Some of us have spent years saying the Tories are living in the past; now Boris Johnson’s Brexit is proving the truth of it.
He is putting us on the brink of war with France for the first time in 206 years.
Over fish.
He has made us the villains by trying to impose rules on fishing near the Channel Islands that were not part of the UK-EU trade deal. The French are – rightly – refusing to countenance them and are threatening to cut off Jersey’s power supply.
So he has reacted in a manner that is not only arrogant, it is also typically – for a Tory – archaic: he is sending a gunboat. Two, in fact,
Spike Milligan was writing jokes about this, back in the 1950s; rulers of a country whose empire is falling into ruins, desperately trying to hold on to a greatness they no longer have with brinkmanship. The comedy is that they would be fools to launch the military expeditions they threaten.
But there is nothing funny about this. It merely proves that those who claimed that the EU – a pan-European alliance of nations – was created to prevent another war on that continent were right; the UK’s hardly been out for five minutes and we’re setting ourselves up for a rumble.
It is ridiculous. It is insane.
Johnson will lead the UK into a humiliating defeat – both legally and militarily, if he takes it that far.
And he’s going to make the rest of us – right-thinking UK citizens – look ridiculous too.
If nobody reintroduces him to sanity, I wonder where it will end.
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StarmerLabour mouth Lisa Nandy was doing the media rounds this morning, telling us that her party’s leadership wants Joe Biden to be the new US president.
There’s nothing wrong with that if she had stopped there but she didn’t.
She went on to say that this was because Biden had supported former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands war.
That is not a good position for Labour to take and I’ll explain the reason,
Once the Falklands had been invaded by General Galtieri’s Argentinian forces (he wanted control of huge oil reserves beneath the South Atlantic), the UK had to go out and liberate the people who lived there and identify as UK citizens – there’s no doubt about that.
But it is widely argued that the reason they needed rescuing in the first place is that Thatcher withdrew naval support from the area, deliberately making the Falklands an attractive target for the Argentinian dictator.
The intention was tacitly to invite him into starting a war that Thatcher could win, in order to create a surge of public support for herself and the Conservative Party here in the UK that would carry them to a stronger victory at the next general election. And it succeeded.
That’s the belief. In the light of it, Nandy’s comment is tone deaf:
Biden has a long history of standing with the British people because 'he stood with the Thatcher government over the Falklands'.
This is Labour now is it Lisa Nandy!?! Pro the spurious war Thatcher started to win an election.pic.twitter.com/PYskSDmEF6
It shows that StarmerLabour rejects its own party as it was in the early 1980s, preferring to trumpet its support for the Tory leader who championed the neoliberal ideology that brought disaster down on working-class families across the UK.
It should come as no surprise that Nandy said this was a good thing. Her talent for media stupidity is fast becoming legendary. Here…
Lisa Nandy went on Radio 4 to announce that antisemitism is a form of racism that “punches up.” Bafflingly antisemitic behaviour here. Genuinely galling. pic.twitter.com/ClkCv1RGwB
… is a clip of her from the BBC’s PM on October 29, presenting the anti-Semitic view that all Jews are rich and that hatred of them is “punching up”. She gets away with making racist comments – and inciting racism with them – because she is on Starmer’s side and for no other reason.
Sadly, she would probably have got away with such a comment, even under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, either because complaints would have been dismissed by right-wingers in the Governance and Legal Unit who would want her to continue as an embarrassment to Corbyn, or because Corbyn, assailed by false accusations, did not want to rock the boat. That was his weakness and ultimately the reason he lost two elections and his Labour Party membership has now been suspended.
Fortunately the tweeting public has no such restraint:
I remember when the @LeFTCampaign organised an excellent post-election meeting in Wigan in January this year, and some asked why we hadn’t invited the sitting MP, Lisa Nandy, to which we simply replied “because it’s a meeting for socialists”
Is Lisa Nandy quite well? Does she actually know what the Falklands was about? She's so embarrassingly useless. Nothing she says is based on any firm knowledge or expertise. Why are people like her so vaunted in Labour? https://t.co/B9iVjz4nFt
— PeakIpsedixitism #IStandWithKeiraBell🕸️🗣🟥🇪🇺 (@Jessica12uk) November 4, 2020
It's telling that the most positive thing Lisa Nandy could say about Joe Biden is that he's pro-war. Says it all. https://t.co/VKRR7vQ1bi
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush (@WarmongerHodges) November 4, 2020
Lisa Nandy says "this is a very dangerous moment for democracy"…
Ironic since she sits in a shadow cabinet who threw their own election twice because they prefererred a far-right populist regime to a caring democratic socialist Government#PoliticsLive
— Politically Homeless #ShockDoctrine #NHSPay15 (@respeak_uk) November 4, 2020
Other comments by the daft Nandy have also attracted justified criticism:
No, the problem is that Labour MPs like Lisa Nandy would rather lose to the Tories than allow Jeremy Corbyn to become PM. They would rather smear their own party as institutionally antisemitic than oppose Tory bills that legalise state murder. https://t.co/6wIWI4Eq7n
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush (@WarmongerHodges) November 4, 2020
Finally, this comment stands as a harsh reminder to us all of the backstabbing ways adopted by Nandy and her kind of Labour MP:
No Lisa Nandy.
That was in the UK in June 2017 & December 2019 but you still managed to screw us over… https://t.co/0sNDoz62Do
If they get into power, they would backstab all of the voters who put them there.
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It’s all about money: if Boris Johnson didn’t have any, he couldn’t harm anyone. So why are we supporting the people who support him?
In a previous article I called for anyone harmed by Tory policies – like students whose ‘A’ level results were downgraded at random by the Department of Education, relatives of people who have died of Covid-19 and so on – to do what they can to stop the Johnson government at a grassroots level.
This means starving it of cash.
The way to do that is to boycott businesses that are run by Tories or that donate to the Tory Party; if you run a business, deny employment to graduates of further education institutions that have denied students places because of the Tory ‘A’ level downgrade; and to urge your friends who have been simiilarly affected to do the same.
I think it would be valuable to have lists of such organisations, so everybody knows who to avoid – and already some names are coming in.
The information is unconfirmed, but so far I am told that these firms donate to the Conservatives:
Tate & Lyle (sugar manufacturers)
Warburtons (bread manufacturers)
Wetherspoons (pub chain)
I’d like to add to this list as I go.
Feel free to contribute names of offending organisations – national, international and local. I’ll look up Tory donations soon.
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You know when we told y’all the rich declared class warfare and you told us to stop being loony lefties. Well now your kids are collateral damage. Wake up, and fight.
— Kerry-Anne Mendoza 🏳️🌈🏴 (@TheMendozaWoman) August 14, 2020
Let’s not delude ourselves. @BorisJohnson does not care for equality & fairness.
Liberals are mistakenly framing #ToryChaos as “callous indifference” or “incompetence”.
It’s class war.
Analysis that fails to explain dynamics of class power & the systematised destruction of the working class is not just bad but dangerous.
— Kerry-Anne Mendoza 🏳️🌈🏴 (@TheMendozaWoman) August 14, 2020
Quite. This is not incompetence. There is no lack of competence In giving contracts to their rich mates or giving them honours or artificially helping the children of the affluent to boost their exam results. This is nor a problem algorithm. This is class warfare.
— Nick Matthews #keepcooperating (@NickCooperative) August 14, 2020
I’m not claiming credit for calling a thing by its name – this is “multiple discovery”, “simultaneous invention”, “synchronicity” or, if you like, an expression of the “zeitgeist”. More and more people are simply coming to realise, understand and accept that it is the policy of the UK’s Conservative government to push them down unfairly.
That is what the decision – and it was a decision, deliberately made – to punish ‘A’ level pupils who weren’t from private schools was all about. Yes, Gavin Williamson and the other Tories are saying it was down to a mechanical system, an algorithm – but that algorithm was written by a human being who intended it to give an advantage to the children of very rich people.
In this way, the Tory class war has stolen your children’s futures and given them to the undeserving rich.
It’s what the decision – and it was a decision, deliberately made – not to fight Covid-19 in any meaningful way was all about. Tens of thousands of people in care homes have died – your relatives, maybe – because Matt Hancock and the other Tories said people with Covid-19 who lived in those homes should be sent back to them – never mind the fact that they did not have isolation facilities and the virus would run through those places like wildfire and be transferred to others by part-time staff who worked in different homes run by the same – private – firm.
The Tories – and their private business collaborators – failed to source personal protective equipment, ventilators, tests and the facilities to carry out tests. The lockdown they imposed was half-hearted and failed to stop the progress of the disease. Now that they have lifted it, albeit with a few measures still in place, more people are contracting the virus again. So they have stopped reporting the daily number of infections.
And the Tories have rewarded their private business collaborators for their failures with hugely expensive contracts to continue failing us – all at the public expense. Serco’s test and trace contract has been renewed, even though we know it won’t stop any second wave (really just a resurgence of the first wave that was suppressed but never went away).
You won’t get justice against the Tories by the normal means available to civil society because the Tories have either corrupted them already or are in the process of doing so. Boris Johnson illegally terminated Parliament’s last session in the autumn of 2019 and what was the result? He called a general election, lied to us until he was purple in the face and was rewarded with an 80-seat Parliamentary majority.
Now he is using that power to ensure that the courts will not be able to stop any more of his corruption by planning a curb on judicial review of government activity. He is imposing a dictatorship – just as he told you he would, if you could have been bothered to read page 48 of his election manifesto.
The police won’t help. Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock, Gavin Williamson and the others are all above the law – no matter what they do. Try reporting a cabinet minister for a crime and see how far you get. They’ll tell you they’re treating it seriously, bounce the accusation around a few different departments and then say there’s no evidence. I’ve been there.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died already because it is Tory policy to kill claimants of sickness or disability claimants, who they consider to be “useless eaters”. That’s why the newspapers have been full of reports showing people with long-term illnesses and disabilities starving to death.
They wanted your homes so they imposed the Bedroom Tax and took them away from you.
The list goes on and on.
And still, too many people think they are the best choice to run the UK – even though the economy is in its deepest recession ever, and Brexit means it may never recover. You will suffer – they won’t. They have been stockpiling your cash and will simply use it to sit out any unpleasantness in the future.
But I feel sure a tipping-point will come – a flashpoint. I wonder how much we will all have to lose before that happens. I’m guessing it’ll be pretty much everything.
By then, many people may think there is nothing they can do. I am reminded yet again of Martin Niemoller’s poem about how the Nazis came for different groups who received no help from anybody else until, by the time they come for the author, there was nobody even left for him to ask.
But I am reminded of another group who were put in a similar position. When I visited Bosnia in the 1990s, I was told how – when the tanks from other countries moved in – the people, who were weaponless, left their homes and went up into the hills. They came back at night, when they took weapons – and lives – from the soldiers who had taken everything from them. And slowly, they took back their land from their oppressors.
I can see that happening here in the future.
I would rather it didn’t.
But it will, if people of good conscience don’t wake up, get up and put up a fight.
Keir Starmer won’t do it. He agrees with the Tories. That’s why he’s busy turning the Labour Party into Tory Lite Mk II (New Labour was Mk I) and accusing anybody who disagrees with him of anti-Semitism.
If you don’t want this to fall into violence, then you need to think what else you can do.
The ‘A’ level fiasco creates opportunities. Already some further education institutions have said they will take students who were downgraded, on the basis of their predicted results. Some haven’t. Clearly we should take note of the side that each University, each college, takes. Those who do the right thing should be rewarded in whatever ways we can. Those who do not should be shunned – meaning not only that we should not even try to send our children there, but that we should reject their graduates when they seek employment with our businesses. We know they won’t be any damn good anyway.
And employers who turn down applicants on the basis of the Tory algorithm’s discredited results should also be named, so we can stop buying their products.
That’s the best – non-violent – response I can conceive on the spur of the moment, and these things need to start happening now.
We’d better get to it, if we don’t want to roll over and die. And yes, that means you.
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Boris Johnson: he doesn’t care about Muslims who died 25 years ago. He probably thinks they were just another bunch of heathens. But he’ll watch you die and then talk about you the same way he referred to them.
I don’t care if he wrote it 23 years ago – Boris Johnson should have been apologising to Bosnian Muslims ever since.
Writing about the Srebrenica massacre, which happened 25 years ago today (July 11), Johnson stated in 1997: “They weren’t exactly angels, these Muslims.”
It’s yet another example of England’s Shame being unable to hold his tongue, therefore proving his imbecility to the world.
Let’s go over the details for those who may not be aware of them: a quarter of a century ago, Serbs led by Ratko Mladic murdered 8,000 Muslims who had sought refuge from them in Srebrenica, which the UN was trying to protect with Dutch forces.
Even Johnson has admitted it was the worst massacre on European soil since World War II.
I was in Bosnia in the 1990s and I think I understand why he said Bosnian Muslims weren’t angels.
You see, when violence broke out in the former Yugoslavia, Muslim Bosnia had no army to call its own and therefore no weapons with which to fend off other former Yugoslav countries’ armies of extermination.
So when the tanks rolled into their towns, they dispersed into the hills…
And when night fell, they came back down and used every means at their disposal to obtain weapons. That required them to do extreme violence to their Serb occupiers – some with their bare hands, some with kitchen knives.
It was that or death.
And it was a war of attrition. As the Bosnian Muslims gained weapons, they used them to gain more – and heavier – arms until they were eventually able to force out the occupiers.
That is how the war was explained to me. It was not without risks for those Bosnian Muslims, but I notice that Johnson said nothing about the reprisals suffered by any who were caught.
I could tell you about incidents that would turn your hair white, but I won’t. Some details of genocide are best left to be told by the peoples who suffered it.
They were people facing extermination.
I cannot help questioning Johnson’s choice to lay that label on them. Was he attempting a little discreet manipulation?
You see, in saying these people weren’t “angels”, he was stigmatising all people who stand up against murderous oppression.
Perhaps he was thinking ahead to a future when a Conservative government headed by someone like himself would be gleefully exterminating people with long-term illnesses, disabilities and care needs, and demonising anybody who tried to speak up for them with a rhetoric about “scroungers” and “skivers”.
Can’t you just imagine him commenting on the latest deaths? “Appalling. But they weren’t exactly angels, these cripples.”
UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace: he even looks shifty, doesn’t he?
Typical two-faced Tories – they say one thing to us and a completely different thing to their warmongering buddies abroad.
In this case, it seems UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace phoned up a Saudi defence minister to renew the UK’s support for the regime there and its work – which we must take as including its genocidal war against Yemen.
This happened just one day after the UK announced sanctions on individuals from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
Here’s The Independent:
The UK government privately showered Saudi Arabia’s government with praise a day after publicly criticising its human rights abuses and targeting it for sanctions.
The government was accused of “calling to apologise” to the regime after some Saudi individuals were included on the foreign secretary’s new “Magnitsky Act” sanctions list on Monday.
Defence minister Ben Wallace is understood to have discreetly telephoned his Saudi counterpart on Wednesday to reiterate the UK’s support for the regime and its work.
The call was not publicised by the British government in the UK, but Saudi Arabia’s state-run news agency used the opportunity to boast about it in a press statement issued on Wednesday.
“His Royal Highness Prince Khalid bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, Deputy Minister of Defense, received yesterday a phone call from His Excellency British Defence Secretary [sic], Mr Ben Wallace, during which the partnership between the two countries was discussed, especially in the defence field, and the efforts made by the two countries to enhance regional and international security,” according to a statement on the Saudi Press Agency.
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A family at war? They may look and act the same, but that doesn’t mean Donald Trump won’t attack Boris Johnson if he feels like it [Composite: Laura Tisdale/Twitter].
This is awkward, with Boris Johnson desperate to get a trade deal between the UK and the USA.
Donald Trump is threatening reprisals if Johnson goes ahead with a plan to tax US tech corporations like Google and Facebook on profits they make from UK customers.
This Writer understands that it is possible to prevent foreign tech companies from operating in the UK – don’t China and North Korea do this?
But if the UK did this, then the US government could impose crippling sanctions on this country.
The simple fact is that Trump has Johnson over a barrel.
And where Trump goes, others will follow. The loss to the UK’s tax take must be staggering.
And it’s all in line with Conservative economic policy.
Ever since Thatcher, Tories have demanded that businesses across the world must be able to operate across the world if they can, but must be allowed to operate from the country of their choice.
And that’s where they are taxed.
I suppose the answer was to demand that these multinationals set up subsidiaries in the countries where they operated. But wasn’t that the situation before Thatcherism?
It seems the Tories deliberately harmed the UK economy with this policy.
Can anybody explain the thinking that supported this economic disaster?
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Liz Truss’s claim to have “inadvertently” approved the sale of military hardware to Saudi Arabia should be enough to have her sacked for incompetence – but there is a better use for her.
The decision has put the International Trade Secretary in contempt of the Court of Appeal, which ordered the Tory government not to approve any new licences to Saudi for use in Yemen and to retake all the decisions on existing licences in a legally compliant manner.
It seems clear that these orders have been ignored by a government department that has a “longstanding and shameful” policy of maximising arms sales regardless of the consequences.
As Andrew Smith of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade points out in his Independent article:
This surely discredits the government’s tired old mantra that the UK supposedly has some of the most “rigorous” and “robust” arms export controls in the world.
Since the bombing of Yemen began in March 2015 the UK has licensed £5.3bn worth of arms to the Saudi regime, including fighter jets, bombs and missiles. These weapons have played a central role in the brutal war, which has created the worst humanitarian disaster in the world.
The extent of the UK government’s support was on display last week when a Saudi military delegation was invited to London by Truss’s department for Defence & Security Equipment International 2019 (DSEI), the biggest arms fair in the world.
While at DSEI, Saudi representatives will have been welcomed by UK civil servants and lobbied for further sales by the world’s biggest arms companies. Nobody will have dared to utter a word about the abysmal state of human rights in Saudi Arabia or the human cost of its bombardment of Yemen.
At the heart of discussions will have been the prospect of further fighter jet sales. Since 2016, the government has been in negotiations with the Saudi Royal Family and the UK’s largest arms company, BAE Systems, to secure the sale of 48 Eurofighter jets.
The deal, which appears to have been put on hold following the court verdict and the international condemnation of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, is thought to be worth £10bn. With that kind of money on the table, government ministers have been prepared to act as cheerleaders for the arms industry.
Mr Smith says 60,000 Yemeni people have already died. If this £10 billion deal goes through, many thousands more are also likely to perish.
Because Tories believe money is more important than lives.
That is the only explanation that allows us to understand why the Conservatives are willing to put themselves in contempt of the UK courts (and consider what this portends for the Supreme Court’s decision on Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament, next week).
I don’t want to be complicit in the murder of thousands more innocent people, encouraged by my government.
The only way to stop it, it seems, is to ensure that the dimwit who has been allowing it is made to do what she should have been doing in the first place.
Let’s see Liz Truss stay in post, for now – but only to show us how she is putting the Court of Appeal’s order into practise, and the concrete results arising from it.
Liz Truss: She used to be Justice Secretary – does she now believe herself to be above the law?
Tory ‘big cheese’ Liz Truss has apologised to the Court of Appeal for “inadvertently” selling hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of military equipment to Saudi Arabia. Why isn’t she in jail?
The courts have ruled that it is illegal to sell equipment of this kind to Saudi Arabia, as it could be used to help murder innocent people in Yemen.
But Ms Truss did it anyway.
And she seems to think saying “sorry!” will get her off the hook for it.
That is not good enough.
If she is saying she did it by accident, then she is admitting that she is incompetent, and should resign her position as a government minister at once.
But we all know that ignorance of the law is no excuse, so Ms Truss should also submit herself – and all evidence relating to this matter – to the courts so her crime – because that’s what it is – may be judged and she can be ordered to serve the sentence required by the law.
Or is this merely further evidence that this Boris Johnson government considers itself to be above the law and that it only applies to plebs like the rest of us?
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Blaze: An oil tanker burns in the Gulf of Oman. But was Iran really responsible?
Isn’t it childish that, in this age of climate change and environmental catastrophe caused by fossil fuels, our leaders are squabbling over oil again?
The Conservative government has supported claims by the United States that attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman – on one of the world’s most important tanker routes – were caused by Iran.
Apparently the removal of a mine from one of the tankers by Iranian special forces was portrayed as proof of that country’s guilt by the US government under Donald Trump. He said he guessed one of the mines used to attack the ships did not explode “and it had Iran written all over it”.
The UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, under prime ministerial wannabe Jeremy Hunt, said an investigation by the United Arab Emirates had concluded that the attacks had been caused by a “sophisticated state actor”, and Mr Hunt said he was satisfied that the actor in question was Iran.
Let’s pause for a moment and compare this behaviour with the Tory government’s response to United Nations claims that its policies had caused an increase in poverty here – DWP secretary Amber Rudd, and Theresa May, said it was impossible for such a conclusion to be formed after such a short period collecting evidence; less than two weeks. The report on the tankers has appeared in less than two days, it seems.
So we have an arguable double-standard in the Tory government’s stance.
But that hasn’t stopped ministers from attacking Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, simply for suggesting that a little conclusive evidence should be collected first:
Britain should act to ease tensions in the Gulf, not fuel a military escalation that began with US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement. Without credible evidence about the tanker attacks, the government’s rhetoric will only increase the threat of war.
Happily, the response from the public has been to challenge the Tories. Consider, for example, this reponse to Mr Hunt:
Jeremy Hunt brands Labour leader 'pathetic' over Iran comments https://t.co/cVh6WlPlyO Remember Gulf of Tonkin, WMD etc where US proof turned out to be false. It's not soft on Iran, or excusing any of their crimes, to demand evidence we can trust before sounding the war trumpets.
— JewishVoiceForLabour (@JVoiceLabour) June 15, 2019
Let’s face it – a previous UK government tried to convince us that a war with Iraq was a good idea, based on evidence that was later disproved. That was in alliance with the United States, too.
The people slagging off Jeremy Corbyn for this tweet are the same people who cheered for the Iraq War when Tony Blair, George W Bush and John Bolton insisted Saddam Hussein had WMDs. Don't be fooled again.
A war with Iran will make the war with Iraq look like a pillow fight. https://t.co/cXFs58tqjg
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush (@WarmongerHodges) June 15, 2019
It is the attack on Mr Corbyn that is most offensive, though:
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