Idiots, hypocrites, protests and British politicians

11 October 2025

Enough stuff has been happening recently to inspire me to hoick out another sheet of vellum, extract a quill from the bum of a passing goose, and scratch away at some more mutterings.

In the first year of his second presidency, Trump’s own online and onstage performances have become so deranged that Madeleine Dean, a Democratic congresswoman from Pennsylvania, told the Republican house speaker Mike Johnson “The president is unhinged. He is unwell.”  

Johnson’s response was “Well a lot of folks on your side are too”.  Or, in English, “So the person with his finger on the button has dementia?  A lot of powerless people on your side also have dementia” (or, in everyday language, “My dog can fart louder than your dog.”)

The other thing that spurred me to action was the murder of Charlie Kirk on 10 September. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who hadn’t heard of him until he was shot but he seems to have been one of the spittle-spouting bigots from the less-humane end of America’s Republican party.

Reactions across the political spectrum were predictable:  right-wingers were incensed that people on the left would do this;  left-wingers were appalled that the killer claimed to be on their side. 

Whether or not I believe Kirk should be canonised is unimportant (although ‘Saint Charlie’ does have a certain ring to it …)  What is important is that I believe nobody has any right to kill anybody else because they don’t share the same political or religious beliefs (or for any other reason).

Then, in Manchester, a British terrorist attacked a synagogue, killing and wounding several people before he was himself shot dead by the police.

This produced an immediate response from one of the world’s biggest hypocrites, Benjamin Netanyahu, who said “Israel grieves with the Jewish community in the UK after the barbaric terror attack in Manchester.”  Followed by which he ordered more barbaric terror attacks on the remaining Palestinians he hasn’t already murdered.  By the end of July, he’d succeeded in killing 18,457 children according to an official list of named victims accepted as accurate by the international community, the UN and Israel’s military (but not Israeli politicians!)

A 27^th ceasefire* and exchange of hostages has since been agreed but we’ll see how long that lasts.  Two hours after the new ceasefire came into effect, Israeli tanks opened fire on Palestinians but their troops subsequently withdrew to new, agreed positions.

Last weekend saw a demonstration in London organised by Defend Our Juries to protest against the banning of Palestine Action, a UK network set up in 2020, “committed to ending global participation in Israel’s genocidal and apartheid regime”.  The ban adds it to a list of more than 80 groups of international political movements with armed wings, like Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as armed groups like ISIS/ISIL, al-Qaeda and Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan.

Some of Palestine Action’s members are certainly guilty of causing criminal damage but it doesn’t have an armed wing and this protest was about the banning of a UK group whose members are opposed to the government’s continuing support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.  One demonstrator was cautioned and nearly arrested by the police for holding up a sign.  As they were about to carry him off, he suggested they read what his sign said:  “I oppose genocide – I support plasticine action”, in big, bold capitals.

The police laughed and left him.

The organisers were hoping to beat the arrest record set by a peaceful CND demonstration in 1961 but, with my help, they didn’t quite make it (I was there in 1961, I was arrested and fined £1, which seemed a fair price for a night’s accommodation, a good breakfast in Balham nick and luxury coach transport to Marylebone Court, followed by which I went back to school for the afternoon).

The demonstration was held on the same day as the Peckham Conker Championships in south London.  Isn’t it nice to have a choice of events to attend.

There’s a great shortlist for Idiot of the Month with Trump telling other countries what to do, Robert Jenrick complaining that Birmingham isn’t the sort of place he’d want to live in because he was there for 40 minutes and didn’t see a white face, goody bags at the Conservative Party Conference containing some chocolate with Kemi Badenoch’s signature printed on the wrapper under the words “When Labour negotiates, Britian loses”.

As fascinating as ever is the continuing fragmentation of the British political system.  For as long as I can remember, the government of Great Britain has been controlled or overseen by Conservatives on the right and Labour on the left, with a few Liberals and others somewhere in the middle. 

Now both the Conservative and Labour parties appear to be floundering in the wake of their unimpressive leaders while Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is attracting so many people disenchanted by the other parties that there’s a very real risk he could be Britain’s next prime minister.  Farage thinks teachers would immediately go on strike if he were elected because he’s accused them of “poisoning our kids” by telling them that black children are victims and white children oppressors – now there’s an unbrilliant reason to vote for him.

But he’s still the best at public speaking if you don’t listen too closely to what he’s saying but his only loyalty is to himself and he only became an MP for the first time last year (his 27^th attempt* for 27 different parties*).

By the way, this blog’s by-line is “a thing of shreds and patches”.  One reader who is clearly much more learned than I am has pointed out my quotation from The Mikado was actually adapted by Sir William Schwenck Gilbert from Shakespeare:  Hamlet describes his murderous and usurping uncle as ‘a king of shreds and patches’. 

*          I exaggerate …

Looking on the bright side

23 December 2023

The Conservative government has just made its second genuinely good decision in 13 years of power by announcing it’s going to introduce a new GCSE in British Sign Language to ease the lives of people who can only communicate by using it.  I once asked a signer at a conference how long it took her to learn to be that fluent;  when she said seven years, I gave up the idea of taking an evening class.

(In case you’ve forgotten the other good decision they made was to legalise same sex marriage.)

This week has also seen Michelle Mone getting a lot of stick after she admitted lying to the press and saying that she and her children wouldn’t benefit from the tens of millions stashed in a trust fund if she and Doug Barrowman were to divorce.  Then I saw part of a recording of her interview with Laura Kuenssberg and discovered she has the most wonderful Scottish accent, my favourite accent in the entire world.  She’s innocent I tell you.  I don’t care if she dolled herself up like a tuppeny tart for the interview or went down 28-nil to Kuenssberg.  Nobody with an accent like that could possibly be guilty of anything.

Well, that’s no worse than judging somebody’s guilt by their gender or the colour of their skin is it?

Also this week, the Civil Aviation Authority approved a licence for rockets to take off next year from the land of some of my foremothers and forefathers and Saxavord spaceport in the island of Unst has become the UK’s first licensed spaceport for vertical rocket launches, with the first rockets to take off next year. 

If you don’t know where Unst is, look it up – https://www.shetland.org/visit/plan/areas/unst – it’s as far north of London as Barcelona is south and is on about the same latitude as the southern tip of Greenland.  Of you’re interested in nature or Viking architecture (or space rockets), go there in June and get dive bombed by great and arctic skuas and watch the puffins hovering to see what’s in your sandwiches, and smell the sweet grass and see Edmondston’s Chickweed, marsh marigolds and carnivorous plants, and avoid being spat at by nesting fulmars.  Take warm, windproof clothes and walking boots to get the most out of your visit.

Quite recently, some 700 miles south of Unst, I had to drive down part of the M5 and proved what I’d hypothesised many years ago:  86.21% of the exits off the M5 between Birmingham and Cherbourg take you onto the A38.  Just when the M5 is settling down to the business of going somewhere, the A38 keeps creeping up on it. 

One advantage of using the A38 instead is that you can stop and collect roadkill for supper.  We have a friend who does this and says that, basically, the only rule is ‘fresh blood good, maggots bad’.  In a recent article on foraging for food, somebody who’d eaten fox said “I slow-cooked the fox overnight.  It smelt like wet dog. Tasted like it, too [and] the dogs turned their noses up, which is never a good sign.”  But he did say mouse is very tasty.  I would of course normally test these opinions before reporting them but I don’t eat meat …

Incidentally, did you know that everything about yew trees is poisonous except the red flesh round the stone – just be careful not to touch the stone while you’re nibbling off the covering.

We’re beginning to accept that overpaid chief executives are already genuinely doing the best they can in the job (if they’re not, why are they still CEOs?)  So why has their pay increased so astronomically when compared to the pay of people who actually do most of the work when they’re already doing the best they can?  And why are they so hostile when workers want their pay increased by much more modest percentages?

I was interested to see that 15 years ago, when the then chief executive of Shell, Jeroen van der Veer (who was very well paid), left Shell, he said “If I had been paid 50% more, I would not have done the job better.  If I had been paid 50% less, I would not have done it worse.”  So recognising the inequity of greed as a motivation and its disconnect from ability isn’t a new thing.

Next year, perhaps we can hope that executive bonuses and what is laughingly called ‘performance-related pay’ will be outlawed.

Another comforting thought, at least for those of us who worry about dementia, is that sufferers are generally not unhappy.  They accept that they have it but most seem unaware of what they’ve lost, or the burden – physical, emotional and financial – they put on their families.  I hope that, if it happens to me I will remain aware enough to take a big bunch of happy pills before I forget where they are.

Even more comfort came from America this week when the Colorado supreme court ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible to be re-elected under the constitution’s ‘insurrection clause’ (section 3 of the 14^th amendment).  No doubt the federal supreme court that Trump stuffed with Republicans will put the law above party membership … 

All over the UK, brave swimmers plunge into cold seawater every day of the year but the Portreath branch has recently complained to South West Water about sewage alerts on 26 consecutive days that stopped them squelching their way out into water that was deep enough to swim in.  In the news clip I saw, most of the swimmers were women and are part of Blue Tits Sea Swimmers group, founded and named in 2014 by Sian Richardson in Pembrokeshire – obviously somebody with a sense of humour.

And another joke I saw recently that made me smile:  retired couple, man sitting reading, woman looking out of the window.  Woman says “That couple over the road, every day when he goes to work, he kisses her goodbye.  Why don’t you ever do that?”  Man replies “Two reasons:  one, I’m retired and don’t go to work and, two, I don’t know her.”

Well, it made me smile, probably just because it’s silly, and the world would be so much better if there were more silliness.

Ship of Fools, taxing the unwise, social care in the UK

28 January 2023

Plato forecast the decay of our government almost 2,500 years ago.  The captain of the 2023 ship of fools has the telescope to his blind eye and says he can’t see any ships (his two predecessors were forced to walk the plank), the first mate is facing about 25 charges of bullying from the crew, the navigator learnt his trade on a small pool of K₉P, the bursar has run out of money but refuses to ask the owners for more, the sailmaker had given millions to his grandmother’s knitting circle for sails that can’t be used, the surgeon can’t afford to stay warm, the quartermaster spent so long fiddling the books that he didn’t get enough food for the voyage, the serjeant at arms spends her time repelling boarders who are bringing them more provisions, and the lookout in the crow’s nest is on strike.

Every week I promise myself I’m not going to mutter about politics and every week some politician does something irresistibly stupid or is caught not evading taxes.  In this case, a tax expert talking about the various levels of penalty said that, basically, if someone’s made an honest mistake, HMRC impose no penalty and they just have to pay the extra tax due;  if they’ve “made an error” and been negligent and/or careless, the penalty can be anything up to 30%, if they’ve been wilfully dishonest, the penalty can be between 30% and 200%.  Guess who only just scraped into the negligent / careless penalty.

Then Jacob Rees-Mogg wrote about Brexit in the Daily Mail and said “The moment of national renewal has come.  We can embark on this new age with confidence and excitement.  Over two millenniums since mighty Augustus quelled the unrest and strife in ancient Rome …”  Hang on a minute.  ‘Millenniums’?  Surely he knows that should be ‘millennia’, or was he making allowances for people who read the Daily Mail?

Anyway, enough of politics, sort of.

Governments have known since we were born exactly when we were going to retire but did that lead anybody to save enough money to pay our state pensions 65 years (and many governments of all colours) later?  Not entirely;  so they delayed retirement ages to take a few years’ pension from everyone.  In the financial field, this would be called a Ponzi scheme, using today’s investors to reward yesterday’s investors, leaving no money to pay back today’s investors unless they can attract more new investors (or, as the government prefers to call them, taxpayers).

The biggest problem now facing the government is the increasing number of older people needing care.  This too has been predictable from when people were born and could have been adjusted for demographic changes and medical advances as necessary.  Unfortunately, for the last 13 years, those in charge have believed money is more important than people and the visible result of their financial mismanagement is the frighteningly increased gap between the obscenely rich and the desperately poor.  

But the rich can spend huge sums on private medical treatment and care, and if the poor have to sell their electric fire to get enough money to buy food, tough, they should have worked harder. 

About 80% of care homes are run by private companies whose prime raison d’être is to make the owners and directors richer by underpaying staff and overcharging residents. 

No wonder care homes currently have more than 165,000 vacancies and are so short-staffed that many have been downgraded by the Care Quality Commission from ‘good’ when they were last inspected to ‘needs improvement’ as their standards have declined in the last few years.

One random example publicised recently, almost certainly neither the best or the worst, is Runwood Homes which claims to be “a family-led, residential care, dementia care and nursing care provider with over 62 beautiful homes and day centres to choose from. We pride ourselves on delivering innovative, personalised care with a real emphasis on celebrating the lives of each and every one of our residents” etc etc.  The firm is owned by Gordon Sanders who has taken at least £21m out of the company (i.e.  from his staff and residents) in the last 5 years despite inspectors finding multiple rule breaches in his firm’s homes.

As a carer myself, I know that a professional carer down here is paid slightly more than the minimum wage but gets only a small proportion of the £10,000 a year the business charges us for 45 minutes a day, and full-time care in a residential home can easily cost £100,000 a year.

Our firm’s owners, William and Sara Flint, trade in Devon as Bluebird Care and their company’s wealth increased by £666,000 (Aleister Crowley might have had something to say about this number) in the two years to March 2022.  This is in addition to anything they paid themselves as directors (which isn’t publicly available) and they borrow money from the company so it isn’t taxable as income. 

They therefore keep almost 30 times as much money for themselves as the average (full-time-equivalent) pay they allow their carers.  And the owners don’t even work full-time so the multiple is actually even greater. 

The archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, has called for checks on “unscrupulous people making profit inappropriately from social care” and the archbishops’ convention has called for taxes rises to fund a new NHS-style universal social care system that would cost an extra £15bn a year.

Sir Rod Steward, formerly a devoted Conservative, has offered (in a live programme on Sky News) to pay for some of the people waiting for hospital scans and said “I personally have been a Tory for a long time but I think this government should stand down now and give the Labour party a go at it, because this is heartbreaking for the nurses.”

I’m now drafting a letter:  “Dear Rod, well done, could you now look at how the Tories are failing the 900,000 people needing care?”

The Spare, the right wing, climate, brainwashing children

14 January 2023

Harry and Meghan have had a lot of media attention following the publication of his book this week, media attention being one of Harry’s major complaints of course.

I watched the first section of his interview but decided at the commercial break I had more interesting things to do so I gave up.  My immediate reactions were that he is sincere about what he has said, and is still very angry at the tabloid media who he blames for his mother’s death.  There was a telling and obviously spontaneous eye-flick at the camera (the only time he looked at the camera in that first section) when he had talked about the paparazzi throwing themselves onto the bonnet of his car and said “we don’t want something like [Diana’s death] happening again”.

He was also genuinely taken aback when the interviewer said he appeared very scathing about Queen Consort Camilla;  he denied it even though it seemed a perfectly fair question to me on the basis of an extract we’d just heard read.  However, from earlier ‘teasers’ for the book, we know a lot of closet doors have been opened, many of which would have been better left shut.

He came over as somebody who’s been very damaged by a dysfunctional family who live an unreal world and, having seen ‘real life’ in the army, he feels unfairly maligned and he wants everybody to know this.  From the huge number of books sold so far and the viewing figures for his various interviews, he seems to have been pretty successful in this.

There are now three main camps:  those who think the monarchy is good and Harry has put it at risk, those who feel sorry for Harry and Meghan and perhaps a president would be better, and those who don’t really care one way or the other.  However, the absence of any comment or reaction from Buckingham palace (“never complain, never explain”) is very powerful and may leave Harry out on a limb.

My Conservative friend reckons the monarchy brings a lot of money into the country and he has no time for either Harry or Meghan.  He is also an unwavering critic of the left-biased BBC and believes union leaders shouldn’t still be paid while their members are on strike.  He thinks Russia is (or calls itself) a Communist country, thereby proving the basic principles of communism are wrong.  He’s anti-PC and anti-woke, and doesn’t accept that the whole concept of ‘woke’ was invented not by ‘wokeists’ (?) but by the far right so they could then use ‘anti-woke’ as an insult. 

He’s an unrepentant Brexiteer and still thinks that the UK is better off away from the bureaucrats in Brussels, and that the new tariff walls and UK/EU border paperwork, delays and controls are caused by remainers*, who won’t accept Brexit is a done deal.  He doesn’t see a problem with having a land border with the EU in Ireland.  He dislikes Joe Biden, France (especially Macron), all recent Labour prime ministers and party leaders, HS2, demonstrators and strikers, civil servants and Working From Home – he recently told me that he’d discovered 99% of civil servants in Wales are doing just that.

He disbelieves polls and research that produce results he doesn’t agree with and dismissed a recent report from The King’s Fund (a highly-respected medical foundation which is forbidden by law from taking political decisions because it’s a charity) on the grounds that all charities are full of lefties and therefore biased.  He doesn’t even like Martin Lewis and his ‘Money Saving Expert’ website because he’s made himself very rich and now appears everywhere (when I pointed out Lewis is an admirable, textbook capitalist who’s made a lot of money by supplying a service that people find useful, answer came there none).

This week’s blinder was a vituperative tirade about the BBC producing a lengthy series on Shamima Begum.  He couldn’t bring himself to say her name but suggested the young lady (though this wasn’t exactly what he called her) should stay where she is or go to Bangladesh and should never be considered for return to the UK.  He says the very idea tempts him to stop paying his TV licence fee.

In fact the only people I can remember his having praised are Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is his local MP (although, to his credit, he wasn’t a fan of Priti Patel). 

While I’m frequently surprised by some of the more extreme things he says, I have to admit I do find it fascinating to be kept in touch with what those on the political right are thinking (he describes himself as “centre right”).  For example, bosses can be trusted (except trade union bosses) and workers can’t, so bosses can do their work on golf courses or over a meal, but workers can’t work at home.  So widespread is this belief that software monitoring employees’ use of their computers has recently been used in Canada to fire a member of staff and recover payments made to them when their spyware had “identified irregularities between [their] timesheets and the software usage logs”.

Before you ask the obvious question, we’ve known each other since we were 16 and I only became interested in politics when Brexit loomed over the horizon.  We swap jokes and comments about Wordle in regular emails and we now also diss each other’s views on politics and society.  

Despite all this, he’s actually a good and kind man who does a lot of voluntary work helping people in his local community and he keeps fit by playing ping pong and smoking;  and we still enjoy each other’s company when we meet.

He will no doubt approve if the anti-strike bill becomes law and bosses are allowed to veto changes in working conditions, limit everybody’s pay (except their own) and generally treat staff as consumables / disposables.

The dangers of unfettered capitalism became clear last week when a study of some old Exxon papers revealed that Big Oil had known of the risk of global heating since the 1950s and, in the 1970s, Exxon scientists had projected an increase in global temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions, predicting an increase in temperatures of about 0.2^oC a decade (which has proved remarkably accurate).  So, as good capitalists do, they hid the results and publicly derided similar forecasts to protect their profits.

Now, as they had foreseen, the weather has changed and we’re on the brink of climate disaster. 

Last May, Rhianan Rudd, committed suicide in a Nottinghamshire children’s home even though charges of terror offences when she was 15 had been dropped.  The decision not to continue with her prosecution was based on evidence that she’d been a victim of online grooming. 

Let’s hope that the government will now accept that Shamima Begum was similarly brainwashed and was also the victim of a trafficking gang.  (The charity Exit Hate says that they’ve found children as young as 9 being radicalised via social media.)  Begum therefore can’t be held responsible for her departure or subsequent actions so they should return her passport and let her come back home. 

Much to the delight of drug barons, smugglers, county line gangs, and your friendly neighbourhood dealer, some idiot has also suggested banning the sale of cigarettes.  Let’s hope the government also responds appropriately to this.

*          Regular polls by the National Centre for Social Research (WhatUKThinks.org) show that, when ‘Don’t Knows’ are excluded, 57% of voters would now vote against Brexit if another referendum were held, leaving only 43% to vote in favour, up from 52% / 48% at the end of 2021.

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

7 January 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recession?  What recession?

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

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

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

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

Things to think about

17 December 2022

At the end of last year, the Department of Health and Social Care appointed the King’s Fund, a well-respected charity (not connected with Charles), to investigate and report on the NHS.

Its 81-page report has now been published and concludes that “Though Covid certainly exacerbated the crisis in the NHS and social care, we are ultimately paying the price for a decade of neglect”.  It believes that ten years of underfunding have so weakened the NHS it won’t be able to clear the 7.2 million backlog of people still waiting for non-urgent care because it’s now got too few staff, too little equipment and too many decaying buildings.

The report is particularly critical of David Cameron’s austerity programme and it contrasts the damage wrought by the Conservative governments with the action taken by the Labour governments after inheriting similar problems when they came to power in 1997.  It also draws attention to Cameron’s decision to reduce annual NHS budget increases from Labour’s 3.6% to an average of just 1.5%, which it highlights as the key reason for the decline.

Is the Conservatives’ commitment to feeding businesses and starving benefit claimants good for the country as a whole? 

Now the government is risking further criticism by countering claims for better conditions and pay for nurses by refusing to discuss their pay, saying “there are non-pay options to discuss with the unions.  For example, there are issues affecting nurses’ morale.”  How fascinating that the government thinks reducing the real value of nurses’ pay for ten years doesn’t affect their morale.

So nurses and ambulance workers are going on strike in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland leads the way and has already negotiated a deal) and most normal people, whether or not they’re in a queue for treatment, are backing the nurses.

Is this likely to encourage people to join the ever-dwindling band of people who would normally vote Conservative? 

Another independent report, this time into how police forces treat accusations of rape, has also been released.  After analysing 80,000 rape reports across five forces in England and Wales, it concluded there remain persistent failures in the criminal justice system and blamed police systems for failing to keep track of repeated suspects, “explicit victim-blaming” and botched investigations.

The exposure of serious racism and sexism that seems to be endemic in the fire service also shames some very brave people who are not guilty but are unable, or scared, to defend the victims.

What can be done to tackle the stereotyping that underlies the prejudices in these services? 

Rail workers too are going on strike although, in the case of Avanti North West, it’s difficult to know whether services are affected by strikes or just their usual management incompetence (their bosses admitted – a week after their contract was renewed in October – that they were “still not good enough” but insisted things would be OK by Christmas).

The likes of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph talk about the strikes being over pay and fail to mention the threats to job security and working conditions or the proposal to reduce overtime pay.  Even the BBC, considered by the Mail and the Telegraph and other skewed nationalists to be left-biased, broadcast a long interview with a man who said he wouldn’t be able to see his son at Christmas because of the strikes.  After people had pointed out there’s a perfectly good bus service, they were forced to remove the story and explain that the man’s travel plans were, in fact, “unlikely to be affected by the strikes”.

(The left-wing film director Ken Loach has also attacked the BBC for “its absolutely shameless role [in] the destruction of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership” of the Labour party, further undermining the far-right conspiracy theorists.)

What many seem to have missed is that any reasonably clever nerd can create timetables to allow fast trains to overtake slow trains – it’s complicated but not terribly difficult – and they’re called management.  It’s the striking ‘workers’ who have to suffer the effects of delays and disruption, and of seeing someone lying on the line or jumping in front of them when they’re doing 90 mph.

Are the respective rewards of the rail bosses and the strikers being fairly represented in the media? 

And what about the Sussexes?  Did the royal family treat Meghan badly because she was a foreign actor with (slightly) differently coloured skin or is she over-sensitive?  Is it actually a genuinely moving love story between Harry and Meghan that led Harry to give up everything he’d been brought up to do? 

Would anybody care that much about them if the media weren’t making money out of keeping the story hot? 

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has been arrested and charged with fraud.  I wonder if he’ll get a fair trial, bearing in mind that the people who lost money were those who were rich enough to buy into cryptocurrencies, and powerful enough to make someone else suffer for what they lost by taking risks with their money.

Of course he should be punished if he was guilty of fraud but should we feel sorry for those who lost money? 

Elon Musk is no longer the world’s richest person after he sold more Tesla shares to finance his purchase of Twitter and, what a surprise, the value of Tesla shares fell.  He’s been replaced as number one by Bernard Arnault, CEO of the group LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, a French corporation selling luxury goods).

Should they stop publishing lists of the richest people on the grounds that, apart from flattering their egos, it achieves nothing and nobody gives a flying fox anyway? 

A leaked civil service survey shows that 8% of civil servants in Whitehall felt they’d been bullied or harassed at work while 7% nationwide made the same claims. Almost a third (30%) of the 33 staff working directly for Dominic Raab say the same and 8 complaints against his behaviour are outstanding.

Should Raab step down until the investigations have been completed? 

After Jarosław Szymczyk, Poland’s police commander in chief, had been presented with a grenade launcher (isn’t that top of all our Christmas lists?) on his visit to Ukraine, he “accidentally” fired it in his office, causing some minor injuries and a hole in the ceiling.  Who is more culpable:  Ukraine for choosing such a dangerous present or Szymczyk for pulling the trigger without first checking whether anything was up the spout? 

Good news for the Democrats in America:  Donald Trump has offered for sale the “official Donald Trump Digital Trading Card” collection with pictures of him wearing a Superman costume, costing “only $99” each.  Since they’re Non Fungible Tokens they’re not even real but they sold out within a day.

Is this another of Trump’s self-inflicted injuries or a canny move by a snake oil salesman? 

Meanwhile, back at a ranch in Oregon, The Democrat governor Kate Brown has commuted the sentences of all prisoners on the state’s death row to life, with no possibility of parole.  It might have been a coincidence of timing but the Death Penalty Information Center revealed this week that 35% of the 20 attempts to execute people this year were botched and caused visible pain.  That’s seven people who weren’t just killed but were tortured first.

I don’t know how many were still claiming to be innocent when they died.

Remember the Pete Seeger song ‘What Did You Learn in School Today?’: “I learned that murderers pay for their crimes / Even if we make a mistake sometimes.”