  I was looking at their website recently to see if they’re planning to come down this way again and discovered they have a new drummer who “is best known for being founder member and drummer of the much-lauded Sweet Billy Pilgrim …  This means he can play in 13/8 time, something we’ve banned him from doing in Police Dog Hogan, as 4/4 is our limit”.

Why is self-deprecation so much more attractive than self-importance?