GBNews, Tory leaders, national borders, abortion and Hermes’ incompetence

5 October 2024

GBNews has obviously been doing some research into their market because I received an unsolicited email from them last Sunday giving me the latest headlines.  It was obvious that they believe they know a lot about me so I’d open the email and jump at the chance to send them money.

The message was headed “For you:  Bringing you the stories that matter most to you” so I knew they really had worked hard at identifying my personal interests, and I felt warm inside that they’d gone to all that trouble.

The update was obviously designed to appeal to red-top readers and included just 12 pictures and headlines leading to the more important stories last Sunday.  Five of the them were about royals, three of them about Harry and Meghan, our ex-pat royals. 

There were also five stories implying that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves might not be the best people to run the country:  pensioners having to return to work, more than 2m extra people now paying tax, “sick-note Britain”, “11 taxes Rachel Reeves could increase to fill Labour’s ‘black hole’” and an invitation to vote on “Do you trust Starmer and Reeves with this country?  VOTE NOW” which will give them a guaranteed scientifically unrepresentative view of Britons’ feelings about the Labour government for a future email.

The other two top stories of the day were “Virgin Media issues broadband warning to millions of UK households who break the ‘golden rule’ of good WiFi” and “Major car brands recall 350,000 vehicles amid fears engines will be replaced and airbags may injure drivers”.

Well, I mean, royals, politics, broadband and cars – right up there with crotcheting in my list of interests. 

I have to admit that I didn’t open all the links but the style of those I did read seemed to be aiming at readers of the Daily Mail, which is not one of my favourite news sources and comes way below Reacher books.  But I did love the reference to eleven taxes that could be increased.  I bet I could think of more than eleven.  Increasing taxes on champagne, olives, tofu, The Guardian, the Hampstead & Highgate Express and the wokerati are six for starters.

The Tories’ grasp of Britain’s problems was as obvious at their party conference as Labour’s conference the previous week had been innovative.  The only excitement on the menu was supposed to be the “Vote For Me” speeches from the four people stupid enough to want to be the party’s leader. 

There was a memorable reference in Kemi Badenoch’s pre-conference pamphlet which apparently used words to the effect of ‘Right is Left and Left is Right’.  I expected a ‘(8)’ at the end because it looked like a red-top crossword clue leading to the answer ‘oxymoron’;  surely she can’t have meant ‘Left is right’. 

Furthermore, all four speakers exceeded the time limit they’d been allocated which doesn’t augur well for whoever wins, if ‘win’ is the right word for a poisoned chalice.

Speakers at the Royal Institution are given an hour to explain their specialist subject to the public.  At the end of their hour, a bell rings and they wind up in a couple of sentences.  The neatest lecture on record is one speaker who heard the bell, finished a sentence and stopped.

A mudblood Trump could be about to cause some discussion in America when Melania’s memoir, to be published next week, reveals her to be a supporter of women’s rights to abortion while her husband is busy leading the Republicans’ efforts to limit women’s rights. Where do they see the dividing line between preventing women having abortions (good because that’s Republican policy) and making them cover their faces and bodies in public (bad because that’s Taliban policy)?

The border between Switzerland and Italy has recently been moved without a shot being fired.  Between Switzerland’s Zermatt region and Italy’s Aosta valley, it has traditionally followed the watershed or ridge lines of glaciers, firn or perpetual snow but, as the glaciers have retreated, so have the dividing lines moved.

Changes to the border were agreed by a joint Italian-Swiss commission in May last year and the Swiss have now approved the treaty.  Italy’s approval is still awaited but nobody seems terribly exercised by either the change or the delay.

Further east, Mount Everest is now an estimated 15-50 metres higher than it was about 90,000 years ago (no, I don’t know how it was measured that long ago).  It’s known to have been formed when the Indian tectonic plate crashed into the Eurasian plate and the collision threw up the Himalayas, a bit like pushing a sample of jam in a saucer to see if the surface rises, thus showing it’s cooked.  Neither the Himalayas nor the Alps are yet quite cooked.

In the UK, Hermes, whose policy is to call itself Evri in the vain hope of breaking with the appalling reputation it had earned as Hermes, is at it again.  I recently bought something from Temu who reported its passage through various depots and airports(!) before handing it over to Evri who proved they delivered it by sending me a photograph of its being put into somebody else’s letterbox. 

I was also told after I’d placed the order that Temu is apparently a marketplace for small suppliers in China.  If I’d known this, I’d never have spent £10 on some plastic bags that were going to be flown half way round the world.  Online, they just seemed to be the best quality at the price but burning carbon fuel to send them 5,000 miles to get Evri to deliver them to the wrong house is just crazy.  I won’t be using Temu again and I’m waiting to see how Evri respond to my complaint …

By the way, why has the English transliteration of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy been changed from Zelenskiy by some, but not all, news sources, when it used to be Zelensky anyway?  Is it an attempt to acknowledge an almost inaudible extension of the last syllable?

Small boats in perspective, coincidences, and happy things

19 August 2023

After Lee Anderson, Conservative MP for Ashfield and Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party and a GBNews presenter had a powerful message for asylum seekers who didn’t want to move from basic hotel accommodation to the Bibby Stockholm, a three-storey barge that had been refurbished and towed to Portland for their exclusive use:  if they didn’t want to live there, they could “fuck off back to France” he said. 

The aim is to save money but the Daily Telegraph has seen an internal document, written in March, showing there would be savings if 1,000 asylum seekers were moved to Portland.  So Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, encouraged 500 asylum seekers to move there, leaving some 49,500 asylum seekers still in hotels.  Braverman is still refusing to reveal the cost of each place. 

We then learnt that officials already knew its water supply was contaminated with Legionnaires’ Disease and the fire service subsequently described it as a firetrap so the 39 ‘residents’ were evacuated.

Then Downing Street signed Braverman’s death warrant by insisting that the prime minister retained confidence in her.

However, it’s important to get into perspective the widespread paranoia about people, adults and children (i.e. ‘small boats’) risking their lives to reach a country where they think they’ll be safe.  In the last 5½ years, the Home Office has detected almost 100,000 migrants who crossed the Channel to the UK in small boats, 53% of them under 30 and 77% male. 

In that time, it’s estimated that 200 people died in their search for refuge.

In 2022, long-term immigration into the UK was estimated at 1.2m people, with asylum seekers and refugees accounting for just 18% of them. Government figures show that some 24,000 people were granted “protection and other leave through asylum and resettlement routes” in the same year.  (Refugees from Ukraine have been dealt with separately since the Russian invasion.)

Of the 2022 applications, 40% were made by people from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Sudan and Syria and more than 80% of applications from these people were approved, with only 8% of the total from all countries subjected to slavery referrals.  (More applicants came from Albania but only half of them were approved.)

In Afghanistan, for example, it’s two years since the Taliban seized power and Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban supreme leader, announced a general amnesty which excluded those who had served in the former military forces or the police.  Surely we should welcome the thousands of women who are now forced to live in hiding as well as the other local people who had helped the British but were abandoned there because we filled one escape flight with stray dogs*.

So let’s not allow politicians and extremists and comspiracy theorists prejudice how we see asylum seekers – the numbers are small and shouldn’t those of us who remember when we lived in ‘Great’ Britain show a little humanity and magnanimity to those less fortunate than we are?

Like those on Liz Truss’s resignation honours list.  Imagine being the type of person who would agree to be on a list submitted by a prime minister who set a record by being chucked out after only 7 weeks (it’s believed that 16 names were proposed and only two of them refused to let their names be put forward). 

And before you all gang together to recommend me to the Cabinet Office for an OBE, you should know that I’d refuse it.  Though it would be rather satisfying to register my contempt by only refusing it after I’d got the invitation to be nominated …

What’s more shocking is that Truss had the gall to submit a list at all and we can only hope that Rishi Sunak rejects the whole thing.  Interestingly, neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown submitted resignation honours lists.

At a more parochial level, Adam and Carly Taylor have recently benefitted from the most amazing series of coincidences.  Carly controls ATE Farms Ltd which bought the (closed) 18^th century Crooked House pub in Himley, Staffordshire, famous for having slipped so far down at one end, it had to be shored up and its slope could convince watchers’ brains that marbles rolled uphill. 

The first, possibly small coincidence is that another company, Himley Environmental Ltd, is registered at the same address as ATE Farms Ltd and operates the 37-acre quarry and landfill site next to the pub.  (Neither of the Taylors is listed as a director and the address might just be that of a firm that provides secretarial services.)

Carly’s husband Adam has a history of upsetting planners with applications for inappropriate developments elsewhere and ATE Farms Ltd has so far failed to answer questions from the media.

But then came a series of more astounding coincidences.  After planners had restricted what demolition the new owners could do to ensure its structural integrity, and within days of the purchase being completed, ATE hired a large digger and moved it onto the site.  Then the access road was blocked by a huge heap of earth, 2½ metres high.  Then the pub caught fire and the fire engines couldn’t get close enough to dowse the flames because their access to the site had been blocked.  Then, before the police enquiry into the cause of the fire could be completed, the serendipitously placed digger demolished the whole building.  If Carly offers you a drink, get her to drink half of it first.

But let’s look at some of the better things in life, like a picture on the front page of last Sunday’s Observer.  Taken after a football World Cup quarter final, a player from the winning side is consoling a player from the losing side as they leave the pitch together.  Now guess if this was men’s football or women’s.

One of the performers at this year’s Edinburgh fringe is Janine Harouni, who is Very Pregnant and has been suffering unpleasant side-effects.  Writing about how she feels, she says “Honestly, being pregnant with my husband’s baby feels like we’ve been paired up to do a school science project where I have to do all the work for nine months but he gets the same grade because he brought the pen.”

And one of the best jokes this year came from Ginny Hogan who said “Everyone says your 20s are all about finding yourself. If that’s true, your 30s are about wishing you’d found somebody else.”

*          Yes, I’m sure they were really all immensely valuable KC-registered thoroughbreds but the principle’s the same.

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

26 June 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s wrong with these people?

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

What’s wrong with these people?

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

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

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

What’s wrong with these people?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.” 

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.

Children’s questions, how we learn, panic buying and charity discounts

26 September 2021

“Where do people go when they die?” asked a 3½ year-old child of a friend.  She said she’d given the usual “Well some people think this and some people think that but nobody really knows”.  When the child saw a picture of one of our dogs who died earlier this year, he looked thoughtful and asked where she’d died. 

We explained that she’d died here at home so we could be with her when she died and, after he’d processed this, he asked what happened to her after she’d died.  We said the vet had zipped her into a black canvas bag and taken her body away and his mother said her body would have been buried or burnt on a big fire.

Isn’t it wonderful watching how young children learn things, and when they’ve got all the answers they wanted!

It reminded me of when my eldest was 9 and we were on what was not then called a glamping holiday in France.  He was wrapped in a sleeping bag with a hot water bottle (no normal English person goes glamping that close to home without one), sitting in one of the chairs in the tent, his face ashen grey after a particularly unfortunate encounter with some dodgy mussels at lunchtime.  Out of the blue, he suddenly asked “You know babies are made when a sperm meets an egg?”  I said “Yes” and he continued “How does it get there?”

So it was that, on a rainy tent on the Cherbourg peninsula, I told him about love and erections and lubrication and what went where and ovulation and ejaculations and contraception (though I used child-friendly words) until it was obvious he’d got enough information and lost interest.

Several years later, his younger brother asked about masturbation so we talked about that for a while and, at one point, he said “You’re not embarrassed are you!”  I said “No, should I be?”.  He just said “Mum is”, to which there was no answer, however accurate, that would have helped him as a young teenager.

My own sexual education came from my father who, in his typically clinical way, produced some scientific charts when I was about eight and explained the physical process.  It made little impact and left out so much that I had to take a ‘Teach Yourself’ / “Learn as you go” course over the next 20 years.

We continue to learn other, less interesting things all our lives.

Some we learn by rote, like arithmetic, some by instruction, like how to write legibly (something I never mastered), some by applying guidance, like learning how to drive, some by a sort of cultural osmosis, like what accents we grow up using, some by exploring and extending what we already know, like scientific research projects, some by avoiding a mistake we made last time, some by unexpected inspiration, like when Isaac Newton was hit by a falling apple etc. 

(Did you ever add “etc” at the end of a list of everything you could think of about something to give the impression you actually knew lots more examples but just couldn’t be bothered to list them?  That’s not what I did there but I was beginning to get bored so I stopped.)

And, though we go on learning all our lives, there are some things we never learn, either because our abilities are constitutionally limited (like cooking in my case), or because of a lack of opportunity or interest, or because we don’t think they’ll be helpful to us, or just a lack of curiosity.

My own learning this week has included:

• there’s a new, third ‘Tebay’ service station north of Carlisle on the M74 in the Borders

• how difficult it’s going to be to replace EU’s most powerful leader when Angela Merkel steps back after today’s election

• Boris Johnson has realised just how insignificant Britain now is on the world stage and the trade deal with the US that he thought they’d be enthusiastic about is so far down Joe Biden’s list of priorities it’s below “Remember Jill’s birthday”

• the government’s telling people not to panic-buy petrol is guaranteed to get all the more stupid car-owners to queue at service stations to transfer our huge stocks of petrol from one big tank to lots of little ones, using petrol to drive to the garage and leave their engines running in the queue …

• that Johnson’s consolation prize was the Labour party’s opening its conference with an attempt to self-destruct, squabbling publicly over internal election procedures with a side offer of old left versus centrism

• the person in Afghanistan’s new regime responsible for prisons, Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, has said “Cutting off of hands is very necessary for security”, claiming it had a deterrent effect (it would certainly deter me from scratching my back) but he didn’t say if he thought it would make people more sympathetic to the Taliban’s interpretation of the Quran in the 21^st century

• charity volunteers can get discounts – I was buying something the other day and was asked if I worked for a charity so I naturally said “yes”, which charity it is and how many hours I do, and they knocked 10% off the bill for me;  if you’re interested, there are probably sites that say which companies do this …

The moral of all this is to keep an open mind about everything, even if you file it as “unconfirmed” or “dubious source”, until you can check it, unless it came from a politician, when you can immediately flag it as the latter.

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

19 September 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afghanistan, Quran and modest dress, oppression of women, psychopathology of murderers and sexism

29 August 2021

Are the Taliban stupid?  (As an infidel, am I allowed to ask this without finding myself subject to a fatwa?)  They’re making it difficult for people trying to leave Afghanistan even though they know these people are, by definition, not Taliban supporters, so the result is they’re keeping a lot of opponents in the country where they could potentially cause problems in future.  Or are they just keeping them to cut off their limbs and torture and kill them for the sheer enjoyment of the revenge they said they wouldn’t take?

Why don’t they help them all to leave as quickly as possible and just keep their supporters?

Somebody said it’s because they’re worried that a lot of highly qualified professionals were leaving but they obviously haven’t thought this through.  Imagine you’re a wounded Taliban fighter being treated by a doctor who’d been kept in Afghanistan against their will:

Location:  A&E, patient conscious.  Doctor inspects wound “Nurse!  Scalpel please.  Whoops, sorry.”

Location:  operating theatre, patient anaesthetised.  Doctor inspects wound “Nurse!  Chainsaw please.  Whoops.  Oh well, another one gone.  NEXT!”

Now the Islamic State Khorasan Province has joined the party with suicide bomb attacks at the airport killing 85 people including 13 American troops, which is hardly tactful.  Joe Biden retaliated with a drone attack killing two senior members of the ISKP and a threat to “hunt [ISKP] down and make [them] pay”, although he’s still refusing to delay securing Kabul airport after Tuesday because it’s thought more terror attacks are probable in the near future.  The last UK rescue flights have now left and the last US troops leave on Tuesday, leaving thousands of Afghan supporters in fear for their lives, hoping that the Taliban will agree to their safe emigration.

The US and UK now have little influence there and, with the complications of IKSP’s appearance (not even al-Qaida like them), there’s scope for a free-for-all with Russia and China likely to shout “me too” and rush in to join the fray.

I still wonder if the UK (and America and Europe) legalised all drugs, it might cut the ground from under the feet of the criminal gangs who currently run the supply chains and, in Afghanistan, it might reduce export funds coming into the country and allow farmers who have to grow opium for foreigners to make a living by growing food crops for their own country.

A survey reported by the World Population Review found Pakistan is the sixth most dangerous country in the world for women residents (as opposed to women travellers).  When I hear something like this, I immediately wonder which are the five more dangerous countries so I checked and it seems possible that Pakistan would now be seventh if the Taliban’s take-over of Afghanistan has jumped it up the charts from 37^th place, just above Canada, into the top five.

Women’s rights haven’t exactly been advanced by Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, either.  He’s expressed support for the Taliban and recently suggested that rape and assault are the result of women not dressing modestly enough. 

If Khan really believes that men are encouraged to commit rape and assault by women who they think are not modestly enough dressed, he should do something about (or to) these men.

The Quran requires faithful Muslims, male and female, to dress and behave modestly and specifies that men’s bodies should be covered between the navel and the knee but Muslim scholars have different views on how this instruction should be applied to women.  The Quran only requires women to cover their chests and lengthen their garments and not to reveal any parts of their bodies that aren’t ordinarily visible but this last bit has been translated and interpreted in various ways and some scholars believe that hands and faces must be “ordinarily visible” as women go about their everyday lives (fetching water for example).

While the Quran does require that women’s chests should be covered with a veil (hijab), there is no reference to these veils also having to cover the hair and face (the Quran is apparently quite specific about things like this and many Islamic experts believe that if God had wanted women’s hair and faces covered, he’d have said so).  In the Quran, hijab usually referred to a curtain or other form of cloth divider;  Arabic has a separate word, khimār, for a headscarf.

Sadly, the Taliban have taken an extreme view of modesty require women to wear a form of burkha that covers them from head to foot, leaving only a fine mesh so they can see some of where they’re going.  (Keeps the mozzies out though.)

The trouble they may now have in Afghanistan is that, for the last 20 years, women have had the freedom to dress how they want as long as the lumpy bits are covered, and younger women will never have known anything else, so it will be interesting to see if the Afghan women feel confident enough to continue this under the Taliban. 

Even Joe Biden hasn’t come out of this well and he’s lost a lot of support:  his decision to withdraw so suddenly and abandon thousands at the airport on 31 August contrasts uncomfortably with his promise to evacuate all American citizens who want to leave.

The writer and human rights activist Joan Smith wrote a book in 2019, ‘Home Grown: How domestic violence turns men into terrorists’ after she’d realised that a high proportion of the worst terrorist attackers had histories of violence against women and had assaulted their wives, girlfriends and other female relatives, or had witnessed assaults in their own families.

She discovered that two terrorist attacks in the summer of 2016, in Florida and the south of France, which killed 135 people and left many more injured, were both carried out by men with long records of domestic violence.  In the following year, there were four fatal attacks in the UK and all six of the perpetrators had previously abused women or, in one case, had seen his father abusing his mother and sister.

The Norwegian man who killed 77 people on an island in Norway in 2011 had a dysfunctional childhood.  His father left home, his mother ignored the children and the boy who became a mass murderer bullied girls, his sister and others.

What this says to me is that we’re not treating abusers (and child witnesses of abuse) properly. 

Punishing them obviously doesn’t work and, if anything, just increases their anger.  Surely they need some sort of support and ‘treatment’ and there must be similarities with PTSD, the destructive effects of which can be lessened, or at least diluted for. Even if the psychopathology of people like the Yorkshire Ripper is ‘incurable’ by the chemical and talking therapies we currently use, some abusers might be able to gain a clearer perspective on their relationships with women.

And yet, some of the jokes circulating on the internet still assume the inferiority and stupidity of women.  Jokes about the Irish and Newfies and people of colour have all but disappeared except perhaps between American’s Proud Boys (I still picture a group of gay men in rainbow colours when I hear this name);  presumably jokes about women will follow as the few older men who enjoy them die off.

As Bob Dylan once said “Bury the rag deep in your face / now is the time for your tears.”

Taliban promises, cephalopods and assisted dying

22 August 2021

It takes a brave prime minister to close down a country after only one person has tested positive for Covid-19’s delta variant.  What a pity the UK’s prime minister isn’t brave enough to learn lessons from a New Zealander who is not only a better PM but also, for heaven’s sake, a woman!  Any chance of arranging a PM job-swap do you think?

Our own Dear Leader has been testing his party’s support to the limit, most recently by going AWOL while the Taliban were hurtling across Afghanistan in their renewed mission to kill people who don’t believe in quite the same form of Islam and to subjugate all women regardless of their beliefs.  Given this example, how could our own Dear Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, resist following his guvnor’s example by going to Crete, presumably with Mrs Raab and the Raabits, where he reportedly refused to take calls as the Taliban advanced, and even failed to make personal contact with his Afghan opposite number, which is both undiplomatic and rude.

Boris Johnson’s excuse was “… the collapse of the Afghan forces has been much faster than expected”.  Given the warnings by US security agencies that the Afghan army could collapse “within days” if they pulled out too fast, this is either untrue or further proof that he and Raab don’t read their briefing papers. 

It now seems likely that parliament’s Intelligence and Security committee will investigate reports made by the Joint Intelligence committee on Afghanistan to see if Boris Johnson really did break the habit of a lifetime and tell the truth for once.

Raab is already under pressure from all sides of the house to resign but Johnson is probably safe until The Party is confident things are starting to improve, when they can replace him and leave him to shoulder the blame for all the disasters of his tenancy, even those that weren’t his fault.

The Taliban leaders have said that, under their rule, women will not be persecuted and one even allowed himself to be interviewed by a woman journalist on television.  However, the weasel words* actually used said women could continue their education and retain freedoms “under Islamic law”, without actually saying which version of Islamic law they’re talking about.  (Would that The Prophet had made it clear who he thought should take over when he died.)

They also said they would not seek “revenge” and that “nobody will go to their doors to ask why they helped” the previous administration.  They also said they would grant “safe passage” to people who wanted to leave the country.

Experts immediately said we should ignore what they say and watch they do.

What they did was:

• they blocked the gates to the airport, letting few through, searching for those who supported the previous regime, and beating and shooting at some who tried to pass
• they searched one of Germany’s safehouses, luckily empty
• they began knocking on doors and rounding up people who had ‘collaborated’ with the established regime they’d just deposed
• they shot two members of the family of a German journalist who had already returned to Germany;  only one survived
• they murdered nine members of the Hazara minority as they surged across the country:  three of the men were tortured to death and six were shot
• they admitted there won’t be elections because Afghanistan is not a democracy.

In a way, it’s like British political party manifestos, but writ very large.  Manifestos contain what a party thinks will make people vote for them and are subsequently ignored by whatever government’s voted in.

Or like the golden future we were promised if we Brexited, while what we get is long queues of lorries that need new car parks built on greenfield sites in Kent for a very long wait while some of them need to visit three different sites for HMRC checks and paperwork and physical health checks on food and animal imports.  Transport companies now have to advertise for HGV drivers with very strong bladders.

Which naturally leads to cuttlefish which don’t, as far as I know, have any bladders (or legs) but do have three hearts, eight arms that can regenerate, blue-green blood and one of the largest brains of all invertebrates.  Research carried out by Cambridge University and published in the journal ‘Proceedings of the Royal Society B’ shows that, while muscle function and appetite decline as they age, they can remember what they ate, where they ate it and when.

Another academic said it was “refreshing” to discover another animal with some aspects of cognition as advanced as our own (better than mine actually, I can’t remember what I had for supper yesterday) despite having a nervous system that has developed so differently from ours in the millions of years since the evolution of humans and cephalopods separated.

In this blog’s previous incarnation, I mentioned the octopus in New Zealand that would lift the lid of its tank, pop into the tank next door to snaffle a fish, then return to its own tank and pull the lid of its own tank back into place so nobody would know what it had done.  (Staff had to fit a CCTV system to discover why the fish were disappearing.)  And we humans think we’re intelligent.

One final bit of good news.  Last week, Dignity in Dying launched a crowdfunder campaign to raise £15,000 for advertisements in the British Medical Journal to refute Baroness Finlay’s claim that doctors don’t support assisted dying.  So far, it’s raised £46,000, which shows how many of us feel that we should have the right to decide for ourselves when and how we die from life-threatening and terminal conditions.

Some time ago, I wrote to our MP about this, mentioning my own mother’s ‘suicide’ 50 years ago, and got a suitably sympathetic and courteously vague reply.  More recently, I wrote again asking for his personal commitment to support any future Bill introducing the right to assisted dying. 

No answer yet but failing to get any sort of commitment from an MP before a party Whip has told them what they believe is so unsurprising I had to go and have a cup of tea.  Perhaps we should require MPs to have a minimum IQ of … pick a figure … and let the Whips exercise the votes of MPs who fail to reach the required standard so they could stay at home and knit lifejackets for migrants.

*          Why ‘weasel’?  What’s wrong with weasels?  I think they’re rather cute.