Tag Archives: news

The news in tweets: Saturday, July 15, 2023

Boris Johnson: for such an apparent social media junkie, he seems remarkably inept at using a mobile phone. Could he be lying yet again?

How long until the Covid Inquiry and courts realise Boris Johnson is just withholding his phone and have him arrested?

I’m betting it never happens.

He’s said he can’t get into the phone to access its WhatsApps because of security issues, and that might work with people who don’t know anything about how these things work.

As for those who do…

 

If you or I were withholding this information, in contempt of a High Court order, we’d be arrested pronto.

Why is Boris Johnson still free?

If you’ve lost track of why it’s important…

So, isn’t it time the authorities took action? Why haven’t they?

And here’s a very perceptive comment:

Labour loses one of its safest council seats to left-winger who was expelled from that party

 

Here’s a taxation strategy that makes sense – so of course none of the main political parties is interested

Railways minister refuses to apologise after misleading MPs on the impact of closing ticket offices

Huw Merriman said no railway station would be unstaffed after the government-backed changes are imposed – but this is not true.

Reeves criticises Tory cost-of-living failures – but Labour won’t make anything better

The trouble with this comment by the Shadow Chancellor is that Labour isn’t offering any help for the people facing these difficulties. All she or her fellow Substitute Tories will say is that they’ll need to consider the nation’s finances when they get into power.

Not good enough.

Is this the reason school absenteeism is rising?

Education Secretary who hasn’t bothered to study the facts behind the junior doctors’ pay dispute dares to say their pay demand is ‘unreasonable’

MPs’ pay has fallen from its level 15 years ago – but only by a negligible amount, and MPs are nothing like as skilled as junior doctors (as Ms Keegan’s performance amply shows).

But junior doctors’ pay has been pushed through the floor over the same period of time.

Ms Keegan doesn’t even try to make an argument justifying this. Perhaps she knows that no argument can.

That’s especially true when you consider her total failure to support a claim that strike action doesn’t work:

Let’s remember that the government is spending three times as much extra money on agency fees because it isn’t employing enough doctors as it would if it paid junior doctors what they want.

The Tory government’s strategy simply doesn’t make sense.

Possibly the most damning argument is the fact that Conservative MPs habitually pay their unqualified friends and cronies more than highly-skilled public sector workers. For example:

Felicity Mercer doesn’t deserve more money than a junior doctor. Whatever she does for her husband in his Parliamentary office, it doesn’t merit higher pay than a medical professional. But she gets it. And that is unacceptable.

British people resorting to pulling their own teeth with pliers is a scandal – but this comment is almost perfect

The inability to access NHS dentists is indicative of the failure of privatisation in the health service, of course.

Also:

It’s a very good question, considering the fact that there’s so much more money around now than there was then. Where is it all going?

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The news in tweets: Sunday, July 2, 2023

An average-sized class at a state-run school in England, due to teachers quitting over pay? No, not really. But it seems Labour doesn’t have any answers to the exodus from the blackboard because Labour won’t offer a decent pay rise either.

Vox Political is changing focus slightly – to concentrate (if possible) on the undercurrents that are driving the major political issues facing the United Kingdom (and, where appropriate, the rest of the world).

It isn’t an easy shift for This Writer. I’m going to be thinking that I’m missing important matters if I’m not writing about them all the time.

So here’s a compromise: The news in tweets (or whatever other means it comes to me).

The idea is to have something denoting the political stories of the day, even if I’m not actually devoting any time to actually analysing what’s going on.

Perhaps if you think I should go in-depth on a particular topic, you could comment in and let me know?

Let’s see what’s been happening on Sunday, July 2, 2023:

Labour ‘more Tory than Tories’ on teachers’ pay

Contradictorily, the BBC is reporting that Labour wants to give teachers a £2,400 bonus to keep them from quitting, and would restore the requirement for new teachers to have a formal teaching qualification or be working towards one – a demand that the Coalition (Conservative/Liberal Democrat) government scrapped in 2012 to allow unqualified teachers to take jobs in their disastrous “Free Schools” experiment.

Sunak said to have reduced university funding because students don’t vote Tory

Michael Howard reckons it was right to privatise water

The gist is that water was far down the list for investment under the Thatcher Conservative government, and privatisation was the best way to get that utility the investment it needed.

He’s wrong, of course, because we know now that privatisation didn’t launch a flood (sorry) of investment. In fact, shareholders have taken nearly twice as much from privatised water firms as they put in, while putting no money at all towards restoring the crumbling Victorian infrastructure.

The expectation is that the losses will be underwritten by the public purse, while the money we pay in our bills will go into the bank accounts of private shareholders. It’s a con-job; a racket.

Leading (alleged) figures in anti-Corbyn witch-hunt named

These are allegations; use your own judgement when watching the documentary – as you should when watching anything the BBC etc have put out about this.

Labour to abstain on anti-BDS Bill to help Israel

The anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Bill is clearly an attempt to clamp down on the freedom of people in the United Kingdom to make their own choices about whether to support governments of foreign countries that act in repressive ways.

As such, it should be opposed. Write to your MP via TheyWorkForYou.com or WriteToThem.com and make it clear that the people of the UK should not have their choices dictated by their government (or, as it seems in this case, a completely different country’s government).

Rishi Sunak wants unqualified people to be your dentists

Seriously!

Would he let somebody who isn’t a fully-qualified dentist work on his own teeth? I don’t think so.

Therefore he should not be foisting such people on the rest of us. This is more Tory “One Rule For Us”-ism.

Does anybody remember the “Backstreet Dentists” skit from satire show The Day Today?

Energy bills to stay high to give shareholders more fat profits

Home Office places lone child in hotel where others have gone missing

Clearly the decision-maker needs to be put under the spotlight and made to explain their intention in exposing a nine-year-old child to this risk.

If that doesn’t happen, you need to draw the logical conclusion about your government’s attitude to child trafficking.

Nigel Farage is cut off from his bank account. Why?

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The news in Tweets – Tuesday, June 6, 2023

The number of stories linked below seems to be proliferating. Is it because UK society is increasingly breaking down while corruption is increasing?

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The news in tweets: June 5, 2023

Is the Tory government scared of sanctioning Alexander Lebedev because his son Evgeny is a Tory peer?

Here’s what you should be reading but I haven’t got time to write about:

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The news in (very) brief from Vox Political

[Image: Black Triangle Campaign].

No time for summaries as I’ve been working on the Covid Inquiry saga all day.

Here are links to other stories I’ve noticed as well:

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CALL FOR COMMENT: what do you think of this video idea?

WHERE ARE YOU ALL?

Right before the first Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020, This Site scored its highest-ever hit count with more than 178,000 views.

Now, Vox Political is lucky to get 3,000 views per day.

All those readers can’t have died out in the pandemic, and the site’s quality hasn’t changed, so something must have changed.

Colleagues on sites like Another Angry Voice are adamant that the social media giants – Facebook, Twitter and so on – have used algorithms to divert readers away from us.

They have suggested that this was at the request of right-wing politicians who don’t like our views, or of mass media publishers who were losing readers (and sales) to us.

The latter would amount to interference in the marketplace, so I’m wondering if there is an official course of action to be taken over it…

Alternatively, some have said that our negative coverage of the government’s activities during the Covid-19 pandemic may have triggered political interference intended to put us out of business.

Whatever is true, we need to find ways to reverse the trend – because people need to have factual information about current affairs, now more than ever.

So I’m trying a new thing and I’d like you to comment on it – and that includes all you lurkers who read but don’t usually say anything!

I’m thinking of creating short videos on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and anywhere else anyone can think of, to compliment articles on the Vox Political website – as summaries of the longer articles here.

The aim is to – I believe the term is ‘funnel’ – readers into the site via alternative routes to Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s a sample I created, using a recent story:

The question I’m putting to you is simple, and twofold: first, is this a good way of generating interest? And secondly, is it worth seeing in its own right?

I’ve used Wave Video’s free generator to make this one; if anyone has recommendations for better options, then I’d like to hear what they are.

Comment, please, down below.

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Media spin – a lie – makes it seem the UK has beaten the EU over Northern Ireland

How childish.

It seems the media are trying to make it seem that the UK has won a victory over the European Union in proposing a way to end the deadlock over how goods get to – and pass through – Northern Ireland on their way to the Republic (EU) or the rest of the UK.

In fact, the plan was proposed by the EU in 2021 and rejected by the then-UK government, headed by Boris Johnson.

Rishi Sunak’s administration has merely resurrected it and put it back before the EU, whose representatives are quite happy to go along with it – because they suggested it in the first place!

Here’s Maximilien Robespierre to tell you a little more:

And here’s Phil Moorhouse of A Different Bias, who goes a little further into detail about the way the media – both here and in Ireland – have been whitewashing the facts:

How can you trust a government that tries to gaslight you into thinking it has won a victory over other nations, with their own strategy – or national news media that go along with the lie?

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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MPs on the take: £17.1 MILLION earned from extra jobs since 2019 election – mostly by Tories

This is a huge exposure of the amount of cash being made by MPs – mostly Conservatives. When they should be representing our best interests, they are lining their own pockets.

Sky News – yes, Sky News – has teamed up with Tortoise Media to peel back the veil covering MPs’ extra money: their earnings from second jobs, gifts and donations to individuals and political parties.

As the blurb for the video clip states,

The Westminster Accounts draw together information from several public sources and – for the first time – make it all available to the public in one place.

And it shows that since the last election in 2019, MPs earned £17.1m on top of their regular salaries, with around two thirds of the money going to just 20 MPs, including two former prime ministers.

Search for your MP with our special tool: https://news.sky.com/story/westminste…

Here’s the clip itself:

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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An alternative view of PMQs – and it echoes Vox Political

I promised to publish alternative takes on Prime Minister’s Questions – and here’s one now.

But it doesn’t say much that I haven’t already.

There’s a bit of context: Rishi Sunak recycled lots of Boris Johnson’s old lines against the Labour Party because he was coached by Michael Gove, apparently.

But much of the rest of the commentary follows This Writer’s initial take, as PMQs was happening:

What do you think?

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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‘Enough is Enough’ protests take place across the UK – and go reported everywhere but here

Here’s yet another indictment against the UK’s news media:

Fortunately there has been some coverage on the social media. Want to see some?

Here’s the RMT’s Mick Lynch:

Eddie Dempsey:

Jeremy Corbyn:

NHS Doctor Rita Issa:

So: 10,000 people came to the event in London alone, and it wasn’t worth reporting on the BBC (apparently).

Dozens more events took place across the UK and they weren’t worth reporting either (apparently).

Perhaps we should all switch to foreign news outlets, like “nurseybird”?

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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