Monthly Archives: December 2021

TV Comedian shreds Starmer

Keir Starmer: he’s not doing here what Sophie Duker suggested in the clip – but the look on his face may suggest he has been in the recent past.

This was too good to leave as a throwaway tweet so I’ve taken video and put it on TikTok to test the possibilities of that platform (and as practice for myself).

It’s from Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, in which comedian Sophie Duker (not Dukes, as the software insisted on renaming her) passes judgement on Keir Starmer’s tenure (so far) as leader of the Labour Party.

It’s not good:

@voxpolitical

Sophie Dukes shreds Keir Starmer (from Frankie Boyle’s New World Order).

♬ original sound – VoxPolitical

(To be honest, the clip isn’t that good either – sorry! But I’m sure it’ll get better once I’ve ironed out a few things.)

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Tributes pour in for left-wing social media activist Maureen Fitzsimmons

This Writer is one of many who will be mourning the loss of a genuine asset to UK politics today.

Like many, I never met Maureen Fitzsimmons in real life; I only communicated with her on the social media, where her comments were a breath of fresh air amid the murk and miasma of Tory neoliberals and New New Labour backstabbers.

Her tweets enliven many Vox Political articles and much of my Twitter feed.

Tributes have been pouring into Twitter – and if you’re not following any of the accounts below, you should; they all support the kind of sensible politics that Maureen advocated.

Here’s a selection:

‘Record’ #Covid19 infection rate is probably a fraction of the total because: no #tests available!

I’m all right, Jack: like Boris Johnson, This Writer has now had the Covid-19 vaccine booster injection. It won’t stop me catching the Omicron variant so I’m still wearing a mask out and conforming with all the safety procedures recommended here in Wales.

Official figures show a record 183,037 Covid-19 infections were recorded on December 29.

Sadly, that number is likely to be a fraction of the total because the Conservative government that spaffed £37 billion of public money on a privately-run test and trace scheme (that didn’t work) is still utterly unable to provide enough tests – either lateral flow or PCR – for those of us who need them.

The government’s response has been to provide “out of office” messages.

And Boris Johnson disappeared for more than a week. Asked where he had been, he said “Inside the country” – instantly indicating to all of us that he has been raving it up in some foreign holiday destination owned by one of his friends and gifted to him on the sly (again).

(This next one is just for fun.)

Oh but hey! Johnson also offered reassurance by saying nine-tenths of people in intensive care have not had the booster jab:

Official policy is to do nothing, despite the fact that official infections are three times what they were just two weeks ago.

It might be reasonable to say that, if the number of hospitalisations and deaths has significantly dropped.

But with even official infection rates rising exponentially, there will come a day on which hospitals will be overwhelmed again – especially because medical teams are being forced to stay away from work because they can’t get a test result.

Which day, do you reckon? New Year’s Day? New Year’s Eve?

Today?

All because a bunch of media hacks told us Jeremy Corbyn was a wrong ‘un after he told them how Boris Johnson was planning to kill the NHS.

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Newspaper censors #DesmondTutu’s life – leaving the way clear for him to be labelled an anti-Semite

Archbishop Desmond Tutu: if he were still with us, he’d probably be covering his ears to block out the lies being said about him now that he’s gone.

This Writer was genuinely saddened to learn of the passing of the great Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

I remember when he was at the forefront of the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa – a struggle that ended the stranglehold of the white supremacist National Party over the nation and ended the segregation that made people of colour into second-class citizens.

In later years he turned his attention to the Israel/Palestine question, nailing his flag firmly to the mast of Palestinian rights and attacking the apartheid he saw being operated by Israel.

Oh – if you think the Israeli government isn’t operating a system of apartheid, with Palestinians as the underclass, take a look at this:

So isn’t it strange that The Guardian should do this:

Meanwhile, apologists for the atrocities being perpetrated in Israel have merrily stepped into the gap and declared that Archbishop Tutu was an anti-Semite, based on hot air and fantasy:

Normally I might be urging you to write a complaint to The Guardian, but you don’t have to: that great campaigner against anti-Semitism lies, Tony Greenstein, has already written one:

He makes a very good point:

When people pay a tribute to someone and deliberately, for unspoken political reasons, excise a part of their life, they end up saying more about themselves than their subject.

To do all these things and distort someone’s life, because it’s politically inconvenient to tell the truth, and is at variance with the Guardian’s editorial line, is not merely dishonest but politically odious. It suggests that the tribute you paid to Archbishop Tutu’s struggle against Apartheid is just hot air. Pious and empty words aimed at convincing your readers that you retain some integrity.

We all know the reasons for the Guardian’s dilemmas. You spent five years demonising Jeremy Corbyn and the Left as ‘anti-Semites’. You lost no opportunity to portray people who were opposed to apartheid as racists. Even worse you did it in the company of genuine racists and anti-Semites.

The omission of any mention of Desmond Tutu’s longstanding support for the Palestinians was not accidental, an unfortunate oversight but a deliberate editorial decision. We know this because a critical comment from Professor David Mond, who pointed this out, was deleted by the Guardian. It did not accord with your ‘community standards.’ Likewise two comments from Mark Seddon, the former Editor of Tribune, were also deleted.

Of course you did not want to mention Tutu’s position on Palestine. Tutu’s opposition to Israeli apartheid routinely attracted cries of ‘anti-Semitism’ from those who refuse to understand that opposing the Israeli state for what it does is not the same as hostility to Jew.

I fully understand your dilemma. The Guardian has spent so much of its time making false accusations of anti-Semitism that you don’t know how to handle the legacy of someone who, according to your definition, was anti-Semitic. Desmond Tutu was an opponent of apartheid in all its forms.

That seems an excellent summary of the situation.

And by creating it, The Guardian has created an opportunity to smear the name of a great man.

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Two-faced #DavidLammy APOLOGISES for nominating #JeremyCorbyn as #Labour leader. Voters will flee

Janus Lammy: January is named after the famous two-faced god, but now it’s been suggested that the month should be renamed Lammy, after the Labour MP.

This Site has praised David Lammy in the past – particularly over his defence of the Windrush generation of UK citizens the Tories tried to deny and deport.

But his latest outburst deserves no support at all. It shows that he is a two-faced fairweather friend who says only what he thinks will help him. We already have a Boris Johnson for that kind of behaviour – and it belongs in the Tory Party, not Labour.

And it shows that we can’t trust any of his previous comments – including those on Windrush.

Voters in Tottenham, who turned out in support of Lammy more when Mr Corbyn was Labour leader than at any other time, will be taking careful note.

And commenters have been quick to point out the flaws in Lammy’s behaviour:

I’ve mentioned the possibility that the voters of Tottenham will turn their collective back on Lammy, now he has revealed himself to be untrustworthy. It doesn’t stop there:

I hope he gets exactly what he deserves from the public, which is nothing – ever again.

I certainly hope his decision to betray Jeremy Corbyn in such an underhand way harms Labour’s electoral chances with Starmer as party leader.

And I absolutely hope that it helps prod the wider party membership to wake up and demand representatives who stand for genuine Labour Party values as laid out by the party’s founders, rather than for their own selfishness.

What can I say? I’m an optimist.

I know there are figures in the mass media that will continue to provide Lammy with a platform, while – I believe the word is “cancelling” – his critics. Consider The Guardian and the way it has refused to allow any mention of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s opposition of Israeli apartheid in order to present him as a wholly praiseworthy figure.

(Strange that opposition to apartheid is now frowned upon by the UK media that tries so hard to present itself as reasonable.)

The responsibility, as it has always been, is personal.

It is up to all of us to remember that Lammy is not worth our time, and to switch him off or block him out. He has nothing to say that anyone could possibly want to hear.

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#BorisJohnson would rather build a #RoyalYacht vanity project than protect children from #Covid19

Endangered: I don’t think school pupils are allowed to sit this close to each other any more (are they?) but if they were, air filters in their classrooms would help attack the spread of Covid-19. Too bad Boris Johnson would rather spend twice as much money on a so-called Royal Yacht, to tickle his vanity, isn’t it?

I’m writing this on the day the UK recorded a new daily record of Covid-19 infections – 129,471 cases, and the Tory government announced that the current evidence does not support more measures to combat the spread of the disease.

In fact, the Tories may well be right. At 9,546, the number of hospitalisations is much lower than the peak of 34,336 on January 18 this year, when fewer infections had been recorded.

But there’s an enormous cohort of the population that has not been fully vaccinated, and today – it seems – we have evidence that the government would rather build a new “Royal Yacht” in which privileged people would gad about the world trying to do trade deals than protect them.

I refer, of course, to school-age children.

That’s certainly what the above tweet leads This Writer to believe (that we are being led to believe what Shuaib is saying).

It’s based on this Guardian article, which says scientists and campaigners have claimed fitting air filters would “significantly” reduce the transmission of Covid-19 in schools.

Without such a measure, the statistical likelihood is still that huge numbers of school pupils and their teachers will catch the disease and that an appreciable number of them will be hospitalised; a lower proportion of the total, perhaps, but when the total is so much higher, the actual number may also be large.

The statistical likelihood is also that some of these children and adults will die – or will suffer Long Covid for an unspecified time afterwards.

But Boris Johnson doesn’t care about your kids or their teachers! He wants his yacht, because a hugely-expensive status symbol is far more important than some poor person’s brat!

Right?

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The government’s Christmas message was that it’s bringing back pint bottles of Champagne. So?

Daft: Liz Truss is trying to woo the public with empty promises.

You may have been wondering where Vox Political has been for the past few days, Christmas notwithstanding.

Well, I want you all to know that I was not partying it up like a crazed Bacchanalian baboon. No!

I was at a business meeting.

For this reason, I was unable to report on the latest Brexit-related development, that turned into the Tory government’s message of great joy for Christmas – until it backfired:

The fact that it’s a brainchild of possible Boris Johnson backstabber may be a source of some consolation for the prime minister, who would be having a rotten Christmas if he was capable of understanding the world of torment into which he is slowly falling.

Quite a few people have been having fun with it.

I certainly can’t understand why anybody would care.

Most of us in the UK don’t remember pint-sized champagne bottles and wouldn’t see the point of them anyway. We would be paying more money for less product, yet again.

And why would any French wine producer (champagne can only come from that region of France) bother changing their production process to provide smaller bottles to the UK market? It would be costly and, with no guarantee of a market, risky.

So it was a meaningless statement: the government is making it possible for manufacturers to sell UK customers pint glasses of champagne – but nobody is likely to do it.

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#Eton under pressure after #RickyGervais rant about the politicians it produces

Eton: has this school done more to ruin the UK than any other organisation.

When are we going to stop taking ‘went to Eton’ as a qualification for running the country?”

With those words, embedded in a sweary rant, Ricky Gervais once again struck a chord with the people of the UK:

He was attacking Boris Johnson, of course – and rightly so.

But the criticism rings true of so many more politicians, especially in recent years.

So the social media erupted:

It would be fair to say that Eton produces high-flyers who are both arrogant and ignorant, and only ever gain positions of power because of the Old Boy Network.

Maybe once it educated genuinely great and good people. But even that is debatable. And those days – if they ever existed – are long gone.

As a private school, providing education to those who can pay its exorbitant fees, Eton does not take the most intelligent people; it takes those whose parents have the most money.

Teachers there may do their best to implant an education into this stony ground but the evidence suggests that the best way Eton equips its alumni for success is by allowing them to say they were “Eton-educated”, even though (in some cases), it would have been more rewarding to educate a brick. It would do less damage, even if it were used only to break windows.

Former Eton pupils help each other into the plum jobs and deny those jobs to more deserving people who went to other schools.

And that’s why the United Kingdom has flushed itself down the toilet.

The quality of the education provided may be excellent. I don’t think anybody is denying it.

But if Eton’s current owners and staff really want to maintain their school’s reputation, that is being trashed by former pupils including Boris Johnson, David Cameron, Jacob Rees-Mogg and, yes, Justin Welby, there’s something they need potential pupils to do before they take any money:

An intelligence test.

Of course, it’s possible that Eton does actually get potential pupils to take such a test.

If so, then it needs to be changed.

To one that works.

Will #KeirStarmer apologise to #LSE students he falsely accused over #TzipiHotovely protest?

Anti-Hotovely, not anti-Semitic: British-Jewish people protesting against a previous Hotovely event.

Students who were condemned by Home Secretary Priti Patel and Labour leader Keir Starmer for protesting against a speech by the violently racist Israeli ambassador have been cleared by their university.

In a letter to around 200 staff, bosses at the London School of Economics stated that they found “no evidence whatsoever of protestors having broken the law” when Tzipi Hotovely gave a speech there in November.

LSE staff members had petitioned for an announcement “immediately affirming our students’ right to protest on campus without fear of police investigation.”

The response was written last month but has only recently become public knowledge.

Isn’t this awkward for Priti Patel, who wrote the following:

There wasn’t any “intimidation, harrassment [sic – Patel can’t spell] & abuse” but Patel demanded a police investigation anyway.

The Metropolitan Police almost immediately responded by saying there would be “no investigation” – because no incident took place that required police involvement.

While we might object to some “no investigation” decisions by the Met (evening, prime minister!) I think most of us can agree that this was the right choice.

Starmer may not – he certainly didn’t at the time, when he tweeted the following:

This is a former Director of Public Prosecutions, remember.

It is not unreasonable to expect him to realise that there was no intimidation; there were no threats of violence.

It is reasonable to expect him to accept the decision of the police and that he was wrong.

But I haven’t seen any evidence of an apology to LSE students – from either Starmer or Patel.

So how about it, Sir Keir – and Priti? Which of you has the strength of character to admit you were wrong – and say sorry?

Source: Protesters against Israeli ambassador exonerated by university | The Electronic Intifada

#JulianAssange appeals against extradition. Will #AnneSacoolas still come to trial?

Protest: the court’s announcement on whether to extradite Julian Assange faced huge public opposition.

Lawyers acting for Julian Assange have filed an application to appeal against a High Court decision to allow him to be extradited to the United States to be tried for espionage.

High Court judges must now decide whether one of the grounds of the appeal is a point of law of general public importance, before the application may be considered by the Supreme Court.

Birnberg Pierce Solicitors, acting for Assange, say they believe serious and important issues of law arise from the High Court’s reliance on US assurances regarding the prison regimes and treatment Assange is likely to face if extradited, and from its judgment.

Assange is wanted in the US over an alleged conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information following WikiLeaks’ publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents relating to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

A decision on the application is unlikely to be announced before the third week in January.

This Writer is now agog to find out if the US will still surrender Anne Sacoolas, accused of killing Harry Dunn in a road collision but who then fled the UK under the protection of diplomatic immunity, to court proceedings beginning on January 18.

See. Assange’s extradition is in line with a one-sided UK-US deal whereby the UK has to surrender anybody wanted by the US, but the US doesn’t have to do likewise.

The fact that Sacoolas was suddenly offered to the UK after the High Court allowed Assange’s extradition seemed extremely suspicious to This Writer, for precisely that reason.

And now that the extradition is in doubt, I’m on tenterhooks to find out whether the Sacoolas trial will still go ahead.

(Not that I ever expected her to come to the UK to serve any sentence, if she’s found guilty. Do you?)

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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