Trump and Johnson’s populism have shaken the old Establishment, and raised some very interesting questions about who is and who is not nowadays inside the Establishment and a beneficiary of the protection of the liberal elite. Yesterday two startling examples in the news coverage cast a very lurid light on this question, and I ask you to consider the curious cases of Hunter Biden and Brendan Cox, two of the most undeserving and unpleasant people that can be imagined.
The BBC news bulletins led on the move to impeach Donald Trump for, as they put it, his efforts to get the President of Ukraine to undermine a political opponent. To be plain, I think Trump was quite wrong to get personally involved in this, but please park the entire subject of Donald Trump to one side for the next ten minutes.
What I find deeply reprehensible in all the BBC coverage is their failure to report the facts of the case, and their utter lack of curiosity about why Joe Biden’s son Hunter was paid $60,000 a month by Burisma, Ukraine’s largest natural gas producer, as an entirely absent non-executive director, when he had no relevant experience in Ukraine or gas, and very little business experience, having just been dishonorably discharged from the Navy Reserve for use of crack cocaine? Is that question not just little bit interesting? That may be the thin end of it – in 2014-15 Hunter Biden received US $850,000 from the intermediary company channeling the payments. In reporting on Trump being potentially impeached for asking about it, might you not expect some analysis – or at least mention – of what he was asking about?
As far as I am aware, the BBC have not reported at all the other thing Trump was asking Zelensky about – Crowdstrike. Regular readers will recall that Crowdstrike are the Clinton linked “cyber-security” company which provided the “forensic data” to the FBI on the alleged Russian hack of the DNC servers – data which has been analysed by my friend Bill Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA, who characterises it as showing speeds of transfer impossible by internet and indicating a download to an attached drive. The FBI were never allowed access to the actual DNC server – and never tried, taking the DNC’s consultants word for the contents, which itself is sufficient proof of the bias of the “investigation”.
Crowdstrike also made the claim that the same Russia hackers – “Fancy Bear” – who hacked the DNC, hacked Ukrainian artillery software causing devastating losses of Ukrainian artillery. This made large headlines at the time. What did not make any MSM headlines was the subsequent discovery that all of this never happened and the artillery losses were entirely fictitious. As Crowdstrike had claimed that it was the use of the same coding in the DNC hack as in the preceding (non-existent) Ukraine artillery hack, that proved Russia hacked the DNC, this is pretty significant. Trump was questioning Zelensky about rumours the “hacked” DNC server was hidden in the Ukraine by Crowdstrike. The media has no interest in reporting any of that at all.
It is plain in that case that Trump is the media’s villain and the Bidens, father and son, are therefore heroes being protected by the Establishment media. Now let us look at the case of Brendan Cox.
Boris Johnson’s behaviour in the Commons two nights ago was reprehensible. Watching the unrepentant and aggressive braying of the Tory MPs, I was genuinely concerned about the consequences for democracy should these empowered right wingers ever get a majority. Johnson has removed the social restraint which used to cloak their atavistic instincts.
This Tory display also very much reinforced what I have been saying for years, that we will not gain Scottish Independence through a repeat of 2014. We were allowed a referendum with only moderate cheating by the British state purely because they believed there was no chance we could win. They have been disabused. There will never be a Section 30 order an an agreed referendum again. We will have to seize Independence by means which the British state will deem unlawful. Anybody not prepared to do that is not serious about Independence.
I digress. Johnson’s behaviour is appalling and he is at an interesting stage where the Establishment and its media is unsure whether to embrace or repudiate him, the calculation depending on whether they think he will win, and on the impact of Brexit on their personal financial interests. But as with Trump, I ask you to set aside your judgement on Johnson and not think of him for a moment.
Yesterday BBC news programmes brought us repeated appearances of Brendan Cox to comment on Boris Johnson and other MP’s parliamentary behaviour. This Brendan Cox:
One such allegation was that Cox pinned a co-worker to a wall by her throat while telling her ‘I want to fuck you’. Cox left the organisation before being subjected to scrutiny on this and other allegations. However, another woman, a senior US official who met him at a Harvard University event, made similar allegations against him, ‘of grabbing her by the hips, pulling her hair, and forcing his thumb into her mouth’ ‘in a sexual way’. In contrast to Assange’s treatment, and despite a social-media furore, for nearly three years there was largely a media blackout on the story. At last, in February 2018, a right-wing tabloid broke the embargo and reported the allegations, and other news organisations had to follow suit. Finally, ‘Cox apologised for the “hurt and offence” caused by his past behaviour’ and announced he was withdrawing from public life.
I strongly recommend you to read that last linked article. Cox is very much on the wavelength of the Establishment media, a full member of the New Labour neo-liberal elite who shuttled between jobs in the Labour Party and in high paying neo-liberal propaganda organisation Save the Children. Cox was personally pocketing £106,000 a year plus expenses from donations to the “charity”. A serial unfaithful sexual aggressor, his wife’s murder sees him recast by the media as the grieving survivor of a perfect marriage. Precisely his strongest political supporters – Jess Phillips, Stella Creasy etc – are Julian Assange’s bitterest opponents due to far flimsier, hotly denied and less attested sexual allegations than those against Cox. But neo-liberals get a free pass from the modern feminist movement (cf Bill Clinton).
Boris Johnson’s behaviour was a dsgrace. But that is no reason for the BBC rehabilitation of the “retired from public life” sexual predator.
The fascinating thing is the binary, good versus evil, narrative which is being pursued in the liberal media. Trump and Johnson are bad. Therefore Hunter Biden and Brendan Cox must be good. The truth, of course, is much more complex than that. I am afraid to say that if you want an excessive simplification, a more accurate one would be that the entire political elite on all sides are self-serving and venal.
There is a more interesting story inside that, where significant portions of the public have lost respect for the Establishment, due in large part to the vast and increasing wealth gap in society, but this disillusion has been battened on by populist charlatans, and particularly directed against immigrants. This feels like an extremely unstable phase in society and politics. But instability brings the possibility of radical change, which is indeed much needed. We must all work for good from it.
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In the coming days Boris is going to hold a Queen’s Speech.
In the event that members of parliament vote this down, Boris & J.R.M. will likely trot off to Scotland to confer with the Queen.
They might decide that it would be best if Boris stands aside, letting another person who could best hold ( if only for a while) the confidence of the house.
Step forward the Labour Party backed by the SNP, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and may be a few rebels from other groupings.
What will be the price Nicola Sturgeon will extract from Jeremy Corbyn?
You think Boris Johnson remaining as PM would strengthen Scots’ attachment to the Union? ….Wow
“What will be the price Nicola Sturgeon will extract from Jeremy Corbyn?”
If it comes to that, then a cast iron, watertight, set in stone, guarantee of a S30 order would in my opinion be the price.
However like Labour of 1979, I’m sure Sturgeon will be wary of trusting Labour of today.
why would she want to do that RoS? when she could just go with the flow the general lawlessness and declare UDI, shirley the Tory’s or Labour for that matter, all wanting to run away from Europe at one time or other, rather than rattle the cage and reform it from within, there are many other countries who want to reform its top down machinations, they have no legs to stand on bleating about the union they are destroying. What could they possibly do to stop Scotland?
UDI, is tricky, although and I believe this is what really matters, that international recognition is the key to independence, that Westminster would cry foul, that the route chosen was not a democratic one, and attempt to have it negated.
No as much as I would like to see UDI, to be done with this unfit union, it would appear that the gold standard approach of holding a democratic referendum and winning it through the ballot box is the correct way to go. It would mean that Westminster would have no recourse on overturning the result.
I’m hoping international recognition is a two-way street though, I’m specifically focusing on Westminster’s continued unwillingness to even consider offering a S30 order if and when asked for, which is very undemocratic, and should I hope, been seen in the international community as not allowing a sovereign people to decide their own future through the ballot box.
So if Jacob is dispatched to Balmoral to beg the Queen for another prorogue and she graciously agrees, Jacob trots back to the House of Lords and tells them the Queen is allowing another prorogue, then Gina Miller gets her cheque book out and books next week with the Supreme Court, it will be like a merry go round.
A queen’s speech happens at a state opening, and Parliament can’t open if it hasn’t first been prorogued. So a queen’s speech requires a prorogation.
A legislative programme that features a large increase in state spending and at the same time a big cut in taxes would have comedy value in other circumstances. Let’s roleplay it from the viewpoint of the ratings agencies: here we’ve got a country that’s trade-blockading itself, cutting taxes, and at the same time it’s raising its borrowing like nobody’s business. Hand out a triple-A with added cherry sauce and a headmaster’s recommendation? I don’t think so.
I doubt there’s going to be a Boris queen’s speech this side of a general election. Boris recommending that the monarch asks Corbyn to try to form a government could happen before an election if the Boris government gets VONCed – which could happen as early as tomorrow.
The House of Commons can set any date it damn well wants for a general election. There is AMPLE time before 31 October to hold one.
A successful VONC doesn’t stop Parliament from passing acts DURING the 14-day period. The Commons could VONC Boris tomorrow and pass a motion on Tuesday to hold a general election on 10 October or 15 October if it wanted.
Eugenics Boy and his team may want Corbyn to request an extension so that the gutter press can then slander him all over the place as a surrender monkey and traitor, as flames roar at refugee centres and in areas with large British Asian populations, and as those who condemn the attacks get condemned as weak whingers who are of undesirable ethnicity or treacherously accommodating towards those who are. The line would be that dirty traitors have weakened poor ol’ Boris, but the “people” must rise – using both the ballot box and the petrol bomb – to put lovely Boris who loves the NHS back in office and with STRENGTH this time, with the strength that you can see the traitors are trying to take away from him because they removed him from office, and so it is up to you, dear honky People, whose rights are in danger of being stolen from you by traitors and the dark-skinned, to put our Boris BACK. “Give us our country back”, etc.
The price that Nicola Sturgeon would extract from Jeremy Corbyn is that the Scottish people get punched in the face by being sent back to the polling stations to vote in a second “once in a lifetime” indyref. Personally I think that’s a price Jeremy Corbyn should pay. Sorry, Scotland, but sometimes you gotta take one for the team.
You forget that we Scots rejected the SNP “once in a lifetime” offer, so we can have another one any time we damn well choose.
Entirely agree about Jo Cox’s husband and his protected position in the New Labour neocon establishment.
I thought part of the complaint against Trump was that he was withholding aid from Ukraine to make them dig up the dirt on a family connection of a Presidential rival.
I think the opponents of immigration among the poorer classes get a bad rap here. For example, I have had to use the NHS emergency services several times recently and there is no doubt they are struggling under pressure of numbers. In my local Urgent Care Centre ( rebranded A&E) and my local walk in centre, the attendees are not dominated by elderly pensioners but a cross section of society, many of whom are there I suspect because, like me, they find it hard to get an NHS appointment at 24 hours notice.
A fair proportion of those present in my local UCC on my visits are not native English speakers. However much they pay in taxes, the impression is of a service being overwhelmed by numbers, of which a significant proportion are recent arrivals in the UK. So people think their numbers should be controlled. This is not a racist view but a rational one in many ways.
Very fair point Mary Paul; the ‘official’ figures for NHS funds lost to ‘health tourism’ are serious under estimates as there is resistance from health professionals , and particularly the RCN, RCGP and the unions to actually record its extent. Free-at-the-point-of-use-with-just-pro-forma-questions-asked health care in the UK differs from the insurance based systems prevalent across the water, where checks are made upon enrollment in the various schemes on offer. This is one of the subdsidiary reasons for Calais, Dunkirk etc being magnets as launching points for illegal immigration into the UK (the others being the absence of ID cards here, and a cowed, unarmed police force unable to carry out basic ID checks). The French authorities have been requesting that the UK authorities deal with these ‘pull’ factors for two decades; however once the Blairites dropped their initial enthusiasm for ID cards (it didn’t play well with the various ethnic constituencies to which New Labour appealed, and whose votes it needed), the political leadership of all the main parties has just ignored the UK’s culpability in creating this mess.
Horseshite.
I’m not so sure…. there’s a fair amount of sense in Old Mark’s post above.
Squeeth
Would you care to expand on your less than intelligent comment, to two very good comments by Mary Pau! and Old Mark?
I have seen first hand examples of health tourism, so blatent that they would have drawn howls of laughter if they had been in a comedy sketch.
As for NHS staffing, we should be training up nurses in the same way that they are trained abroad, not saddle them with crippling debt.
Not all horsehite, Old Mark has a valid point about health tourism, it’s just that ID cards may not be the answer as they would make it easier to monitor troublesome minorities, and by implication to victimise whoever the out group of the day is. ID cards are dangerous.
Squeeth
And your explanation for the collections of illegals clustered at the channel ports is what precisely ? What is so attractive about the UK that they can’t get in France or Belgium ?
Thanks for that OM. I have friends in the NHS who say that the problem is actually Mrs Thatcher’s Children and her Children’s Children.
They don’t give a shit.
They have no commitment to their patients, they don’t care if the sick or elderly or infirm live or die they are only in the job for the money.
Getting them to help patients at all is a major problem because by and large they despise them.
Many nurses take the S*n or the Mail and believe every word they read.
Most vote Tory
Many in management have no job, just a position. They walk around all day doing SFA and muttering inanities as they go.
Add in privatisation and the pharmaceutical rip off and it’s wonder the NHS works at all.
But you go on and blame the foreigners if it makes you feel better and vote Tory at the next election to ensure it gets worse.
Yeah its al them foreeners falt. We wunt ar cuntry back.
Or is it Tory cuts.
“A fair proportion of those present in my local UCC on my visits are not native English speakers. However much they pay in taxes, the impression is of a service being overwhelmed by numbers, of which a significant proportion are recent arrivals in the UK. So people think their numbers should be controlled. This is not a racist view but a rational one in many ways.”
A fair number of the NHS workers are also imported to support the NHS. A fair amount of those poorer workers in supermarkets, delivery vans and rubbish collection are also immigrants. If you really look at one side of the problem then I am afraid you are looking at it from a potentially racist point of view. You have to look at why these people are here and also why the normal rules of letting people use the privileges of this country because of deliberate policy by governments who could have tightened these controls and who could fund the NHS more appropriately rather than just blame those wretched recent arrivals. And by the way, how do you know they are recent arrivals?
And of course there s absolutely nothing racist about rampaging around the third world stripping the place of the few educated people they have just they can come and look after you. Whilst you remain too lazy and to indolent to train enough medical professionals of your own.
You want to know why these people are here? They are here because you have paid them to be here. You have paid them more to come here than they could earn where they come from and you are happy to do so because outcompeting third world wage rates still works out cheaper than training your own people.
Obviously sick people from overseas will want to come here, in part because you have stolen their own medical professionals. What do you expect people to do?
Loony
Spot on. That was what I was trying to convey. Now all I ask you is not to be personal, I have done no such thing myself.
But you’re not ‘here’. If only it were as simple as your rants.
No mate I’m not here, so I must be there.
You see it really is simple – either you are here or you are somewhere else. Unless you are God in which case you are everywhere.
Here, there and everywhere in fact
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdcSFVXd3MU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4HHaspKL_4&t=32
Actually the Philippines specifically train nurses for the overseas market and the remittances they bring. Not so of course Romania. Yes the remittances do form a significant part of overseas income but we are rapidly depopulating Romania here in Western Europe and their educated doctors.e. No Remainer wants to discuss this aspect of free movement.
As you know, the Philippines is not in the EU. I agree that this aspect of immigration is not talked about, but it will continue in full after brexit, especially with a right wing government. There is no sign that anything will change.
Who are the “they” you refer to?
Blatant racist, I suggest.
Entirely evidence free assertion I suggest
I am not saying my superficial observations are necessarily true, simply that without greater knowledge than the average person possesses, they can appear to be so. The people I have observed while sitting around for long hours in my local UCC, and for whom English is not a first language are both Asian ( chiefly in my area from the Indian sub continent,) and Eastern European. In some cases the sick person is accompanied by a family member or friend who translates for them, in others they struggle to make themselves understood.
Of course austerity has played its part in the NHS but today there are a lot more people living in my area today than there were 20 years ago. For a start there are a lot of Eastern Europeans who have joined the existing population. We now have ethnic East European shops, Eastern European accents on public transport and when MrPaul did jury service, recently both cases involved Eastern Europeans who had arrived here since they joined the EU.
l looked it up and the court cases locally involving Eastern Europeans constitute about 35% of local jury cases. Mr Paul also commented that the cases dragged on because interpreters had to be hired to help clarify emails exchanged and cross questioning of accused and defendents.
One of my big issues with free movement in the EU is how can you plan for extra numbers if you have no idea how many to expect? We all know original government estimates were totally inaccurate. So people see large numbers of new arrivals about whom there has been no consultation and they say slow down until we can get a grip on numbers. For this they are called racist.
These comments would have been understandable in 2003, but 16 years things have stabilized and it won’t happen again. We should now be providing local investment to support infrastructure in areas such as yours. This could be funded by the overall economic advantage of immigration.
No-one is worried that the entire population of the UK could descend on Hull (say) tomorrow, and force it to a standstill. Similarly, by now we know what to expect with EU migration, there are not surprises, and so we should be able to mitigate any effects it has on infrastructure.
S
Blair lied through his teeth.
Actually , to our credit , lying totally pisses off most of us.
If politicians like Oaf Johnson realised just how offended ordinary people are by lying , they’d choose a different job.
As it is they lie so spectacularly that even their own friends and supporters hatebthem like scorpions.
Just how do the ultra liars like johnson endure the tsunami of rage their lying generates amongst us?
Please no answer needed.
They surround themselves with other liars, like 11 downing street, who don’t notice.
“I think the opponents of immigration among the poorer classes get a bad rap here. For example, I have had to use the NHS emergency services several times recently and there is no doubt they are struggling under pressure of numbers.”
What you say in the second sentence is an example of what?
Many of the opponents of immigration both in the working class and in any other class are racists. If you want to make the point that they are not all racists and that it is legitimate for them to fight against the deterioriation in their living standards then I agree with you, but you should first accept that point. Racism and xenophobia (which are very closely bound up with each other) are exactly what the rulers love to see in the poorer classes because they divide the exploited and they take the heat off the said rulers.
“In my local Urgent Care Centre (rebranded A&E) and my local walk in centre, the attendees are not dominated by elderly pensioners but a cross section of society, many of whom are there I suspect because, like me, they find it hard to get an NHS appointment at 24 hours notice.”
“Cross-section of society” is middle class speak for proles?
“A fair proportion of those present in my local UCC on my visits are not native English speakers. However much they pay in taxes, the impression is of a service being overwhelmed by numbers, of which a significant proportion are recent arrivals in the UK. So people think their numbers should be controlled. This is not a racist view but a rational one in many ways.”
Or why not sterilise everyone who wears glasses? Or kill all the elderly? There are many ways to reduce numbers. Most immigration to Britain comes from countries from which it is already controlled. Immigration has brought real problems for many natives – unlike most who are on the left I do not deny that for a single moment. The answer is not to join up with the rulers in some kind of ethnic bund. Are you seriously sure you could stomach that? Do you think the rulers of this country love the natives more than they love immigrants, just because the natives have a British royal crown printed in their passports? They think all proletarians are scum. The answer isn’t more division. It’s stronger trade unions that welcome immigrants and that fight against wage undercutting and the divisions that employers have loved to drive among the workforce since about as long as employers have existed. In struggles outside of the workplace, the same principle applies.
While we’re here…many of the medics too can’t speak English properly…
If this filthy country called Britain weren’t so dominated by a Social Darwinist, sociobiological, Malthusian sensibility, then more medics would be trained up among people on the council estates and in poor areas generally…but of course the posh boys would never countenance that for one moment. On BBC radio yesterday, I heard some schoolteachers working for interests that are flogging musical services to schools say that children should have a go at a range of musical instruments “so they can find out what they’re good at”. In what other country in the world do teachers have such a disgusting, foul, cretinous mindset? Imagine somebody who has such an education-hating attitude strutting around calling themselves a “teacher”. It almost beggars belief. If any British schoolteachers read this, I doubt that 1 in 20 will even have an inkling why a person might have contempt for the view that children should try different things “to find out what they’re good at”.
“While we’re here…many of the medics too can’t speak English properly…”
I guess you have some evidence for this statement? In case you have not realised that is also a veiled racist statement.
Very surprising to see this racism being allowed on here. Suggest those carping contributors try the US system, having their credit cards at the ready, and where a large proportion of personal bankruptcies are caused by inability to pay medical bills.
PS There is no mention of the underfunding of OUR NHS, nor of the shortage of doctors (low recruitment levels attributed to workplace stress) and nurses (caused mainly by the abolition of nursing bursaries by the unlamented Theresa May) nor of the increasing privatisation within the service.
https://weownit.org.uk/public-ownership/nhs
Sharp Ears
FFS don’t follow the standard NHS envyoftheworld line here by comparing it ONLY to the US system. The German and other mainland European systems offer socialised medicine for a small upfront outlay (which incidentally also is an effective tool against abuse, whether by unentitled foreigners or locals who fail to keep booked appointments) and with much better health outcomes, and levels of satisfaction, Like you I have long term health issues and use the NHS a lot- when it works well it is indeed a marvel, however the problems it has all relate to access – and it being free at the point of use, and thus not valued for what it is- a gateway to the cornucopia of possible treatments for every conceivable ailment that western medicine can offer. Some treatments don’t come cheap, and instead of rationing them, a per capita charge on all UK residents for enrollment onto the system (say £25 per annum) and charges for GP appointments beyond say 3 per annum, are long overdue.
It is interesting that most of what is said about the unenrolled foreigners is used to bash the NHS rather than the politicians.
Most bloggers here stop their skepticism of the government or particularly the Tories and fall to blaming the foreigners when it comes to the NHS. At least it is a much more caring and humane system. Turning away ‘unentitled’ foreigners is a political not a healthcare decision.
well, the latest russian joke on the similar problem
“- What are ‘national projects’?
– This is government officials and agencies… perform their normal duties.”
Yes
To Old Mark’s point:
I have lived in the US, and the healthcare system there is an expensive nightmare, with bureaucratic overheads one would not imagine while living in the UK or Europe.
However, the other European systems are entirely different. For instance, Dutch healthcare consists of paying a compulsory premium of about 100 euros/month. You can pay more if you want extra (private room, full-package TV entertainment, etc.) . This entitles you to extremely good hospitals and doctor/GP facilities, and probably will include some physio type sessions for free.
The 100 euros monthly premium – and this is key – does not depend on your current age or state of health. If you really cannot afford this, it will be paid for by the benefits system.
“the latest russian joke”
I can’t wait to see the punchline, should be good.
There is no shortage of evidence.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/27/eu-doctors-work-in-uk-failed-english-skills-gmc-licence
Why not attack the Guardian for being racist?
Loony
Have you opened the link let alone see the title of article?
“Almost half of EU doctors seeking work in UK failed to prove English skills”
The key is in the word “seeking” which is not difficult to interpret, even for those not living here.
The rational response would be to increase the numbers of “Urgent Care Centres” (degraded A&Es) and walk in centres (and correct the under-lying under funding and staffing of GP surgeries too) as well as the numbers of NHS staff. Clearly we do not have enough. Though, as you say, racists will manipulate the narrative to suit their anti immigrant propaganda in the hope of provoking resentful patients to react viciously.
9% of NHS Doctors have an African origin. Why don’t you, in non racist terms, explain exactly what right the British have to steal Doctors from Africa.
Do you now that Africa, home to over about 1.2 billion people, has one dedicated children’s hospital. At the last count the UK has 17. Tell me, tell me, c’mon tell me the answer – what is so special about British children that is not so special about African children?
Nice attempt at diversion. Doesn’t work. We need to spend much more on all our pubic services. End of.
(When you say “end of” does that mean the debate is closed?) As ever Loony raises interesting points despite his constantly provocative vocabulary and needling tone. Your reply suggests that you think the solution to African health problems is none of your business, and that even more should be done to attract foreign doctors to the UK. This is a very unattractive colonial attitude, Bramble, even of the rich have always stolen from the poor.
We can start by terminating all the PFI contracts. Pay the contractors what it cost them to build the hospitals and then run them on a not for profit basis.
That would make a huge difference to NHS finances as the trusts fork out millions to the PFI parasites before even thinking of budgets to treat patients.
It is impossible to overwhelm the PE NHS with numbers only with underspending and diverting revenue to non-health purposes. A long queue shows how successful the starving of the former NHS has been. The next step is trumped up allegations of abuse against staff to remove people from GPs rolls, a la DWP.
Generation identity noises, Mary Paul
What would you say of uk voters living in Europ, quiet a few of them, and their reciprocal health services abroad? Are they overstretching the services and do you think that EU countries have not planned in such needs? Regardless of whether they pay taxes, some are OAPs, do you really think theyll be left in peril?
The UK spends a good deal more on treating EU residents here than it obtains in repayment of UK residents treatrdc in the EU. Someone will no doubt be along to correct me but from memory it is around a,£643m spend against around £47m claimed back. This is at due to our failure to reclaim which seems to be a combination of culture ( medical care should be free to all who need it ) and inertia (simpler not to bother reclaiming.). The largest group of UK citizens in the EU are the UK pensioners living in Spain whose incomes are welcomed by the Spanish.
Mary Pau!
The cost to the NHS for non UK treatment is astonishing, around £1.8 billion per year, of which only around £500 million is recoverable. In my GP surgery the computerised checkin system has two languages – Polish and English.
https://fullfact.org/health/health-tourists-how-much-do-they-cost-and-who-pays/
Kindly post the full facts.
What is the total NHS budget?
What percentage is used by ‘health tourists’?
What percentage is ‘un-collected’?
What percentage of GNI is spent on NHS?
What are the per capita numbers?
How does that compare to other advanced economies?
All else is just a bunch of shit stirring in my opinion.
Mary Paul, Loony and Old Mark and perhaps also N_
Of course we are importing doctors and nurses and other skilled people from around the world. Actual imperialism has turned into economic imperialism. Of course it is a policy to deliberately limit the expensive training of enough doctors and nurses for our needs and supplement these numbers with those from overseas. And overseas does not only mean EU a large proportion of doctors and nurses in the NHS come from non-EU countries.
But in the context of what the people feel about foreigners, some of them supposedly on the left here, including those who are trying to help us by joining the NHS, we should respect them not denigrate them as some here try to do.
The answer to the woes of the NHS, the inequalities, the exploitation of foreigners trained staff and deindustrialisation is not Brexit. That is what I am saying, Brexit has become a panacea and the foreigners have become the culprits in reducing our living standards. This is of course a racist diversion and is rubbish of the first degree.
The answer at least in part, for the problems discussed is first to stop military intervention in other countries. Secondly to give meaningful aid to make these countries self sufficient and not just use their resources and privatise their facilities for the gain of international elite. Abolish the IMF and its cruel shock therapy.
The heart of the problem lies with the system and we are here stabbing at its individual manifestations. Replacing the EU alliance with the US alliance does not address any of the problems because the system of hypercapitalist neoliberalism will only be stronger here. That is why those claiming to be on the left and want Brexit, are whistling in the wind.
The left cannot reduce or do any damage limitation here because the true left is trying to find an answer within a hypercapitalist system to reorientate society to centre on people rather than materialism and money. The pseudo left meanwhile joins the system wholeheartedly trying to convince us that the answer is tweaking the system here and there.
This does not address the pressure on public services caused by the large increase in the number of EU citizens moving here to live since Eastern Europe joined the EU. I understand there are still significant numbers leaving Romania which has undergone a significant exit of qualified medical personnel among the large numbers depopulating the country in recent years. Europeans including Eastern European are all the same ” racial” stock.
You still persist in reiterating that the main cause is the pressure on the NHS is immigration which is if simply not true at all is a very serious oversimplification. And then you throw in the Rounanian doctors. You take these two together to conclude that that is why people voted Brexit. But these same people will get the biggest shock in their lives when they realise that Brexit is the wrong answer to this problem. If we do not exploit Bulgarians and Roumanians, or if Greece is not brought to its knees or if we have not to have austerity it is not because of the EU it is because of the international economic system of hypercapitalist is neoliberalism where rich and strong countries get richer and stronger. We merely will go back and exploit someone else when we leave.
And by the way nobody voted Brexit to save Roumania and Bulgaria from being depopulated so it is a red herring in this discussion.
SA
In my view the EU is a pernicious neoliberal organisation much like those running the UK. Yet some of its supporters, including my sister, insist it is dedicated to improving the lot of the working man and woman.
SA
Mary Pau! is absolutely correct, because it is the EU dictating to countries and forcing them to impose austerity measures which harm the poorest in society.
http://www.tuaeu.co.uk/eu-austerity-measures-driving-millions-into-poverty/
AOL
But if it was not the EU it would be the IMF or World bank, so what?
The pressures on [public services are entirely self generated, by closing hospitals, shutting wards for elderly coming out of hospital; to recuperate for home, and most of all, the horrendous cost of PFI/PPI, seemingly the only way to build a hoispital these days is via involving vultures such as banks.
Don’;t blame the EU for your own blindness. As for the unreformed NHS, it will have to adopt a different system of funding in future, employers and workers will have to find an equal amount of money to fund it, NI does not do it.
I agree about PFi which as I recall, was enthusiastically adopted by the former UK Chancellor and PM, (and Scottish politician,) Gordon Brown.
“Scottish politician”
Double boo!
Nevermind
You seem to be the one who is blind.The EU is a fascist bureaucracy. Europe a Nation was a policy developed by British Blackshirt Fascist politician Oswald Mosley as the cornerstone of his Union Movement. It called for the integration of Europe into a single political entity.
And this from a Remain paper recently which has just woken up.
The EU commission has been accused of adopting “grotesque” and “fascist” rhetoric after it created a new “Commissioner for Protecting our European Way of Life” role to oversee immigration policy.
Incoming president Ursula von der Leyen unveiled the new job along with the rest of her cabinet at a press conference in Brussels on Tuesday, explaining that it would cover migration issues.
But critics said the new job’s Orwellian-sounding name suggested that immigrants were a threat to the European way of life.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-news-latest-commissioner-for-protecting-our-european-way-of-life-ursula-von-der-leyen-a9098991.html
Thank you for the interesting analysis of these confusing times, Craig.
In the Trump case, my guess would be that he is seen by the American military establishment as an excessively dovish President who stole the presidency from their would-be stooge Hillary Clinton. Therefore they have been trying to undermine his presidency ever since, largely under the cover of the Left.
The Johnson case is much more puzzling. He was promoted to the premiership by almost the definition of the establishment – Conservative MPs and Conservative members by a huge majority. He also spent many years working for the Telegraph, the most ‘establishment’ newspaper there is. Therefore he surely must be establishment in any meaningful sense of the word.
There appear to be three main possibilities: a) The Conservative Party has been taken over by the American hard right, with Johnson appointed their stooge to carry out Brexit. In this scenario, his bumbling and gaffes would be a way to allow him to be made a scapegoat when Brexit is ‘over the line’. Then, the puppetmasters appoint an Obama-like figure to ‘heal the nation’, much as they did having ordered Bush to his military disasters.
or b) Johnson is a stooge of elements of the UK establishment to undermine Brexit by posing as a hardline Brexiteer while in fact scuppering any practical Brexit and at the same time discrediting the Leave campaign and neutralising Farage
or c) Johnson really is incompetent and has been outmanoeuvred by opposition politicians, the EU and the realities of Brexit
One element that hints that some of this Brexit drama is a charade is the Lib Dems – on the one hand they rail against Johnson’s behaviour and claim to want to stop Brexit, yet on the other, they refuse to back one of the few politicians who does behave decently and could stop Brexit and Johnson – Jeremy Corbyn.
If it wasn’t so dangerous you could think that all this chaos was a mess up by Johnson and the ERG as well as Farage.
In my opinion that is not what’s happening.
If the UK exits with no deal then this opens up the way to a UK/ US Bilateral Trade Agreement.
Any form of Deal that isn’t a no deal ( with the exception of May’s crap deal ) would not allow for that bi-lateral deal to happen.
With Johnson you are always looking at his motives.
Johnson is doing what Johnson does because there is something in it for himself.
He sister more than hinted at one reason.
One of many maybe.
But his reward in heaven is that if he delivers a no deal Brexit he will be lauded by Trump and the right in the US for years to come and will receive commensurate income from it.
He is doing an inverse Blair/Bush routine of getting up the backside of the US as far as you can.
The politics they have in common is that neo liberal economics despite past evidence is still the best place for the UK to be.
This is a given even though Blair is pro EU.
Of course the main enemy is neither of these two but Corbyn’s Labour Party.
That is an existential threat to all those concerned in the EU v US debate.
Jess Philips and her mates agree with this too and many in the Parliamentary Labour Party agree with not reversing
austerity.
Lib Dems similarly.
They still have faith in the market which landed millions of their constituents into poverty or poorness and that is the reason why they visit their constituency offices week in and week out. It is the reason why Jess Philip’s sons school is shut on a Friday.
Then again If you allow the Tories to get their way because of your hatred for Corbyn your school will be shut on Wednesdays – Thursdays never mind Fridays and you might have to pay as well.
I’m not picking on Philips solely there are loads of men who qualify to, it’s certailnly not the preserve of women.
Harriet Harman came out with a gem re: Margaret Hodge’s re-selection process:
She Tweeted that Margaret Hodge has exposed tax evasion for years in her select committees.
Apparently Hodge’s company hasn’t paid any tax ( or not much ) on its turnover for years. in the UK.
Comedy gold.
But not surprising as it’s becoming the trend that it’s not the Yanks who don’t do irony – the British politicians are not doing it now.
The latest nasty debates are proof positive of this new trend.
Margaret Hodge’s chairmanship of the Public Accounts Committee – financial probity and standards in public life and all of that – was indeed comedy gold.
That came after her role as Children’s Minister which was an amazing appointment given her protection of paedophiles in Islington, but nobody would call it comedy.
It still remains unexplained why her nephew skedaddled from that hotel in Praia da Luz in Portugal so fast (a day early, without checking out, with his children, and straight out of the country to Switzerland) a few hours before it was claimed that Madeleine McCann had “disappeared” from that same hotel. And he’s billionaire bracket, and the hotel wasn’t in that bracket at all, so work that one out.
N_
Wow! I have just been researching this, and found a pretty explosive Twitter feed. The connections and the people involved are off the scale.
https://twitter.com/ciabaudo/status/1030517284023021568?lang=en
Thanks for that link, @Andy. I agree this goes way off the scale. One site you may find useful is Jill Havern’s. (They quote our host Craig on their front page.) No way was the little girl “abducted”. Within weeks of her not being seen any more, Gerry McCann had been on the phone to Gordon Brown a number of times. Well, Brown was prime minister and here were some British citizens who were in difficulties abroad, it might be said. But actually no, Brown wasn’t prime minister at that time. He wasn’t foreign secretary either, and he had no responsibilities in foreign affairs. Nor did the family have any connection with his constituency. He was chancellor of the exchequer. Then a few weeks later GMcC was in the US meeting US attorney general Alberto Gonzalez.
Incidentally Kate McCann has for decades been a close friend of Esther McVey, at whose career you might also wish to take a look. McVey has certainly been “helped” a lot, and she is criminally connected – there is no doubt about either of those statements. (There’s some interesting material on McVey at Jill Havern’s site.)
Another link is to Clement Freud, Liberal Democrat paedophile, who had a house in Praia da Luz where he had friendly meetings with the McCanns and who assured them they had nothing to fear from the sniffer dogs. Kate McCann wrrites “Thank God for people like Clement who kept us smiling” and she happily reports that he asked her “So Kate, which of the devout Catholic, alcoholic, depressed, nymphomaniac parts is true?” This was weeks after her three-year-old daughter had supposedly been abducted and not seen since.
Then there are the witness statements by Arul and Katherina Gaspar.
And…there’s the role of Clarence Mitchell doing the PR, putting out many many stories over the years about the hunt for some imaginary abductors. Enormous influence has been wielded in this case. Why?
Interesting stuff, and there’s this (which I didn’t see on the twitter feed – apologies if I missed it); https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/programmes_which_bbc_newsnight_p?unfold=1
” . . . The Islington whistleblower Dr Liz Davies maintains that she told Jeremy of the abuse of children in care in the Borough, but Jeremy did not act on her concerns.”
http://www.drsallybaker.com/uncategorized/the-turn-of-the-screw/
James Charles
No reason to disbelieve that, it would be a logical step to contact your local MP (Islington North since 1983) if you felt there was a cover up in a local council. It makes me wonder how much stuff actually gets swept under the carpet which we never hear about.
Just for information: Jeremy Corbyn was a much weaker figure than Margaret Hodge in Islington in the 1980s.
Those interested in the high-level connections of organised paedophiles in London might like to look at the “Johnny Go Home” films of 1975 which were so powerful that many still remember them now, and yet they are extremely hard to get hold of.
The thigh squeeze claim by Charlotte Edwardes against Boris Johnson may possibly be misdirectional. There are many much more damaging stories in his background, several of which could get him sent to jail, and others which even if they wouldn’t come with a prison sentence would still remove him from office, unlike the “her word against his” allegation by a former colleague at the Spectator that he squeezed her thigh 20 years ago.
Matt Hancock’s comments are all over the place. He seriously seems to be at a loss for what he might say about Edwardes’s allegation that anybody might appreciate. By now, CCHQ or Number 10 have probably told the idiot to keep his gob shut.
Penny Mordaunt says she thinks Johnson “cares a great deal about women and girls”. What – even ones he hasn’t forced to sign non-disclosure agreements?
Sooner or later someone may even publish one of his NDAs. C’mon, Seumas, offer Danielle Fleet a big payment into a Channel Islands account!
well, the people who don’t usually vote would be delighted if victor saved brexit
One right word here, tax evasion. And Margaret Hodge is equally tainted. Having her in place, as well as the Brexit gang, suits the offshorers in the city o London Corp.
For them the exposure of sums into these should nevet be made a public accountable fact .
Thats why the country is being kept divided!
Any extension into the next year, for this EU country, is untennable as the vast sums being passed by the exchequer due to flawed tax laws, can never be public knowledge.
Instead they are playing on this by making out that the dithering has to stop and their tools Snolly G Johnson and his sidekick shit stirrer Farrage, hence must take us out on the 31.Oct.
And then as hinted by many, this country will become a low wage, low tax haven and carry on to undermine the economy to favour a few.
I know a solution, but it would be wrong for me to say here. Brace yourself for an election pact of the right and the most violent cheating election you have ever experienced, as campaigners clash with those they apparently stand up for.
Me, i have no vote and shall keep out of it, as this country is targetting EU citizens.
But with the conviction of Sophie Scholl who had her life ended for organising student opposition to the Nazi regime, some 75 years ago, I will support and help those who stand up against racismn.
Of course Brexit suits tax evaders and the City of London.
That would explain perfectly why 67% of people in Blackpool voted to leave the EU – Blackpool being the global center of tax evasion. Only last week someone was claiming, by implication, that Blackpool was a seething mass of rabid zionists.
Aint it strange that with all this Israeli money and no requirement to pay taxes Blackpool remains one of the most deprived parts of the UK
the blackpool i know is a ****hole dominated by casual workers, run down unviable hotels housing mostly imigrants in poverty. whites are left behinders staring out to sea.
not just my description evidently
https://www.ilivehere.co.uk/blackpool-2.html
OK so Blackpool is comprised of “mostly imigrants (sic)” Yet 67% of people voted for Brexit
Elsewhere in these comments you can find people claiming that Brexit voters are all indigenous right wing racists and fascists. Now according to your logic we learn that Brexit voters are, at leat in part, immigrants. presumably the phrase “left behinders staring out to sea” is designed to inculcate in the reader a sense that these people are stupefied.
We now learn that various people are claiming Blackpool as home to zionists, tax evaders, xenophobic immigrants and stupefied morons all of whom have made common cause to vote for Brexit.
How likely is this to be true?
Those immigrants weren’t eligible to vote in the referendum, you idiot.
Misinformation alert:
“ Blackpool is comprised of mostly immigrants”
Blackpool’s pupilation is mainly white according to this website:
http://www.blackpooljsna.org.uk/Blackpool-Profile/Ethnicity.aspx
Sadly the immigrants did not have a say on their future here, otherwise tthe now historic national poll would have looked different.
“That would explain perfectly why 67% of people in Blackpool voted to leave the EU – Blackpool being the global center of tax evasion.”
No. It simply means that they are stupid.
No. It simply means that they are stupid.
Careful Kathy- quite a few of the retirees in Blackpool are Scottish; its one of the few towns in England where Scottish banknotes are accepted widely.
kathy – “No. It simply means that they are stupid.”
You should get a job in the Labour or Lib Dem parties, you would fit in a treat. The vast majority of towns in the North West, voted to leave the EU, with high turnouts and similar percentages to Blackpool.
whichever way brexit go’s the motivated lumpen are either angrier or triumphant – don’t know which is worse.
If we try to consider that question from a fascist point of view, I think there could be mileage for those who want fascism (e.g. Stephen Bannon) in giving the lumpen another even bigger reason to feel that what they want has been stolen from them. Imagine if a Labour government were to call a single-question referendum pitting a “soft Brexit” versus Remain.
…Or if a Labour-led or rainbow or caretaker government hits the Revoke button at five to midnight on 31 October, which would be dramatic but I wouldn’t rule it out from happening. It’s more likely than a LibDem majority.
Steve Bannon s simply a representative of blue collar America – a representative of people tired of being kicked in the bollocks in the name of some kind of bizarre and twisted morality.
All that is happening there is that Bannon is kicking those that hate the working classes right where it hurts them.
Suck it up losers – because Trump is now a shoe in for 2020, and you can almost smell the fear in the British ruling classes that Brexit just might happen.
None of this has anything to do with fascists, but the kind of ludicrous smears perpetuated by people like yourself will create fascists. I expect more to be created in Spain come the next election.
Why not spend between now and November 10th asking yourself what is worse a fascist or a creator of fascists?
“Shoe-in”? 🙂
Perhaps that means your hero, that brilliant, stable genius, is going get the boot?
But seriously, your pretence that a cheesy multi-millionaire con-man (or a Tory posh-boy for that matter) is actually a champion of the people is nothing more than a very transparent lie. You cannot have failed to notice that all Trump’s tax breaks have gone to the super-rich, and he has staffed his cabinet with billionaires and their lackies.
Your role as a shill for this miserable huckster is pretty consistent – either you’re still running a parody account, or you’re an exceedingly obvious stooge.
“Steve Bannon s simply a representative of blue collar America – a representative of people tied of being kicked in the bollocks in the name of some kind of bizarre and twisted morality.”
Well, there’s certainly a market for that position, which Bannon and Trump have exploited.
But, Bannon seems to me more a master of discourse and dialectic, conjuring the repressed.
I’d agree that materially there does seem to be some sort of fight between producers and financiers.
But Bannon’s involvement with CA leads me more to the view that his interest is in playing the discourse than in remedying the material problems. Especially those of the US.
To call Stephen Bannon a representative of the blue collar US working class is wrong and insulting but need not delay us.
Bannon is a far-right (but not ultra-traditionalist) Roman Catholic fascist who promotes the cause of race war (although not, as far as I know, white supremacism), as evidenced by his references to Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints. The far right media in Britain (Daily Mail, Torygraph, Express, Sun) are pushing in the same direction. The “riots” that are
being prepared“predicted” if a section of the British population hits the roof because it feels that a British government has “sold out Brexit”, or is about to sell it out, would be race riots, pogroms, murderous Enochian celebrations.” . . . and you can almost smell the fear in the British ruling classes that Brexit just might happen.”
It appears that ‘the British ruling classes’ are very divided re BREXIT?
@ N. 03.19. I think the first two targets of rioters will be offices of the state; Jobclubs, council offices, police stations etc, The second targets will be those places which ponce off the poor including dodgy employers and payday loan companies. Many of those places will be burned to the ground.
Those looking to loot would be wise to avoid items which generate most of the economic activity in the west but which in a grid-down situation are pretty useless. A nice suit from a designer store won’t keep you warm and dry like a parka from a charity shop. Microwaves won’t run without electricity but cheap camping stoves from army surplus stores will always heat food. Phones, TVs, computers, not much use and all have traceable numbers, while fishing gear’s useful. A new BMW from a showroom will be no good once its fuel runs out, but a second-hand bike will take you places.
The best shops to loot will be charity shops, army surplus stores, fishing tackle shops and pawnbrokers. Other places selling desirable goods you need a pocketful of money for, they’re basically superfluous.
Having stocked up with a booze cruise and a couple of weeks of being European, i had to see wots what! The Obsessive today is telling.
InCohenRant has taken a anti dose of Jekyll/Hyde serum and completely failed to bare his usual slathery fangs at Corbyns mere existence!!! Is it some kind of StopOctober? Good boy.
However Ridiculous Rawnsley just falls short, by writing about the ‘language of hate’ but can’t stop himself blurting out ‘ HIS zealots’ who are posting to Labour MP’s – obviously not TO Abbott though? Who he puts at the bottom of a list of female MP’s getting online abuse! (Everyone knows Diane gets the most and the worst – why doesn’t Andrew?)
He also refers (like all msm) to the Brexit bus – there was a fleet of them, not just a SINGLE bus.
“there are now some clear connections between incendiary political language and physical violence.”
“One of the better observations made by Jeremy Corbyn in recent days was that no party “has a monopoly of virtue”. All the parties bear some guilt for the poison flowing through Britain’s body politic. The Labour leader’s one-time promise to introduce “a kinder, gentler politics” rings very hollow with the Labour MPs who have been targeted with vicious abuse by some of his zealots. ”
The rest of his piece reads less like a critic of the badboys and girls brexiteer corps ugly campaigning and more like a gushing and fainting at the hipswaying of young Dr Strangelove – Spaffy Dom.
Some super comments btl – not completely drowned by the usual troll bots – curious.
Maybe Rusbridger’s opinion has tempered their usual tabloid hysterics.
“Most foot soldiers in journalism do the job because they absolutely believe in the role of good information in good democracies. Something is stopping them: and the sooner we can fix that the better.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/28/end-front-page-falsehoods-and-regain-publics-trust-press
No shit Sherlock! You broke it – if you really want to fix it, admit that first. And stop the Hqrry Potter lookalike photo byeline too while you at it …
That piece by Rubisher might be the most disingenuous article they’ve ever published. He seems to take his readership for idiots. The loyal readers have let in droves now sharing brilliant articles by Matt Kennard about the guardian’s new found role with the security services. How he can pontificate about honesty in journalism whilst the (ex)readership learn about the guardian taking up permanent residency on the d-notice committee and expect up to go there with him is beyond me. Does he not know that we all know?
In case anyone doesn’t know what I’m talking about it’s shared below
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-09-11-how-the-uk-security-services-neutralised-the-countrys-leading-liberal-newspaper/
When the hedge fund gamblers Rees Mogg, Boris Oaf, etc want to collect their zillio pound debt against No Deal, it sounds like they OWN us . . Not bad, scooping Britain and everything leveraged by the rest of the world on our City of London, twice in 12 years.
Looks like the British people will be enslaved for ever and chained by the neck for building Pyramids for Boris and her majesty Liz 2.
Has anybody got any bright ideas how to lock the racist brexiteers up before October 31 st, because I have an idea that it will be these mindless thugs who’ll be whipping us when we don’t lug the boulders fast enough.
Rees Mogg as a hedge fund manager should not be in a government forcing a hard Brexit from which he will gain millions. It is called not just conflict if interest but corruption and if he was an African would have had regime applied to him and tried for corruption. But wait,who will the judges be?
SA
From his point of view he’s in exactly the right place. These posh-voiced Tories use their voices to disguise the fact that they are governemnt insiders. Maybe he just pops into the HoC on the way to his club for a cup of tea.
Maybe he pops into the HoC for a slouch.
” if he was an African would have had regime applied to him and tried for corruption.”
No he wouldn’t. He’s not the only one who benefits and neither are the equivalents in Africa, that’s why there are a lot of them about. You have to step on some serious toes to get regime changed, i.e. by not using the dollar standard. At least you did until regime change stopped working.
The story that the monarch “sought advice” on circumstances in which she might sack a prime minister, which her office (“Buckingham Palace”) have responded to by saying they “don’t comment on rumours” (poshspeak for “yes, we confirm it”), must surely have originated from her office in the first place.
I will p*** myself laughing if one of the plays in the game in the near future is that “the Elysée Palace” releases incontrovertible evidence of British state culpability in the murder of Henri Paul, Princess Diana, and Dodi al-Fayed.
Agree. I followed the inquests. I use the word loosely. A travesty.
https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20090607230252/http://www.scottbaker-inquests.gov.uk/
How about putting Erik Prince (Prinz) of Blackwater infamy into the ‘Villains’ category?
Here he is on Al Jazeera. No conscience. No admission of culpability. No shame. A psychopath.
‘In this episode of Head to Head, Mehdi Hasan challenges Erik Prince, the founder and former CEO of Blackwater, on his security firm’s performance during the Iraq war, the “exit strategy” he’s proposing for the war in Afghanistan, and his support for US President Donald Trump.
During the early years of the Bush administration’s so-called ‘War on Terror’, Blackwater grew into one of the most profitable private military contractors in the US. Over the years, it received over a billion dollars’ worth of government contracts to provide security to top US officials, train members of the Iraqi army and police, and support the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and Department of Defense’s counter narcotics programme in Afghanistan.’
/..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOB4V-ukpBI
If ever there were unlawful comabatants it has to be mercenaries. Not so much dogs of war, more…dogs.
The cognitive dissonance that infect these pages is because people on either the remain or leave side think that Brexit either way will solve any problems of the poor, rectify injustices to Greece, Romania (sorry have been misspelling)and Bulgaria, or repatriate sovereignty. This is cloud and cuckoo land. Brexit will do none of these things, and incidentally neither will Scottish independence be an answer to Scotland’s problems.
The fact that the EU is the neoliberal way it has become is nothing to do intrinsically with the idea of what the EU should have been but merely a reflection of how the neoliberal globalists have commanded the agenda. The left is in retreat everywhere and in disarray because all that they can offer is a softer version of neoliberalism and globalism. The socialist movement had always been that of encouraging cooperation between the working classes internationally but whilst there trade unionism, with all its faults, is retreating, the future looks very grim.
“The left is in retreat everywhere and in disarray because all that they can offer is a softer version of neoliberalism and globalism.”
Indeed, encapsulated in centrist / centre left fetishization of the EU.
“The socialist movement had always been that of encouraging cooperation between the working classes internationally.”
Indeed, but it never saw the EU as a vehicle for international socialism — an organisation that exists to facilitate the agenda of big capital.
“Indeed, encapsulated in centrist / centre left fetishization of the EU.”
But also encapsulated with some in the left aligning themselves with the extreme brexiters who will carry it out.
“Indeed, but it never saw the EU as a vehicle for international socialism — an organisation that exists to facilitate the agenda of big capital.”
The EU introduced some good social protection for labour. The underlying problem is not the ‘idea’ of the EU but the fact that its constituent member states have slowly become dominated by the right and the extreme right and so has the recently elected parliament.
Part of your exercise in cognitive dissonance should be pondering whether both of these can be true:
A) Cox is a first-degree jerk
B) He’s right about Johnson
Yes, “MSM” stories don’t include all details of all people at all times. That would be both boring and confusing.
If anyone is guilty of simplifying people into good/evil righteous/neoliberal … maybe it’s you?
Yes, it is perfectly possible for Cox to be a first-degree jerk and to be right about Johnson.
If anyone is guilty of simplifying people into good/evil righteous/neoliberal … maybe it’s you?
Politics is evil.
The same Tories who imposed austerity on the poor, created the poor in the first place, and basically destroyed the British economy over the last 40 years, are now claiming to be champions of the poor and blaming foreigners for the dismal state of the U.K.
As if that isn’t bad enough, the people made poor and who paid the price for this Thatcherite stupidity are following the Thatcherites and supporting them in their millions, somehow convinced that they stand to gain from Brexit and a Hong Kong model that can only make their lives even more miserable and deprived.
In the old days in Scotland we used to leave land aside for the devil — let him do his mischief there rather than amongst us was the idea. We called that land the devil’s plantation. Brexit makes the whole of the U.K. a devil’s plantation.
Where there is no justice, nothing can be unjust.
“Politics is evil.”
I wouldn’t go that far, yes there are many self serving politicians who care not a jot about the huddled masses. However there are politicians who do care but the political will isn’t there to see their ideas come to fruition.
Many of us would not be here today if it wasn’t for Attlee and Bevan, Bevan said in order to create the NHS which has saved countless lives, I had to stuff the BMA’s mouths with gold for the NHS to be born, which was based on the Highlands and Islands Medical Service.
Politics has been around for thousands of years, its a way to avoid war, to compromise and reach an agreement, without out it nation states would go to war far more easily.
Of course evil men use politics to get their way, but when not abused politics can be used to reach accords and keep the peace.
Been keeping up with the rumours surrounding Sturgeon, ros?
I like wings but he makes mistakes. Maybe this is another.
“Been keeping up with the rumours surrounding Sturgeon, ros?”
Rumours? Or do you mean opinions?
Both, I suppose. Whatever.
Sturgeon has never impressed me in any way. I’d love her to step down and make way for someone with a spine.
“Sturgeon has never impressed me in any way. ”
With regards to what exactly, excluding independence.
I’m not sure why you want to exclude independence. Maybe you concede that she has completely screwed up on that front. I predicted her strategy would fail to deliver independence on here almost three years ago.
Beyond that, I think her approach in Scotland has been stupid too. I don’t think she should be using the Scottish budget to mitigate Tory cuts, for starters. I’ve yet to hear an argument for doing that that didn’t hinge on sentimentality.
From a political and pro-indy standpoint, it would make more sense to let Scots feel the lash of Tory austerity on their backs. You want to be British? Be British and suffer with the rest of them…
On a more directly personal level, I don’t think she’s a very effective politician. She comes across as very contrived to me and insincere.
That’s a personal opinion, of course. I just don’t get the colour coordinated outfits, and I know they say it’s sexist to focus on how female politicians dress, but I don’t see Joanna Cherry dressing like that and I think Cherry is extremely capable and formidable as a politician.
The 2015 election marketing strategy told you everything you needed to know about Sturgeon — “I’m With Nicola!”
What an insult…
Then she started eulogising John McCain when he died, a guy that most Hawks in the US kept a safe distance from.
Tell me when you want me to stop.
So you don’t rate her because you don’t like her outfits, or that she’s mitigating some of the worst Tory austerity policies in decades or because you think she’s insincere and contrived.
Nor do you like her I’m with Nicola slogan. Or that she said a few kind words on the life of John McCain.
Wow, is all I can say about that and not in a good way. You obviously haven’t been paying attention, I’ll leave it there.
Okay.
“Trump and Johnson’s populism have shaken the old Establishment, ”
On the contrary, Craig, it’s just replaced one set of bastards with an entirely new, and far less pleasant, set of bastards.
We’d all like to see big changes, but you shouldn’t let that blind you into thinking any of this is in any way good.
From a humble field-worker’s perspective, there’s a fight in the big house, we can hear the master and his family fighting, and there’s smoke billowing from the kitchen window.
But the fields look magnificent today. Dew has quietly gathered on the cotton and it’s sparkling in the morning’s golden light.
Oh well.
Your’e right.
The whole thing is about replacing one set of neo liberals with another set of ‘ foreign ‘ ( thanks Nigel ) neo -liberals.
In fact the irony in all of this is that Farage and Johnson claim to be great patriots as they sell the UK down the river.
Unfortunately 37% of Tories and 13% of Brexit party supporters think it is for ‘ sovereignty ‘ to be given back to the people, when in actuality it is being given away after being grabbed back from the EU and then handed over to Trump and his meey band of capitalists.
It’s not radical anti – Establishment change ( that slight change comes from Corbyn and even that set of policies would not look out of place in Germany ) but if his party wins with him in charge it is regarded by all the Establishment as a paradigm shift and a terrible example to show to the world.
Simply put the whole Brexit strategy is to get Out of the EU and into the hands of the US.
Frying pan and fire for ordinary people.
So, now they try to impeach him.
A legitimate democratically elected US President reminds another legitimate democratically elected Ukrainian President to investigate whether a US Senator is corrupt. And the reaction of other US senators is – to impeach this President. Nice!
—-
Do you know what we call people’s desire for freedom and justice?
– A planned U.S. action.
– What do you call people’s desire for freedom and justice in the United States?
– Red threat.
—-
It is clear to me that these “US actions” and “Red threats” are simply far-fetched pretext to drive attention away from crimes. But really, who buys the story? Can people be really so naive?
ah, another russian joke 😉
A General wakes up after a grand booze. He openes his eyes and sees that the adjutant cleans his jacket all covered with vomit. To somehow hide the embarrassment, the General says:
– Kids today, just can’t drink! Yesterday some Lieutenant threw up all over my jacket!
Adjutant:
– Exactly, comrade General! that rascal sh*t in your pants, too!
Thanks for some Monday morning hilarity, Tatyana.
BTW. The Oregami workshop In Vyatskoe, once well accepted amongst villagers, has folded….
you’re welcome, nevermind, and thank you too 🙂
btw, I’ve seen ‘The Professor and the Madman’ this weekend, and their fame now haunts me, a humble linguist.
I suggest it be better spelled ‘Hillary-ty’ , so you can perpetuate the language of historical events and to give a new nuance of meaning.
I can also suggest ‘ex-Hillaryation’.
Tatyana
Boris Johnson got London to pay for his bimbo’s business trips to Israel.
He and his business friends are gaming the currency and stock markets over Brexit.The embarrassment to British politics will be more than a dirty pair of boxer shorts.
El Al must do very well from the Tory travellers. Priti Patel too and countless MPs who are members of the Friends of Israel groups, from all three main parties. I don’t think the SNP have been enrolled and trust that they never will.
They boast on their websites and give the names of the participants.
eg https://cfoi.co.uk/delegations/ August being the latest on here.
LFoI decided not to have a stand at this year’s Labour conference. Ellman is the chair of it. She was given a damehood by Agent Cameron and P Charles presented the award. P Charles was not wearing his embroidered blue velvet kippah for the occasion..
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-friends-israel-conference-antisemitism-corbyn-a9110536.html
More of the rot about perceived anti-semitism before anything has happened.
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/labour-mp-dame-louise-ellman-receives-her-damehood-from-prince-charles-1.474238
It is truly bizarre. Now we have the “pussy grabber” in the White House and the “thigh squeezer” in Downing Street. I sometimes wonder if this is all a strange dream that I’ll suddenly wake up from…
Why can’t they grab and squeeze each other’s thighs and, whatever, and just leave the positions for decent people?
Mr. Clintor tried to hide and deny his ‘fitness’ with Ms. Lewinsky. Unlike Mr. Trump, who sees nothing wrong in his statements. Maybe this attitude towards women they study in special US president’s tutorials?
I even recall that Billy Bob Thornton’s role in Love Actually film is also some kind of “p*ssy grabber”, and it is interesting that an expert in picturing human types that is Richard Curtis, found it’s what exactly needs to be shown. Because it’s symbolic, it defines the character in a couple of seconds.
(the film I adore and it makes me sob every time. The best British Prime Minister I’ve ever seen is performed by Hugh Grant and I wish you had such a PM in reality)
This is from a previous thread but highly relevant to this one:
“I have expressed at length my view that the idea the Queen was “misled” is a nonsense. David Cameron’s description of the process of getting the Queen to intervene in the Scottish Independence referendum, involving multiple conversations with her private secretary (a senior civil servant on secondment), lifts the lid a bit for those who have not been inside the system. There will have been detailed discussions with the Queen’s private office of the prorogation and its motives, which Buckingham Palace could see as well as any of us. One cheerful thing about today’s ruling is that it states unequivocally that an Order in Council, issued with the authority of the Queen, is void if unlawful. This is as much a poke in the eye for the Queen as it is for Boris Johnson, despite the near unanimous pretence of her immaculate innocence and infallibility.”
@Craig – I would be very interested to hear your take on the monarch’s involvement in the Leave campaign, which went through both Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC and the front page of the Sun newspaper. I don’t believe for one moment that any of those stories were published without the okay from “the Palace”. Do you?
People may be interested to know that Hillary Clinton (with daughter Chelsea) will be live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 10th November.
She may, or may not, take questions.
https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/136848-hillary-rodham-clinton-chelsea-clinton-2019
Will Madame Ghislaine Maxwell be there too? They invited her to Chelsea’s wedding. Will Mary Beard dare to ask anything meaningful?
ghislaine will be sorting something out for bill while they’re away.
Will we finally see Ms Beard as a Establishment floozy, enabling the Clinton dynasty with its arranged marriage to join the self Chosen rulers of the world?
Klein too – when she is interviewed by Viner – will she mention Integrity Initiative and Assange and the Groaniads sell out?
The gatekeepers are increasingly being hung-out as the narrative management fails faster daily – thanks to the sites such as this, MoA and Consortium – even the faux ‘alternative’ newer sites are suddenly outing their reactionary roots, as they realise that the hard brexit is slipping away; Russia/China/EU are not playing the Atlantists Imperialist games ; and the daily failing neocon-game of neverending war for blood profits in far away places, unreported in their controlled msm is over.
The final battle (here in the UK) will perhaps end with riots and storming of palaces of power if THEY insist on persuing the narrative of forcing the hard brexit and installing a gnu to deprive the country of its first real chance in 40 years to reaffirm the socialist democratic post war covenant and save our public services and future generations from mass indentured servitude.
The pushing of ‘Surrender’ is not just about getting the hard brexit it is about med squarely at Corbyn and is there to awaken the ‘No Surrender to the IRA’ fuckwittery in the moronic msm fed masses to stop that otherwise straightforward election victory.
Yup i’ll hit the streets and multiply the poll-tax campaign ten fold!
She may, or may not, take questions.
Well, she (they) may be too busy taking donations to take questions.
when Von Papen was Chancellor 1932
the head of state dissolves parliament and shortly afterwards reparations to the surrender monkeys(french)are terminated and an agreed commitment of 3 million Reichmarks not paid. shortly after, Papen’s economic policies, which were all enacted through Article 48, were to cut the payments offered by the unemployment insurance fund, subject jobless Germans seeking unemployment insurance to a means test, lower wages (including those reached by collective bargaining), while arranging tax cuts for corporations and the rich.
i watched it yesterday and agreed with most of it but flinched at his assertion about the necessity for a national identity.. I suspect it’s not what most people wake up thinking about, literature, film, music transcend nationality don’t they? And the poor sods who live in rwanda or haiti are they condemned to perpetual shame?
It starts as you might expect a Brexiter piece to start, by suggesting that the EU is the same as the Soviet Union. That’s the brilliance of Brexitism, it can’t do better than that. But it’ll go down well with all the Brexiters on this blog.
Thanks Janet, did it mention the many MP’s who for 40 years failed to point this out to us?
didn’t mention the stagnating economy and youth unemployment either – guess that’s he’s above that
“Short selling: can hedge funds make a fortune from no-deal Brexit?” <- quite a sad article in the Guardian, where "hedge fund" stands in for "big private fund" and little understanding is shown of what it means to "hedge", let alone of how speculation can be on volatility as well as on the price of the underlying.
I offer the following to assist with the understanding:
imagine a two-horse race, in which
X is a bookmaker who has balanced his book
and Y dopes the favourite.
X might make 10%.
For Y, the sky is the limit. The non-favourite might be at 5\1. Since Y knows what's going to happen, he's going to borrow as much money as he can and slap it all on the horse he knows will win. Then on race day he makes 500% on the whole amount that he bets, and the few % he has to pay in interest to whoever lent him the money won't be a problem. Now the problem is you don't really bet with the bookmaker; you bet with other punters. That's OK if you've got the newspapers in your pocket…
nay problem, we’re at the western end of the retreat corridor.
I just heard a school’s administrator on Radio 4 criticise parents for not understanding the ins and outs of school governance. Obviously the spying state has to listen 24/7 to what we speak or read and it would cost too much to bump off every parent governor that was speaking or reading about the White Helmets being part of Al Qaida, whobarr proxy terrorists serving the colonial agenda of usukis neocons.
It would cost too much to breed and feed the right wing nutters on top of breeding and feeding the Islamist nutters.
So let’s explain what Islamists actually do to ordinary Muslims. They utilise the universal spying techniques they share with government and then they interfere with a person’s family and friends, setting them against the person by revealing private matters about them people become socially isolated and that in turn creates coping mechanisms which in turn provide food for the control freaks to feed on.
What the Schools professional is asking for is for UK government institutions who look after young people to have the powers they delegate to Islamist terrorists to the General population of young people. The state will have the ability to define the immoral ( Boris Johnson ) as fully sane and competent, and the religious or politically thinking or artistic but moral people as mad and wrong.
Mostly the Tory Party wants Brexit in order to unfetter government from exercising Fascist control over us, from the slightly lefter EU.
Listening to the Tories at their Manchester do is like standing outside Battersea Dogs Home.
“Mostly the Tory Party wants Brexit in order to unfetter government from exercising Fascist control over us, from the slightly lefter EU.”
Brexit, specifically a no deal one, is to allow Johnson’s hedge fund buddies, such as Crispin Odey to have a free reign to make billions. They don’t want to adhere to the EU’s new Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive, which will severely limit hedge fund operations.
Ros, stop romanticising it. The peasants didn’t go to vote in 2016 with hedge funds in their heads. They went to the voting stations with ideas of racial superiority at the forefront of their thoughts. If any entertained economic ideas alongside, the ideas hinged on taking wealth from foreigners before sending the foreigners home and sharing that wealth amongst themselves.
“stop romanticising it. The peasants didn’t go to vote in 2016 with hedge funds in their heads. ”
I know they didn’t, they were spoon fed lies that leaving the EU will somehow enhance their lives it won’t . My comment is about the real reasons Johnson is prepared to push the boundries to obtain a no deal Brexit.
It has absolutely nothing to do with numbers on a big red bus, or a billboard poster with immigrants supposedly heading for the UK. It has to with the likes of Jonathan Wood Tory funder who handed Boris Johnson £50k in preparation for his leadership contest which as we all know he won.
Rees-Mogg, Banks, Odey, Wood and other of a similar ilk, have hedge fund billions to short the pound in anticipation of Johnson obtaining a no deal Brexit.
Well, they wouldn’t be doing it without the stupid masses voting for it in their millions.
17.4 million chickens vote to let the foxes run the chicken coop… the motives of the foxes isn’t something I’d spend too much time puzzling over — they’re just doing what foxes do.
I presume this is the new line.
“Brexiteer thicko racist northern inbred semi literates led up garden path by smoothy pants southern toff Tory hedge fund speculators”.
Try that and see if we can shame a few who want to better themselves to come over to our side.
Possibly remainers not as clever as they think they are ?
Geoffrey
‘ Trying to better themselves. ”
So the divide and rule crack which the Tory riffs have decided to insert their crowbars is between Wessex, Anglo- Saxons and Mexican Norse people
If it works between Sunni and Shi’a why not try it between the schisms of 1066 .There’s a chap called Dominic Cummings whose Northern who knows how to stir up the Southern shit.
Now the hedge fund bankers have found out how to divide and rule us, shall we just hand the contents of the bank of England directly to them or are we going to do something about it?
Mercia
Cannibals
Paradites
“Mostly the Tory Party wants Brexit in order to unfetter government from exercising Fascist control over us, from the slightly lefter EU.”
Even so, there’s something funny about all those peasants thinking the Tories that made them poor in the first place are somehow going to lead them to a prosperous and glorious future.
They think it’s grim up north now — wait and see what it’s like when they Hong Kongify it. There won’t be an NHS to complain about and if poverty as a problem is solved after Brexit it’ll be because the starving will be left to die and rot.
Wolves
Battersea Dogs Home must be near the new U.S. Embassy.
Looks like they’ve chickened out of having a no confidence vote – no Jeremy in No.10 this week then!
I thought they were going to wait till post-19th of October to see if Johnson would finally take the initiative and seek an extension from the EU, though Johnson was adamant he’d die in a ditch first.
However I’ll be surprised if liberal leaning Tories who strongly disagree with Johnson and his uncouth tactics, vote for Jeremy Corbyn to be caretaker PM after a VONC, if there is one.
Here’s a quick rundown as to why the opposition halted the VONC.
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-opposition-parties-rule-out-no-confidence-vote-in-boris-johnson-this-week/
When Politico write that “an official” attended the opposition parties’ meetings, do they mean a civil servant?
There may be more government-opposition cooperation behind the scenes than is being admitted. The opposition line that they don’t want to VONC because Johnson and Eugenics might “find a loophole” in the Benn Act is hard to believe. What loophole might it be that a majority of MPs can’t close right now? I thought Parliament was sovereign! A majority of MPs with support from a majority in the Lords can do any of many things, such as
* amend the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 so that even in a state of emergency it may not be used to suspend the Benn Act by means of an Order of Council, or
* pass legislation requiring that the prime minister submit the extension request within three hours and in the event that he fails to comply then there will be an election 10 days later and both the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 and the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 are amended accordingly, or
* simply call a general election (amending said two prior Acts accordingly).
That kind of thing could be done within hours. But most of the media is referring to the requirement that “25 days” must elapse between calling and holding a general election (a law that is six years old) as if that’s something that can’t be changed.
It was only a few months ago that they were saying it would take several months for a referendum to be organised, because 11 different tiers of men wearing tights and 17 different committees of expert bureaucratic word-checkers would have to hold meetings every day to decide the wording that would go on the ballot paper and what font would be used for each character, and if anyone tried to shorten the process they’d get a slap around the head from the Supreme Court. What an utter load of cobblers!
Number 10 and now Javid too saying “Ooh, don’t chase us around the corner because Bullingdon Boris with his second-class degree and his hand that he likes to stick up any nearby skirt has got something up his sleeve and we’re not saying what it is”, and Corbyn and Swinson replying “Ooh, you dirty devils! Well we won’t chase you around the corner then, but we might chase you around it in three hours’ time when you’re called in for your tea” is a f***ing ridiculous game and seriously you have to marvel at how almost everybody is drinking it up.
There is no clear and obvious to everybody reason why Parliament can’t just say right, here you go, this country is requesting an extension to the A50 deadline because we are sovereign and we say so, and if the government doesn’t obey our instruction then we’re ordering the British representative in Brussels to send the letter within the next hour and we’re calling a general election on such-and-such a date. Let Mophead and Eugenics go to the Supreme Court and … and what? Will they do a Yeltsin against the Palace of Westminster?
By the way, what’s happened to the requirement that Eugenics et al hand over all their communications regarding the prorogation attempt?
He’s only worried about his thighs
Your military’s sovereignty is already sold to Uncle Sam through NATO and the “Five Eyes”.
But why do you care about the EU? The UK is leaving the EU isn’t it? Isn’t that what you wanted? Okay maybe something inside you realises you’ve sold yourselves to Trump and the crazy ultra-capitalist Ayn Randists – the Peter Singers and Robert Mercers of this world. But that was the “will of the people” (well the people of England) wasn’t it?
And an EU military pact is a good thing. It ensures OUR independence from the US and UK. Do you realise that Brexit day is also OUR independence day from the US and UK?
Sp Prit Patel is playing judge juror and executioner by telling Ms. Begum that she will never see her family again. Lets not forget that this young woman was an easy to indoctrinate young teenager when she left with her two other friends and that she has been used by the MSM to vilify and criminalise her for daring to leave.
Contrast that with the Manchester bomber who was known to MI6, bust still was allowed to come here freely,. hence the limited inquiry into this Government cock up/deliberate election false flag.
I have the solution for an eager and willing PP, how about we exchange her for Ms. Begum, but, lets nopt be heartless, we can always arrange that her flight goes to Israel, were she can entertain the IDF at her hearts …..content, safeguardimng taxpayers money from her whimsies.
what an odious women she is, and that is a nice word for her.
sorry, ‘so, but, lets not and safeguarding’ should have proofread.
N,
I do hope the tragic demise of the young reporter nurtured by the Beeb and the Scott Trust… who had an ‘exclusive’ on Begum, has nothing to do with her ‘work’.
Lets not forget that this young woman was an easy to indoctrinate young teenager when she left
Yes- and the same age then as Greta Thunberg when she began her climate emergency campaign. Was Thunberg similarly ‘indoctrinated’ or did she (despite having a known mental health problem, being on the autistic spectrum) act on her own agency ?
If she did, what evidence do you have that Begum wasn’t acting under her own agency also ?
Or are only Scandinavian female teens capable of agency, not hitherto confident, well adjusted Bengali girls of the same age ?
The BBC report that Jeremy Corbyn, Jo Swinson, government chief whip Mark Spencer, Ian Blackford, and the leaders of other parliamentary parties, as well as John Bercow, have signed a declaration that language used should be moderate and not inflammatory.
A cynic might wonder what else this group discussed with each other.
Personally I think Jeremy Corbyn should agree to install Margaret Beckett as prime minister so long as a) he can nail it down very tightly that she actually does get installed, and b) there’s a general election on a stated date. Stop letting the damned Liberal Democrats play hard to get.
Enough of this “Tee hee hee, so you’ve got a loophole up your sleeve, have you? Well we’re not going to ask you to show it – oh we really aren’t” game that doesn’t look great when it’s played by grown-up politicians.
N_. Yes, Jeremy should give up on sacrificing the remaining years of his life, on a selfish population about to be taken to the cleaners. I understand he like cycling and following the ‘Tour’. Go for it Jeremy, they aren’t worth it mate.
Wikikettle
I think there might be a gentle slope near islington but nothing like the Tour Dr France. I admire everything about Jeremy Corbyn from his good manners to his good brain and his patience. Kinnock never shut jup about socialism for a minute.
There is a massive intellectual army rallied behind Corbyn’s common sense.
The Chancer of the Bounced chequer stuck out a few pawns today in the form of promises he can afford to break.
But it is that solid base of intellectual knowledge and gravitas that will win Corbyn his place as PM.
Like a magnet to steel, Corbyn’s destiny is drawn to power . Steve bell summed it up in the cartoon of Boris’s bum set in the pavement outside No 10 when Corbyn is l9king for somewhere to park his bike.
Pure genius.
@Wikikettle – I don’t know what you’re saying “yes” to. I think it’s OK for Margaret Beckett to be prime minister between shortly after a successful VONC and a general election a few weeks later. I want that election to result in a Labour landslide that installs Jeremy Corbyn in Number 10, hopefully to remain there for many years. I was addressing how to bring down the Tory government ASAP.
I don’t want to wait until 2022, by which time there probably won’t be much of a country left to be prime minister of, if Labour don’t win a general election within the next few months.
Incidentally I was at a meeting with Jeremy Corbyn in Islington in 1984, the purpose of which was to discuss how we in Islington could support the striking miners. He wasn’t on the platform; he was just attending and participating. Do you know what line he took? Rather than support a practical contribution, a practical escalation, he said we should focus everything on building towards electing a Labour government. The next chance that people would have to do that was three years later, in 1987. A fat lot of good that kind of idiotic position did the miners or the working class generally!
I’m sure he doesn’t take take that approach in today’s circumstances.
Bring the f***ers down now, not later. Screw whatever memes are being spread about “loopholes” or “the queen” or the brilliance of Sun Tzu Eugenics Boy. If that means that Margaret Beckett, who as a long-time member of a war criminal cabinet under Tony Blair should have her a*se hauled to the Hague, has to be caretaker prime minister for a month, so be it.
Beckett (as Foreign Secretary LOL) didn’t move a muscle when Israel invaded Lebanon and hammered Beirut.
She has been an MP since time immemorial. Dreadful Blairite stooge
For the last four years we have helped KSA destroy the poorest county Yemen and our educated informed population has cared naught. We have destroyed Libya. We helped Jihadists destroy Syria. I care little for domestic politics now.
Corbyn said there had been no just war fought by Britain since 1948. Now is not the time to give the neocons any face.
Where did he have in mind for the period between 1945 and 1948?
Greece? Oh sorry, we aren’t supposed to mention that particular skeleton.
Hatuey
My grandfather was a P.O.W. in Geece at that time.
Any significance?
He had a furniture business in Birmingham and later London..
I was going to ask if he was a prisoner of the Germans or the British but it’s possible both since they were in collusion after the war ended in Europe.
The Greeks made the mistake of assuming they were fighting for their freedom during the war when Britain supported them against the Nazis.
Churchill had other ideas, ideas that took the form of percentages scribbled on a grubby piece of paper.
Your grandfather is probably worth talking to, if he’s still alive.
Hatuey
I’m 64 and he died when I was about 10. He had a furniture factory , father was an electrical engineer and zi repaired old books for a living. None of us had anything in common, apart from coming from an old Dorset family with eccentric opinions
Wikikettle..
The sickening thing is that the whole world Knows the situation in Yemen..The U.N is a Disgrace, Cowards.
“Yemen’s Customs Department and Consumer Protection has seized over 24,000 tons of infested, rotten, or expired food and medicines sent as “aid” to starving Yemenis since 2015. Yemen currently faces the worst humanitarian disaster in the world due to four years of intense blockade.”
Yet, With all the Mass Starvation the Yemenis Are forced to seize or return much of the food aid.. This much –
” Since 2015, Yemen’s Customs and Consumer Protection has had to either send back or seize over 24,000 tons of aid determined unfit for consumption sent from the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). Among the “aid” included 15,000 tons of supplementary food for pregnant women and medicine.
On November 6, Yemen’s Port Authority rejected and sent back a vessel from the World Food Program containing 10,000 tons of white wheat. After inspection, authorities noticed the wheat was infested with live insects. A similar incident occurred in February when authorities inspected a WFP shipment containing 96,000 bags wheat that lacked an expiration or production date stamp.
Another particularly notable incident took place in May of 2019. At this time, Yemeni authorities found dead insects inside 8 million kilograms of wheat. Throughout June, authorities were forced to reject nearly 130,000 bags of white beans that were either wet, rotten, or infested with dead insects.”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/un-caught-sending-24000-tons-infested-rotten-aid-starving-yemenis/5682249
Brian
The Muslim Brotherhood believes that war is the only means of making Muslims submit to their authority.
But when the Syrian Muslims understood what Germany and the Brotherhood conspired to inflict on them they rallied to Assad.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamism is nothing more than power politics and the end result both in Syria and Yemen and also in Iraq is that the Shi’a are more intrinsically right than the I slamists desire to control people, which is aided and abetted by the West.
In Yemen as in Syria the theologically purer sect demands a level of submission similar to the Pope.
Henry 8 got rid of the Pope because he was a fascist.
I.e. the Pope, who set himself up as an intermediary between mankind and God.
At least the pope is elected albeit by an archaic institution but Henry the eighth and Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg were not.
Hatuey
Corbyn was afraid an election would scupper the Benn Law.
Boris Borggia is only interested in another sort of pole. Like all good men, including Craig. I’ve said it now . Probably get sent to Coventry to purge my soul.
Our educated and informed public has no idea what is happening thanks to MSM.
Reading about the GFA, some interesting facts transpire. The DUP campaigned against the GFA and was against power sharing. The fact that devolution in NI has been put on hold for the last few years, may or may not be related to the ongoing Brexit saga but it seems to me that beneath it all the DUP is now going to fulfil a long held desire to scupper the GFA whilst people discuss the OM touching someone’s knees twenty years ago.