Category: Boris Johnson

On justice

We all have our pet peeves – the things that stir us up, that light that ‘fire in the belly’ and get us going. For some it’s about family, for others it’s about a particular belief, mindset or ideology. For me it’s about ‘justice’.

For some justice is synonymous with vengeance. They follow, to some degree or another, the old ‘eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth’ standard of the bronze age shepherd. For them justice is both simplistic and obvious. Theirs is the ‘two wrongs make a right’ approach that most of us grow out of before we leave the schoolyard. That’s not my type of justice.

Others acknowledge the complexity of determining right from wrong in a world that contains so much more grey than simple ‘black and white’. They accept that justice is complex and often difficult to define. I have to admit, that seems like a very good starting place. But then they go and spoil things by demanding that the victims of crime, the very people least likely to be objective, get to determine the most appropriate punishments. They’re the same people whose only real (and particularly unimaginative) contribution to debates about crime is to state….

“You wouldn’t say that if it was your…. (mother, father, son, daughter, home, money etc.)”

And of course, they’re right. I’d most probably want someone’s head on a plate, not because that’d be the right thing to do but because I’m human, I’m emotionally driven (as are we all) and sometimes I can be irrational (as can we all). But I still shouldn’t be able to mete out judgement or take the law into my own hands.

The hallmark of a civilised society is that punishment is taken out of the hands of the individual and placed into the hands of the state.

Still others seem happy with the idea of a state controlled judiciary until it comes to the sentencing of offenders. Then their true colours tend to show. Then they become so similar to the ‘let the victims decide’ contingent that it’s hard to tell them apart.

These are the people who, with little or no knowledge of the often complex court proceedings and mitigating factors insist, as though through automatic reflex, that the sentence is too lenient. These are the people who complain loudly and incessantly that the convicted murderer ‘could be out in ten years’ without ever pausing to imagine just what ten years incarceration might be like. They’re the people who prefer emotional vengeance to rational justice and their lack of a sense of proportion shows all too well. They’re not interested in positive intervention to effect positive change. They simply want another person to suffer. In that respect, despite the apparent veneer of social awareness, they’re no more advanced than the ‘eye for an eye’ brigade.

These are the unthinking, uncaring individuals, the vengeful defenders of people they’ll never meet against people they’ll never understand. These are the easily led, the tories target voters who faithfully fail to notice the damage that ‘Boris’ bastards’ are doing to our country so long as they can be distracted by a juicy crime story or a made up threat from foreigners fleeing persecution or warfare in distant lands. These are the people who think populist emotionality can substitute for paying political attention and the likes of Patel, Gove and Sunak are more than happy to play along. Let’s face it, Johnson and his cronies will play any game at all if it’ll let them hang on to a little bit more power for a little bit more time.

By pandering to the lowest common denominator of our basest instincts, of tribalism and of vengeful hatred they can persuade the people to give away all their rights under the pretence of stealing them from someone else. It’s not me they’re after, it’s them others! 

But the changes to our justice system that made it into law last week in Parliament affect us all – not just the few foreigners and criminals targeted by the populists.

Ironically enough, populist fervour leads to a government so buoyed up by nastiness that it can literally do anything it likes. So last week we lost the right to protest, the right to free expression and even the right to save drowning people without facing prison if they happen not to be British.

We lost the right to fair trial with several crimes being defined and people found guilty and sentenced not by judicial process, not by a court or a jury but by the Home Secretary, personally.

We lost the right to scrutinise and censure politicians when they break the law. Judicial review can now only go ahead with the consent of the very government the system aims to scrutinise. In short, they can now do pretty much whatever they like and, short of revolution or some other form of insurrection, there’s very little we can do to prevent it.

This crop of tories – the truly nasty party representatives – have taken principles of fairness, of justice, of democracy and of hope and turned them into rules intended to benefit themselves and their cronies at the top of the financial tree at our expense. They allow energy companies to make vast profits while many Brits are unable to heat their homes. They allow sewage companies to dump raw effluent into our waterways – waterways only recently clean again thanks to EU regulations – you know – the ‘red tape’ we were all told to dislike so much. That’s the same red tape that’s been removed as we lose employment protections with no effective recourse to law and extremely limited access to legal aid. And all because decent people were conned into voting for a pack of vicious hyenas.

Personally I tend to lean toward utilitarianism – the philosophical approach that seeks to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. That doesn’t make me ‘soft’ or ‘naive’, by the way. I absolutely believe that society has both the right and the duty to protect itself. Sometimes that means long sentences – even life and that’s OK by me. But often it means something quite different. Often it means understanding, compassion and education. Often it means rehabilitation. What it most certainly does not mean and cannot, must not mean is the gratuitous inflicting of suffering. Justice must be purposeful and devoid of emotional bias. And it can never be right that the person under scrutiny is the very person deciding whether or not the trial can go ahead. Guilt and sentencing should never be decided by a politician with an axe to grind and nobody should ever be sent to prison for saving a human being from drowning. What inhuman monster came up with that idea?

However the real purpose of this post is to make one, simple point. Justice, as determined by the state, must be in response to actions and behaviours. It has nothing to do with prejudicial assumptions about nationality, heritage, skin colour, sexual orientation, poverty, dependency, political affiliation, wealth or place of birth.

Perhaps some of those unthinking supporters of our far right, nationalist government would do well to remember that.

The lovely people

Nice people made the best Nazis

Naomi Shulman

Naomi Shulman once wrote, “Nice people made the best Nazis.”  She was writing about the people who weren’t really into politics. These were the people who still exist today. The people who take pride in their stubborn refusal to take any interest in the world beyond their workplaces, their families and their favourite sports or streaming box-sets on Netflix. As Shulman put it…

“they were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbours were dragged away.”

These are my neighbours. They’re the people who close down any serious discussion of the state of our nation with tired old tropes about not talking about religion or politics. Yes they’ll acknowledge, even laugh about scandals like partygate but take no interest in serious attacks on our democracy like Patel’s Police, crime and sentencing bill or Johnson and Rees-Mogg’s attacks on the legal system.

My polite, unassuming, docile, deliberately ignorant neighbours would have been fantastic Nazis. My modern neighbours think that because they can’t see the jackboots kicking in doors in their pleasant, middle or even working class neighbourhoods it’s not happening and never will happen.

They ignore the evidence of racism in our land.

They pour scorn on those who try to highlight the issues by having the audacity to do terrible things like taking a knee before football matches – the bastards!

They make excuses for the government that deliberately put our most vulnerable citizens, those the Nazis described as ‘useless eaters’ in harms way with covid, leading to the highest death rate in all of Europe and the 7th highest in the entire world.

They conveniently ignore the massive corruption that saw billions of pounds of their money squandered on spurious covid contracts for government ministers, for the tories’ friends and for tory party donors.

These are the lovely people who don’t rock the boat, who never stop to think about where our nation is heading, about the implications of abusive policies toward immigrants and refugees, about the motivations of those who tell them blatant lies about the economy and whose pre-election promises remain unfulfilled and even, in many cases actively undermined by this very same government.

These lovely people never bother to look behind the headlines and media pronouncements, never noticing that yesterday’s lies are simply forgotten by the media today once they’ve served their purpose. They don’t notice that Rishi Sunak’s best policies are the same ones the press, and the tories themselves described as naïve, unworkable, even Marxist when first suggested by those the press didn’t support. Remember what the papers did to Jeremy Corbyn.

They confidently repeat the lie of Corbyn’s anti-semitism whilst ignoring the reality that the United Nations agree with him on the issue of Israel’s apartheid regime in Palestine and even published a special report saying so as far back as 2017. Funnily enough very few British newspapers mentioned that report at all.

These lovely people are leading the charge of ignorance as we sleepwalk into neoNazism. Their lives are so full of petty parochial concerns and cheap reality shows that they have no time left to notice what’s going on all around them.

They don’t notice the crippling poverty of their neighbours because they’re alright.

They forget the principles of fairness, of human rights and equality they once held dear and they even support the government policy of further impoverishing the most vulnerable whilst giving vast tax breaks to the already wealthy.

These lovely people who never rock the boat have already found a way to justify to themselves the appalling treatment of those who for one reason or another are not like them. They assume unemployed people are just lazy, that disabled people are all skivers and that Muslims are universally hostile to the British way of life.

They ignore the fact that black Brits are over-represented in our prison system, not because they have committed more crime but because their sentences tend to be harsher then their white counterparts. They disregard the racial profiling that means black people in UK are many times more likely to suffer the indignity of public stop and search because they, like me, another white person have never been stopped and searched themselves.

And yet they’ll gleefully repeat the rhetoric of hatred and division that so threatens our democracy. They’ll dismiss everything that the newspapers tell them to and support whatever the papers demand, even though those same newspapers change their minds on a disturbingly regular basis. These lovely people never stop to wonder what motivated the change of heart from their favourite columnist or even to notice that it has happened.

And when they finally do notice the destruction of their rights, along with the rights of those other people they naively thought were the real targets, they’ll genuinely be surprised and wish that there had been some way of knowing what was going on. They’ll bemoan the ‘fact’ that there was nothing they could have done to prevent it and, just as now, they’ll studiously avoid any risk of awareness of their own responsibility, their own dereliction of their civic duty when they could have prevented it.

The following words come from an anonymous German resident who had just been taken by allied troops to view the carnage at his local concentration camp…

“Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done, (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing).

You remember the occasions in which maybe if you had stood others would have stood too. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.”

They Thought They Were Free (1955)

The Germans 1938-45

University of Chicago Press

These lovely people, the ones who think they’re simply enjoying a quiet life without getting involved in politics will be just as guilty as the likes of Patel and Farage who have brought about these abuses both politically and socially. And they will be just as compromised.

Will you?

The peasant’s revolt: 1381-2022

“The matters go not well to pass in England, nor shall do ’til everything be in common…”

Comparing the modern government’s callous disregard for the people of UK with the cruelty of 14th century leaders like John of Gaunt, Simon Sudbury and the boy king, Richard II.

In those days the peasants sought remedy and retribution through bloodshed. Today we just need to notice, to remember and to vote as soon as we can to get these callous, lying, sleazy scumbags out of office and out of our hair!

Who’s the f*%*ing traitor now?

Not so very long ago I and people like me were branded traitors, liars and enemies of Britain. Gutter press tabloids and the hard of understanding alike accused us of being anti-democratic collaborators with a foreign superpower bent on destroying British sovereignty. We were the cucks who enabled a trojan horse style invasion by radical Islamists. We were inviting gangs of marauding East Europeans who wanted nothing more than to rape our daughters whilst we looked on helpless to prevent it.

People who’d never had a political thought in their lives and never even considered the reality of European membership until 2016 suddenly became experts because they’d seen a couple of headlines – not read the actual article, mind you – but seen some headlines in the Daily Fail. So all of a sudden they became fuckin’ experts! If only they’d read something about the Dunning-Kruger effect we’d all be way better off today.

But they hadn’t and so they kept on deluding themselves about our alleged treachery. And all because we wanted to uphold electoral law. Because we wanted to provide genuine facts to our fellow Brits instead of the fake slurs peddled by the likes of Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg, Nigel Farage and Michael Gove.

All because we wanted to protect our nation from the catastrophe that is now upon us. But we failed. You won – get over it!

And stop bloody complaining about the mess you created. If you’re a Brexiteer – or even worse, even more ridiculous, a working class tory then you did this. It’s all on you!

No longer do the newspapers call us traitors – because nobody would believe them.

No longer am I hesitant to go in certain pubs for fear of being assaulted by drunken Brexiteers – they’re all decidedly sheepish these days.

No longer do people talk about sunlit uplands – now it’s about economic hardship – how hard will it be and for how long will we have to endure it.

And it hasn’t really started yet.

Yes we’ve seen jobs lost.

Yes, we see harvests going to waste.

Yes we have shortages in the shops because we sent all the lorry drivers home.

The NHS is struggling without the mainstay of European workers.

The cost of living, driven by Brexit scarcity is rising exponentially and many Brits, employed as well as unemployed are unable to feed themselves and their families. And that’s before the new cuts to universal credit come into force.

But if you think this is bad just wait. We still haven’t started checking imports at our end yet. That’s because the government knows that, given how bad it is just checking on one side of the channel, once UK customs swings into action it’ll be a whole lot worse.

Why do you think we’ve been building all those lorry parks in Kent? It’s because once we begin checking both imports AND exports the delays will be monumental. Fresh food is already becoming unexportable because it goes off in the lorry transporting it to the mainland. How many jobs has that little bit of red tape cost? What will happen to imports once we start the same protracted process at our end? Then we’ll really see scarcity. Then we’ll really see inflation.

This government gained its majority on the back of three key election pledges.

One was to get Brexit done. Well – even if that were a good thing (obviously I don’t think there’s much good about it) it’s nowhere near done and won’t be for many years.

The new trade deals we keep hearing about are less beneficial to us than they would have been had we stayed in the EU. The not new deals are just temporary roll-overs from existing EU agreements which, of course keep us bound to EU regulations only now we have no say in how those regulations are created.

The second pledge was that there would be no tax rises for those at the bottom of the tree. Part of the ‘levelling up’ agenda. This week Boris has announced a massive hike in tax and National Insurance – hitting those at the bottom hardest.

Thirdly – maintaining the triple lock which states that pensions must rise by either 2.5%, the rate of inflation or the level of the average wage – whichever is the greatest. For the next few years Brexit economic hardship will see the state pension rise far above that of falling wages as it matches rising inflation instead. Personally I think that’s OK. Today’s pensioners were promised welfare ‘from the cradle to the grave’ and having paid their share all their working lives have no time to save for the future. As a nation we should honour that social contract, that pact the nation made with them all those years ago. But Boris is again considering changing the triple lock to remove those protections, protections we owe to the people who worked so hard to rebuild our nation after the first and second world wars.

I began this video by reminding you how so many of us were vilified as traitors.

But when we see the results of Brexit and this extreme right conservative government’s policies – results we were trying to avoid for the sake of the British people… let me ask you…

Who’s really the traitor?

Nazi Britain: a warning from history part 4

If you’re still unconvinced of Boris Johnson’s gradual Nazification of Britain then this final part of the film provides evidence not only of the parallels with Hitler but the way that the Johnson government continues to attack our rights and freedoms. Johnson is a dictator in the making and the nature of that dictatorship is far from benign.

But there is hope. Watch to the end to hear what we can do to change this terrifying trajectory. The Tory party knows nothing of loyalty to leaders once they are seen by the public for what they really are. We can use the Tory party’s own inherent callousness to overthrow this regime before it’s too late.

The government that follows will still be tory but at least it won’t be Nazi. That might not be a perfect solution but it beats what the current government has in store for us.

Nazi Britain: a warning from history part 2 of 4

I’ve just made a pretty big claim, some might say an extraordinary claim and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Just what makes me imagine that this society, this land of my birth is becoming the very thing we opposed not only in wartime but on British streets as well?

This is the land of Cable Street, of Brick Lane where thousands of anti-fasciststook to the streets to oppose Mosley’s Blackshirts and Griffin’s National Front.

It’s the land of the Levellers, the Chartists, of Magna Carta and the Battle of Peterloo where working class artesans gathered peacefully to hear speeches against an oppressive British government and were massacred, by order of that government and the king, at swordpoint by local yeomanry and cavalry soldiers.

So, before we get too smug about our anti-fascist national credentials we should also bear in mind that in each of those other famous conflicts the police, the establishment and the government sided with the fash.

The people in power followed the money, as they often do.

And in recent years that money has been in the hands of far right donors, think tanks and agitators from Breitbart to Cambridge Analytica, from Eugenicist Dominic Cummings to disaster capitalists like Arron Banks and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Covid ‘Freedom day’ cometh

So we’re looking at 100,000 new infections per day.

The Health secretary and the Prime minister are both happy to remove restrictions, the things that kept most of us alive for the last 16 months without giving a hoot about the lives that will be lost. The economy’s the thing. Who cares if a few thousand extra vulnerable, disabled, elderly or unemployed people die?

Who cares if workers die? There are plenty of idlers on the dole to replace them and reduce the benefits bill at the same time.

If I had the energy after 16 months of nursing through the pandemic I’d get angry – but I’m beyond that now.

I could weep!

That Nissan/Sunderland deal

OK. It’s official. My MP thinks we’re stupid. He thinks we don’t realise how transparent, how utterly ridiculous the Sunderland Nissan deal is. He thinks we’ll all accept it as a benefit of Brexit when in reality the exact opposite is true. This Nissan deal is a shining example of the huge damage that Brexit has done not just to the people of Sunderland, not only to the British automotive industry but to the British economy as a whole.

Let’s look at the facts…

Nissan has announced a £1bn investment in the North East to build electric cars and the batteries they need to work. This has resulted in the creation of around 900 new jobs. How cool is that?

Well… not very cool at all to be fair. Sunderland has already lost around 1500 jobs in the short time since Brexit leaving a shortfall of 600 jobs. The country as a whole has seen the loss of around 10,000 jobs in the automotive industry since we actually left in 2020.

Still, at least Nissan is investing in UK, right?

As it happens Nissan never confirmed that it would leave anyway. It just said that it would remain here if other big car manufacturers didn’t because then it could have a bigger slice of the domestic market. With other manufacturers casting all those jobs the market is wide open for Nissan and so they’re staying, just as they always planned to. So that’s hardly a Brexit benefit – a foreign firm chooses to stay so it can pick over the bones of a shrinking market.

But would we have had this plant without Brexit? Well – maybe not. You see Elon Musk had planned to build a much bigger version of the same thing in UK with a much larger workforce until concerns about Brexit drove them away to Germany. Their Berlin plant is expected to operate at around 6 times the capacity of our, smaller Sunderland operation. And the Elon Musk plant wouldn’t have cost us a penny – it would have been true investment backed by the EU.

The Nissan plant comes with a government bribe. £100 million pounds of taxpayer money has sweetened the deal even though Nissan has already said it would remain in UK if others left – which they have. Not only that, Sunderland council has had to stump up another 80 million. That’s a total of 180 million pounds paid to a foreign company whose profits are taken out of the country. That’s hardly a Brexit benefit either.

But Mark Jenkinson MP (and presumably everyone who still thinks Brexit was a good idea) would have us believe it’s all good.

The people of Sunderland, along with the government have been forced to pay 300,000 pounds per head for their 600 unemployed car workers to lose their jobs and not a penny of that will go back into unemployment benefits or retraining schemes. That money has been lost to the UK because of Brexit – so have all those jobs.

So why did we agree to this awful deal?

The answer to that is obvious.

This is the government’s way of pretending that Brexit wasn’t actually a disaster.

Maskses, Vaxes and hypothetical hoaxes

Enough is enough!

One year ago today the UK went into lockdown. Yes, it was late. No, it wasn’t strict enough and didn’t last long enough. Absolutely we should’ve closed borders more quickly and deliberately encouraging ‘one last bash’ before the pubs and bars went silent certainly helped boost the infection rate. But forget all that for now. The government may never truly learn those lessons anyway, even though most of us have.

On that day, March 23rd 2020, way fewer than 1% of our current total had died because of Covid-19. We locked down with less than 1,000 deaths because we knew what was coming. We’d seen the devastation in parts of Italy and Spain and the government didn’t want to see the same thing happen here… allegedly. Whatever your views on the Brexiteer government’s intent (and there are many) most of the people took the lockdown seriously and the infection rate began to fall.

Since then advice has changed periodically. Advisors have come and gone. Alternative science groups have formed and court cases have been launched to hear cases relating to tory party profiteering, dodgy govt. deals and betrayals of both key workers and the vulnerable among us. But for now let’s forget all that too. I want to talk to you about something just as serious but far more current. Covid 19 deniers, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. On the whole they’re the same people and they’re bloody dangerous.

In writing this post I’ve had a bit of a dilemma in tone. You see I’m a great advocate of human rights – including the right of people to avoid putting anything in their bodies that they don’t agree to. This should lead me to support anti-vax rights and choices. And indeed, it does. I do support anyone’s right to make an informed decision to refuse to accept vaccination. I know several people who have perfectly viable and sound reasons for refusing the vaccine, even religious reasons. Personally I consider religion irrational too but still support peoples’ right to follow and abide by it.

And then there are others whose decision is not informed or rational. They refuse based upon nonsense conspiracy theories involving technically impossible microchips and one world conspiracies led by George Soros and Bill Gates. This is where my support for anti-vaxxers tends to fall down a bit. If someone is fooled into acting against their own best interests, should we still support that decision and their right to make it.

And still I think the answer is ‘Yes’ – but with a heavy heart. The issue of rights and autonomy is too serious, too precious to give up, even in the face of imminent tragedy, but respecting someone’s right to choose doesn’t mean I have to respect their choice or even the person themselves. Enough is enough.

So here’s my take on this whole conspiracy theory driven debate…

There is no global conspiracy to stick microchips capable of technologically impossible ‘sneakaboutery’ in your bloodstream.

Refusing the vaccine and encouraging others to refuse too makes it harder to achieve herd immunity. This undoubtedly will mean more deaths later.

Refusing to wear a mask is an attack on others. Your personal risk is unchanged by mask-wearing. It’s to contain your breath, especially your coughs and sneezes. Your refusal puts the lives of others at risk because you believe that Covid is a hoax. Well… I believe that you are a fool to believe that. I believe that you are a dangerous fool who risks the lives of others, including my 83 year old mother.

So, even though you have my support for your anti-vax decision, I continue to disagree with you.

You have my sympathies for having been duped by Covid conspiracy theories.

You have my contempt for risking the lives of vulnerable others.

You may never have my forgiveness if your intellectually lazy refusal to research actual facts leads to the death of any of my friends or relatives.

Enough is enough!

The NHS: Brits taking back control

I released a longer video some time ago in which I talked about international trade talks, the NHS  and in particular US trade talks and the practice of negative listing. That’s the idea that unless something is specifically listed as ‘off the table’ in trade negotiations it most definitely is to be considered ‘on the table’.

This week our conservative majority government, including my own MP, Mark Jenkinson voted not to protect the NHS in this way. They could have made it illegal to sell the health service in whole or in part to foreign concerns out to make a fast profit from our taxes but they didn’t. They actively chose to keep our national health service vulnerable to predatory private health providers.

Ah, you might reply, but at least it’s a British decision from the British parliament made via British sovereignty.
But you’d be wrong.

You see, they also voted to extend their own impotence. Tory MPs, including my own, voted once again to ensure that the government doesn’t need the approval of parliament to make far-reaching changes to our constitution, to our system of government, to our democracy and to the institutions of state.

If your MP is not a cabinet minister then you have no representation in parliament because the tory MPs used their majority to give it all away.

How’s that for taking back control?

Boris’ super-spreader incubation machines

Typhoid Mary meets the Broad Street pump (or so it seems).

Can anyone explain which dataset was used to verify that…

  1. Efficacy isn’t reduced over 3 months between 1st and 2nd doses?
  2. The delay isn’t creating an environment of evolutionary adaptation that runs a very high risk of creating a strain that’s impervious to the vaccine?

I ask because neither vaccine was tested beyond 42 days (6 weeks) and both Pfizer and Astra/Seneca have cautioned against delay, not least because there’s no dataset to analyze covering the 90 days currently mandated by this incompetent and scientifically illiterate government.