Tag Archives: Guardian

Guardian reports ‘systematic use of rape by Hamas’ – and why I don’t believe it

Admitting rape: but is this a member of Hamas? No – it’s a former member of the Israel Defence Force, where sexual violence appears to be part of the culture.

The Guardian has published a piece claiming that members of Hamas committed rape and sexual violence during the October 7 attacks on Israel that is, on the face of it, horrifying.

Reporter Bethan McKernan – in Jerusalem – says the paper has been made aware of sexual assaults for which multiple corroborating pieces of evidence exist:

By cross-referencing testimonies given to police, published interviews with witnesses, and photo and video footage taken by survivors and first responders, the Guardian is aware of at least six sexual assaults for which multiple corroborating pieces of evidence exist. Two of those victims, who were murdered, were aged under 18.

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At least seven women who were killed were also raped in the attack, according to Prof Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a legal scholar and international women’s rights advocate, from her examination of evidence so far. The New York Times and NBC have both identified more than 30 killed women and girls whose bodies bear signs of abuse, such as bloodied genitals and missing clothes, and according to the Israeli welfare ministry, five women and one man have come forward seeking help for sexual abuse over the past few months.

Rape and sexual assault are considered war crimes and a breach of international humanitarian law. Hamas has denied the accusations of sexual violence.

It is entirely possible that some criminal opportunists in Hamas or the other groups that broke out with it on October 7 committed heinous crimes against women.

But I find the evidence being presented hard to believe for two reasons.

First, we are told that the emergency services who dealt with the dead did not consider sexual violence at the appropriate time:

Emergency responders risked their lives in the fighting on 7 October and several days afterwards to rescue the wounded and retrieve the dead. The chaos meant there were significant failings in preserving evidence of gender-based violence and what is coming to be seen as the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war by Hamas.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, overwhelmed by the sheer number of victims, and the burned or disfigured state of some of the bodies, morgues were preoccupied with identification and did not have the time or capacity to test for sexual assault using rape kits, said the police spokesperson Mirit Ben Mayor. Lack of trained personnel was also a problem: according to the Israeli daily Haaretz, there are only seven forensic pathologists in the entire country.

Secondly, all of the eyewitness evidence – as far as This Writer can tell – comes via the Israeli authorities that have been desperate to accuse Hamas of widespread rape and sexual violence since the October 7 attacks took place – as if that can justify their killing of around 25,000 innocent Gazans, including 10,000 children, in response.

In fact, Israel released an enormous mass of propaganda after October 7 – most, if not all, of which was proved to be a pack of lies, as documented on This Site.

That alone makes any new evidence coming from that country and anyone connected with its government, military or other authorities, highly suspicious – especially after more than three months.

Coupled with that must be the fact that the Israeli Defence Forces have been repeatedly accused of rape themselves:

The immediately preceding clip stated that sex crimes against women in the Israeli armed forces were not adequately handled. Following up on that:

The list goes on and on.

Nothing that is said above should be considered to be supporting/condoning rape and sexual violence – of any kind.

It is entirely possible that members of Hamas and the other groups who carried out the October 7 attacks committed sexual crimes as part of them.

But by reeling out false accusations time and time again, the Israeli government and its spokespeople have made it almost impossible to believe the current accusations.

I’m not the only one who thinks this:

And the recorded conduct of the IDF makes this a classic situation of people in the proverbial glass house, throwing stones.

Put it all together and it should be easy to understand why I do not believe the latest claims.

Source: Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks | Israel-Gaza war | The Guardian


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Right-wing news channel falsely accuses Jewish cartoonist of making anti-Semitic cartoon

Michael Rosen: He’s Jewish but has previously been accused of anti-Semitism over his support for Jeremy Corbyn. Now he has been accused of anti-Semitism on an entirely false premise.

We seem to be living in an age of accusing Jewish people of being anti-Semitic.

It’s utter insanity – this time perpetrated by right-wing current affairs channel GB News against Jewish poet and former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen.

It seems GB News presenter Katherine Forster accidentally attributed a cartoon in The Guardian to Mr Rosen, when it was actually by Martin Rowson.

Unfortunately for all concerned, this particular cartoon featured a depiction of recently-resigned BBC Chairman Richard Sharp – who is Jewish – with a box marked Goldman Sachs, where he used to work, that contained what appeared to be a puppet of the current prime minister Rishi Sunak, an animal that looks like a squid and a CV – while Boris Johnson, on a high pile of an unidentifiable substance (the Independent seems to have reckoned money) calls out encouragingly to him.

The cartoon has been described as having “antisemitic imagery” such as “outsized, grotesque features” alongside “money and power”.

Mr Rowson has apologised profusely for the image, as reported in The Independent:

“Satirists, even though largely licenced to speak the unspeakable in liberal democracies, are no more immune to f****** things up than anyone else, which is what I did here.

“I know Richard Sharp is Jewish; actually, while we’re collecting networks of cronyism, I was at school with him, though I doubt he remembers me.

“His Jewishness never crossed my mind as I drew him as it’s wholly irrelevant to the story or his actions, and it played no conscious role in how I twisted his features according to the standard cartooning playbook.”

The Guardian has also published an apology on Twitter:

And the cartoon has indeed been removed.

GB News seems to have been more reticent about apologising for its own transgression.

Mr Rosen contacted the channel – via Twitter – at 4pm on Saturday, and requested a response detailing what it proposed to do about the error:

He repeated his request almost a quarter of an hour later:

From the tweet that follows, it seems GB News deleted its tweeted clip showing discussion of the cartoon, but not before it had been viewed 79,000 times.

At around 5pm, Ms Forster tweeted an apology to Mr Rosen and said the tweet had been removed. He responded with gratitude for her words, and with a statement crystallising his own view – that GB News should broadcast a correction along with its own apology:

He had already requested a correction by the time he had responded to Ms Forster:

By now, his supporters were making suggestions of their own. Mr Rosen, in the spirit of fairness, said he was waiting for GB News to respond:

Then he even put up a suggested wording:

That was at 5.36pm, Saturday, April 29. I’ve seen no apology/correction from GB News – although it has published a story about The Guardian‘s apology for the cartoon.

That piece does not mention or apologise for the broadcast comments about Martin Rowson.

This Site has contacted GB News to find out what the channel intends to do – if anything.

If no apology is forthcoming, it will be up to Mr Rosen to decide whether to take the matter further.


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These newspapers are tying themselves in knots over Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn, writing about Jews including Roza Robota, Szmul Zygielbojm and Anne Frank, in the Holocaust Educational Trust’s book of remembrance.

What has been going on over at The Graun and Observer?

First Sonia Sodha wrote an almost fact-free article suggesting that Keir Starmer was right to say Jeremy Corbyn would not be allowed to stand as a Labour candidate in general elections again, as if Mr Corbyn was somehow responsible for the plethora of (mostly false) accusations of anti-Semitism against the party during his time as leader.

Then The Guardian ran an editorial that was pro-Corbyn.

And then the letters came in – from the usual suspects. The Graun ran a few of them on its letters page.

“It is simply neither sufficient or even accurate to say, as you do, that ‘Mr Corbyn has a formidable record fighting against racism and in speaking up for many persecuted peoples, but in this case he was too slow and too defensive. To show how much better he was than some of his critics allowed, he should have tried harder to engage with their criticisms,'” wrote crossbench Baroness and Rabbi Julia Neuberger.

“The truth is that he was not slow or defensive. He simply did not act. He failed to engage with those who pointed out how toxic the party had become for Jews. He consistently failed to accord antisemitism the status of racism – which it undoubtedly is. He has been selective in those causes he has taken up – and rising antisemitism, including within his own party, apparently was not worth worrying about. Meanwhile, due to his inaction and failure to understand, he made absolutely miserable the lives of several Jewish MPs in his own party. To name but a few, Louise Ellman, Luciana Berger, Margaret Hodge and Ruth Smeeth all had a terrible time and had to put up with the vilest of hate campaigns on social media. Some even left the party.”

None of the immediately preceding paragraph is true. Mr Corbyn did act. He launched a strategy to handle anti-Semitism in 2016 – but due to the reluctance of right-wingers in the party machine, had to wait until his choice of general secretary, Jennie Formby, was installed in 2018 before he could see it put fully into practice. He never denied anti-Semitism within the Labour Party – in fact he accorded it a great deal of importance. And if the named ladies suffered hate campaigns, how many of them were brought on because they had fabricated accusations of anti-Semitism? One example would be Luciana Berger’s claims against Liverpool Riverside CLP; she has yet to provide any evidence of anti-Semitism by any member of that organisation (to my knowledge).

Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote: “It is extraordinary that the Guardian should devote a formal editorial to defending Jeremy Corbyn only three years after his toxic crankery led to the unprecedented shame of an Equality and Human Rights Commission investigation into racism in the Labour party – and a Tory landslide.” His toxic crankery? The EHRC found that efforts to improve Labour’s response to anti-Semitism allegations had been hampered by right-wing factionalists (and did improve after Ms Formby because gensec)… and wasn’t that Tory landscape more to do with Labour’s policy on Brexit – that had been written by a rising shadow minister called Keir Starmer?

He continued: “To suggest his sole fault was that he was ‘too slow and too defensive’ would be laughable if it was not so deliberately dishonest.” I don’t know about deliberate dishonesty but it is mistaken. I’ve already mentioned the reason the Labour Party had been slow to take up Corbyn’s plan to better-handle accusations. As for defensiveness – unless I’m mistaken, several people directly accused Mr Corbyn of anti-Semitism. As he was and remains a lifelong campaigner against discrimination of any kind, it’s possible that he had a right to act defensively.

There was more of the same from Karen Pollock of the Holocaust Educational Trust and Mike Katz of the Jewish Labour Movement (which you don’t have to be either Jewish or a member of Labour to join, unlike Jewish Voice for Labour which, we’re told, is occupied by the wrong kind of Jew – whatever that means).

Only Glyn Turton of Baildon, West Yorkshire – who is not, apparently, a peer or a member of a campaigning organisation – was shown standing up for the former Labour leader.

Even then, the support was lukewarm. “One can surely ask more of Labour than to use up so much political capital in defining itself in opposition to its own past,” he wrote. “There is a graver threat to the country than the political ghost of Corbyn. It is the party currently in office that has brought this nation to the brink of ruin.”

Fortunately for balance, a couple of days later, Jewish barrister Geoffrey Bindman KC, chair of the British Institute of Human Rights and former legal adviser to the Commission for Racial Equality, appeared in the Graun letters page with a more substantial defence:

Here’s a video clip of him saying much the same as he stated above; that from 220 complaints the EHRC could find only two cases of unlawful conduct by people labelled as Labour Party agents – both of whom are challenging the findings in the High Court, that the findings of interference by the party leadership have been questioned in the Forde report, and that the party’s inadequate training of its staff was not a failing of Mr Corbyn:

And then former Labour MP Chris Mullin stepped into the fray to point out that, under Labour rules, Mr Corbyn is fully entitled to put himself forward as a candidate to stand for Islington North Labour at the next election:

So: Keir Starmer was wrong. Mr Corbyn’s detractors were wrong. And it seems Mr Corbyn and his supporters are right. Again.

Source: Do not forget Jeremy Corbyn’s failure on antisemitism | Labour | The Guardian


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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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Dawn Foster: mainstream journalist blacklisted by The Guardian dies aged just 34

Tributes are being made to Dawn Foster, the journalist who was fired from The Guardian for – rightly – identifying centrists as the cancer in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.

Ms Foster has died at the tragically young age of 34, after a long battle with illness.

But it is not her illness that comes across as the most upsetting part of this. Scan down the tributes below and you will see that friends of Ms Foster are incandescent with outrage over the fact that she was blacklisted by The Guardian for writing something we now know to be a clear and demonstrable truth:

That was written about the 2017 general election result, which Labour very nearly won – and, it is believe, would have won if not for centrist saboteurs. They had better luck in the 2019 election, after having carried out two more years of wrecking. Read the full article via the link below.

It should be pointed out that there were some in the Labour Party who rated Ms Foster.

For This Writer, though, the extraordinary thing about her was this perception of her work (with apologies for the strong language, which is not mine):

 

She wasn’t; many, many journalists – including This Writer – criticised Watson continually after his agenda became clear. That was in 2015, so we spent many years doing it.

But we were on the social media and she was in the mainstream. Her blacklisting demonstrates the high degree of censorship carried out by the UK’s media giants.

They really do tell you what to think – and, critically, what not to think.

I’ll close with perhaps the best tribute that I’ve seen, and I hope that everybody reading this will support the sentiments it conveys:

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Hostilities recommence over alleged #Labourantisemitism ahead of EHRC report

After a relatively quiet summer when we all had other things on our mind, it seems the controversy over alleged anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is about to well up all over again.

Hostilities have resumed ahead of publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report on alleged institutional anti-Semitism in the party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

According to The Guardian,

Senior Labour figures are braced for the equalities watchdog to rule that the party acted unlawfully in its treatment of Jewish members.

Sources close to the inquiry said an earlier draft report found evidence of indirect discrimination in the operation of the party’s processes, which would be a breach of equalities law.

A draft report is known to have been shared with the Labour party in July, as well as with a small number of key figures from the Corbyn administration.

There are understood to have been multiple challenges to the draft report and the EHRC’s final conclusions have been kept under wraps.

[Current Labour leader Keir] Starmer is likely to accept all of the report’s recommendations, though a legal challenge to the EHRC’s findings is planned by Jewish supporters of Corbyn if they disagree with its conclusions.

But we should all bear in mind that the anti-Corbyn Graun is widely considered to have played a large part in stirring up the scandal in a bid to see him forced out of the Labour leadership.

As an example of the hostilities that are breaking out, consider the last paragraph quoted above, saying that Jewish supporters of Jeremy Corbyn will launch a legal challenge to the EHRC’s findings if they disagree, and then consider this (with apologies for subjecting you to some vile language):

As you can see, the insults are already flying without a scrap of evidence one way or another.

Source: Labour braces for damning ruling in EHRC antisemitism report | Politics | The Guardian

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Labour goons are trying to get lefties to buckle under to Starmer. Did they miss the last five years?

Keir Starmer: he’s not interested in accommodating left-wingers in Labour; he just wants them to shut up and do as they’re told.

It must be a kind of psychosis. Former Corbyn adviser Andrew Fisher’s outburst in The Guardian is just a symptom.

After spending five years refusing point-blank to accept Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party and follow the new (which was actually a traditional) Labour Party line, these creeps – and their buddie in the media (Graun) – are trying to get lefties to slavishly follow Starmer:

Labour’s left must work constructively with Keir Starmer and resist the temptation to go “back in our sealed tomb”, Jeremy Corbyn’s former policy chief has warned.

Notice the choice of language. Nobody on the left suggested the uptight right-wingers belonged in a “sealed tomb” (although let’s be honest, a fascist rally would be more appropriate).

He said it was the responsibility of senior figures within the party’s left to reassure new members that Corbyn’s replacement would not lead to their marginalisation.

That would be irresponsible because we have already seen leading left-wing figures marginalised (Rebecca Long-Bailey, for example).

Fisher said Starmer’s 10 leadership election pledges, which included commitments on abolishing tuition fees, taxing the wealthy and public ownership, was “still basically our policy programme”.

Not true – Starmer has already reneged on nine out of the 10.

So I don’t believe Fisher, and I don’t think anybody else should either.

The opportunity for the different sides of “broad church” Labour to come together was under the left-wing leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

It can’t happen under right-wingers like Keir Starmer because their attitude is as described in this article’s headline: buckle under or bugger off.

They’re not interested in devising a policy platform that is acceptable to traditional Labour supporters – and good for the country as a whole.

They just want to use rank-and-file Labour subscriptions to line their own pockets. In This Writer’s opinion.

Source: Labour left must work with Starmer or risk ‘return to tomb’, says Corbyn adviser | Politics | The Guardian

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Vox Political writer mentioned in Graun piece on anti-Semitism – where’s my right of reply?

Keir Starmer: he’s clueless about anti-Semitism, as this latest debacle demonstrates.

This is pathetic from the Guardian – and the Labour Party.

It seems a councillor in Brighton and Hove has been suspended by the Labour Party for sharing Facebook posts “promoting alleged anti-Jewish conspiracy theories” – including one on This Site.

The article states:

Labour’s inquiry will also focus on a second post from August 2018 on a website run by Mike Sivier, who was expelled from Labour in the same year after he allegedly refused to undertake antisemitism training.

The headline of that post said: “Jewish Israeli journalist claims pro-Israel propagandists have ‘taken out contract’ to stop Jeremy Corbyn being elected.”

I was not contacted for comment on this, despite the fact that it clearly concerns me and implies that I have been spreading anti-Semitism.

The article – if either of the reporters on this piece (Henry McDonald and Jessica Elgot) had bothered to visit it – quotes the highly-respected award-winning (and occasionally controversial) Jewish journalist Gideon Levy, demonstrating that former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had support among Jews at a time when many – including high-profile members of the Labour Party itself – were claiming he was an anti-Semite.

As Mr Levy is himself Jewish, it could be argued that attacks on his article – or mine that quotes it – are themselves anti-Semitic, by alleging anti-Jewish behaviour by someone who is himself a Jew.

Regarding my own circumstances, regular readers will know it is true that I was expelled from Labour in November 2013, but not because I refused to undertake anti-Semitism training.

The expulsion was based on false accusations by people who had selectively quoted from my articles in order to present a false impression of my views.

There was a hearing involving a tribunal of Labour’s National Constitutional Committee that was nothing short of a kangaroo court; my own evidence was ignored and it was clear to me that the tribunal members had made up their minds before even arriving at the hearing.

I have therefore launched a legal action against the Labour Party – for breach of contract – with the case to be heard at Bristol Civil Justice Centre on October 2.

Guardian reporters are certainly invited to attend, where I expect to win my case.

If I do, it will have a significant impact on perception of the Labour Party’s attitude to allegations of anti-Semitism – and, I hope, to the reporting of this issue in rags like the Graun.

In the meantime, I have contacted The Guardian and expect the newspaper to make an offer of restitution in the near future.

Otherwise it seems I may be forced to consider even more litigation.

Source: Labour suspends Brighton councillor over alleged antisemitism | Politics | The Guardian

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Why is Johnson so popular when he has bungled the coronavirus crisis so badly?


I don’t get it.

A poll out yesterday (April 2) shows that most people believe Boris Johnson and his government have botched their handling of the coronavirus pandemic, endangering lives.

But popularity polls put him and his party at their most popular in years, with more than 50 per cent of people supporting them.

In the name of all that’s decent, why?

And don’t give me the old flannel about the alternative being worse. That’s a false argument; we don’t know that the alternative would be worse and can only judge the situation that we have.

The new poll by Ipsos Mori shows 56 per cent of said the social distancing measures were imposed too late while just four per cent believed they were brought in too soon. A further 35 per cent of respondents said they thought the measures were taken at the right time.

Even so, a majority of those polled said they thought the measures had been effective – while watching death figures increase steadily. This is contradictory; if Johnson brought in the measures too late, then he has endangered lives and they have not been effective.

Other critics are harsher.

“No 10 appears to be enamoured with ‘scientism’ – things that have the cosmetic attributes of science but without its rigour,” wrote Nasim Nicholas Taleb, professor of risk engineering at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering and author of The Black Swan, and Yaneer Bar-Ya, president of the New England Complex System Institute.

“Collective safety and systemic risk are the business of the state. Letting a segment of the population die for the sake of the economy is a false dichotomy – aside from the moral repugnance of the idea.” This is a reference to Dominic Cummings’s favoured ‘herd immunity’ idea that was, in fact, unscientific and would have resulted in the deaths of millions of UK citizens.

“Gambling with the lives of citizens is a professional wrongdoing that extends beyond academic mistake; it is a violation of the ethics of governing,” they concluded.

Foreign commentary has been even more unkind.

“Looking across the Irish Sea I find myself thinking surely now, surely the British can see how they’ve been hoodwinked,” wrote Joe Horgan in the Irish Times [boldings mine].

“Boris Johnson is incompetent in a way that is astonishing even to those of us who thought he was a mere showman charlatan.

“Johnson told you one week to carry on, everything would be fine, and the following week to not step outside the door. For a man so fond of wartime imagery there is one that seems to fit him. An image from WW1 that was used to describe British soldiers in the trenches and the generals that ordered them to their deaths. Lions led by donkeys.”

(Led By Donkeys is, coincidentally – or perhaps not – a UK organisation that ran a billboard campaign highlighting the contradictions of Johnson’s, and other Brexiteers’, words on Brexit.)

“Much like those generals, Johnson’s initial idea of herd immunity seemed willing to sacrifice thousands of you only for him to turn around in the middle of no man’s land and run for cover.

“Of all the European leaders he has looked the most out of his depth, the most shallow, and vacuous. These are dark times and rambling verbal buffoonery looks as essentially useless as it essentially is.”

He concluded that he felt the Irish people had been lucky, and: “I dearly hope you, our neighbours, our friends, and our family, on the other side of the Irish Sea, I dearly hope you get lucky too.” Because luck is all that can save us from Johnson’s disastrous policy blunders.

Perhaps most cutting was the New York Times.

“Boris Johnson has spent decades preparing for his lead role, honing his adopted character, perfecting his mannerisms, gauging the reactions to his performance and adjusting it for maximum effect,” wrote Jenni Russell in that publication.

“Now he has the national stage and the rapt audience he always craved… throughout these last weeks as the coronavirus crisis became apparent to everyone in Britain, Mr. Johnson has been indecisive, contradictory, confused and confusing, jovial when he should be grave, muddled when a frightened nation desperately needs him to be clear.

“The man picked for his supposed talents as a great communicator has stumbled his way through news conferences, occasionally hitting with evident relief upon a jolly riff he finds familiar.

“In the rare moments when he has struck the right note, he unerringly hits a jarring one minutes, hours or days later. His switches of strategy and his lack of clarity left far too many Britons oblivious to the importance of social distancing until far too late.

“As the virus spread into Europe in mid-February, an alert prime minister would have taken immediate charge, turbocharging preparations, aware that a possible pandemic posed a grave danger to Britain. Instead, he vanished from public view for 12 days, most of it spent on a private holiday with his pregnant fiancée at a palatial country house.

“It was only at the end of February, with 80,000 known coronavirus cases worldwide and the World Health Organization on the edge of declaring a pandemic, that Mr. Johnson began to wake up. By that time there were 20 confirmed cases and one death in Britain already — and surely many more coming.

“On Feb. 28, after the FTSE index had suffered its biggest one-week fall since 2008, Mr. Johnson finally said the virus was the country’s top priority. Only not enough of a priority, it turned out, for him to start work on it that weekend. He could have convened an immediate meeting of the government’s top emergency committee, Cobra, but he postponed it to Monday, as if the virus’s unseen and exponential spread would also be taking the weekend off.

“The next week Mr. Johnson announced that “we should all basically just go about our normal daily lives’’ so long as we washed our hands for 20 seconds, several times a day. It was advice he immediately undermined by boasting cheerfully that he was still shaking hands, as he had indeed done at a hospital with several virus patients just days before. He did not recommend stopping.

“Two days later, as Italy and Spain were shutting down, pleading for other countries not to repeat their mistakes, Mr. Johnson was explaining jauntily that one of the options for handling the virus was not to close schools or sporting events but to “take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking as many draconian measures.” The policy, it was later revealed, was to encourage “herd immunity.” That implied some 40 million people getting ill and another 800,000 ending up in intensive care.

“It was instantly apparent to an aghast public that a creaking, underfunded health service with fewer than 5,000 intensive-care beds; an acute shortage of ventilators, masks, suits and gloves; an inadequate testing capacity; and a disease running free would fall apart just as Italy’s had done.”

Was it? His opinion poll ratings seem to suggest otherwise – in defiance of reason.

““Herd immunity” was quietly reversed. Suddenly restrictions started piling on, but sometimes only as recommendations: 14-day isolations, a warning against pubs, restaurants, theaters; a ban on mass gatherings; school closings. Each day brought new shocks as the government ran to catch up. Each day it acted as if taken by surprise by the virus’s spread.

“Mr. Johnson found it impossible to maintain either consistency or seriousness. He delighted in describing cutting peak death rates as “squashing the sombrero” and declared with verve that we would soon “send coronavirus packing.” He has veered among solemnity, evident boredom and grins, as if his virus briefings were the Boris Johnson Entertainment Show, not the grimmest of necessary broadcasts.

“He said the elderly must be protected from contact, then declared he hoped to visit his mother. Desperate doctors and nurses were warning of imminent disaster, and some of his cabinet were in revolt at his failure to grip the crisis, risk his jolly image and order Britain closed. On Monday, finally, he had to announce that Britain’s lockdown had begun.

“Even then, at this time of profound national fear and disorientation, Mr. Johnson could not speak with gravitas, only with the odd, stagy emphasis of a man pretending while half his mind is elsewhere. His whole political appeal has always rested on his capacity for artful ambiguity, for never necessarily meaning anything he says, for amusing and uplifting people, for avoiding hard facts. It’s what he knows, but not what we need.”

(Apologies to the NYTimes for quoting so much of the article but the facts it contains, and the conclusions it draws, should be drawn to the attention of the UK’s population.)

Given all of these criticisms, it is perhaps unsurprising that Mr Johnson has decided that discretion is the better part of cowardice and is remaining in retreat from the public.

Apparently he still has coronavirus symptoms and is therefore continuing his self-isolation.

Some of us are sceptical, including This Site’s old friend Samuel Miller.

He said Johnson “may stay inside a fridge” – referring to the incident in which our great and illustrious prime minister hid inside a refrigerator to escape having to answer difficult questions.

That’s Boris Johnson for you. That’s the prime minister we elected. A man who spouts nonsense at us and then runs away and hides.

And the people, we’re told, love him for this genocidal stupidity.

In the name of all that’s decent, why?

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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Windrush victims may be unhappy but Philip Rutnam was right to quit over MP bullying

Sir Philip Rutnam: he was contractually obliged to carry out the orders of the Tory government; he didn’t make those orders.

The Guardian has published a comment piece criticising Sir Philip Rutnam for his decision to quit as permanent secretary – de facto boss of civil servants – at the Home Office over bullying by Priti Patel.

Columnist Amelia Gentleman reports that some consider it offensive that, by contrast, he could preside over – for example – the “hostile environment” that led to the Windrush Scandal with no concerns.

The criticism is understandable, but wide of the mark because of one fundamental point:

Civil servants put into effect the decisions of Parliament. They do not have a say in those decisions.

So Sir Philip had to enact the policies of David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson that created the “hostile environment”, Windrush and all the other scandals because, as a civil servant, he had no choice.

Ms Gentleman suggests that he should have spoken up to get the Tories to change the harsh – racist, in my opinion – policies that they were ordering him to carry out. But who says he didn’t?

That would have been a private discussion that he or his officers would have had with the relevant Tory MPs. We would not have been told about it because civil servants put into effect the decisions of Parliament.

The decisions of Parliament, of course, are mostly dictated by the government of the day, and we have a Tory government.

And who has been able to persuade a Tory to change their mind?

But leading civil servants do have a duty to protect their subordinates and themselves from mistreatment.

So, if the allegations are correct, Sir Philip was right to highlight that civil servants in his department, including himself, had been mistreated by Home Secretary Priti Patel; to point out that this behaviour apparently had the support of the prime minister; and to take legal action over it.

It might be an uncomfortable fact, but a fact is what it is.

If you’re angry about a government policy, don’t blame the civil service for it.

Blame the government you elected.

Source: Victims of the Windrush scandal have little time for complaints about bullying at the Home Office | Amelia Gentleman | Opinion | The Guardian

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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