The biggest anti-Semite, Trump the Felon, Labour dithering, bank’s irresponsibility

1 June 2024

The most effective anti-Semite is now proving to be Benjamin Netanyahu.  This week, he excelled himself by killing about 50 people living in tents by bombing the Rafah refugee camp.  He argued that Hamas terrorists could have been hiding there and what are a few innocent lives worth compared with the death of a terrorist.  He didn’t put it in quite those words but the man is obviously bonkers.

His actions have even caused America, until now one of the biggest supporters of the state of Israel, to pull back and limit their support, particularly since reports have claimed the bombs used in the attack were made in America.

Even those of us who were appalled and horrified by Hamas’s unheralded and murderous attack on Israel in October have been even more horrified by Israel’s wholly disproportionate response that has been extended into a genocidal attack on everybody living in Gaza.  People who have unwisely compared this with the Nazis’ holocaust are missing the point:  no desire for racial purity is being claimed, just Netanyahu’s desire to delay his ending up in a criminal court.

We also heard this week that Israel has been using its intelligence agencies to “surveil (sic – how I hate that word, backformed from surveillance), hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior staff” of the International Criminal Court by intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents, for at least ten years, so Netanyahu had advance warning of what they were thinking.

Isarel also made it clear that “we know where you live”, sending pictures of their families to people who didn’t seem to believe the sun rises in Israel and were seeking an arrest warrant for Netanyahu himself.

It is no doubt coincidental that the governments of Ireland, Norway and Spain have decided to recognise the state of Palestine.

How long will it be before Netanyahu joins Donald Trump in having to offer a defence to a court?  Perhaps he’ll do the decent thing and have heart failure first.

Trump himself has been found guilty of all 34 of the offences he was charged with after only 12 hours of deliberation by the jury.  Even though his crimes were committed to hide things from voters deciding whether to elect him in 2016, he’s unlikely to be given a custodial sentence because telling lies in politics and falsifying business records are ‘white collar’ crimes, but he could have to report regularly to New York’s probation department.  If he is – God forbid – re-elected as president, you can imagine it can’t you:  “Sorry Benjie, I can’t meet you next Tuesday, I’ve got to report to my probation officer”.

What amazes me is that his poll ratings have hardly reacted to his exposure as a liar and a thief and devout Republications everywhere are claiming it’s a stitch-up.  I wonder how many of them have read all the documents presented to the court and listened to all the arguments before making this judgement.

Worryingly, his conviction doesn’t prevent his becoming president again.

Which reminds me that the largest and most complete Stegosaurus fossil ever found is coming up for auction at Sothebys in the summer with an estimate of $4m-$6m.  I haven’t seen any reference to the costs of posts and packing but perhaps it’s ‘buyer collects’.

Which reminds me Jeremy Hunt has promised that current tax thresholds will stay the same for six years, thereby forcing millions more to pay more tax, but he’s said wouldn’t increase taxes.  Anybody else spot the self-contradiction?

The Labour party has been getting its knickers in a twist by refusing to let Diane Abbott, who said something stupid and apologised, stand as a Labour candidate but, luckily, commonsense has prevailed and they’ve changed their minds.

Whether Angela Rayner’s intervention, saying she couldn’t see any reason why Abbott shouldn’t stand for Labour, made any difference, we’ll never know, but it stopped Keir Starmer’s dithering.

Rayner had previously been accused by Tories of having dodged tax on the sale of her former council house but she was given absolute clearance this week by the police, the local council and HMRC.  HMRC of course says it never comments on an individual’s tax matters but, somehow, what a surprise, its conclusions were made public and they stated categorically that she had done nothing wrong.

And a final apolitical thought:  have you ever realised how banks have become less and less interested in securing the money they hold on trust for their customers?  These ‘touch and go’ cards mean that anyone with somebody else’s card can use it to spend up to £100 without permission.  Again and again, until their credit limit is reached (or the card’s owner realises and cancels the card).

Well, the banks will no doubt say, it’s just like cash, which anyone else can spend if you lose it.  Except that it isn’t because the chances of dropping several hundreds of pounds in notes in a public place are very much less.

And, if your account is hacked and your money is transferred to an unknown account, will the banks chase it and refund it?  Will they buggery.  You should have had a second level of security, they say.  Why?  Because (they won’t say) their first level of security is grossly insufficient and they don’t have any control systems that pick up things like a first-ever cash transfer to Switzerland, or repeated payments to betting companies that you’ve never made before.

But why should they take care of the money you’ve entrusted to them?  It’d just increase costs.

This has all happened to a friend of mine recently so, if you’re thinking of changing banks, avoid Barclays like the plague.

Guns, diluting standards, Elizabeth line and typos

29 May 2022

19 young children and two primary school teachers have been shot dead, and three more young children orphaned when the husband of one of the dead teachers had a heart attack two days later.

The murderer was a teenager who wasn’t old enough to buy alcohol but had legally bought and registered two automatic weapons, practised by shooting his grandmother.

This was at Uvalde’s Robb elementary school in south west Texas, 10 days after another teenager had killed 11 people at a supermarket in Buffalo NY.

The school itself is said to have established and practised safety responses – locking the door, turning the lights out, hiding under desks and everybody staying very quiet – but this wasn’t enough.

Gun violence is of course endemic in America and, while a small majority of people believe gun laws should be tightened, the National Rifle Association spent almost $5m last year trying to convince people they are already too restrictive.  It’s also, of course, complicated by the lack of any federal law which restricts everyone, so states make their own laws.

In the UK, a murderer shot a lot of children at a primary school in Dunblane in 1996.  In 1997, the successive Conservative and Labour governments under John Major and Tony Blair passed a law banning the private ownership of handguns despite active opposition from the gun lobby and many on the political right (including one Boris Johnson) who argued that owning guns wasn’t the problem, even though the one thing that all such killers have in common is they own a gun.

Since then, gun crime in Britain has fallen significantly, fatal shootings are mercifully rare and these have almost all been individually targeted rather than mass murders.

International comparisons also show that the more households that have guns, the more gun-related deaths there are, and records of shootings in America show that having a gun in the house actually makes it more likely that a member of the household will be killed by one.

The laws vary widely between different American states, from Massachusetts where gun ownership is fairly tightly controlled (by American standards) to Texas where there are few controls.   Many who support gun ownership quote the Second Amendment to the US Constitution but others argue that these people either haven’t actually read the amendment or failed to understand its purpose and that the ‘founding fathers’ of the United States would be horrified to see how their intentions are being misinterpreted.

Just as worrying is the lack of any control on the sale of ammunition.  In a recent documentary, a British journalist asked one dealer how much ammunition he could buy.  The answer was “How much money have you got?”

I wonder how many gun owners are male and how many female.  My own prejudices make me feel that you’re more likely to see a man with a big penis-substitute in a holster than a woman with a Saturday night special in her handbag, but I could be entirely wrong.

The trouble is that the problem has been linked – probably by the NRA – with politics so, broadly speaking, Democrats want more gun control while Republicans want more guns.  The gun lobby thinks the answer is more guns, and teachers should be armed so that, if a gunman (I’m sticking with the sexism) enters their classroom, the children can watch a real-life shooting match in which real people get hurt and killed.

Their argument is that guns aren’t dangerous, it’s people with guns that are dangerous but ignores the fact that the country has conspicuously failed to educate gun owners so far.

Other suggestions include

• incorporating the NRA’s safety rules in federal law
• banning automatic weapons and extended magazines
• perhaps even allowing only guns that fire just one bullet before they need to be reloaded
• limiting gun permits to hunters
• increasing the minimum age for gun ownership to 21
• more background checks, including mental health histories
• requiring a gun permit when selling ammunition and only selling cartridges for the gun in the permit
• limiting the amount of ammunition that can be sold to any one person
• requiring owners to be insured and responsible for all damage caused by a gun registered in their name
• rewriting the second amendment to make it clear that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State” is the prime reason for “the right to keep and bear Arms”.

Jacinda Ardern gave Harvard’s annual commencement address this week and was given a standing ovation after describing how New Zealand had tightened gun laws after the 2019 shootings in the Christchurch mosque.

Let’s hope Americans have the courage to make changes.  

The UK can do it: Boris Johnson rewrote the rules on Friday to remove the duty of ministers to resign after breaching the code of conduct and deleted the words “honesty”, “integrity”, “transparency” and “accountability” from the foreword, thereby exempting ministers from four of the seven (Nolan) principles of public life (adopted in 1995).  All this in an attempt to save the skin of a congenital liar who probably can’t even spell integrity and who believes being open about and accountable for one’s actions are for lesser people from cheaper schools.

The good news is that, after five months of pressure from the Labour party to introduce windfall taxes on serendipitous profits, the chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, has finally accepted they are necessary and done a U-turn, though actually he’s not imposing ‘windfall taxes’, he’s imposing a “temporary targeted energy profits levy” which is, of course, quite different.

Anything to divert attention from the details in Sue Gray’s report on ‘partygate’.

And, in another amazing coincidence, this week saw Johnson claiming credit for the opening of nearly all of the short central section of London’s Elizabeth line which was described by one commentator as being “true to the finest traditions of British infrastructure … years over deadline and billions above budget”.

I can remember Crossrail’s route being discussed in the early 1990s and, after years of negotiations, building work officially started in 2009.  While this was shortly after Johnson had been elected mayor of London, claiming credit for it seems to be rather less than truthful – good job he’s no longer required to be honest.

The only real success in the story is that some 3m tonnes of soil dug out from under London was taken to Wallasea Island on the Essex coast, creating a new wetland sanctuary for birds.

Back in the days of typesetters and hot lead, the Guardian contained so many typographical errors that Private Eye always referred to it as the Grauniad but the editors always took it in good spirit and apologised when necessary.  A columnist in yesterday’s paper repeated what she described as “the greatest correction of all time”:

“A caption in Guardian Weekend, page 102, November 13, read ‘Binch of crappy travel mags’.  That should, of course, have been ‘bunch’.  But more to the point, it should not have been there at all.  It was a dummy which we failed to replace with the real caption.  It was not meant to be a comment on perfectly good travel brochures.  Apologies.”

And the week’s other major event was Bob Dylan’s 81^st birthday.  Never let anyone tell you that excessive use of drugs will shorten your life.

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.

Trusting Boris Johnson, G7 and Brexit, your medical secrets, Michael Gove broke the law and releasing murderers

13 June 2021

Cornwall was closed this week.

Nothing to do with local demonstrations against the destruction wrought on local village economies by second-home owners, or even ‘entertainment industry’ owners (like ice-cream merchants) complaining about the loss of tourist income, just the G7 meeting at Carbis Bay where world leaders were supposed to meet to solve the world’s problems, with a side order of hammering the final nail into the coffin of the mythical honour of an English gentleman.

Well, I suppose the image of an Englishman’s honour (no question that Celts or women were ever involved) was self-generated anyway and the “my word is my bond” stuff only worked if the Englishman was on the blunt end of a weapon.  England’s power and wealth is the result of theft – international piracy and the British Empire, which developed for purely commercial reasons at the expense of the indigenous peoples (“natives”) who worked as slaves or were massacred.

So Johnson is not the confident host he so wanted to be but is stuck in a corner, trying to avoid admitting that nobody who backed Brexit realised that the UK has a land border with the rest of the EU, that he left negotiating an agreement until the last minute and now wants something different, risking the Good Friday Agreement that’s given us all 20 years that have been a lot more peaceful than Friday nights at the Bullingdon Club (an interesting article on which can be found at https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2021/02/02/a-day-in-the-lockdown-life-of-a-bullingdon-club-member/ )

The EU’s anger is based on the demonstrable fact that, under Johnson’s leadership, the UK can no longer be trusted and even Joe Biden said, in the exquisite language of an experienced politician, that “Any steps that imperil or undermine the Good Friday agreement will not be welcomed by the US.”  He went on to say that this was not a threat or ultimatum but he was “crystal clear about his rock-solid belief in the Good Friday agreement as the foundation for peaceful coexistence in Northern Ireland” and urged both sides to sort it out (the NI problem, not the mixed metaphor).

Less familiar with weasel words, Emmanuel Macron said that “nothing is negotiable” in the agreement and protocol that was voluntarily negotiated, agreed and signed by all parties.

All this in the background while G7 was trying to concentrate on things like the Covid pandemic, the distribution of vaccines, global economic recovery, the climate emergency, China, how quiet St Ives is, and the quality of the breakfast sausages. 

Before the summit had even started, foreign policy experts and former British diplomats were worried that the UK was widely perceived as not trustworthy and therefore not in the same league as Biden, a big man from a big country, who all too obviously outclasses Johnson, a small man from a small country, in every respect.

A side benefit of these tensions is that, presumably because he can’t risk upsetting even more people, Johnson has agreed to delay his plan to share our medical records with the private sector via NHS Digital, something his government had been trying to sneak through the back door with an absolute minimum of publicity.  Luckily some eagle-eyed cynics noticed and told everyone. 

Otherwise, in no time at all, Google, Amazon, Rupert Murdoch and any half-way competent hacker will know all about our abortions, acne, acute hypochondria, heartburn, hernia, piles, STIs, verrucas, Viagra addiction etc and will be able to target ads directly at our, er, frailties.

So put pen to paper NOW and tell your GP your information must not be released.

And tomorrow it seems likely we’ll hear that we’re not being freed on 21 June and the remaining Covid restrictions will stay in place for an extra two or more weeks, depending on scientists’ judgements of the increasing likelihood of a third surge in infections as the Delta variant hurtles through the population.  (What are they going to do when they reach Omega?  Go on to a chronological list of Derby winners since 1950?)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the High Court has ruled that Michael Gove broke the law when he awarded a large contract to Public First.  The Cabinet Office has said this doesn’t matter, setting a worrying precedent:  if Cabinet Ministers are now allowed to break the law and stay in office, we’re on a greasy slope.

Remember Jonathan Aitken?  He broke the law, went to prison and was subsequently ordained as a parish priest in the Church of England.  Or Jeffrey Archer?  He broke the law, went to prison, and is still writing rubbish books.  Why don’t they just let Gove go to prison and do whatever he’s capable of when he’s released?

But the most impressive news released this week was a brilliant wheeze that the FBI and police in Australian and Europe set up three years ago.  Frustrated by their difficulties in intercepting criminal communications, they set up their own secure, specialised, end-to-end encrypted messaging app, An0m, shut down its two major competitors and recorded all traffic using An0m.

This led to the arrest of 800 suspected members of criminal gangs and the recovery of more than £100m in cash plus tonnes of drugs, cryptocurrencies, weapons and luxury cars.  It also revealed that some gangs were being tipped off, which led to more arrests and “high-level corruption cases in several countries” according to an FBI agent.

Also this week, the UK’s Parole Board approved the release of Colin Pitchfork, who was jailed for life in 1988 with a minimum of 30 years when he was 28, for raping and murdering two 15-year old girls.  His release remains provisional for 21 days until the Justice Secretary Robert Buckland decides whether to approve or appeal against their decision.

The Board heard evidence from Pitchfork as well as his probation officer, police and a prison service psychologist and its decision said “After considering the circumstances of his offending, the progress made while in custody and the evidence presented at the hearing, the panel was satisfied that Mr Pitchfork was suitable for release.” 

Pitchfork has been in an open prison in 2018.

If he is released, he would be subject to a risk management plan that would impose strict conditions, including living at a designated address, being subject to probation supervision, wearing an electronic tag, undergoing lie detector tests, disclosing the vehicles he uses and who he speaks to, with particular limits on contact with children.  He would also be subject to a curfew, have restrictions on using technology and on where he can go, and he would not be allowed into Leicestershire or to knowingly approach any of the girls’ relatives.

What would you do?

On a lighter note, a 17-year old in California saw a large mother bear with two cubs on top of a wall in their backyard.  Four dogs ran out barking and the bear batted at them.  Without thinking what she was doing, the teenager rushed out and pushed the bear off the wall, then picked up the smallest dog and got all of them back into the house.  Great bit of film recorded by a surveillance camera …  (Poor old bear, said a friend, she was only trying to protect her cubs.)