politics | the brilliantly leaping gazelle

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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July 4, 2025

33:64 presents “Harold Wilson.”

For quite a while I used to feel almost sorry for Boris’s Johnson. Everything he’d ever done in his life was in the ruthless pursuit of one day becoming PM. The irony was so blatant it was absurd. For someone who loved dropping Latin phrases into conversation, his story was a tragedy worth of Seneca. When, after all the years of philandering, lying, resignations, treachery and backstabbings, he finally achieved his goal, it was at the worst time in post war British political history.

The Brexit deal was yet to be done and the EU were being all EU about it. The angry divisions in Parliament were matched only by those in the country. Everyone felt betrayed. The press was hostile. The Supreme Court got involved. And to cap it off, he lied to the Queen.

Yet somehow, he still managed to win the 2019 general election with an 80 seat majority. Brexit hadn’t been done yet but there was renewed vigour, a feeling of a corner having been turned. It was all going to be alright. Phew! It was getting all a bit squeaky-bum time there for, but onward and upwards towards those sunny uplands and….COVID?

What the fuck is COVID? Why has does some ‘flu in China mean we have to stay indoors? A year of this? Are you insane?And then when we think it’s all over, we’ll have to do it all over again? This time in the winter? And it’ll push us to near bankruptcy as well?

That why I almost felt sorry for him. He’d imagined being PM as one thing and it turned out not to be that thing at all. But whilst Brexit was a uniquely British thing, COVID very quickly became a global thing and for all the rights and wrongs regarding the government’s response to COVID, no-one said that it was their fault that COVID had happened in the first place.

So whilst I used to feel sorry for Boris’s Johnson, it is as nothing when compared to the nothing I feel for Stymied. The one year anniversary of his general election triumph must be tainted by the knowledge of what that year held in store. Because if the oft-quoted dictum is indeed true, and a week really is a long time in politics, then how much longer must a year feel? Especially given how, at the start of that year, Stymied was seen as all things to all men. Remember that? When the press and the public were united in their adoration of him. An adoration he earned by doing the bare minimum, which basically involved not saying or doing anything that might upset people and most importantly, not being Boris. That was it. Keep your head down and not be Boris.

Unfortunately, when he did eventually have to raise his head during the election campaign, he neglected to raise his game as well. Or maybe he did, maybe that was him trying his level best, trying to be all dynamic, and not like the boring technocrat he really was. His performance during a live televised debate between himself and Prada was a shambles. Labour strategists must’ve been in tears. Stymied had the record of fourteen Tory years to throw at Prada, but unbelievably, he floundered and spluttered his way through it. The watching public must’ve thought, “Well at least he wasn’t lying, his dad really was a toolmaker.”

The election campaign itself was basically one gigantic waste of time. The day it was announced, they could’ve held it and there’d have been no discernible difference in the outcome. Apart that is, from Reform UK springing up out of nowhere and having the audacity to win over 14% of the votes cast. That got them five MP’s. Even more outrageously, Labour got a smidge over 33% of the vote which somehow got them 411 MP’s. But the important thing was that the grown-ups were finally back in the room. That seriously minded people were going to do seriously minded things and that Britain would be the better for it.

But then things started to wrong very quickly indeed, and as is the way with politics, when things go wrong they invariably create a domino effect, causing more things to go wrong. Whilst politicians can only ever react to events – and in the case of Stockport, it was the mass stabbing and murder of three children at a dance class and the subsequent rioting that escalated throughout the England – it is up to politicians how they react to them. As I wrote at the time, no matter how distasteful the motivations, opinions and the sometimes violent means of expressing them the rioters used were to the new government, simply dismissing the rioters as ‘far-right’ negated any sensible discussion of any underlying causes.

Then the law got involved. The speed and severity with which rioters were treated was seen as disproportionate to their crimes, not least when compared to the more lenient sentences handed by the courts to arguably more violent offenders. Then problems with prison overcrowding meant that prisoners who were more of a threat to public safety were released early to make room for them. It emerged that one prisoner released early under the scheme was charged with sexual assault relating to an alleged offence against a woman on the same day he was freed. This in turn highlighted flaws in the probation service, whose job it was to monitor them.

Quite aside from the most alarming and unexpected events that any politician has to deal with, it was the domestic events that seem to blindside him, even though these were of his own making. Having made much in the election campaign about how he wasn’t going to tax working people, he did what all new governments do, and blamed the last one for leaving the country finances in such a bad way that he had no choice but to.

No matter the country had had a year of COVID, of a furlough scheme which meant no tax venue to pay for it and thus massive borrowing, the way Stymied would have us believe it, Boris’s Johnson had basically Johnson’d the money away. This had created a £21.9 billion “black hole”, and because of this, certain winter fuel payments would be scrapped for around 10 million pensioners. The farmers inheritance tax protests and employers increase in National Insurance tax storms followed. More scandals engulfed him.

All of which culminated in a weird kind of buyers remorse. People felt cheated. This wasn’t what they’d voted for. Although as Labour only got 33% of the vote, meaning that more people didn’t bother to vote in the first place, it was difficult to feel much sympathy for their nonsense. But now, how people feel is a big thing in our society, and because of this, we live in age where if you feel unhappy about something you start a petition and if you tell people about it on social media, hopefully enough people sign it and something will be done about whatever it was that made people sign it in the first place.

Over three million fuckwits signed one demanding that a new election was held, and in so doing, highlighted one of the inherent problems with a functioning democracy. Namely, in order to be considered as such, its electorate should some level of basic understanding of how it works. And how a government is elected is about as fucking basic as it comes. Its not complicated.

But thats where Britain was at the end of 2024. With a public who thought our government was like a crisp manufacturer and that by signing a petition calling for a new election was no different to one demanding that prawn cocktail Wotsits to be brought back. But this is a public addicted to social media, so used to sharing their thoughts and opinions, that they delude themselves into thinking that how they think or feel has greater worth than others who don’t think the same way.

So it can’t have been too much of a surprise then for Stymied to discover that Corblimey had a special anniversary present for him. A parliamentary expression of the same way of thinking, as equally blinkered and dogmatic, of the most performative virtue of the age, the least virtuous of all the virtues that have infected peoples minds, opposition to the Israeli war in Gaza. Yes, he and co-leader Raisin might’ve thrown in the odd references about socialism, to benefit cuts, poverty and the disabled but it was all just blah, a smokescreen to conceal their true intent.

Which is to pile on yet more troubles for Stymied, to weaken his position still further and to hasten the calls for him to go. With the year he’s had, one could hardly blame him if he did.

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July 1, 2025

34:63 presents “Oscar Wilde”

The best kind of virtue signalling is of course the kind that has minimal adverse consequences for whoever it is that’s signalling their imagined virtue, but will conversely only accrue them a multitude of positive ones. And no virtue is more worthy to be signalled these days than support for the Palestinian people, which is essentially little more than some cunning media strategy. It demands no actual obligation upon the signaller other than to loudly and with as much fanfare as possible to announce it. So, with all of this in mind, what am I to make of the news that the Co-Op, is banning all Israeli products as part of doing something it hopes will appease it members?

Those would be same members who voted overwhelmingly at its AGM last month in support of a motion which urged the board to demonstrate “moral courage and leadership” by removing Israeli goods from the shelves. To no-ones surprise the board issued a statement at the time of about it reviewing its sourcing policies, to “ensure that they reflect both our values and principles and the views of our members, which they have made clear today”.

Talk about delusions of grandeur and an over-inflated sense of self-importance coupled with a breathtaking moral superiority. Bear in mind that the The Co-Op is a supermarket. It sells things. That’s it. It has no business other than being in the retail business. It has no obligation to anyone other than its shareholders and only then to maximise the profits it makes for them. Remember when times were simpler, when business’s were solely involved in the business of making and selling things things? A nice transactional arrangement that suited everyone and more importantly, one in which everyone understood the role they they played in it. Nobody was confused, mainly because there was nothing to be confused about.

When exactly did business’s become so obsessed with not only how they were perceived by their customers, but also if that perception was a negative one, one that potential customers found off-putting, to change it to a more favourable one? Or have they always been and I just didn’t notice? But certainly, its got out of hand now, so much so that one could be forgiven for thinking that the actual business of some business’s was nothing more than an embarrassing hobby, a distraction from fulfilling their true purpose, that of being social justice warriors,?

The only values its members should be concerned about is getting value for money. Principles are fine and everything but until their customers stop using Apple products because their made in sweatshops in China, its all for show, a prop in service to the bolstering of their self-righteous smugness. By pandering so cravenly to the childish posturing of its members, the Co-Op has demonstrated that it isn’t a case of lions led by donkeys, as more donkeys led by asses.

I’ve tried to find out exactly how much the trade of Israeli goods is worth to the Co-op as a percentage of its profits, but to no avail. This invariably causes me to suspect that the sums involved are relatively small, because if they were significant, then the Co-Op would be parading that fact with gusto. Nevertheless, the internet positively abounds with articles praising the Co-Op. Because as always with anything to do with Israel, the internet mistakes pandering for principles.

Of course, this adverse consequence free ‘virtue’ signalling nonsense has infected our politics and anything that can be presented as a robust something against Israel is guaranteed to garner approving headlines and positive social media posts. The appearance of doing something, irrespective of what that something is or even if that something has any practical impact in achieving that something, is far less important than being seen to do something. The government knows this only too well. As its recent announcement of more sanctions against Israel amply demonstrated.

According to a report in ‘The Independent’ last month,“Britain has issued fresh sanctions against Israel over its “morally unjustifiable” escalation of violence in Gaza, and demanded an end to its “cruel and indefensible” 11-week block on humanitarian aid.”

And what, exactly, did these sanctions consist of? Suspending trade talks with Israel, basically. Which of course leads one to ask exactly how much trade Britain does with Israel and then, how does this compare with other countries?

According to the governments own figures, ‘Total trade in goods and services (exports plus imports) between the UK and Israel was £5.8 billion in the four quarters to the end of Q4 2024.’ This made Israel our 44th largest trading partner. The 1st was of course the US, with a total value of over £314 billion.

There was more of this performative politics earlier this month when the BBC reported that “The UK has sanctioned two far-right Israeli ministers over “repeated incitements of violence against Palestinian communities” in the occupied West Bank.

Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich will both be banned from entering the UK and will have any assets in the UK frozen as part of the measures announced by the foreign secretary.

It is part of a joint move with Australia, Norway, Canada and New Zealand announced on Tuesday.”

Which is yet more something, although when one looks at the governments website, which most people won’t, we find that the something amounts some big talk but very little action. Freezing assets held in the UK is going to have little more than zero impact, however If Switzerland had joined in that’d be another matter. There’s also a similarity pointless travel ban. Boo-fucking-hoo. They can’t visit the UK or Norway. That’s bound to hurt.

So suspending trade talks, not the trade itself mind, or imposing functionally meaningless sanctions, might give the appearance of Britain taking a principled stance, because that is precisely what it is meant to do, give the appearance of principle. Although if that principle boils down to minimising the threat of yet more candidates winning largely Muslim populated constituencies by standing on as a pro-Gaza platform and maximising positive media coverage, then that principle isn’t that all that principled, is it?

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Amid all the furore about a nonentity capitalising on the faux ‘free thinkers’ of the Glastonbury crowd and seizing his opportunity to say something designed to raise his bands profile and create demand for tickets sales to their shows, the bleeding obvious truisms have been missed.

All of the headlines, all of the media agonising about various this and that’s, overlooks three things.

Firstly, there is no such thing as bad publicity, Pop music thrives on notoriety, especially if it positions itself as not being pop music, as being radical, apart from the mainstream. Worked a treat for the Sex Pistols.

Secondly, what did people expect? Yes what he said was crass, but it was the logical continuation of madness that has infected our politicians, hijacked the BBC, most of the press and which we see played out on the streets of London on a weekly basis.

Thirdly, the irony of him encouraging a crowd at Glastonbury of all places was to join him in wishing yet more Jews to be killed was as staggering as it was offensive. He knew what he was doing.

He’d have known that less than three years ago, people at the Nova festival in Israel doing exactly the same thing as the Glastonbury crowd were doing and were raped, slaughtered and kidnapped by Hamas terrorists for it.

He’d have also known that no-one at Glastonbury would even realise the hypocrisy.

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June 23, 2025

33:64 presents “Kemi Badenoch.”

We are indeed living in strange times. Times made all the stranger by things happening, that up until quite recently would’ve seemed by turns ridiculous, outlandish or farcical, but now seem to be another indicator of just how strange the strangeness is. And nothing seems to perfectly encapsulate the strangeness of these times more than the demonstrations against the bombing of Iran that took place in London last weekend.

Had one no knowledge of the well documented brutality of the Iranian regime, one might be forgiven that rather than being an unspeakably strict theocratic regime, it was a much maligned innocent in world affairs, one that had been unfairly cast as a villain by others in their pursuit of some unfathomably evil plan.

One might also be forgiven for thinking that because of the presence of women in the photographs that accompanied these demonstrations, that Iran was an implacable defender of female rights, and that these women doing nothing more than showing solidarity with their Iranian sisters.

Seeing such photographs and having read accounts of these demonstrations online, as so much news is accessed nowadays, one might also imagine that Iran was a bastion of press freedom, where internet access is as ubiquitous as it is unfettered.

To say nothing of the fact that these demonstrations, whilst heavily policed, were nonetheless allowed to take place and as such were part of the same freedoms as enjoyed by the citizens of Tehran.

The reason why you’d never think any of these things is possibly because you’d been aware of Irans previous abominations long before last weekend. The numerous reports on its human rights violations. It’s medieval treatment of women. It’s censorship of the internet. And that would mean that you didn’t rely on social media for your news and most importantly, weren’t infected by the current plague for interpreting every act through an incredibly subjective and highly reductive prism of anti-Israelism.

So whilst Iran may be bad, the US is far worse, there aren’t words sufficiently descriptive enough to describe just how bad Israel is. Despite Israel being the only country in that part of the world where most Britons – especially women and gays – would choose to live, it has attained a place in some peoples minds as the embodiment of evil. Which is utterly insane, factually unsustainable and morally repugnant.

Kemi Badenoch found herself engulfed in a media brouhaha a while ago after she made the claim that not all cultures were equal. Quite why is a mystery. It is undeniable fact. Life in Britain is better than life in Iran and only a fuckwit would suggest otherwise. But to users of the same reductive prism that absolves Iran for any complicity in the situation it now finds itself in and who happily march in support of it, it also allows them to denounce Britain as somehow being a jackboot away from being fascist.

There are protests to be had, causes deserving of media attention, injustices to be highlighted, action to be demanded. Iran however, isn’t one of them and for proof of that, I’d suggest that those protesting support for Iran in London, try protesting support for Britain on the streets of Tehran and see where that gets them.

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May 20, 2025

34:63 presents “Judas Iscariot.”

Much as it pains me to write this, I suspect that Farrago might be only honest politician in Britain. This bold assertion comes with add a few important caveats. The foremost one of these is that the usual standard of honesty as most people understand it, does’t seem to apply to to the world of politics. Boris’s Johnson’s entire political career bears this out. As his former Home Secretary Amber Rudd once put it “Boris well he’s the life and soul of the party, but he’s not the man you want driving you home at the end of the evening.”

But at least Boris tried to implement the will of the British people after they voted for Brexit. This was despite the entire cultural and media elite being fervently opposed any expression of democracy that didn’t advance their interests, the judicial and parliamentary attempts to thwart it, and the relentless besmirching of those who’d dared to do make the elites nightmare a reality. The deal he got wasn’t perhaps the best deal he could’ve got, but it wasn’t as if the EU were minded to offer him one. They wanted to signal to other EU member states – the ones who had a high degree of Euro-scepticism among their electorate and were closely looking at how Britain fared – France, Italy Austria, and The Netherlands – exactly how steep the price for leaving would be.

Fast forward two elections and five PM’s to yesterday and Plonkers so called ‘reset’ deal with the EU. I’m not going to discuss it in any great detail and not just because I’m holiday as I write this, looking out at the sea and luxuriating in the good weather, but more importantly because it was’t a surprise, him never exactly being a massive supporter of Brexit.

After all, he campaigned for a second referendum, happy to ignore the democratic wishes of the majority of UK citizens when it suited him and his increasingly metropolitan outlook. By that I mean an outlook that wasn’t predicated upon prioritising the needs of the many, but instead the minority of people unhappy about the whole Brexit enterprise, people who thought of themselves as Europeans and not British.The ‘Youth Mobility Scheme’ bit of the deal amply demonstrates this.

Ostensibly a scheme to allow UK youth to work and study in Europe, in reality it serves as an encapsulation of his betrayal of Brexit. Firstly, it is because only those children that have not just the necessary skills and qualifications needed to make that even a possibility, but also parents rich enough to make that possibility a reality. Parents who not only have encouraged their children learn a European language, but have inculcated in them a sense that this is but the restoration of an entitlement. So not the kind of parents who work in care homes, as mechanics or teaching assistants.

Secondly, we have a population of around 60 millions, as compared to Europes total of nearer 450 millions. Can anyone see the problem here? In Britain we have a welfare system, one that’s struggling cope as it is, without even more demands placed upon it from EU citizens with a legal rights to it.

All this at a time when net migration is at historic highs, when the public is palpably crying out for control, when Reform UK gave Plonker fair warning as to the levels of discontent brewing in the country at the recent mayoral and council elections and he responded by seeming to take heed of their concerns, when in reality all he has done is make it worse.

Thats why, much as I am am loathe to, I think that Farrago might be the most honest politician in Britain today. Don’t be thinking I’m in any way a fan of Farrago. I think he’s nothing more than a snake oil salesman, all smarm and the kind of bluster that most people mistake as plain speaking. But if you were to ask any British voter at anytime within the last 15 years or so what two things sprang to mind when they thought of him, those two things would be the EU and immigration (although to be fair, that’s because they were the only things he ever seemed to talk about.) So he hasn’t shifted so much as the electorate have moved closer to him, in part because the other political parties have have moved further away from them.

So with that in mind, I’m going to rename Plonker ‘Stymied’ because that’s what he’s done to Brexit and as always, when I write about Brexit, I feel the need that to point out that I voted to remain

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May 18, 2025

34:63 presents “Yuval Raphael.”

If there’s one act that perfectly encapsulates the moral obscenity of the pro-palestinian ideology, then yesterdays attempt by two protesters to storm the stage during Israels performance in the Eurovision Song Contest is going to take some beating.

Yuval Raphael survived the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas gunmen at the Nova music festival. She hid under a pile of dead bodies for eight hours until she was rescued. But apparently her trauma wasn’t sufficiently traumatic. So despite having survived one act of unimaginable horror by having to commit another, her ordeal continues.

The two protesters will ever know how that day changed her life, and how much bravery it takes for a Jew to stand on a stage outside of Israel and represent Israel. Because they don’t care, their warped ideology doesn’t allow for there being any Jewish victims. In their world, the only victims are the Palestinian ones and the only ‘genocide’ being committed is the one by Israel. The fact that Hamas’ founding charter explicitly and repeatedly calls for the killing of all Jews, with the ultimate aim being the eradification of Israel itself, is something else.

What that something else is, however, doesn’t much matter really. When one’s world-view is shaped by social media posts, reinforced by their friends groupthink and bolstered by dubious ‘facts’ and biased ‘news’, when the concept of ‘my truth’ becomes a thing, it does so at the expense of objective truth.

Of course, this means that the Chinese State Circus can perform around the world with impunity, despite widespread evidence of human rights abuses by the Chinese government and allegations of a genocide of the Uyghur population. Perish the thought that because Beijing has takes a hard line with protesters – even outside China – that this informs peoples thinking.

And as a result of which, we get two protesters thinking their deranged understanding of things trumps Yuval Raphael’s lived reality. Because of course, when it comes to Israel, it is only a Palestinians lived reality that has any value.

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May 6, 2025

34:63 presents “Graham Linehan”

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I saw in ‘The Guardian’ the other day that ‘More than 400 actors and film industry professionals have signed an open letter pledging “solidarity” with the trans, non-binary and intersex communities who have been affected by the recent supreme court ruling.’

Of course they did.

Why is it a such a uniquely actorly thing to do, to imagine that just because their success in one field of human endeavour has afforded them some measure of celebrity, it somehow confers upon them some kind of greater a moral authority, one that the rest of us should take heed of?

The letter is quoted as saying,“We must now urgently work to ensure that our trans, non-binary, and intersex colleagues, collaborators and audiences are protected from discrimination and harassment in all areas of the industry – whether on set, in a production office, or at a cinema.”

A few things immediately spring to mind.

The first is that actors are by quite a wide margin the one group of people I’d expect to show solidarity with trans-women, for the simple reason that their entire working life is essentially pretending to be someone else. So the idea that by simply by saying they’re someone else, they they become that someone else, isn’t that outlandish to them as it might be to a say, a mechanic.

Additionally actors – pronounced as if John Gielgud was hamming up the word for all it was worth – are on a ceaseless quest for validation, and not just from themselves either. Those big awards ceremonies are nothing more than a giant narcissism circus with frocks and because the media fawn all over them – to be granted a red carpet interview or some other content clickbait – it perpetuates their sense of overblown entitlement.

Actors are forever banging on about the research they do before embarking on a role, often living the life of the character they are going to play, sometimes even undergoing bodily modification to better achieve ‘authenticity’.

Robert de Niro is a good example of this – for his portrayal of Jake la Motta in ‘Raging Bull’, he trained for, and then fought in three professional matches. He then gained over 60 pounds – nearly 9 stones – to play the ageing La Motta. To better play Travis Bickle in ‘Taxi Driver’, he drove a taxi around New York for two weeks. We know this because de Niro himself told everyone. It’s become a benchmark for other actors to emulate. Thankfully, he has ever played a serial killer.

Actors just love going all ‘method’, often staying in character for the duration of a films shoot, even when the cameras aren’t rolling, because of some ridiculous idea of ‘honesty’, ‘of needing to fully embrace the character’. How is this anything other than a very diluted version of a trans woman and his ‘lived reality’?

So whilst the letter loftily proclaims ‘We believe the ruling undermines the lived reality and threatens the safety of trans, non-binary, and intersex people living in the UK.’, it ignores the ‘lived reality’ of actual women, their safety, their rights and freedoms. They can just shut up and quit their yapping about single-sex spaces. Female rights are all well and good, it seems, right up until men with delusions are adversely affected by women not wanting to share those rights. Then the rights of the majority of the UK population must be eroded to satisfy the nonsense of a minority of a minority.

That is the key here. This isn’t some great civil rights movement, similar to the ones fought by African Americas in in 1960’s or by lesbians and gays in Britain in the 1980’s.Those battles were about gaining the rights enjoyed by everyone else, not about taking rights by reducing other peoples.

But then actors enjoy a privileged position in an increasingly celebrity obsessed world. And just like the trans activists who expect their every whim to be unquestioningly granted, and get more than a bit stroppy when they’re not, so too actors imagine that their concerns should be everyone concerns.

Conversely, actors are only too happy to criticise others who don’t share their same ‘moral’ worldview, feeling it not only their right but their duty to tell us how they feel and therefore, we should take heed of this and act accordingly. Robert de Niro was one of the many US actors who very vocally gushed glowing tributes to Mr Magoo when he retired from the 2024 presidential campaign and with nary a heartbeat transferred their support to Kabbalah Vibe.

Did her campaign the world of good did that.

So frequently are actors given to this method of visible virtue are they that one can’t help but wonder if She Who Must Not Be Named has a point when she suggests that it is more to do with career prospects than anything else that motivates them to sign these sort of things.

Because I’ve yet to learn of a newsagent having her marriage collapse on her because of the constant harassment she was getting from other newsagents, the boycott of her shop by customers, refusal of suppliers to sell to her, for crisp, chocolate and sweet makers to publicly denounce her as someone they wanted no associate with, simply for expressing an opinion that others disagreed with.

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May 3, 2025

34:63 presents “Asterix”

I must confess to feeling slightly disappointed upon waking this morning to discover that the sky hadn’t fallen in. Because yesterday, the media were full of either grim pronouncements or jubilant celebrations about exactly what Reforms UK’s performance in Thursdays elections meant for the future of British politics.

Brexit, as it is for most things nowadays, was involved, being the catalyst that lay behind this wholly predictable, and indeed, widely predicted drubbing. Indeed, in all the coverage I’ve read, what is striking is just how much opinions are shaped by Brexit. In a tangential yet unremarked way, Brexit was but a symptom of a greater, more fundamental problem confronting democracy, not just in the UK, but elsewhere. One that moreover, has the capacity to fatally undermine it by using its own inherent flaws to achieve this, voter turnout, or more accurately, voter absence.

In all of the mayoral elections contested on Thursday, not one of them had a voter turnout of more than 34% and neither of the ones that elected Reform UK mayors managed even 30%. Why no media attention is being given to this problem is beyond me, especially as a little over a year ago the dangers were revealed to exist.

Remember George Galloway’s campaign in the Rochdale by-election last year? Where he made it clear from the outset that he was targeting the Muslim community in Rochdale – 30% of its population – and instead of focusing on local or even national issues, but rather on Israel/Gaza? It was an act of effectively strategic masterstroke, resulting him getting 40% of all the votes cast, which sounds impressive, until you realise only 39.7% of voters actually bothered to. And then suddenly that 40% seems even less impressive, especially when you realise that that once impressive 40% translates into 12,335 actual votes.

This trick – targeting a specific community and focusing on an issue not directly related to their daily lives – was repeated a few months later at the 2024 general election. Whilst George Galloway wasn’t re-elected, five candidates were, all pandering to concerns of a minority but crucially, a minority who turned out to vote. Together with Jeremy Corblimey, they formed the Independent Alliance and their ranks could easily have been increased to nine, because three candidates, standing on a similar platform were narrowly defeated.

It isn’t that surprising that Labour is so quiet on this issue – low voter turnout – because it suited them very well at the 2024 general election. Despite the fact there was a load of guff in some of the media about how constituency boundary changes and the need for voter I.D would work against Labour, like so much political speculation, that didn’t happen. Voter turnout was about 60%, and despite Labour getting a lower share of that, 34%, somehow they got 412 seats or 63% of them.

Some awfully clever people have worked out that the you take into account the number that did vote for them, the number that didn’t and the number of people who could have voted but chose not to, combine all of that and only 20% of the UK electorate did so. Of course the media are predicting all manner of things, because that’s what the media do. Political forecasting is as good at predicting the future as reading tea-leaves, checking ones horoscope or listening to a clairvoyant.

Its much easier than them questioning why this keeps happening, why political parties have consistently failed to engage with voters the way seem all to happy to do with lobbyists. And by not doing this, they’re not only perpetuating the problem, they’re failing to do their job. Nearly as much as the politicians.

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Tag: politics