the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Today is the 6th June and it has always been a constant source of unique amazement to me that this date isn’t immediately synonymous to people as the anniversary of the single most important day in European history.

I once knew someone whose birthday was on the 6th June and upon him telling me this I remarked that it was a day of incomparable import. His look of total incomprehension was matched only by his subsequent casual indifference when I told him why. 

This was someone who had just completed a P.hd in Art History, so had received an education sufficient to detect numerous meanings from the types of crockery used in old paintings, or how the use of certain colours were signifiers of social status  – I jest not – but somehow D-Day had passed him by. Despite all of his schoolings, his exams and his comfortable life in academia, he had no knowledge of it.

He voted Remain in the European Referendum and whilst not as vociferous as others regarding his belief that a profound injustice had been orchestrated upon him, he was still possessed with a low-level simmering resentment about it. The sheer hypocrisy that permits such opinions to be championed are no less offensive if one is ignorant of the fact that such a hypocrisy exists. 

The European Referendum, no matter its causes and eventual outcome, was a democratic exercise enacted by our democratically elected government. The right to protest about the verdict is itself a product of our democracy, from parliamentary agitations, the legal challenges, constant media criticisms down to the basic freedom of an individual to hold, let alone express or communicate, a dissenting view. 

The democracy that allows all of these concepts to grow, to embed themselves in a society so much that they become part of what we understand democracy, indeed the very idea of a parliamentary democracy, was so fundamentally antithetical to Nazi ideology, but for D-Day we might never have known.

But for D-Day and the eventual liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny, the world would be very different. I probably wouldn’t be here in London, because I doubt if my parents would’ve left the Republic of Ireland if Germany had won the war. The decision might not even have been theirs to make, if Hitlers desire for total domination of Europe was left unchecked.

That’s why the anniversary of D-Day is so very resonant now, why it isn’t just another dry fact of history, why it doesn’t just exist in faded black and white newsreels, increasingly few personal recollections full of unspoken heroism or patriotic nostalgia. Instead all of us owe a debt of the most sincere and boundless gratitude for the fact we are in the middle of yet another election campaign because Britain robustly defended the democracy we enjoy today.

The simple fact that we take for granted what we consider inalienable rights, rights that could so easily been crushed under a jackboot, is precisely why D-Day is for me the single most defining moment in European history. 

In just under two hours from now, there’ll be live head to head debate between Prada and NotHardie on ITV. Unfortunately it won’t be the sort of head to head one tends to find online, but the much more boring and less interesting spectacle of two men both desperately wondering exactly how Farrago’s announcement yesterday that he will be standing for election will affect them.

It’s a pity he hadn’t waited until today to make the announcement, because that would really have scuppered their carefully rehearsed strategies for the debate. Like him or not, no-one can seriously deny that Farrago has done again what he’s always done, which is to shake things up. 

By entering the fray, he’s perfectly illustrated how both Prada and NotHardies dullness is matched only by their lack of ambition. Farrago pretty much single-handedly brought about the Brexit referendum, while all the other two have given us are similar versions of uninspiring.

So the spectre of Farrago will be at their shoulders, the question is whether they’ll rise up to the challenge and show some gumption or will they retreat into easy soundbites. Thankfully their spin doctors will be on hand to tell the assembled media whores that what was said we actually misheard and that was meant was actually quite different.

Spare a thought for ITV though. A commercial broadcaster having to give up an hours prime-time slot and for what? Low viewing figures and being forced to fill the breaks with plugs for its own shows because no advertiser wants their brand to be tainted by such a visual cure for insomnia.

 Diane Abbott is certainly a great many things to a great many people but to me, she is the first politician in this election campaign to have called upon the services of the irony police. 

To deny a claim of racism made against her, many of her supporters have claimed that her suspension from the Labour Party and its subsequent treatment of her by them, was itself motivated by racism with the wholly predictable result that the original offence has been largely forgotten. 

The issue that now preoccupies the media and has engulfed The Labour Party is the both disingenuous and dangerous falsehood that she is the victim.

Lest we forget, the original charge of racism against her and which led to her suspension from the Labour Party was a letter she sent to the Observer newspaper in April 2023. For reasons unknown, she made the incredibly offensive claim that ‘It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus.’.

I’m not even going to bother to explain why I think what she wrote is so offensive because I trust that anyone reading this post knows why. But the notion of her being a victim of racism, that her suspension from the Labour Party is itself essentially motivated by racism, being both disingenuous and dangerous I will explain.

The former Labour leader, Corblimey had the Labour whip withdrawn in 2020, after he said anti-Semitism within Labour during his leadership had been ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons’, following a damning report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. 

That’s why its disingenuous. Corblimey’s entire leadership was, it seemed to me, forever being assailed not just by accusations of anti-Semitism within the party but accusations about the way those accusations were dealt with. 

Its dangerous because by suggesting that racism is a contributory, if not the primary reason that has motivated her treatment, then it not only calls into question the motives of those who are only too eager to find examples of racism everywhere, but it additionally creates a culture whereby that thinking takes root, allowing other racist incidents to be all too easily dismissed.

On a more obvious note, there was a headline in The Observer on Sunday ‘ Starmer on Abbott: ‘I’ve actually got more respect for Diane than she probably realises’, which to me seems like a back-handed compliment, if the starting point was way less than zero anyway.

Is it just me or does the conviction yesterday of Donald Trump remind anyone else of the show trials in the Russia of the 1930’s under Stalin? Where the charges, such as they were, were incidental. The main purpose of his trial, as I understand it, was to put Trump on trial for something, find him guilty and thus scupper his chances of being elected as President in November.

The more that I learn about the whole sordid affer, the more sordid it becomes. Yes paying a porn star to keep quiet about an alleged affair is sordid, but much more sordid is a prosecutor using frankly inconsequential misdemeanour and somehow turning into a serious felony to bolster his own electoral prospects.

Donald Trump isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a proponent of any kind of politics I’d defend, he is a rabble rouser who exploits peoples fears for his own ends. But isn’t that what politicians do, what they’ve always done and what this trial is about? 

I imagine that a fair amount of Trump opponents may have at best a few of the talking points that the media has relentlessly repeated over the last eight years to affirm why they revile him so but doesn’t this echo the constant lambasting that Boris’s Johnson has been subjected to?

Like I wrote, sordid and like it as not, this kind of of lawfare – the weaponisation of the law to achieve political ends – is already here and only going to get worse.

They were at it again yesterday in The Guardian, once more promulgating the totally disingenuous and blatantly self-serving idea that what is needed to combat the threats posed to humanity is to do everything except having less humanity. 

They published an article by David King, chair of the global Climate Crisis Advisory Group, entitled, ‘Humanity’s survival is still within our grasp – just. But only if we take these radical steps’. However, having read the article, he should be chair of the global society of ostrich impersonators, so deep is his head in the sand. Possibly that’s because he knew that the article was intended for The Guardian, which as I’ve pointed out on this blog before, has its entire business model predicated upon telling its readers what they want to hear in order that they keep funding it. 

Which they do, giving so much money in fact, that over half of its income comes through its readers. This means that instead of having one cigar chomping, pin stripe suit wearing and stinking rich old white man as proprietor, one who influences its editorial content to better advance his business interests, they have thousands of proprietors, many drinking fair trade coffee with soya milk, wearing ethically sourced clothing and who possibly identify as non-binary. All of whom are eager to read about how they can still have children and care about climate change.

Hence we have this this choice selection of pandering nonsense ‘But we have agency to change this, and a thriving future is still on the table. To grasp it, we must embark on a radical journey encompassing an essential “4R planet” pathway. This means: reducing emissions; removing the excess greenhouse gases (GHGs) already in the atmosphere; repairing ecosystems; and strengthening local and global resilience against inevitable climate impacts.’

All of which would no doubt help alleviate the situation, but the single most effective solution, the one would that would unquestioningly reduce global consumption and the energy needed to produce the things consumed, halt the expansion of cities by reducing overcrowding and therefore protect natural habitats more would be a curb on population. I have no idea how that might be achieved, only an awareness that whilst such an idea might be unpalatable to some, it doesn’t make it any less necessary.

The scale of the necessity of doing so is only matched by the political avoidance of even discussing it. Indeed, as the United Nations observed recently ‘The world’s population is more than three times larger than it was in the mid-twentieth century. The global human population reached 8.0 billion in mid-November 2022 from an estimated 2.5 billion people in 1950, adding 1 billion people since 2010 and 2 billion since 1998. The world’s population is expected to increase by nearly 2 billion persons in the next 30 years, from the current 8 billion to 9.7 billion in 2050 and could peak at nearly 10.4 billion in the mid-2080s.’

So whilst David King may worry that ‘the world is emitting over 50bn tonnes of GHGs annually into the atmosphere, expressed as CO2 equivalent. Since we are unlikely to achieve a removal rate exceeding 10bn tonnes per annum, there can be no way forward without reducing emissions to a very small figure.’, the most obvious way forward would be to reduce the numbers of humans producing those emissions in the first place, which to me is far more practical than changing the things consumed if there are increasing amounts of consumers to consume them. Or am I missing something?

And in an election campaign, when the electorate are hopefully more engaged with politics than at any other time, politicians should have the moral courage and integrity to be honest. They’re forever banging on about ‘needing to make difficult choices’, but to me there are two choices, one astoundingly simple and the other almost impossibly difficult. Is the current amount of people alive today sustainable and if we don’t want that number to increase, how do we achieve it?

So yes, ‘a seismic cultural shift is imperative to steer humanity away from self-destruction towards a just and sustainable future. We must realign our political will, economic priorities and societal values to recognise that ecological wellbeing is matched to human wellbeing.’ But if that ‘seismic cultural shift’  doesn’t involve addressing the most blindingly obvious causative factor of increased greenhouse gases, continued use of fossil fuels and and the increase of extreme weather events – an increasing population – then any changes are about much use as re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Deckchairs ethically sourced and made from sustainable materials by workers in the global south, if one is a Guardian reader of course  

One of the many reasons why the electorate holds politicians in such contempt is because they make wildly preposterous claims which they expect to be taken seriously. This wholly rational way of thinking has been borne out time and time again, but reaches a cyclical peak every general election campaign.

Nothing epitomises this truism more than taxes, specifically any claim a politician makes that they won’t raise taxes. Both the main parties will make this pledge that even as they make them they must know to be if not untrue, then highly improbable. Because in making such a pledge they deny reality by ignoring the challenges that the double-whammy of an increasing and ageing population population presents.

Yesterday it was Rachel Reeves Labours Shadow Chancellor turn. Speaking on BBC1’s ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’ she said that Labour supported lower taxes, but she would not put forward “unfunded proposals”. Pressed repeatedly on her tax plans, she said: “What I want and Keir [Starmer] wants is taxes on working people to be lower and we certainly won’t be increasing income tax or national insurance if we win at the election.

The bad news for her is that her notion of ‘want’ and ‘support’ is as effective as a child making a wish as they blow out the candles on their birthday cake. The demographics bear this out.

According to the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), whereas today 18% of the population is over the age of 65, by 2065 they predict it will be 26%. The OBR also has a lot of forecasts, analysis and projections that I’m sure are as fascinating as they are terrifying but what I takeaway from it is this; 26% of people in 2065 will be costing the state much more than they contribute. The older people get, the more they’ll be prone to age related illness, meaning more pressure on the NHS and because of the increasing onerous obligations that statutory social care places on councils, a state of affairs that’s clearly financially unsustainable.

And with 15% of the population predicted to be under 16 by 2065, that means that 41% of them will be paying no tax. Even if the OBR forecasts are wrong – and that hasn’t happened before, has it? – we still face the same problem albeit it being a tiny bit less of a problem. How on earth does Ms Reeves – or MisLeading as she is now – imagine this ever worsening problem is to be resolved?

She dare not because it is another truism of politics that the older someone is, the more likely to vote they are. No politician wants to risk the kind of political shitshow that engulfed Theresa May when she inexplicably chose to announce her plans to reform adult social care in the middle of her 2017 election campaign. But several large hats off to her for even attempting to be honest with the electorate about the sums of money involved. Adult social care alone cost £26.9 billion in 2021/22, up 3.8% from 2020/21 and the more older people there are and the more they keep living longer, that cost is only going to increase.

And then there’s pensions.

According to the OBR, pensions will account for 42% of the welfare budget this year, that’s £124 billion, the largest single expenditure and it follows that the more pensioners there are, and the longer that they live, the greater tax burden they’ll place on the decreasing amount of people paying that tax.

When the current crop of pensioners – those over 80 I’m talking about here – were adults of working age and paid tax, successive governments had a realistic expectation that their time as a pensioner might last for maybe 15 years or so. Wasn’t that the deal with state pensions? That their tax paid for the pensions of the old, and when they were old the tax paid by others paid for theirs. However, the Office for National Statistics estimates that by 2045 there will be 3.1 million of them or 4.3% of the population. So to my way of thinking, anyone over the age of 85 who is claiming a state pension is guilty of benefit fraud. It may well be through no fault of their own, but they’re still claiming a benefit to which they’re not entitled.

Not that I care too much about it as I’ll most likely be dead by 2065, at least I hope so if the meat runs out before then. But that doesn’t excuse the blatant sophistry of MisLeading, because whilst she may well rule out raising taxes, she doesn’t rule out introducing new ones, does she?

Did Londoners see the ULEZ scheme coming?

As we enter into the last days of the phoney election campaign, the one where politicians do the the equivalent of warm-up exercises before a big race. Finalising their election stagey, adding last minute changes to their manifestos, not just checking everyone’s fully aware of what messages they want to constantly repeated for weeks- ‘strong and stable’ is a classic from 2017 – but also the attack lines, the pithy quips and barbs that they’ll use against their opponents, that sort of thing.

They’ll also be gearing up to unleash their advertising campaigns, ones for not only the various ways the electorate consume their media but within that, the specially targeted online adverts to reach certain interest groups. Think of hundreds of different leaflets, all differently worded and tailored to press individual buttons but with the same basic message, Vote for us. Don’t vote for them. 

So with all that in mind and with all that lies in front of us – lie being the operative word – lets have a closer look at some of the charlatans and frauds who are stepping down as MP’s at this election, because its much better for your CV to jump rather be pushed.

Some names you’ll be familiar with – Michael Gove, Theresa May, Caroline Lucas and Harriet Harman – and others you’ll think ‘How are they still there?’ – Matt Hancock  and Kwasi Karting – but most have carefully managed to stay out of the spotlight hoping that their assorted nefarious doings fade into obscurity like them.

The following MP’s took the whole concept of cash for questions to a whole new level, so much so that there was almost a sense of grudging admiration for the way that they’d escaped detection for so long. The whole shabby episode was only revealed when one of them, Charles Tye, drunkenly mistook a journalist for a lobbyist at the Conservative Party Conference in 2017 and said enough to launch a 18 monthinvestigation.

According to the UK Parliament website, ‘Select committees run inquiries on specific topics. The outcomes of these inquiries are public and many require a response from the government. Select committees also carry out their work through correspondence, by engaging with the public through events and surveys, holding round-table discussions and undertaking visits.’ 

Thomas Close was appointed to the Committee on Selection (CoS) in 2005, eventually becoming its deputy chair in 2012. The purpose of the CoS is to nominate candidates to sit on other select committees. Sounds dull, doesn’t it, but Close saw an opportunity and approached two lobbying firms with defence, financial, technological and clients. He undertook to influence the committee into nominating MP’s favourable to their clients interests to sit on relevant committees.

Eventually Soham Toney, and Dan Heaton joined him on the CoS, Brent Eleigh sat on the Committee on Arms Export Controls and later served as chair on the Defence Committee for four years, Morfa Dinkile sat on the Finance Committee for eight years, and upon his becoming a Lord was replaced by Hesketh Bank. Thorpe Merieux  sat on the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee for eleven years.

According to Wikipedia,’ the scale of the corruption was so difficult to believe that it was suspected on all sides of House to be a smear campaign orchestrated by News International, publisher of The Sun, The  News of the World, The Times and Sunday Times to divert attention away from the Leveson Inquiry into press standards’. In addition to luxurious all expenses paid five star holidays and ‘fact-finding trips overseas, it was rumoured that Close had trousered nearly £650,000, Brent Eleigh £375,000 and the rest between £100,000 – £200,000.

He also acted as a political influencer, helping to arrange meetings, having questions raised in the house after tipping off journalists about a possible story in his client interests. On one memorable occasion doing a ‘filibuster’ of six hours straight – talking a bill out of allotted parliamentary time before a final vote to pass it into law can take place – regarding tighter restrictions on ‘pay day’ loan companies.  

Charles Tye was censured but not expelled because the House of Commons Standards Committee decided that as he had only been approached, had not breached parliamentary rules. Tye has announced his intention to set up a charity to help recovering addicts when he leaves parliament in June.  

If, as widely predicted, Labour do indeed win the election, wouldn’t it be an incredibly satisfying turn of events if a vocal minority Conservative voters constantly banged on about how utterly unfair they thought the outcome was and sought to overturn it? 

Possibly by launching court cases based on nothing more than sour grapes which might end up involving the Supreme Court, calling for judicial reviews of the process and attempts cancel the result. Not to thwart the democratic will of the majority you understand, but to do something incredibly complicated that only the grown ups might be able to understand.

Which would necessarily suggesting that the credulous fools who’d voted for Labour not only had been lied to, but that Labour had knowingly lied to them. That Labour voters didn’t really know what they were voting for – was it Eurovision? – effectively implying that Conservative voters were intimately aquatinted with every detail of their manifesto.

Because it is a truism of political election campaigning, that political manifesto’s are sacred texts, and all of their promises are always enacted if elected and reused again and again if not, to signify exactly how committed to them they are. No political campaign in the history of ever, has been accused of falsehoods, misleading claims and downright lies. 

There’d also be the unspoken assumption that there was something inherent in their character that had caused them to vote Labour. Either a moral defect or an irrational fear, possibly both, that rendered them susceptible to manipulation via well funded and highly targeted social media adverts.

But of course this won’t happen and the reason it won’t happen is losers consent, the ludicrous premise that the losing side in an election gracefully accepts defeat and moves on. You know, the way democracy is supposed to work, you win some you lose some.

I just want to point out again that I voted to Remain in the European referendum, but was appalled by the way that certain sections of the media, especially BBC TV, BBC Radio 4 and The Guardian constantly promoted the fatuous idea that some elaborate political chicanery had taken place. And even more appalled that there was an audience all too willing to believe such complete and uttter bollocks and that they alone were part of the chosen few who could see it.

It is said that every cloud has a silver lining and until yesterday evening, I never believed it true. First off, the cloud.

For reasons wholly to do with selective virtue signalling and wanting to be well thought of by the digital mob, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh resigned as patrons of the Phoenix cinema in London in protest over the venue hosting an Israeli state-sponsored film festival yesterday

As The Guardian reported 

The cinema – one of the UK’s oldest – is holding a private screening of Supernova: The Music Festival Massacre, as part of the international Seret film festival on Thursday night. The documentary tells the story of the attack by Hamas on the Nova music festival on 7 October through survivor testimony.

That would be the attack by Hamas in which 364 civilians were killed.

As I have observed before on this blog, Hamas knew well what sort of response this would provoke, but decided to do it anyway. So to my mind, any Palestinian deaths resulting from the subsequent Israeli military action is totally their fault. I don’t understand why people are so unwilling to accept this.

Leaving that aside – for now at least – and back to Ken Loach. I’d always admired him and his work. His was the kind of film-making which, whilst not always an easy watch, was imbued with a sympathy for the ordinary person and which was never patronising or condescending, but critiqued the forces, political with both a large and a small p, that confounded them.

His 1969 documentary about the charity ‘Save the Children’ despite being partly funded by them, was banned from ever being broadcast by them, it being so critical. In 1980, his documentary ’A Question of Leadership, about the steel workers strike of 1980 and the Thatcherism that had caused it, was considered so inflammatory it was withdrawn and when it was finally shown, was savagely edited and a ‘balancing’ programme shown afterwards.

So him telling the Guardian: “‘My resignation as a patron of the Phoenix shows what I think of their decision. It is simply unacceptable.” is so disappointing, not least because it is the sort of treatment he has faced.

Now the silver lining.

There were two protests outside the Phoenix last night. One was by the usual pro-Palestinian rabble rousers parading their selective virtue, and wonderfully, a counter protest by a pro-Israeli crowd shouted them down so much they gave up and went home.

Oddly enough ‘The Guardian’ wasn’t able to find enough digital space to run this story today, but thankfully, The Jewish Chronicle did. It was able, however to rehash yesterdays story today.

As with previous UK general elections, I’ll be attempting to write a daily post, concerning both the various shenanigans of all involved in the campaign and also some of the wider, more tangential issues that I consider to have some bearing upon it.

I will attempt to be scrupulously fair and impartial when commenting on such matters, by which I mean I’ll be by turns scathing, cynical and deeply suspicious of not only politicians actions during the campaign, but also the way in which the media choose to report them.

It will be many things, but it won’t be boring. Unfortunately for you, it will offer a glimpse into the way my mind works but as as it is a mind that is brain damaged, think of this as you doing your good deed for the day, akin to indulging the whims of a small child.

All aboard the unicorns then!