the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Tag: politics

July 3, 2026

33:64 presents “Gerry Mandering”

Here’s a conundrum. Is the right thing to do, still the right thing to do if it is done for the wrong reason? I’ve been atop the horns of that particular dilemma for a week now. And all because the government is re-introducing previous voting system for electing mayors, reverting back to the Supplementary Vote system (SV) that been used up until 2024.

I know that this shouldn’t bother me. That to most people it’s simply a dull procedural matter of no importance and besides, there are more pressing concerns to worry about. But that is precisely why it bothers me so. I’ve never thought politics dull. Every single aspect of our lives is governed by political choices over which we have no control. Politics even decided whether you were born or not. 

Did your mother have access to contraceptive advice, let alone have access to them? If she chose to have you, how easy might ante-natal services be to access? How well funded would the hospitals maternity unit be? What about healthcare needs after the birth, the follow up checks, vaccinations, mother&baby clubs? Or could she have had a termination if she chose? If not, then how likely was it that she could choose to have the baby adopted. Everything is political, and so the method by which we choose our politicians is about as important as it gets. 

But what is the SV and how does it differ from the first-past- the-post system (FPTP). Well, as the names suggests, FPTP means that whoever wins the most votes wins. As simple as that. There is no threshold, no winning margin required, just coming first is all that matters. SV is a bit more complicated than that.  Its a ranked ballot, meaning that voters have the option to rank candidates. If no candidate gets more than 50.1% in the first round of counting, then the candidate with the lowest amount of votes is eliminated but the second choice of the eliminated candidate voters are then added to the tally. As soon as a candidate reaches the magic 50.1% threshold, thats it. It’s an just incomparably fairer. 

Does this renewed enthusiasm for proportional representation suggest the end is nigh for FPTP?  Is it a long overdue acknowledgement of the fundamental structural unfairness inherent our democracy? A belated acceptance of the notion that every vote should matter? And then if the answer to all of the above is ‘Yes’, then if FPTP isn’t fit for mayoral elections, it follows that it isn’t fit for general elections either.

But that is to forget what happened in 2024. In the space of a month, Reform UK came from basically nowhere to win over 14% of the vote at the 2024 general election. Since then, all political parties have had to adjust to a new political landscape. In the UK, this has been most problematic for the Labour Party. Despite ‘winning’ the 2024 election, it did so with the lowest ever share of the vote in any UK general election, 33% but ending up with 64% of the seats – hence the title of this blog – it was acutely aware that its traditional supporters were not supporting them in the way Labour had always assumed they would. The one word answer is Brexit. For more words, read this blog I posted a few days ago.

So clearly FPTP had its flaws. But canny voters realised that by voting tactically, they could vote in by elections for candidates not on the basis of wanting that candidate to win, but on the basis of wanting someone else not to.This happened in the Caerphilly by election of 2025 and in the Gorton and Denton one in 2026. I wrote blogs on both of them, full of boring statistics to prove my main point. Long story short; that rather than presenting a united front – a defiant coming together of different political tribes in order to defeat a common enemy – which the prevailing narratives were keen to promote, the very opposite was true.

Because in both cases the reason for the winning party’s increase in the share of the vote could be explained almost exactly by the decreases suffered by all three main parties from the last time elections were held there. And it’s not as if lack of voter awareness was to blame for the low turnouts. The media loudly trumpeted the threat that Reform posed.

This to me offers a more plausible explanation as to why there’s been a change back. Even before Andy Capp became Westminster bound, his chances of becoming mayor again were looking slim.  Yes, he got 63% of the vote in that election. But only 32% of the voters bothered to do so. And that was two months before the general election. Before Reform had even been a thing and long before all the various ‘Two-Tier Kier’ headlines that were shorthand for political ineptitude and institutional preferences. Instead of doing the ‘hard yards’ and changing political ideology to better align with with the values of the people the party was set up to represent, much easier to change the voting system expressly to deny them that

The last thing Andy Capp needs is for Manchester to elect a Reform Mayor. That would really rain on his parade.  Its fine for the people to speak, just as long as they’re telling what he wants to hear.

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June 23, 2026

33:64 presents “Liquid Cool.”

Happy Birthday Brexit. 10 years old today, who would’ve thought it? I hope people still remember and they haven’t forgotten. After all, it’s not easy keeping track of everything, especially when everyone is busy moving on with their lives, inevitably it becoming just another memory. And like all memories, gradually fading away into a vague collection of nostalgic imaginings and wistful regrets.

As if! Brexit is a potent and divisive as it ever was. Possibly moreso. Time isn’t the great healer.  Andy Capp proves it. His forthcoming coronation is predicated on appeasing the ranks of disaffected Labour MP’s, and nothing appeases them more than the prospect of ever closer ties to Europe. I know he said to the voters of Makerfield that he’d reversed his previously held opposition to Brexit, but everyone knows he’ll reverse that reversal. He’s a politician. He says what people want to hear. 

And whilst I’m on the subject of telling people what they want to hear, it just so happens that ‘The Guardian’ is running this story today. ‘Three in five gen Z Britons would like new vote to rejoin EU, poll finds.

Data reveals 60% of 18 to 28-year-olds would vote to rejoin bloc if given the opportunity’ 

And a story is exactly what it is, if we understand a story in ‘The Guardian’ about Brexit to be utter bollocks. One of my main gripes about any poll about Brexit that appears in ‘The Guardian’ tends to have at least two things in common. First of all, there is the astonishingly small number of people polled upon which they base the ‘story’. ‘The More in Common study, which surveyed 440 young people across Britain, shows that 50% of gen Z Britons categorise Brexit as a failure.’ But a graph helpfully clarifies that that 50% is actually 50.2%. This illustrates my second gripe; they interview just enough people to get the desired result and then stop. There’d be no point carrying on. If anything, it’d possibly make things worse. 

As soon as the magic number – more than 50% – is reached, no more people are asked the question, as doing so only increases the likelihood of that number falling. More in Common knows exactly what ‘The Guardian’ wants the poll to confirm and also knows that the more it gives them what they want, the more it will be asked to do so.‘The Guardian’ also knows precisely what its readers want to read. Well I write readers, but they could more accurately be described as cash cows. And boy, are they milked! I’ve written about this mutually beneficial relationship before. 

The more that ‘The Guardian’ promotes narrative in which Brexit was disaster, that the people who voted for it are wracked with guilt and how the sooner we rejoin the better, the more money it is that the readers will hand  hand over. It’s certainly lucrative and getting even moreso. Up from £88m in 2023/2024 to £107m in the year to the end of March 2025.     

I’ll end by sharing two observations, one serious and the other less so. Hopefully you’ll be able to work out which is which. Firstly, that 50.2% is a much better number than 220.88. Which is what it is. Quite who or what .88 is or even how it exists, don’t ask me. 50.2% of 440 is 220.88.

Secondly, if England lose tonight against Ghana, we all know what ‘The Guardian’ will blame it on…

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June 21, 2026

33:64 presents “Cathy Sheldon.”

Reflecting on Andy Capps victory in the Makerfield by election, I thought of ‘The Joker’ in ‘The Dark Knight. Specifically, the scene where he outlines to Harvey Dent his belief that as long as everything is going to plan, it matters not what that plan is. Just that everyone knows what the plan is and knows that its being its being followed  Its quite the observation, as simple as it is irrefutable. Humans love order, infer patterns where none exist, are hard-wired to find comfort in the predictable. Its known, its reassuring, its expected. 

This applies to Andy Capp insofar as his victory has essentially been wished into existence by fear. The fear in the ranks Labour Party that Emu is no longer the electoral certainty he was two years ago. That beset by scandals, gaffes, and the unfortunate headlines that they necessarily create, he has been forced into policy u-turns which have only highlighted his liability. MP’s have their jobs, their salaries and future career prospects – both in and out of politics – to consider. 

In this context, the plan holds true. We know politicians are ambitious. That their only true loyalty is to themselves. This isn’t our first rodeo. We’ve been here before. We know how it goes. First come the rumours about this, whispers about that and sources ‘close to’, ‘highly placed or ‘influential’ neither confirming or denying the other. Then it becomes an open secret, and soon it isn’t a secret anymore. Then the next thing we know, a Labour MP has stepped down and triggered a by election which could well propel Andy Capp into Downing Street. The names and the methods might change, but the plan, well, we all know the plan and everything’s going according to it.  

The plan is both reinforced by and co-written by the media elite. They choose who is to be the hero and who is to be the villain. Unfortunately for Emu, he was chosen to be both. The hero when the when one was needed,  before the last general election but the villain – or incompetent fool – quickly thereafter. Actually, I’ve no idea if he is incompetent, just unlucky or a combination of the two. I know as much as you do and what you do comes from the media and the media has a plan. And the beauty of the plan is that it has already done most of its work for it. That reinforcing I mentioned earlier? The scandals and the gaffes that lead to the headlines? There it is. 

So the plan nearly always works.And when it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work spectacularly. Brexit was the only time that the plan failed, and the mask fell, all pretence abandoned. The outrage of the liberal media elite when confronted by the reality of a democracy out of their control was a thing to behold. Which is what happens when millions of people give the wrong answer given to a question that those same elites think should never have been asked in the first place. Remember ‘The Wizard of Oz’ when Dorothy pulls back the curtain and see’s that the great and powerful Oz isn’t so great and powerful after all. Or that bit at the end of ‘Singing in the Rain’, where once again a curtain is pulled back to reveal the truth. 

Ah, Brexit! It increasingly occurs to me that if Brexit had never happened, I mean if the referendum had never taken place, then something broadly similar to it would have been needed to have been invented to explain away working class disillusionment with the political process. It was easier, more comforting and smugly patronising to explain away the frustration that Brexit revealed as evidence of manipulation, of misinformation and symptomatic of the xenophobic and bigoted tendencies of the working class. As opposed to their realisation that the system was rigged against them; that regardless of the solemn promises that whatever political party made to them since they were old enough to vote, those promises were worthless. 

Ten years on from the Brexit vote and every elite one can think of – political, cultural, academic, media, – are just as angry as they were the day after it happened, only know their better at finessing it now.  But the plan is back in place. Andy Capp will return things to ‘normal’, which means before Brexit. He says he’s – finally – accepted Brexit, the democratic will of the people, but the only democratic will he’s willing to accept are the ones that further his ambitions.  We were promised that the grown-ups were back in the room – according to plan fluffer Andrew Marr after the last general election –  and lets hope that this time its true. Otherwise the plan will have to begin all over again. 

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March 8, 2026

33:64 presents ‘Lewis Carroll.’

In Lewis Carroll’s “ Through the Looking-Glass”, the White Queen tells Alice that she praises believing ‘six impossible things before breakfast.’  This, she maintains, is a good thing; that it illustrates how the power of power of belief and imagination can make the impossible possible. In the Britain of 2026 however, where objective reality for some is objectionable, the power of belief and imagination causes them to believe more than six impossible things, and not just before breakfast either. All day, every day.

Including today, International Women’s Day. People in the UK, and around the world no doubt, have been protesting their support for the Iranian regime, and decrying the death of Supreme Leader Snoke. These idiots are blinded by their own moral certainty. So invested are they in their belief that everything America and Israel do is evil incarnate and that therefore who they do it to is deserving of their outrage, that their breathtaking hypocrisy escapes them.

The sheer level of contradictions one would need to overcome in order to think such a thing is incomprehensible.. That large numbers of ostensibly sensible people think it is worse. That they imagine that International Women’s Day is a suitable occasion upon which to lament and mourn what Iranian women have been pleading for for years only proves how deluded the protesters are 

Under Supreme Leader Snoke, the evil empire of Iran was not exactly known for being a staunch defender of women’s rights.  The legal restrictions upon them and the ruthless application of them, defies any rational understanding. Women in Iran, if they even get to see the images of the protesters, can only wonder at the absolute betrayal of people who would call themselves feminists. But who still have no problem putting their dangerous political fantasy  before universal principles of equality. Who enjoy the freedoms that living in a Western nation offers, one that has had the Enlightenment and its attendant values woven into society. A society moreover, that derives its laws not from religious interpretations of a book written over a thousand years ago, but from set of laws that are being constantly updated to better reflect the society it serves.

But getting back to Lewis Carroll, the White Queen and the six impossible things. If you believe that women can have penises, that achieving Net Zero is a worthwhile undertaking or that free speech isn’t absolute, then I suppose you can also think that Supreme Leader Snoke’s death is a bad thing. 

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March 6, 2026

33:64 presents “Jeremy Bowen.”

As has always been the case, I usually find myself not being in the least shocked by something other people find shocking, but by the fact that they find it shocking at all. The current conflict in Iran being a good example of this. The joint US/Israeli military campaign, one of overwhelming force has been, initially at least, brutally effective. The deaths of basically the entire senior Iranian political leadership and with them the ability of its military to effectively co-ordinate a response, was both long overdue and totally a good thing.

Would that this sentiment be shared by all. However, this is the Britain of 2026, a Britain where a crude Third Worldist narrative has taken hold. One which casts the US is as the origin of all wickedness, Israel the ultimate villain, and consequently anyone or anything opposed to them must be virtuous. The sincerity of those that believe in this nonsense, however is questionable, not least because it also fortuitously allows them to be either ruthlessly opportunistic, conditionally concerned or shamelessly bandwagoning. 

By ruthlessly opportunistic,  I mean those who manufactured, and then exploited the anger of the conditionally concerned regarding the civilian deaths in Gaza. Broad swathes of the UK media, and quite probably media around the world are guilty of this. Conveniently reducing the many horrors over many decades of a regime that gave religious intolerance a new benchmark, they seek to downplay its well documented barbarism to highlight just how evil the military action is. 

If this seems worryingly familiar then thats because it is.The parallels between how the media reported the Israel/Gaza war and the current one in Iran are near identical. Again, that crude Third Worldist narrative, the one that always has America as being little more than a puppet controlled by Israel and consequently their enemies of deserving uncritical support, created the conditionally concerned.

By conditionally concerned, I refer to those who claim to be all kinds of distressed by the deaths of Iranians, just so long as it is the right sort of people killing them. That would be the US and the Israelis. But not if it was the Iranian regime that was killing them. Those deaths, while reported on, did not garner a sustained, relentless and partisan global media campaign. Nor did they trigger widespread demonstrations in major cities around the world. 

The many thousands of people who attended these demonstrations, held sit-ins on university campuses and demanded that politicians ceased supporting Israel because of its war in Gaza and civilian deaths were conspicuously silent when the Iranian regime was killing thousands of protesters. The irony of that silence was beyond irony. The protesters in Iran wanted nothing more than to have the same freedoms that protesters busily denouncing Israel enjoyed. But when deaths occurred because of US/Israeli military action, action which the protesters had long been calling for and which the US had promised, only then did Iranian deaths matter.

This brings us to the shamelessly bandwagoning. The charities, the NGO’s and all the others in the alphabet soup of moral certitude and probity who are all plugged into a mutually beneficial circle of criticism. Again, just as in the Israel Gaza war, if these charities and others issue damning reports full of fearful projections, alarming statistics and calls for immediate action, their profile will raise along with their funding. They’ll then cite these other reports as evidence something must be done, only as long as they approve it and can blame others – Israel and now America – if it goes wrong,

Then there are my favourite kind of shameless bandwagoneers,  the political ones, who never see a tragedy without seeing an electoral opportunity as well. Which in the light of the recent trouncing of Labour by the Greens in the Gorton and Denton by-election, meant that Emu initially refusing, then reluctantly and since critically supporting the US/Israeli action. This had nothing whatsoever to do with attempting to placate Muslim voters ahead of Mays local elections, so better to prevent the widely predicted disaster. 

The Cunning Stunt, who got even more of a trouncing at the same by-election, has pivoted wildly to signal his principled opposition to any such disaster in May. His speech in Parliament on Monday was textbook pleading. He quickly signposted his antipathy towards the regime, but then focused upon who he thought were more deserving of his condemnation; the British influencers and assorted tax exiles in Dubai who wanted to be flown home by the the government. 

All of the above, the ruthlessly opportunistic, the conditionally concerned and the shameless bandwagoneers, exist in a perfectly engineered eco-system. One that is constantly propagating itself, sustained by its own imagined moral certainties but which is also oblivious of its inherent contradictions and manifold hypocrisies.

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November 21, 2025

33:64 presents “Kath Viner.”

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I’ve long been convinced that British popular culture has for some years now, been a poor imitation of the American one. An textbook example of this idea was always hamburgers. They had McDonalds and we got Wimpy. Even its name warned of disappointment. Because nothing screamed ‘fast food’ more than waitress service. Now I have an updated example of the same sadsackery, only this one comes with added ‘virtue’.

America now seems to be infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS),  which effectively views every action committed by President Trump as evidence of something so unspeakably awful that it must be spoken about all the time. Or protested about. But no matter how pathetic I think TDS is, he is at least the President. He has proper power. He can shape millions of lives. He leads a unified government, meaning that every branch of it – him, the Congress and the Senate – are all Republican. He is also the commander-in-chief of the worlds greatest military. He controls a vast nuclear arsenal. He can end billions of peoples lives at the touch of a button.

The most Farrago can do at the touch of a button is change the TV channel on his remote. The leader of a party with a the smallest number of MP’s in Parliament – 5 out of 650 – he somehow manages – in some peoples minds – to be the modern embodiment of Hitler,

So naturally, we have have to make do with Farragos’ Fake Scandals (FFS), which aren’t even proper scandals. The similarities with TDS don’t end there. Both are social contagions and both rely upon worryingly similar methods of transmission. Either passed on via individuals through friendship groups or other social networks, or for much greater propagation via constant repetition on the mass media. And similarly, both TDS and FFS are punishments for perceived ‘crimes’ against democracy.

Perceived of by those who believe in democracy, only it has to be the right kind of democracy. The one in which the right sort of people deliver the right sort of result. And when the wrong result is delivered by the wrong sort of people getting involved in matters best left to others, then the wrong sort of people suddenly became the wrong sort of right; ‘right-wing bigots’ or far right-wing extremists’.

Therefore, according to their twisted, wholly self-serving and corrupted version of democracy, Farrago who galvanised so many into being so wrong, deserves everything he gets. No allegation, no speculative conjecture, no hint of a hint of any impropriety is not so inconsequential as not to be worthy of feverish discussion and opined over. 

And nothing is more inconsequential than allegations that when he was 13 – 13 – he made some distasteful comments. At 13 his voice hadn’t yet broken! He was barely a teenager. He was just starting puberty. Yet these allegations are ‘deeply shocking’? Indeed they are. I am shocked that anyone that anyone thought that these were shocking, still less that they thought they mattered. 

And that’s my first problem with this. Do people seriously imagine that something boy of 13 is alleged to have said is in any way indicative of the man that boy has become 48 years later. It is alarming that people think it does and beyond ironic that these are the same people who quite happily blame Russian interference for influencing the Brexit vote, completely unaware that they are just as skilfully being manipulated as they believe others were. The motivation of grooming isn’t always sexual.

My second problem is what it says about the media we have and not just that because this isn’t the first time  ‘The Guardian’ have tried before to smear him based on decades old here-say about his schooldays. But also because of the calculated cynicism it reveals. ‘The Guardian’ knows full well it’s readers will lap this up because it vindicates their fantasy of Farrago as being a throwback to a world they’d wish never happened. It also allows others to weigh on it, to report on what ‘The Guardian’ is reporting. Very now, very meta.  And because of that, it allows Stymied to demand that Farrago to answer those reports.

Which is exactly the point of FFS. Throw enough mud, often enough and unexpectedly enough – who could’ve predicted that things he allegedly said 48 years ago would become a FFS – then some is bound to stick. And hopefully, the more that he’s discredited, the greater the likelihood is that potential supporters of his won’t want to be associated with that kind of mud.   

Its also unsurprisingly hypocritical of ‘The Guardian’. Less than a fortnight ago, it gave their newest electoral hope a platform to rail against what he imagines to be his unfair treatment by the press. ‘The right can mock my teeth all it wants – it shows the Greens have struck a nerve.’ He may not have written the headline and probably not the sub-header that followed,’As a politician, I expect opposition and debate. But when it centres on personal insults, not policies, something else is going on.’ 

But he did write ‘What’s now clear to me, both from the sheer number of attacks and their increasingly wild nature, is that they are a product of a political and media establishment rattled by a party that’s growing fast and willing to say the unsayable: that our country has been hijacked by those interested only in serving the super-wealthy.’ 

If he really thinks that it is ‘the super-wealthy’ who have ‘hijacked’ our country or that he’s the one saying the unsayable then he’s so green I should rename him Jack Beanstalk. The ‘political and media established’ aren’t in the least bit rattled by him. If anything, the mere fact of ‘The Guardian’ giving him the opportunity to make this claim fatally undermines it. 

The fact that FFS is now a staple of British politics proves that it isn’t Jack Beanstalk who scares them. It’s Farrago and what he represents. An ability to divine, articulate and champion the views of a substantial part of the electorate who feel cheated by this version of democracy, The ones who voted for Brexit. The ones who are living with the reality of what that means. 

It also amuses me that ‘The Guardian’ which can usually be relied upon to be vocal supporters of an indigenous peoples in their struggles with a political system it believes marginalises them, takes an opposite stance both here and in America.

Although a really cynical interpretation of FFS is that it suits all concerned to let it continue. Farrago can use it to claim he is spearheading a revolt against the status quo, and his supporters can feel vindicated that the more FFS there are, the more worried ‘they’ are by them. Conversely, ‘The Guardian’ has a business model that depends on a endless stream of FFS and TDS stories, so the more they do, the more their readers keep funding them. They too feel vindicated, albeit in an absence parody of virtue. 

On and on it goes, the political equivalent of an infinite loop.

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October 26, 2025

33:64 presents “Bob Dylan.”

The defeat suffered by Labour in the Caerphilly by-election would be incredibly ironic were it not for the fact of it being an ominous portent.  

To begin with, the irony is that the same electoral discontent that propelled Labour into government is exactly the same as that which caused them to be so  comprehensively rejected in Wales. Just as how their victory in the general election of 2024 wasn’t evidence of some long dormant upswell in Labour values amongst the voters, more than that it reflected their collective disenchantment after fourteen years of Tory Government, so to does its defeat last Thursday indicate less of a desire for Welsh independence than to send a message to Stymied.

No matter how much Plaid Cymru (PC) might claim otherwise, their basic shtick to the people of Caerphilly was ‘We’re not Reform’. Which was a shrewd piece of electoral maths. Anyone that might have otherwise have voted for Labour, the Conservative, Liberal Democrats or the Greens would have calculated that tactical voting was far more important than the result of one inconsequential by election.

Because no amount of testiculation can alter the fact that by-elections are the medieval equivalent of the government of the day being dragged to the stocks by voters and then pelted with rotten fruit, eggs and faeces. They prove only how unpopular a government is, which can be discerned from the both the voter turnout and who it was that the voters bothered to turnout for. 

Which in this case amounted to 50.43% of them, of whom only of those 47.4% voted for PC of which significant proportion of those were the aforementioned tactical voters. The change in vote share bears this out, the short version being that Labour and Conservative vote share collapsed from the general election and from which PC benefitted. 

My point is that this not only highlights voter disaffection generally – as evidenced by by the low turnout – but also a specific disaffection with the options open for them to choose from. If the main reason for your electoral success is from hoovering up ‘x’s from voters who detest another party more than they support your one, then that isn’t good.

It is also ominous because if we consider the success in 2024 of the six Independent Alliance MP’s and the barely over 30% of the vote they got on a roughly 40% turnout, and then factor that in with the collapse of traditional voting allegiances, then its clear that times are indeed a changing. Gone are the old class based loyalties. There was a certainty about them, rooted as they were in tangible differences which essentially boiled down to rich or poor. 

Yes they were simplistic but the Britain of  1970’s, 80’s or even the 90’s, were simpler times, there was no hint of just how complicated politics were to become. But whilst the Britain of 2025 is still one of simpler times, it is not the simple one of of recent history, but rather the simple dvision of identity politics. 

This is an inevitable consequence of a society that champions, rewards and celebrates an ever greater division based on identity.  One that is increasingly partisan, intolerant and self-righteous but also a society which rewards those politicians that seek to fashion that discontent into political opportunity. By perpetuating the very division proclaims it opposes and by fostering more grievances, more reasons for division, they are like political alchemists; they turn impotence, frustration and alienation into electoral opportunity.  

With little or no broad policy agenda – other than being opposed to things – and with scant regard for voter engagement beyond their core base and having no upside in remedying that, we are seeing a new kind of politics. Typified by Rasin, who hasn’t just divided along traditional political sectarian lines – left and right – but also among left and far left, and incredibly, those in the far left who don’t share her vision of what the far left is. 

But then again, is she all that different to Stymied or The Cunning Stunt? Only by degree’s, not by instinct or motivation. They have spent the last eight years vilifying people who believed in the wrong kind of democracy. Would ideally prefer that it had never happened, traduced and impugned the reasons of the people who caused it to happen and ignored their point of view. How different is her divisive politics to those politicians who can’t accept that Brexit happened?

How is her continual repetition of the lie of there having been a genocide in Gaze not too dissimilar Stymied and Co banging on about the racist, xenophobic or bigoted motivations of Brexit voters? Or her pandering to disaffected former Labour voters, those who imagine themselves progressives or else those who feel more than they think any more cynical than than those politicians who citing Russian interference, manipulation by the ‘far right’ or fundamental ignorance as comforting explanations for Brexit?  

It’s all on the same spectrum. I disagree with you and because you’re wrong, you’ve forfeited any right to be treated with the same respect I demand of others. That’s why the tactical voting in Caherphilly was so ominous, not because of what it was so much as to what it foretold. A growing willingness on the part of the electorate not to vote for who they want but to prevent the election of someone they want even less, And along with that, the idea that society should prioritise your grievances, needs and values above any other concern. 

Now there’s a cheery thought.

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October 23, 2025

33:64 presents “Christine Keeler.”

A few weeks ago I posted a blog, in whichI outlined my belief that the British press love a sex scandal, just as long as it’s the ‘right’ kind of sex scandal.  And that how,  if there was a ‘right’ of scandal, then it followed that there was a ‘wrong’ kind, and that the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal was a textbook example of one.

The very fact of the press describing them ‘grooming gangs’ underlines precisely how much of the ‘wrong’ kind of sex scandal it was. By dint the press repeatedly labelling them as ‘grooming gangs’, then having politicians and the police follow suit, it trivialised the sheer scale and depravity of what they did. Calling them ‘grooming gangs’ made them sound harmless teenage  miscreants, engaged in some hi-jinks involving pranks on horses. Calling them rape/torture gangs, by contrast, would have been more accurate and have demanded immediate action.

I’m not suggesting that some sex crimes are more deserving of proper examination than others. A sex crime is a sex crime. There should be no hierarchy. But according to the press there is. The events of this week prove this to be demonstrably so. One looks at how Prince Charmless has been all over the media this week, as compared to the scant coverage given to yet another rape/torture gang trial in Rochdale. 

This is a criticism of the media, how they choose to cover certain stories and of how the coverage of these stories can become an end in themselves. Of how these choices are made not according to some arbitrary moral code, but on basest of base principles upon which the media operates these days; cost and time. Of how by pursuing such lamentable objectives they inculcate in their readers an unhealthily prurient interest in how the story unfolds. Often, and the trial in Rochdale illustrates this, at the expense of stories more redolent of their readers lives. In my year at school for example, there were three girls who now would be the subject of all manner inter-agency safeguarding protocols, initiatives or interventions but back then, were just left to fend for themselves 

In Rochdale, six men are currently on trial for multiple sexual offences, including rape. The victims are two young girls, one of them 12. Both, the trial was told, “Were very vulnerable children with deeply troubled home lives and were known to the authorities. Their school attendance was poor and they were often missing from home. These men preyed upon those vulnerabilities for their own perverted sexual gratification in the most humiliating and degrading way imaginable.” What is so depressing is just how familiar I’ve become with learning of similar tales involving similar victims and similar perpetrators using similar methods. 

Rape/torture gangs have been predominantly operating the North of England. At least 1,400 girls were abused in Rotherham and more than 1,000 children in Telford. The gangs were also active in Newcastle, Bristol, Derby, Oxford and Halifax. That’s what I mean by scale. The crimes involved so many perpetrators and in so many locations, that it beggars belief that rumours didn’t begin circulating in these locations, and that these rumours didn’t reach the press. My contention is that they did and for a variety of reasons to do with how the press now operates, these rumours were not properly investigated by by the local press resulting in them not getting the sort of national coverage that would have angered the public much sooner. 

Firstly, most of the local press in this country is syndicated, meaning that apart from the odd local story, most of its content is generated elsewhere. Sometimes starting life as a press release sent out to an agency like Pressat or prfire who will then forward it on to their many subscribers. Maybe the local paper is part of a much larger media behemoth, like Newsquest which is “one of the UK’s largest regional media groups with more than 250 news brands.” TOn top of that you have the advertisers, who if not similarly syndicated, will be acutely aware of local reputational damage  if associated with a controversial story. Think of the digital mob, how quickly social media can be weaponised and then think of the struggling retailer with wages to pay.

And as if there weren’t already enough plates spinning in the air to be getting on with, there is also the cost of employing journalists to fill the space that isn’t taken up by all those rehashed press releases, generic celebrity pish, advertorial and proper adverts. So the last thing an editor wants to be thinking about is expensive legal action arising out of a story which instinct, anonymous sources and highly placed whistleblowers have confirmed but for which the pockets are not deep enough.

So we get to learn all about Prince Charmless instead. Editors of the big nationals know they’re on very safe ground there. The royals don’t sue – really, does anyone think Harry is a proper royal? – and Charmless doesn’t have a reputation anymore, well not one worth defending anyway. They can go wild, find ever newer ways to keep people scrolling, posting and consuming. Who knew what and when? Was there a cover up and if so, who was involved? How damaging is it to the monarchy? Will he have to leave his tiny mansion? Where could, would he go? Would Lord Lucan be with him?

It’s all nonsense, a well-organised distraction, one that has claimed so far one dead American paedophile, his former girlfriend and now Charmless, who is as real to most people as Snow White. One that distracts us in much the same way that waving something shiny and noisy will distract a small child.  

So unfortunately and for may reasons, the rape/torture gang scandal wasn’t the ‘right’ sort of scandal.  For one thing, it hadn’t happened years ago and far away and even worse, It had happened here, very recently and possibly still is. To further compound matters, it was difficult, required the kind of actual investigative journalism our press no longer does and not just a rehash of information others had uncovered. Additionally, it questioned a foundational principle that underlines multiculturalism, namely that if assimilation had been achieved, and the British born Pakistani men who made up those gangs had been fully integrated, how could this evil have happened? 

For good measure, they might have asked why such evil flourished in different parts of the country, usually with the same victim/perpetrator profile and often with a similar modus operandi. They might also consider whether the fact that most of the towns where these gangs operated were run by Labour councils and that if this played any part in the abject lack of action. If a desire not to be seen as racist, to prioritise ‘community relations above all else, was only extended to one part of the community.  All of which demands perseverance in the face of official stonewalling, determination when confronted by blanket refusals to co-operate and the sort of fearless leadership needed when the lawyers get involved, qualities our press is not renowned for. Calls for questions to be answered are easier to ask if those answers will have negligible repercussions for those asking them and then only if there exists the will to ask them in the first place.

As far as I’m concerned, the press has demonstrated yet again how poorly they serve the public and how, as the saying has it, what interests the public isn’t always in the public interest. Why is the rape/torture gang scandal so rarely in the news. I don’t mean the political distraction engulfing it either, That too is safe ground for the press, its a known thing, a political row played out in the Westminster pantomime, headlines and tweets. Why hasn’t the inquiry happened? Why has no chairperson been appointed? Why are people so unwilling to take part in it? How committed to it is the government? What will blah blah fucking blah…

The press, normally so keen to foster identification with the victims of crime, the easier to keep the readers interested, has been curiously restrained in dealing the true horrors of the rape/torture gang scandal. Where are the tales of unimaginable degradations, of wrecked lives and ongoing trauma? Or is it easier to focusing on the suffering of children when those children are thousands of miles away? The real scandal is why some scandals become scandals whilst others do not.

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October 17, 2025

33:64 presents “Robert Bolt.”

If anyone had any doubts whatsoever that the outbreak of peace in Gaza was the ‘wrong’ kind of peace, the cover of the latest edition of ‘Time’ magazine allays them. Ostensibly, it is a photo of Tangoed captioned ‘His triumph’, recognising the most remarkable diplomatic achievement of this century, in bringing an end to the fighting in Gaza. However, out of all the photos of him that they have, they chose one of the most unflattering. No-one looks at their best when photographed from underneath, certainly not an older man, so much so that when I initially saw it, I wasn’t even sure it was even him.

There can be no question that this was an editorial choice made at a very senior level. The cover had to be repeatedly approved and passed up the chain before the magazine was even published. But management at ‘Time’ might have calculated that their readers would have correctly interpreted the cover for the back-handed compliment it was. ‘Yes’, the cover says, ‘ we acknowledge that the fighting has stopped and whilst we are overjoyed at that, did it have to be you that made it happen? 

And that, fundamentally, is the main reason why it is the ‘wrong’ kind of peace. It affects people’s business. Because if, for the last two years, lots of people had business’s that depended on the upon the war in Gaza continuing. The longer it did, the more profitable the profitable denunciation could occur, the more outrage, the more fulmination, the type of profit they were making being directly related to whom their it was that business was focused. But no matter what it was, that business has come crashing down around them. At the front of the gravy train there are the heads of governments, intergovernmental organisations and global media conglomerates. In second and third class are the NGO’s, the charities and the various domestic political opposition parties, all the way down the to those at the other end, the student protesters, the march organisers, the keyboard warriors, all of them fucked, and not in a good way. 

American politics is a prime example of what I mean by it being bad for business. If you were a Democrat politician who had constantly decried Trump as someone who was the very embodiment of Hitler, as being a very real threat to democracy itself and essentially Satan in a bad wig, then this peace deal is absolutely the worst possible news. If your whole shtick had been to make a name for yourself by castigating Israel for anything and everything, being an apologist for Hamas and suggesting that Tangoes cosying up to Notonyournelly had made the prospects for peace even more remote, then you were fucked. The profit that your business depended on, which was turning media appearances, penning opinion pieces for old and new media, visibly grandstanding at protests,  and then turning all that into votes, gone. In an instant.

The same is true for our domestic politicians. They also have the difficult task of welcoming the cessation of war whilst not wanting to acknowledge the fact of who made it possible. This is further compounded by the fact that the Americans have been explicit in critiquing the UK’s recognition of Palestine as a state as making the deal more difficult than it needed. Which in itself was a very  deliberate act of diplomatic point-scoring, a chastisement of various government leaders, highlighting exactly how much their chasing of domestic electoral success had acted against the very aims they professed to want.

The media who now find themselves in a situation entirely of their own making. When he was running for President the first time around, the media first portrayed him as a joke candidate until he emerged as a corrective to the more ‘professional’ politician they were used to. When he won, in part by appealing to those who had felt ignored by the old political order, they were appalled. In the UK it was worse, given how irrelevant we are within the American political system. However if one read most of the UK’s broadsheets, visited news websites – like The Huffington Post – or subscribed to online news organisations – like Novara Media – one would be forgiven for thinking that we were integral to its smooth operation.

Because, in a weird way, it was. Tangoed is good copy. He is news, and the business of news is to attract readers, or eyeballs and keep those eyeballs or readers doing so long enough so they can sell them to advertisers. That’s why he’s has been rarely out of news for over ten years now. The media knows this, knows that its in an ever more competitive world and ‘The Guardian’ is the most blatant example of this inevitable reality. It printed at least one negative story about him seemingly every day for years, some about the war, some not and endless opinion pieces all having the same opinion The more they printed, the more money their readers gave them. It was like a weird version of payola. 

The’ll have to some proper news now, focus on events much closer to home, do the hard years that actual journalism requires and just reinforce what their readers have been duped into believing. This is equally true for our own shyster politicians, opportunistic rabble rousers and the rabbles they rouse. How can they call for a ceasefire when there is one? How can they pretend to want peace, yet when the very peace they were calling for and which they endlessly claimed was so elusive actually happens, what now for them? What of their profit, which amounted to little more  than increased visibility, name recognition and enhanced reputational  kudos now?  

Its funny that Tangoed once wrote a book called ‘The Art of the Deal’ because with this deal, which they assured us could never happen, he’s managed to call all of their bluffs.        

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October 12, 2025

33:64 presents “Sir Lenny Henry.”

The only thing funny about Sir Hoover is more funny peculiar than funny ha-ha. I’m baffled by the fact that anyone ever thought him a comedian. A total mystery. To me, he was as funny as a kick in the bollocks. He was like the joke in a Christmas cracker. The joke being the fact that everyone knows the joke is going to be crap, but plays along anyway so as not to ruin the mood. Everyone knows everyone else is playing along and everyone shares in the communal sense of good-natured embarrassment. 

But fuck me, he’s only gone and pulled a blinder. Something genuinely funny and even if it wasn’t totally unexpected, it was still a shock. A fucking big one. Hoover has co-written a book entitled ‘The Big Payback’ in which he advances the case for the UK to hand over £18 trillion in compensatory payments, as reparations for Britains role in the transatlantic slave trade. The book claims that the reason why there is racism in Britain today is because of the slave trade, and that this is key to understanding why disparities exist between black and white citizens. He then goes on to suggest not only in a vast cash transfer to Caribbean nations, but also for money to be given to individual black British citizens, arguing that “we personally deserve money for the effects of slavery”. 

Where to start with this? Probably by stating from the get go that slavery was one of the many stains on humanity, unspeakably evil and should be rightfully condemned as the abomination it was. That being the case, we also have to acknowledge that the transatlantic slave trade is but one iteration of this monstrous obscenity. Slavery has a long and ignoble history, one that our own history amply demonstrates.

Before the Roman occupation, slavery was prevalent in Britain, with indigenous Britons being routinely exported. Following the Roman conquest of Britain, slavery was expanded and industrialised and following the fall of Roman Britain, both the Angles and Saxons cultivated it to their own advantage. When not fighting the Vikings, Saxon slave traders sometimes worked in league with them, often selling Britons to the Irish. So prevalent had slavery become in Britain that by the time the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, over 10% of England’s population were slaves. So most Britons are, one way or the other, descended from slaves. 

But as is so often the case these days, there’s a ‘right’ kind of something and a ‘wrong’ kind of the same thing, and suggesting that most the indigenous British population has an ancestor who was a slave is ‘wrong’. It doesn’t accord with the prevailing narrative, which promotes the notion that slavery was exclusively suffered by black people because of white people. 

And its also obscenely simplistic to suggest that because Britain owes much of its global success on the Industrial Revolution and that the cheap labour afforded by slavery was a contributory factor in achieving that success, it necessarily follows that if we are white British, we have debt owing. Because most of us don’t. Most of us aren’t rich and neither were a our ancestors.

It wasn’t the rich who were losing their lives deep underground in coal mines. It wasn’t the rich who were evicted from their homes to allow for the building of the railways that transported that coal to the factories that powered the Industrial Revolution.  The rich neither worked in those factories, lived in the slum housing that surrounded them or had their lives blighted by poverty, disease and want. It wasn’t the rich who suffered.They never do. 

Another problem is the idea that the solution to any problem is money and that’s before we even start with the sum involved, £18 trillions. I know, a trillion sounds a lot like the outlandishly astronomical numbers bandied about in primary school playgrounds, “I bet you a gazillion pounds I can eat a bicycle.”The difference is that whilst a gazillion pounds was made up, and that we all knew it was – rather like everyone knowing the joke in the cracker was crap – a trillion pounds is real. All too real, actually.

A billion pounds is a thousand millions and a trillion is a thousand billions. To put that in terms that are slightly easier to understand, last year Britains GDP was about $3.66 trillions, GDP being the total output of our economy. Sir Hoovers proposal is essentially that in order to atone for an historical atrocity, we should commit a financial one now. The UK’s national debt net debt is already £2.91 trillions equivalent to 96.4% of GDP. 

But ignoring that for the moment, who exactly would share in all this largesse, which black Britons would qualify anyway? How black would they have to be, and what kind of black Briton. Most of Britain’s 2.4 million black population is of direct African descent, and therefore not the descendants of people enslaved in the Caribbean. How would anyone prove it? Mixed marriages and children born outside of them would only complicate matters. So would there be point whereby if ones ancestry couldn’t be proven by DNA to be more than 25, 50 or 75% of the qualifying kind, then would one be unable to claim? Or would there be a sliding scale? And who would decide what that scale is?

Again, I’m not making light of slavery, but what I am doing is pouring well deserved scorn on the fatuous assertion that money makes everything better. And where would the money come from anyway? The UK is already facing unprecedented social and economic challenges as it is, without massively adding to them. Reducing the budget of the NHS, of schools and of a whole host of other public services won’t only adversely impact the indigenous British population. Many of whom are themselves descended from slaves and a significant minority of whom – about  a third of it it – are either first or second generation immigrants.

I’m one of them. My parents moved here from Ireland. It’s beyond offensive to suggest that others peoples ancestors sufferings are worth more than my own. I don’t know for certain, as I haven’t been bothered to find out, but given that both of my parents families were rural farmers, quite possibly some of their sufferings were caused by English landowners. Why should my life be made worse because of something none of my ancestors participated in or benefitted from? I’d imagine that my reaction might be shared other children of immigrants.

So whilst It might seem at face value radically progressive to call for reparations for slavery, it manages to be logically inconsistent because, as Orwell put it “Some are more equal than others.” Far from eradicating racism as Hoover hopes reparations would, it would exacerbate and entrench it by not only placing a greater value on one groups sufferings than on others, but by giving that value a price and expecting others to pay it

There has to be a statute of limitations regarding compensation for wrongs committed in the past. They weren’t crimes when they were committed and despite them being immoral and obscene, they were legal. Otherwise madness awaits if humanity is now to be forever judging the past by the standards of now. Even the most cursory examination of slavery reveals rather sobering fact that has always existed. As far back in human history as you go, slavery has always been there, existing across many ethnicities and cultures because of a simple irrefutable truism of the human condition. The powerful will always want more power and it is the weak who will always suffer

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