Monthly Archives: May 2021

Johnson hosts Orban visit: they’re all anti-Semites together

Boris Johnson and Victor Orban: they’re all in it together – if “it” is anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Boris Johnson is currently hosting a visit by the rabidly anti-Semite prime minister of Hungary, Victor Orban. Next week he’ll be welcoming Rowdy, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan!

He might as well.

Orban has been accused of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, based on his behaviour in office. Johnson has been accused of those prejudices, based on his behaviour both in Parliament and away from it (as anyone who’s read his novel 72 Virgins must know.

What’s the message here? That it is okay to be anti-Semitic as long as you’re supplying millions of pounds worth of arms to Israel so it can bomb Muslims?

Even the BBC’s report has mentioned that the visit has been met with widespread condemnation.

Here’s how some of it looks:

This commenter highlighted a decision by The Guardian (amongst others?) to describe Orban as “populist”:

Then there’s this:

Well yes. The Jewish Chronicle spent years campaigning against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, on the grounds that this veteran peace campaigner, who never wished harm upon anybody, was somehow a raving anti-Semite.

In fact, of course…

Now, in fairness, the Jewish Chronicle has published an article in which some Jewish voices have called on Johnson to raise the issue of anti-Semitism with Orban. No more than that.

But it does indicate that Mr Monehan’s sentiment in this tweet is accurate:

The real reason for the meeting is obvious: trade.

Having led the UK out of the excellent trading circumstances it enjoyed as a member of the European Union, Johnson is now reduced to grubbing around among the lowest of the low, desperately searching for someone who will take our products.

Even if he wasn’t an anti-Semite and Islamophobe himself, those considerations would trump his own personal feelings.

If he gets to do a deal, he would happily tell anybody complaining that it is only business.

And his ministers, tasked with ensuring that a good trading relationship is created with this anti-Semitic, Islamophobic government, would give us the classic Nuremberg defence – that they are “only following orders”.

Source: Viktor Orban in talks with Boris Johnson amid condemnation – BBC News

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Will Labour celebrate as more reliable Survation poll puts party only 11 POINTS behind Tories?

Uninspired: Keir Starmer searches for something else to blame, having realised that saying Labour’s problems are all due to Jeremy Corbyn won’t work any more.

This Site suggested, back when YouGov put Labour 18 points behind the Tories, that the figure might not be entirely accurate.

YouGov is a Tory-run polling organisation, remember. It shows, doesn’t it?

Now we have figures from Survation – the pollster whose figures have most accurately described voting intentions for the last few years – and they’re not much better!

Survation puts Labour a colossal 11 points behind the Tories. The Conservatives are up six points to 44 per cent, while Labour has plummetted five points to 33 per cent. That means they were level-pegging in the company’s previous survey.

But wait – there’s worse.

Boris Johnson’s approval rating has shot up to four per cent, while Keir Starmer is now languishing at -11 per cent. It’s a rise of 11 points for Johnson, while Starmer’s ratings have been falling steadily since May last year. He started with 17 per cent in May last year and has lost 27 points over the 12 months since.

On the question of who would make the best prime minister, Starmer hasn’t been a contender since September last year. Boris Johnson leads by 17 points, with support from 45 per cent of voters, while only 28 per cent thought Starmer would do a better job.

And people are under no illusions about the cause of the party’s collapse:

The question now is how much longer Starmer can hang on before he realises that nobody believes him any more when he blames Jeremy Corbyn.

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Johnson’s government actually asked ‘Who do we NOT save from Covid-19?’ – but nobody seems to care now

“Who do we NOT save?” a whiteboard showing the moral bankruptcy the Johnson government reached in the Covid-19 crisis.

There’s a big problem with Dominic Cummings’s evidence to the government, as provided (and reported ad nauseum yesterday): we all know he’ll say anything to justify himself.

Remember the narrative he created in order to justify breaking lockdown rules to visit his family? We all knew he did it because he thought he was above the laws the rest of us have to follow.

And he was proved right, too, because he was not punished at all.

So it is hard to accept anything he said yesterday at face value. He was trying to justify himself and to disparage his former colleagues in Boris Johnson’s Tory government.

For the record, some of his main points were:

“Tens of thousands of people died, who didn’t need to die.” This is the soundbite that sent the mass media into a frenzy. But it has prompted no resignations among the Johnson government yet.

“Senior ministers, officials and advisers like me fell short of standards the public has a right to expect. When the public needed us most, we failed.”

Boris Johnson had ‘ignored advice’ and was late to introduce both the first and second lockdowns. The PM was consistently anti-lockdown, ignored scientific advice and failed to take Covid seriously – even ranting last summer that he should never have done Lockdown 1.

It would not have been helpful for Johnson to attend emergency COBRA meetings in February – five of which he missed – because he would have had flippant responses to the crisis: “In February the Prime Minister regarded this as just a scare story. He described it as the new swine flu.”

It was suggested that Johnson should tell everyone “It’s swine flu, don’t worry about it, I’m going to get Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV with coronavirus so everyone realises it’s nothing to be frightened of.”

Cummings “blamed” Johnson for the second wave, thanks to his flat refusal to lock down for a second time in September. He told MPs: “Fundamentally I regarded him as unfit for the job.”

On March 12, Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill said, “Prime Minister, you should go on TV tomorrow and explain to people the herd immunity and that it’s like the old chicken pox parties – we need people to get this disease because that’s how we get herd immunity by September.”

That day, Chief Scientist Patrick Vallance told the nation suppressing the virus completely was not “desirable” because some immunity was needed. And Boris Johnson told the nation “many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.”

Cummings said March 12 was the most “surreal” day of his time in government because, just as he was waking up to the danger of Downing Street’s “delay the peak” plan, he claimed, “suddenly the national security people came in and said Trump wants us to join a bombing campaign in the Middle East tonight. Fortunately, thank God, the attorney general persuaded the PM not to go along with the whole bombing campaign.”

On top of all this, that day the Times had run a huge story about the Prime Minister and his girlfriend and their dog. “And the Prime Minister’s girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story, and demanding that the press office deal with that. So we had this sort of completely insane situation in which part of the building was saying are we going to bomb Iraq, part of the building was arguing about whether or not we’re going to do quarantine or not, the Prime Minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial, and you have all these meetings going on through the course of the 12th.”

Cummings became downright festive in his descriptions of Matt Hancock’s contribution to the Covid-19 tragedy – as described in a separate article on This Site.

Boris Johnson had no idea for weeks that people leaving hospital into care weren’t being routinely tested in late March.

That led to the virus being seeded into care homes and tens of thousands of residents dying.

Matt Hancock promised that people were going to be tested in care homes – but this did not happen: “It was only in April after the Prime Minister and I had both ourselves been ill that we realised that what we were told never did happen, or only happened very partially and sporadically. The government rhetoric was ‘we put a shield around care homes, blah blah blah’ – that was complete nonsense. Quite the opposite of putting a shield round them, we sent people with Covid back to the care homes.”

Until the second week of March the consensus in Downing Street was that there was no point locking down because it would only delay the inevitable peak.

But former Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen Macnamara allegedly said another top official, Mark Sweeney, had told her: “I’ve been told for years there is a whole plan for this. There is no plan. We’re in huge trouble.” In fact there was a plan – but it had last been updated in 2011 and was nine years out-of-date.

Ms Macnamara said on March 13: “I think we are absolutely f****d. I think this country is heading for a disaster, I think we are going to kill thousands of people.”

Carrie Symonds had pursued “completely unethical and clearly illegal” attempts to pack No 10 with her own friends. Cummings said: ”My resignation was definitely connected to the fact that the Prime Minister’s girlfriend was trying to change a whole bunch of different appointments in No10 and appoint her friends to particular jobs. In particular she was trying to overturn the outcome of an official process about hiring a particular job in a way which was not only completely unethical but was also clearly illegal.

Cummings said he told the PM on March 14: “There is no lockdown plan. It doesn’t exist. SAGE haven’t modelled it. [The Health Department] don’t have a plan. We are going to have to figure out and hack together a lockdown plan.”

He said by March 11, when there was “pushback” about ordering people with coughs to stay at home, he believed “the system is basically delaying announcing all of these things because there’s not a proper plan in place.”

Officials also dodged locking down because they thought the public wouldn’t accept it. But that was clearly “false”, and he said he realised that when family members were texting pleading for information.

Cummings said claims about extensive preparations for a pandemic were ”basically completely hollow” and “we didn’t figure this out until the back end of February”.

Boris Johnson refused pleas to lock down for a second time in September, only doing it from November 5.

“He wasn’t taking any advice. He was making the decisions himself,” said Cummings.

“The Cabinet wasn’t involved…there wasn’t any formal Cabinet meeting to discuss it. Or if there was, it was a purely Potemkin exercise.”

The PM had decided he was protecting the economy, and Mr Cummings said “we could not persuade him that if you basically took the view of ‘let it rip’”, it would lead to an economic and health “disaster.”

Mr Johnson later used the phrase “let it rip” as a catchphrase to showcase the kind of approach he would not take.

The government was turning down ventilators in late March because prices had been marked up. [Instead, it has been alleged elsewhere, Johnson offered James Dyson tax breaks to manufacture ventilators – but that came to nothing].

Downing Street staff drew up a back-of-a-fag-packet plan for Covid-19 on a whiteboard, which included the line “Who do we not save?”

We’re about halfway through Cummings’s allegations. They have prompted a huge verbal response from the public, along these lines:

And yet there is very little demand for change.

Even Matt Hancock, the minister Cummings attacked most strongly, is still in his job.

Have we all stopped caring that these self-obsessed incompetents killed off our relatives and friends due to their own inability to do their jobs?

Or have we just given up expecting them to be visited by any kind of justice – after Cummings himself got away with his Barnard Castle rule-breaking junket?

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Defending the indefensible: Hancock responds to Cummings allegations – with LIES

Liar: Matt Hancock is so incompetent that the web of lies and half-truths he spun before Parliament, in response to Dominic Cummings’s allegations about him, is easily shredded.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has been trying to defend himself against claims by former Downing Street aide Dominic Cummings that he should have been sacked for dishonesty and incompetence in the early weeks of the Covid-19 crisis.

It isn’t going well!

Cummings said he called for Matt Hancock to be sacked “almost every day” due to alleged “criminal” behaviour but claimed Boris Johnson was advised to retain the health secretary because “he’s the person you fire when an inquiry comes along”.

He said Hancock should have been fired for “at least 15 to 20 things – including lying to everybody on multiple occasions”.

And he implied that Hancock should face charges of corporate manslaughter for allowing unnecessary deaths.

Cummings accused Hancock of being obsessed with meeting a “stupid” target he set himself to offer 100,000 Covid tests a day and of diverting officials’ attention away from the task Cummings had set them to build a test-and-trace scheme from scratch capable of processing 1m tests a day.

Recalling a major battle in Whitehall, Cummings said he had to call around and tell people “do not do what Hancock says, build the thing properly for the medium-term”. Meanwhile Hancock was telling them to “down tools on this” and “hold tests back so that I can hit my target” in order for him to crow about his success in TV interviews.

Cummings also said he warned the prime minister in February and March that if Hancock was not fired, “we are going to kill people and it’s going to be a catastrophe”.

Turning to the times Cummings said Hancock lied, he recalled that the health secretary blamed Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, and Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, for a shortage of personal protective equipment, claiming they had “blocked approvals”. Cummings said he asked Sedwill to investigate to find out if that was correct, and that Sedwill later told him it was “completely untrue”, meaning he had “lost confidence in the secretary of state’s honesty in these meetings”.

Asked if he made a note of Sedwill’s findings, Cummings said yes and promised to supply proof to the two committees quizzing him.

He said there were numerous other examples, also citing Hancock claiming over the summer that “everyone who needed treatment got the treatment they required”.

Cummings claimed: “He knew that was a lie because he’d been briefed by the chief scientific adviser [Sir Patrick Vallance] and the chief medical officer [Prof Chis Whitty] himself about the first peak, and we were told explicitly people did not get the treatment they deserved. Many people were left to die in horrific circumstances.”

It seems Tory MPs leapt to Hancock’s defence, even though it is unlikely they knew any of the facts:

Hancock himself said he didn’t watch Cummings’ testimony because he was busy “saving lives” – attracting a huge amount of ridicule, of which the following is just a part.

We know some of the facts:

Fact-checking by The Guardian states that Dominic Cummings’ claim – that Matt Hancock had said a protective shield would be put around care homes but that this was nonsense – was true.

Responding to MPs’ questions in the House of Commons today, Hancock started by saying the government had met every goal it had set. This is clearly nonsense.

Did the government reach its goal of testing 100,000 people a week by May 1? No – and Hancock lied about it. This Site reported the facts at the time.

Other lies included the claim that Covid-19 vaccines only won swift approval in the UK because the UK is no longer part of the European Union. In fact, the approvals were granted according to EU rules. This Site reported the facts at the time.

He lied that suicides had decreased during the pandemic. This Site reported the facts at the time.

And as late as February this year, he lied that there had never been a national shortage of personal protective equipment. Again, This Site reported the facts at the time.

So his evidence to the Commons didn’t get off to a good start: consciously lying to Parliament is a sacking offence.

He said the government had been straight with MPs and the people. Judging from the evidence above, this is clearly another lie.

He said scientific developments had been followed by ministers – but this is another lie. Boris Johnson admitted lying about “following the science” in February.

He has dodged questions about the “test and trace” fiasco. The government launched a privatised scheme and threw £37 billion at it. Nearly a year later, it still doesn’t work.

He has been asked why there was no national plan for the pandemic, and said that the government has been learning how to respond by dealing with Covid-19. This is dissembling. The Tories do have a national plan for dealing with a pandemic emergency – but it was last updated in 2011 and was hopelessly out-of-date when Covid hit the UK.

This appearance has been a tissue of lies and evasions which even the most cursory fact-check can tear apart with ease.

Hancock was clearly trying to hide the fact that he has failed to handle the Covid-19 crisis with anything like the competence expected of a government minister.

He was also trying to hide the fact that he has lied to Parliament and to the nation on dozens of occasions – by lying yet again.

He has to go. More to the point, the prime minister who protected him has to go as well. When will Boris Johnson face a similar interrogation?

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Sasha Johnson: Five arrested on suspicion of attempted murder

Sasha Johnson: she remains in critical condition after being shot in the head at a Peckham house party on Sunday.

It’s good that progress is being made on the shooting of Sasha Johnson – even if it seems to be accidental.

The first arrest – of a 17-year-old boy – came after a stop-and-search process which led to him being arrested on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon and possession with intent to supply class A drugs.

This led police to a Peckham address where three men, aged 18,19 and 28, were arrested on suspicion of affray and possession with intent to supply class B drugs.

And a 25-year-old man was later arrested after a police chase, on suspicion of affray and failing to stop for police.

All five were later also arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and remain in custody, according to a Met spokesperson.

So these arrests follow what appears to have been a random stop-and-search – a routine that has been criticised for overly targeting black people.

I’m not aware of the skin colour of the people who were arrested but if they were black, I wonder whether the police will try to use this to justify a procedure that is allegedly racist.

And, if these people are connected to the shooting of Ms Johnson at a Peckham house party on Sunday, isn’t it shameful that police could not trace them through – you know – actual detective work?

Of course, if it was them, and if they are black, one major question on our minds should be why they targeted a prominent campaigner in the Black Lives Matter movement at all.

Source: Sasha Johnson: Five held on suspicion of attempted murder – BBC News

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Hillsborough trial collapses as judge rules there’s no case to answer

Betrayed again: it seems early inquiries into the Hillsborough tragedy were organised in order to deflect criticism of the police while having no legal weight at all.

It seems to me that somebody has been dancing around the law in a very clever way.

Three people accused of perverting the course of justice, with regard to the Hillsborough disaster that killed 96, have been acquitted.

The reason? The statements they prepared – which have been called into question – were provided to a public inquiry chaired by Lord Taylor in 1990 – but it was not a statutory inquiry, therefore not “a court of law”, so there was no “course of public justice” which could be perverted.

In that case, what was the point of having such an inquiry?

Nothing it found can be considered safe.

We have no information on whether the statements by retired Ch Supt Donald Denton, retired Det Ch Insp Alan Foster and former solicitor Peter Metcalf were slanted to minimise blame on South Yorkshire Police.

Without knowing that, we cannot know whether the conclusion of the inquiry – the inquiry, mark you – was accurate or not.

The question therefore arises: why was this not a statutory inquiry? Was a political decision made to run it as it was, in order to avoid possible legal repercussions in the future – like the accusation of perverting justice now?

Some might be hoping that this judgement will close the book on Hillsborough – but it has only given us more reason to demand justice for the 96.

Source: Hillsborough trial: Men acquitted as judge rules no case to answer – BBC News

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Maureen Lipman quits actors’ union Equity to support apartheid Israel

Maureen Lipman: this is an old image from 2018 because she honestly doesn’t rate the time it would take me to get a new one.

Once upon a time, Maureen Lipman was best-known as a legend among her fellow actors. Oh, and as Beattie from the British Telecom ads.

Now she’s best known for quitting the Labour Party – multiple times, apparently – and today for quitting actors’ union Equity.

Here’s Metro:

Coronation Street actress Dame Maureen Lipman has resigned from Equity, the actors’ union, after the organisation urged members to join a pro-Palestine march, it has been claimed.

‘I’m going to resign and I’m also going to ask for my £1000 a year membership fees to be given back to me, and I’m going to send it a charity for the victims on both sides,’ she told [The Telegraph].

‘I didn’t join a political union. I joined a union to protect its members. You don’t dictate to artists what they believe in, and don’t incite them to join a mob.’

This Writer is sure that the 200,000 people who took part in the “mostly peaceful” event in London last weekend will be nonplussed to learn that Lipman has branded them a “mob”.

And while some may say she is right to ask, “Where is [Equity president] Maureen Beattie on the Uyghurs, Rohingyas, the Sudanese, the Yemenites?” some of us applaud the decision to take a stand on a topical issue.

And when there’s a major demo for Yemenites and the others, I for one will look forward to seeing Equity representatives standing alongside everybody else.

A few misguided souls have supported Lipman’s stand:

I wonder whether she feels validated by the support of a former journalist who, as editor of The Sun, falsely accused Liverpool supporters of responsibility for the Hillsborough disaster?

And, as she is falsely accusing Equity of drumming up support for a “mob”, I can only surmise that she does.

Perhaps she prefers the statement by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which falsely claimed that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza happened because that overwhelmingly better-armed nation, supported as it is by the weaponsmiths of the UK and the USA, needed to defend itself against some home-made fireworks that mostly rebounded from the so-called Iron Wall.

Before reading this, let’s remember that the violence happened because Israeli soldiers had been attacking residents of Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem, turfing them out of their homes in what’s known as ethnic cleansing, and had invaded the Al Aqsa Mosque, hitting worshippers there with rubber bullets and stun grenades:

Strangely enough, accusing Jews in the UK of being more loyal to the people they know in Israel, has been described to us all as an anti-Semitic trope. Draw your own conclusions on what this says about the Board of Deputies.

Would you appreciate some more rational responses?

Some have reminded us that Lipman spent the last few years threatening to quit Labour over the false claims that the party had become a hotbed of anti-Semitism:

In fact it seems this isn’t the usual time of year for Lipman to quit Labour – that’s October or November, as far as I can tell.

Others have pointed out that Lipman’s stand is a contradiction: by opposing Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, she supported anti-Semite Boris Johnson’s racist Conservative Party back into power…

(If you don’t think Johnson is an anti-Semite, you need to read his novel 72 Virgins – or at least those parts of it that he stuffed with anti-Semitic tropes.)

… and by supporting apartheid Israel, she supported – well, read it for yourself:

Others have been more generalised in their criticisms:

But the message that people have taken from her announcement is all too clear:

Perhaps the most cutting comment is the one on which I’m going to end:

How the mighty have fallen. Lipman has brought a once-glittering career down to end in ashes.

Postscript: There is some good news:

Source: Coronation Street’s Maureen Lipman ‘quits’ union’ over pro-Palestine march urge | Metro News

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Investigation of Conservative Islamophobia is another blatant whitewash

Boris Johnson’s comments about the clothes worn by Muslim women are only part of the huge volume of Islamophobia and racial hatred he has tried to stir up on his own – but the EHRC was happy to let the Tories investigate accusations against their own party and now that report stands revealed to be a whitewash.

An independent (was it?) review into Islamophobia in the Conservative Party has said there is no “institutional” problem – to howls of outrage from the rest of us.

Even though it does report attitudes that make “uncomfortable” reading for Boris Johnson and other Tories, the report is as much a whitewash as the examination of “institutional racism” in the UK, a few weeks ago.

The government has been resisting calls for that report to be discredited and scrapped ever since and the Conservative Party must now face the same calls over this.

Here’s the BBC, calmly presenting the Tories in as kind a light as possible (in other words, very dimly):

There is “clear evidence” the Conservatives’ complaints system is “in need of overhaul”, Professor Swaran Singh’s independent review into alleged Islamophobia and discrimination in the Conservative Party said.

It found anti-Muslim views were seen at local association and individual level.

But claims of “institutional racism” were not borne out by evidence of the way complaints were handled.

The report warned it “should make for uncomfortable reading for the party”.

But it also said it found “no evidence the party had… systematically failed any particular community”.

Oh, really?

Let’s go to some of our favourite people on Twitter for their analysis.

Here’s Ash Sarkar, who happens to be a Muslim who has suffered Islamophobia from Conservative Party members:

She was also able to provide an example of Islamophobia by a very senior Conservative, from very recent history:

She was referring to this:

Johnson’s own comment about women wearing the burqa (or burka, spell it how you like) looking like “letterboxes” and “bank robbers” was criticised as “insensitive”. That’s a strange way to spell “racist”!

It seems he tried to excuse himself with the pathetically weak comment that he wouldn’t do it again, now that he is prime minister.

How is that acceptable? He was saying that he still holds his racist, Islamophobic opinions, but he now intends to deceive the public that he doesn’t by choosing not to broadcast them!

Perhaps he feels he should not be picked out for special investigation because he isn’t the first Tory prime minister to be out-and-out racist filth. Theresa May’s “hostile environment”, that gave rise to her racist “go home” advertising vans and the Windrush scandal, springs to mind.

But apparently these historical examples of racism and Islamophobia are still not enough for the Singh review!

They were enough for Russ Jones:

Also on a party-wide basis:

Some have seen this as marking the right time for the Equalities and Human Rights Commission to resume its own investigation into Tory Islamophobia, that was called off after the Singh review was announced.

This was rightly criticised at the time because the EHRC point-blank refused to call off its inquiry into Labour anti-Semitism after that party announced an internal review.

So Peter Oborne’s suggestion rings hollow:

The most that is likely to come from it, even if the EHRC deigns to respond, is confirmation that it is biased towards the Conservatives.

And as far as Conservatives are concerned, we have this comment to put the whole situation in its proper context:

Divide and rule. It is the Tory mantra. They have spent more than a decade encouraging prejudice and racism across the UK.

And they’re not going to stop, now they know it’s working.

Source: PM’s burka comments gave impression of insensitivity – report – BBC News

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Motormouth Nandy shouldn’t be a Labour MP. She accuses Corbyn, but SHE is the genuine anti-Semite

Open mouth, insert feet: it seems Lisa Nandy can’t open her mouth without saying something stupid – and she spends a lot of time with her mouth open, looking stupid.

What an ignorant thing for a Labour front-bencher to say.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy has told right-wing talk radio station LBC that Jeremy Corbyn should not be re-admitted to the Parliamentary Labour Party until he apologises for hurt he has caused to the Jewish community.

He already has:

But he shouldn’t have done it then and he has no need to do it now.

Nandy, on the other hand, has no reason to be anywhere near the Labour Party; she disgraces it by her presence.

Remember when she described anti-Semitism as “a particular kind of racism, that punches up instead of punching down”?

Labour recorded multiple complaints against Nandy for that howler – not only from Jews who rightly regarded it as anti-Semitic (separating Jews from everybody else), but also from BAME communities who rightly regarded her as putting them beneath the rest of us.

StarmerLabour quietly swept these complaints under the carpet and let racist anti-Semite Nandy stay in her frontbench position. How hypocritical.

Remember when she supported a plan for a new system to investigate anti-Semitism allegations against Labour members, that was actually illegal?

She wanted to share information on disciplinary cases with other organisations – including the media – but as a data controller, Labour is under an obligation to keep data on its members confidential.

Remember when she advocated the use of force to prevent Scotland from gaining independence from the Union?

She infamously said that the UK should “look to Catalonia” for lessons on how to defeat Scottish nationalism.

She was referring to the Spanish government’s use of force to try to stop a disputed independence referendum in Catalonia, in 2017.

She has no moral authority to pronounce any kind of judgement on Jeremy Corbyn.

He is a far better Labour MP than she will ever be – even when she sits on the Labour benches and he has been banished from them.

Source: Lisa Nandy: Jeremy Corbyn shouldn’t be a Labour MP until he apologises to Jewish community – LBC

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Wait for dentist appointments in England stretches from two to three years in three months

Check-up: if you haven’t made an appointment already, don’t expect to be in this position at any time… probably for the rest of your natural life.

Dental treatment in England is collapsing beneath the weight of demand.

Only three months ago, This Site reported that NHS patients were being told to wait two years for appointments. Now we learn that the wait has been extended to three.

By the time these poor souls get any treatment, they’ll probably have lost every tooth they have in their mouths!

The report by Healthwatch England confirmed that people are being advised to take private care instead – at cost.

Back in February, the same organisation reported that people were being asked to pay £1,700 to private practitioners for treatments that would cost £60 on the NHS.

Other findings in the latest report include:

  • People removed from the practice list for not making an appointment sooner.
  • Repeated cancelled appointments – even midway through treatment.
  • Dentists have reported that they have thousands of people on their waiting lists, with some patients claiming they are unable to even get on a waiting list.
  • Dentists shutting down or going completely private.
  • Patients being asked to wait up to three years for appointments – or six weeks for emergency care.
  • Some who called NHS 111 seeking emergency dental care were told to “use salt water” and carry on calling practices until they could find help.
  • Other patients have been told to use DIY filling kits while they wait for an appointment.
  • People being increasingly prescribed antibiotics with no prospect of a follow-up appointment to actually treat the problem.

It’s a racket, isn’t it? Blackmail.

Dentists have realised that the Covid-19 lockdowns have created huge queues for treatment that they know the surgeries they run for the NHS cannot service.

They are greedily worsening this bottleneck by closing NHS practices, forcing people either to pay a fortune for private care or face a future of pain and possible disfigurement as their teeth decay.

Perhaps it will serve them right when they find that the victims of their scam can’t afford to pay them; and consider even NHS prices to be too expensive:

The watchdog warned that even when people can get access to dental care on the health service, three fifths (61%) of people deem treatment too expensive.

Healthwatch England has called for sweeping reforms to NHS dentistry to avoid harm to the dental health of the UK as a nation.

Fat chance.

The Department of Health has said it is committed to ensuring everybody can access affordable, high-quality dental care.

But it has said nothing about how it will achieve this miracle in the face of dental practitioners’ unwillingness to co-operate. Its spokespeople have been able to talk about only what they did in 2019-20.

You can bet Boris Johnson’s corrupt crew won’t do anything at all for the rest of us. They can afford dentistry, after all.

Anybody who voted for the Conservatives voted for their own teeth to rot out of their head.

Source: People in England ‘face three-year waits for dentist appointments’ | Dentists | The Guardian

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