Tag Archives: democracy

Corbyn deselection: he talks about democracy – they harp on about anti-Semitism

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Motivating the masses: even after three years of sidelining and vilification, Jeremy Corbyn has more social media followers than Keir Starmer and the Labour Party put together (I’m told).

The contrast could not be more pronounced.

After Keir Starmer had Labour’s NEC vote to forcibly deselect Jeremy Corbyn as a party candidate in general elections, not just in Islington North but anywhere, the former Labour leader made his feelings about the matter clear in no uncertain terms:

His position could not be clearer: the vote – and the decision – were an insult to democracy and showed contempt for the Labour Party members of Islington North, whose wishes have been steamrolled by Starmer.

And how do Starmer and his lieutenants justify their behaviour?

They talk about a subject that wasn’t even mentioned in Starmer’s NEC motion.

Here’s Wes Streeting on Robert Peston’s show:

For the record, Streeting was lying. Jeremy Corbyn apologised many times for the focus on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party during his leadership (that he was right to say was disproportionate; anti-Semitism in Labour at the time was lower than in any other UK political organisation); he fully accepted the EHRC’s report and called for its recommendations to be enacted in full (which is yet to happen, as I understand it).

Here’s Wes Streeting on Kay Burley’s Sky News show:

It’s the same nonsense.

Let’s have a balancing view: the Alba Party’s Alex Salmond telling LBC’s Iain Dale where to get off:

That’s the fact of the matter, isn’t it?

Keir Starmer thinks that banning Jeremy Corbyn from standing, and sending Wes Streeting to trot out that fake line about anti-Semitism, will earn him points among the middle class voters of Middle England.

He’s wrong and he’ll find that out for himself in just a few weeks’ time.

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Observer hack attacks Jeremy Corbyn – and triggers a war of words

Jeremy Corbyn: falsely accused YET AGAIN.

What was Sonia Sodha thinking?

“Keir Starmer was right to exile Corbyn,” she wrote. “Labour has a duty to voters, not to rebellious members.”

And: “The party leader correctly sent a signal that democracy is about winning votes, not indulging nostalgia among a minority.”

What?

Did Ms Sodha hear the same speech I did?

Starmer used the opportunity provided by the Equality and Human Rights Commission whitewashing his anti-Semitic attacks on left-wing Jews to again tar Mr Corbyn with the anti-Semitism brush, along with any Labour members who supported Corbyn’s “Scandinavian” style of socialism.

And then Starmer told socialists across the party that if they didn’t like his leadership, he wanted them to get out.

So anybody who takes his advice won’t be voting for him, then. So much for Starmer’s duty to voters and to winning votes!

I don’t see where nostalgia figures in what happened at all.

And that’s just looking at the first two paragraphs of Ms Sodha’s Observer article!

She makes basic errors of fact:

  • The EHRC’s report of 2020 did not find Labour responsible for “institutional antisemitism” as she claimed – indeed, it ruled that Labour was not guilty of such an offence.
  • Ken Livingstone – and Pam Bromley – may have been found to have unlawfully harassed Jewish party members, but both are currently (as far as I can tell) embroiled in court action against the EHRC over this claim; it is wrong for her to publicise the former without also confirming the latter.
  • Claims of “appalling” abuse against Luciana Berger from within the Labour Party have been debunked (although she did receive abuse from right-wing activists who had nothing to do with the party)(there are far too many examples for me to provide links here); Margaret Hodge submitted hundreds of complaints – the vast majority of which had nothing to do with Labour Party members.
  • Jeremy Corbyn did not accuse the EHRC of the EHRC of “dramatically overstating” the extent of antisemitism in the party “for political reasons”; he said that, in general, the scale of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party had been overstated by its political opponents.

  • Mr Corbyn has no reason to show contrition because he had not “presided over” anti-Semitism in his party. In fact, he worked hard to eradicate it and succeeded in reducing it until anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was far below not only that in other political parties but also well below the national average as well. Under Mr Corbyn, Labour really was the safest place for Jews. That is not true under Keir Starmer.

And let’s have a few facts that she missed:

  • The report said that Labour discriminated against people who had been accused of anti-Semitism in 42 of the 70 cases the EHRC examined, meaning complaints were exaggerated.
  • The report wrongly blamed Mr Corbyn’s Labour leadership for failing to do enough – or act quickly enough – to implement recommendations for improvements, but it also showed that this situation was quickly put right when Jennie Formby took over from right-wing factionalist Iain (now Lord) McNicol as general secretary; it was party officials working under him who had been dragging their feet.
  • The leader’s office was found to have interfered in several investigations – but often the prejudice was against the people who had been accused of anti-Semitism, and not against anybody Jewish.

So Ms Sodha’s claim that Starmer’s decision was “principled” and “morally correct” because Mr Corbyn hasn’t shown any contrition for the anti-Semitism he “presided over” is baloney because he didn’t preside over it – he worked hard to stop it.

Starmer’s decision therefore comes across as narrow-minded factional hysteria. Ms Sodha’s description of him as a “leader of integrity” is risible; he has opportunistically hung an unwarranted attack against an innocent man on the EHRC’s announcement.

Ms Sodha says Mr Corbyn’s “deep unpopularity in 2019 was a significant factor in Boris Johnson’s resounding victory” but fails to accurately record the reason for that unpopularity: false media reporting of issues like anti-Semitism that has clearly gone uncorrected in the mainstream media to this day.

Still, she gets one aspect of Starmer’s leadership right: he’ll sacrifice any and all principles in order to grasp power.

Ms Sodha wrote: “For Labour’s left flank… votes are not to be achieved at the expense of sacrificing their principles,” clearly implying that the so-called “moderates” (in reality, right-wingers who have very few political differences from the Tories) with happily go anywhere the wind blows if they think it will win them a few votes: “Democracy is first and foremost about winning votes.”

It’s Tony Benn’s argument about politicians being either “signposts” or “weathercocks”; a “signpost” always points in its direction of travel and you know exactly what they are, while a “weathercock” changes with the wind, meaning you can never trust them to do what they say they’ll do from one day to the next. Keir Starmer, as I’ve said before, is clearly a “cock”.

It follows clearly from this that Ms Sodha’s claim that Starmer’s “duty is to voters” is not how the current Labour leader sees his position; he reckons his first duty is to elevate himself, no matter what means he uses to do it. If he’ll sacrifice any policy position to achieve his aim (and remember, he has ditched all 10 of the pledges he made when he was seeking election as party leader), then voters cannot know what he will do and he clearly feels no duty to them at all.

She goes on to attack democracy; if members of the Labour Party can’t have equal say in the election of a Parliamentary candidate, then democracy has been betrayed. If party leaders can override constituency members in choosing who will represent them, then democracy has been betrayed. Ms Sodha denies this.

“It is fundamentally undemocratic to give the small, unrepresentative sliver of voters that constitutes the Labour party membership too much power to impose a leader that neither the party’s MPs, nor the country at large, think is decent and competent, or to impose an idiosyncratic choice of individual as a likely local MP on tens of thousands of voters,” she trumpets, unable to see the fundamental flaw in her argument.

What is that flaw? Simply that the membership of a political party describes its policies, beliefs and direction of travel – or should do so. The membership’s choice tells the voters at large what the party is about.

And – crucially – handing these important decisions over to the leadership simply gives power to an even smaller, less representative sliver of voters and must, therefore, be even more undemocratic according to Ms Sodha’s own argument.

So much for her.

The article has attracted a large amount of flak. Here’s just some of what I’ve found:

You can probably find more on the social medium of your choice.

Personally, I hope press regulator IPSO receives a barrage of complaints about this article.

Ms Sodha – and all at the Observer and sister paper The Guardian – should be ashamed.

Wimborne-Idrissi expulsion shows Starmer’s contempt for democracy

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi with Mick Lynch, general secretary of the RMT Union, who is currently doing sterling work countering the anti-strike rhetoric being pushed by the UK’s right-wing national media: you can see why the current Labour leadership would want to remove her.

Keir Starmer’s right-wing ‘Labour’ Party has expelled the only elected Jewish member of its National Executive Committee in an act that shows contempt for internal party democracy and has been described as anti-Semitic.

In an act of psychological warfare that is typical of the Labour Party under its current administration, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi was only informed of her expulsion after it had been leaked to a client journalist who tweeted it out to the public… on her birthday.

One really has to wonder at the sick, psychotic mindset of people who deliberately time these blows against a person’s reputation and self-esteem to take place at moments when they would normally be celebrating.

Ms Wimborne-Idrissi’s party membership was suspended shortly after she was elected to the party’s ruling National Executive Committee – in another move with suspicious timing, that happened right before Labour held its 2022 party conference.

It came amid a series of smears by right-wing organisations within the party like the Jewish Labour Movement, which claimed she denied the “scale and severity” of anti-Semitism within the party.

Well, this expulsion clearly shows active discrimination by colleagues of these right wingers against Jewish members, proving anti-Semitism is alive, thriving and actively encouraged in Keir Starmer’s Labour.

But I doubt that those who have been howling about it have any interest in punishing the real culprits.

The charge on which Ms Wimborne-Idrissi was expelled was one of association with now-proscribed groups that weren’t proscribed at the time – and, according to Skwawkbox, “the party spread false claims that she had associated with one after expulsion, when in fact she had merely attended a separate one-off event with a similar name”.

She has announced that she intends to appeal the expulsion in the following Twitter thread, explaining also its circumstances:

This Writer is reminded of my own brush with Labour’s disciplinary procedures, in which false claims about me were leaked to Gabriel Pogrund of The Sunday Times. That newspaper – and others including the Jewish Chronicle – were later forced to retract and correct their statements after I made a formal complaint to the regulator IPSO.

I was still expelled from the Labour Party, but a lawsuit I took out against the party later revealed that the breach of its rules for which I was removed was nothing to do with anti-Semitism (as had been widely touted) but was in fact for accurately reporting on subjects that the right wing of the party wanted to keep quiet.

“It disenfranchises thousands of members who voted to put me on the NEC.”

There you have it in a nutshell.

Labour’s decision to expel Jewish members is unreasonable, anti-Semitic, and anti-democratic.

Background information is available in Vox Political articles:

here

and here.

 

Hypocrite Starmer promises to promote local democracy – after destroying it in the Labour Party

Empty: Keir Starmer’s claims are as empty as the promises in the 10 pledges he made when he was trying to be elected Labour leader (all of which he has now broken).

This went down well, didn’t it?

After Keir Starmer claimed in a newspaper column that he would promote local democracy and empower local communities, people on the social media have been queuing up to slap him down.

The classic comment comes from a Twitter account holder who stated: “It’s laughable hypocrisy to carp on about direct democracy when your party scratched locally chosen candidates and imposes its own shortlist.”

A Skwawkbox article on the subject states:

Starmer made same promise as part of con to persuade Labour members to vote him in as leader – and has waged war on their rights to democracy and free speech ever since.

You can read more about this issue here: Starmer pilloried for farcical pledge to promote local democracy – after non-stop war on it – SKWAWKBOX

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The attack on #courts and #democracy was a #Tory #manifesto promise. Didn’t you know?

RIP democracy: this image of Boris Johnson in a Hitler moustache was stuck to the door of the Conservative office in Beverley, near Hull, earlier this year.

This is nothing new:

Funny how The Times has only just learned of the Johnson government’s plan to overrule court rulings, in December 2021, when it was in the Conservative manifesto for the December 2019 general election almost two years ago!

Yes, Boris Johnson backpedalled for a little while, but that’s a classic Tory tactic; they lure you into a false feeling that everything’s going to be all right and then they stab you in the back.

If it’s good enough for them when they’re electing leaders, then they’re not going to see any reason not to do it to you. Right?

It is an offence against democracy and a step into elected dictatorship – but you knew that already because This Site told you.

So did the nearly 14 million people who voted for it. Right?

Wrong?

They didn’t know?

They just voted Tory because they wanted to get out of the European Union so badly they didn’t care what else happened over the next five years?

Oh, wow. And – hey! – The Times could have told them all about it back in 2019 but didn’t?

That’s a real shame.

It’s also the reason people are told, time and time again in their lives, to RTFM.

In this case, it means Read The F-ing Manifesto!

Too late now.

Because this is one manifesto promise that Boris Johnson is hell-bent on keeping.

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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Labour conference: as party leaders fight to destroy democracy, isn’t it time for a ‘no confidence’ vote?

Fraud: Keir Starmer pretended he would be a decent Labour leader but all he has done is destroy the party from within. For the good of UK politics, he must be removed. Who will have the courage to demand it?

Labour party MPs and members: which of you will be brave enough to demand a vote of ‘no confidence’ in the leadership of Keir Starmer?

The Labour leader – who got himself elected under false pretences and ditched all his election pledges after his win – is working hard to undermine democracy in his own party: he’s having delegates to the conference suspended en masse to prevent them voting to remove his unelected right-wing general secretary, David Evans.

Left-wing NEC member Mish Rahman has raised the issue on Twitter:

This is transparent, surely? Starmer is having delegates suspended purely so they won’t be able to vote to have Evans removed. They aren’t being given reasons for the suspension – and isn’t that itself a breach of party rules? – because there are no reasons.

That is not the act of the leader of a democratic socialist party. It is the blind savagery of a dictator.

The revelation follows the announcement that Starmer wants to roll back democracy in party leadership elections in order to save his own scrawny neck from legitimate challenges.

And we also heard recently that Starmer undermined Labour’s position on Brexit in order to engineer the 2019 election defeat that led to his election as leader in the first place.

Since then he has failed to oppose Boris Johnson’s incompetent Conservative government in any meaningful way, and seems more keen to support the Tory attacks on working and poor people, rather than do his job and defend them.

This is the background to the 2021 Labour conference, which starts on Saturday.

It is clear that Starmer’s behaviour is unacceptable on any level at all. He has disgraced the Labour Party and has brought its leadership into the worst kind of disrepute; he attacks his own party rather than the Tories.

Is there anybody within the Labour movement – who has not yet been expelled from the Labour Party itself – with the courage to stand up and demand his removal?

Anyone?

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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Queen’s Speech confirms it: Boris Johnson is renewing his attack on your freedom – because it’s what Britain wanted

Manifesto commitment: the Conservatives made their plan to end democracy clear in their 2019 election manifesto. Every Conservative voter demanded an end to democracy and a slide into dictatorship.

Boris Johnson is getting back to business after the Covid crisis – and his business is stripping you of the liberties and freedoms your ancestors fought hard to win over the last several hundred years.

Be in no doubt: you will have lost most of your rights by the end of this Parliamentary term, and you can thank your Tory-voting neighbour for making it happen.

Included in the Queen’s Speech were announcements that all three main planks of the attack on democracy – listed on Page 48 of the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto, so everybody who voted Tory absolutely supported them – are still going forward. They are:

  • Removing your right to protest so they can use the police and armed forces to put down any dissent.

  • Imposing dictatorship by ensuring that the courts cannot stop the Tories from breaking the law.

  • Imposing indefinite Conservative government.

The only one of these that has been given prominence by the mainstream media is the last – the planned repeal of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. This has been reported as meaning that Johnson would be able to call elections before his Parliament has served its full five-year term.

But it could also mean that he will allow himself to delay elections indefinitely.

The FTP Act repealed the previous electoral law that allowed prime ministers to call elections at any time during their five-year term, but demanded that they must call an election to be held after five years, no matter what.

So repealing the FTP Act means that unscrupulous prime ministers like Johnson would be able to call elections whenever they liked – or simply neglect to call them at all and remain in power indefinitely.

This is what will happen unless he specifically writes new limitations on Parliamentary terms into his new law. And why would a corrupt liar like Johnson do that when he has a majority of 80 seats in the Commons and can currently do whatever he likes without fear of punishment?

Worse still, the new legislative programme includes more attacks on democracy, the most important being the planned limitation of the right to vote to those who can afford to show the proper photographic identification.

This, Johnson claims, is to stop electoral fraud. You may assume that this is a rampant problem across the UK, but in fact it is practically nonexistent. His plan will strip the vote from around two million people:

Here’s a graph showing the scale of voter fraud as a percentage of all votes cast:

You see the picture?

Further information is available below:

The plan will strip votes from people who are poor and young – in other words, people who will not vote for the Conservatives at the next election. It is corrupt Tory gerrymandering to prevent the voice of the people from being heard at elections.

Typically of the current Tory government, its MPs tried to justify the planned law by lying to us about it. Gillian Keegan, whoever she is, claimed you need photo ID to pick up a parcel from the Post Office – and was put straight in no uncertain terms by fact-checking site Full Fact:

Many of us think valuable Parliamentary time would be better spent preventing the kind of corruption that allowed Tory cronies to gain multi-million pound contracts to provide vital supplies in the fight against Covid-19, that they were totally unable to fulfil. What happened to all that money?

Finally, shall we consider the misplaced priorities of these entitled Tories who have spent more than a decade manslaughtering benefit claimants without feeling any need to reform the system?

Come to that, why isn’t the government introducing plans to end tax evasion? I mention this because the deaths of disabled benefit claimants are linked to the Tory clampdown on claims – the so-called “magic cures” that claimed hundreds of thousands of people were not disabled at all, despite volumes of medical evidence showing they were. These people were unceremoniously stripped of their benefits and many of them subsequently died. The figure of 120,000, quoted above, is a very low estimate.

The Tories spend huge amounts of money every year on their campaign to strip disabled people of their ability to survive. It is a campaign of persecution that has been more successful in eliminating the disabled than the infamous Nazi “Aktion T4” in 1930s and 1940s Germany. In comparison, they spend hardly anything on tracking the rich Tories – let’s not deny it – who have evaded their tax responsibilities in order to squirrel away trillions of pounds in tax havens abroad.

Absent from the new legislative programme are any plans to support the rights of workers with promised reforms to zero-hours contracts and the gig economy, and an end to the practice of “fire and rehire” – terminating workers’ contracts and then demanding they take new contracts with lower pay and fewer privileges:

“Fire and rehire” is a key element of Howard Beckett’s campaign to lead the UK’s largest union, Unite. He was in London to campaign about it while the Queen was delivering her speech:

He has also made the very obvious point that the currrent Labour leadership has no interest in looking after the interests of British workers – because Keir Starmer actually refused to oppose “fire and rehire”.

The oppression goes on and on:

Long-awaited plans for reform of social care – promised by the Tories years ago – went undiscussed. There is no plan for such reforms in the current Parliamentary term.

Admittedly, Andy Burnham is right to say all parties are responsible for allowing social care to fall into the disrepair we have today; New Labour failed to do anything about it too.

And Death Health Secretary Matt Hancock has claimed the government is committed to social care reforms this year – 2021:

He spent the whole of 2020 lying about the severity of Covid-19 and justifying his decisions to award government contracts worth billions of pounds to Tory cronies who couldn’t fulfil them. What are his words worth?

Oh, and before anyone suggests that plans to address the climate crisis show at least some hope for the Tories, they don’t:

For a more detailed attack on the new legislative programme, take a look at Unite’s response (under current leader Len McCluskey). I’m sure other critiques are also available.

Last word can go to Smokey, below, who makes an excellent point despite their inability to spell the word “speech”:

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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The Tories have started their attack on court power and their plan to create a dictatorship

Manifesto commitment: the Conservatives made their plan to end democracy clear in their 2019 election manifesto. Every Conservative voter demanded an end to democracy and a slide into dictatorship.

We all knew this was coming because the Conservatives announced their plan to attack the so-called separation of powers that prevents our country from slipping into dictatorship back in 2019.

It was in their manifesto, which means everybody who voted for Boris Johnson and his Conservatives deliberately and knowingly supported it.

For those who have had their heads in the sand for the last two years, or have only become politically aware since the election, I’ll explain:

The separation of powers is the division of any state’s government into different branches, each with its own powers and responsibilities.

The intention is to prevent the concentration of power under any leader that would lead to a dictatorship, by providing checks and balances: each branch has power to limit or check the other two, induces them to prevent either of the other branches from becoming supreme, thereby securing political liberty.

The typical separation of powers is into three parts: a legislature (Parliament), an executive (government) and a judiciary (courts). That is what we have in the United Kingdom.

Each branch must have legitimate means to defend their own legitimate powers from those of the other branches.

But Boris Johnson’s plan – as laid out in his 2019 manifesto – is to strip the courts of their power to act as a check and balance against his government, allowing himself to enact laws that would be illegal otherwise.

Currently the courts have a mechanism known as judicial review, which allows them to decide whether decisions by government ministers or public bodies are against the law.

As it stands now, it works very well.

The courts cannot overturn Acts of Parliament; they can only rule that decisions made in the name of particular laws were wrong because either a minister did not have the power to make them, or the process leading to them was unfair or irrational – or does not conform with the Human Rights Act.

Most appeals for judicial review do not reach the courts: in 2018, 3,597 were lodged and only 218 saw the inside of a courtroom. The government went on to win half of them.

But Johnson was upset by two court decisions – on the government’s management of Brexit, and on his aborted prorogation of Parliament.

He says that the decisions of the judges meant they were acting politically, considering the merits of his government’s political decisions rather than the way those decisions were made. This is not true.

The claim that the current system allows judges to retake decisions on how a policy should operate is wrong. They don’t. They have stepped in to clarify the law after the government failed to do so – probably in an attempt to push through offences against democracy under a fuzzily-worded law – but that is not the same thing. The courts have merely acted in accordance with their power to rule whether the government acted within the bounds of its own laws or not.

So now, Johnson intends to ensuring that, when his government breaks the law in the future, the courts will not have the power either to reveal the illegality or to prevent it.

It is part of the three pillars of his manifesto that drag us into dictatorship – the other two being removal of our right to protest (in the Police Bill currently going through Parliament) and imposition of indefinite government (by repealing the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, which has not yet happened).

All were on page 48 of the Tories 2019 manifesto.

I stated in an article a week before the 2019 election:

While the manifesto states: “We will get rid of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act – it has led to paralysis at a time the country needed decisive action,” it means: We will impose an indefinite Conservative government.

While it states: “We will ensure that judicial review is available to protect the rights of the individuals against an overbearing state, while ensuring that it is not abused to conduct politics by another means or to create needless delays,” it means: We will impose a Conservative dictatorship that the courts cannot stop from acting illegally.

And while it states: “We will update the Human Rights Act and administrative law to ensure that there is a proper balance between the rights of individuals, our vital national security and effective government,” it means: We will remove your right to protest against our dictatorship and if you try to stop us, we will use the police and the armed forces to PUT YOU DOWN.

If you vote Conservative on December 12, that is what you are demanding.

And they did demand it. More than 13 million people voted for a dictatorship – less than one-quarter of the UK’s population – but that was enough to give Johnson a mandate to end democracy here.

I added:

A vote for the Conservatives is a vote to end the rule of law.

And I was right. But my words were read only by those who already knew the truth of what I was saying.

Now we’re all going to experience it, and it will be very ugly indeed.

But if you ever see a Tory complaining about the hardships that are to come, feel free to remind them:

You voted for it. You wanted it. And you got what you wanted.

Source: Right to challenge government in courts overhauled – BBC News

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#BorisJohnson wants to dictate when – and WHETHER – #elections take place – as #VoxPolitical warned you

Dictator Johnson: you put him into 10 Downing Street. Now, like all fascists, he is taking steps to ensure that you can’t get him out again.

Remember last December when This Site warned the UK electorate that Boris Johnson’s manifesto said, “We will impose an indefinite Conservative government”?

It means he planned to stay in power just as long as he wanted to, with no election unless he felt like it.

And the UK electorate ignored the warning and voted for him in what may be the last democratic election to take place in this country.

Do you think that’s overstating the case?

If so, you haven’t been paying attention.

Johnson intends to repeal the Human Rights Act and end your access to the European Convention on Human Rights – including the right to vote in elections.

No, it’s not just about making sure asylum-seekers can’t use human rights as an excuse to stay in the UK when they shouldn’t.

The plan to let Johnson dictate when – or rather, if – we have elections is the second part of this. And it seems some people, in Parliament at least, can see what’s coming:

MPs looking into the issue say there should be no return to the days when the date of the next election was a matter for the government alone.

The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee says that would give an unfair advantage to the party in power.

Under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, the next UK general election will be on Thursday, 2 May 2024 – but Mr Johnson is seeking the power to go to the country before that date if he wants to.

In fact, he isn’t. The FTP Act repealed all the other legislation on when elections take place, so getting rid of it wouldn’t be giving Johnson a choice on whether to have it sooner.

It would be giving him a choice on whether to have an election at all.

Source: Don’t give prime ministers the power to choose election date, say MPs – BBC News

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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Will Russia give us its working Covid-19 vaccine if we’re condemning Navalny poisoning?

This is awkward.

It seems Russia has developed a Covid-19 vaccine that works – it creates an immune response with no ill effects:

Sputnik V, which the Kremlin announced in August would enter mass production this month despite serious international concern, caused no major adverse effects and induced antibodies in all participants in two small rounds of early testing. The results were published in medical journal The Lancet on Friday.

If this is true, then it could end the crisis worldwide – if distributed beyond Russia.

There’s just one problem.

The Establishment here in the UK spends most of its time condemning Russia. At the moment the UK is treating that country with disdain over the poisoning of Alexei Navalny – and for interfering in UK democracy.

So there’s very little incentive for the Russians to help us.

In fact, the Russians would do well to withhold the vaccine. That country could then resume business as usual while the rest of us remain under restrictions until we come up with a vaccine of our own – or steal theirs via spies (gosh).

The UK has already fallen well behind the rest of the world because of Boris Johnson’s pathetic response to the pandemic. Make no mistake; the nation has suffered unduly because of his dithering.

Brexit could push us even further back, if Johnson fails to get a decent trade deal. That’s what we understand he wants, too.

Being forced to try to compete while still under Covid-19 restrictions could finish off the UK economy altogether.

Source: Coronavirus: Russia’s vaccine induces immune response and is safe, early trial results suggest | The Independent | Independent

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