Tag Archives: post

Rishi Sunak caught misleading us about ‘stopping the boats’ AGAIN

Rishi Sunak and his priorities: he won’t stop the boats by changing UK law, it seems.

Check out the ‘context note’ beneath Rishi Sunak’s latest tweets about ‘stopping the boats’:

“Non-refoulement” is “the practice of not forcing refugees or asylum seekers to return to a country in which they are liable to be subjected to persecution”.

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It is indeed a fundamental principle of international law, meaning that the UK is prohibited from sending refugees who come here to another country from which they may be returned to the country from which they originally came.

This Writer can’t see how changing UK law will change our obligation in international law.

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Tory clowns: their plan to cut post-Brexit red tape has created MORE of it

Red tape Britain: and the Tories are making it worse.

This will be hilarious in hindsight. Not so funny now, though:

Plans to cut down needless regulations by reviewing policies every two years have faced criticism from Whitehall departments who claim the proposals will be time consuming and burdensome.

It was hoped the proposals would help businesses but cutting needless regulation, however civil servants have warned the requirement will increase administrative burdens on departments.

The Department for Transport and the Department for Levelling Up would oppose the changes.

So plans to cut down on needless regulation are in fact creating more needless regulation.

What typical Tory incompetence.

Even when they mean to do what they say, they cock it up.

Source: Post-Brexit government reforms to cut red tape face civil service backlash – for ‘creating more red tape’

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Tories plan to rig local elections with change from proportional representation to FPTP

The Conservatives are planning to make it easier for them to win local elections by changing the voting system to make it less representative.

Currently, elections for Combined Authority mayors, the mayor of London and police and crime commissioners are carrried out using a version of proportional representation which takes into account the preferences of people whose first choices do not have the highest number of votes.

Two candidates go through to the second round if no one gets more than 50 per cent of the primary vote.

A winner is then chosen from the remaining two by taking preferences into account from the voters who chose eliminated candidates as their first preference.

This means that everybody’s vote helps to influence the result – but the Conservatives lose out.

That’s why they want to change the system to FPTP – “First Past The Post” – in which the party winning the most votes in a single round of voting wins the election, even if it doesn’t have the support of a majority of the people.

Priti Patel announcing the plan to change the system, lied that the British people had rejected proportional representation in a referendum in 2011.

She was wrong. The public endorsed FPTP only for general elections, because the referendum was focused only on them.

The intention is clear: the Tories are going to rig local elections to ensure that they have the best chance of winning.

The London School of Economics has warned that the change could wipe out the accountability of a London mayor (for example) by removing small parties like the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party from the London Assembly, which holds the mayor to account.

And London Labour warned,

For the Tory Government to impose a change to the electoral system without first asking the views of Londoners in a follow-up referendum demonstrates their breathtaking arrogance and their utter disdain for devolution.

Fortunately for democracy, any change to electoral systems will have to be approved by Parliament via legislation, and this cannot happen before the local elections – including the London mayoral election – on May 6 this year.

Just watch how quickly the Tories try to impose the change if they lose that election!

Source: Government plans to change London mayor elections to First Past the Post : CityAM

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Facebook HAS been filtering out left-wing news. Is it time to check your settings? 

Facebook: presumably, all the silhouetted people here have been cut off from the left-wing news-related articles they wanted to read and are wandering aimlessly in search of them. Isn’t it time this interference was ended?

The social media platform Facebook has confirmed that it knowingly changed its news algorithms to filter out sites like Vox Political from your feeds.

The claim is that this was in response to pressure from right-wingers who claimed that they were being victimised.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, Mark Zuckerberg.

This lopsided treatment appears to have continued: SKWAWKBOX readers have reported posts they have shared disappearing from their newsfeeds, ‘see first’ settings disappearing in spite of repeated attempts to prioritise the page’s updates and other anomalies when they try to view or share news.

If you get your links to articles by This Site, or Skwawkbox, or The Canary, or any of the other left-wing sites via Facebook, it seems now would be a good time to check that the system hasn’t messed with your preference settings.

Alternatively, why not cut out the middle man altogether?

In the right-hand column of this page (if you’re using a computer) there’s a section marked “SUBSCRIBE VIA EMAIL”. It’s easy to use and won’t take more than a minute of your time.

Then you can be sure of receiving the articles you want to see. Isn’t that better than letting some faceless Facebook fascist separate you from what you want to see?

Source: Confirmed: Facebook changed its system to filter out left news from user feeds while leaving right untouched – SKWAWKBOX

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Now Iain Duncan Smith has received something intimidating in a brown envelope

Iain Duncan Smtih: apparently the ‘pick’ of Tory candidates for Chingford.

Iain Duncan Smith is formerly the Conservative Work and Pensions secretary who oversaw the transformation of the DWP from a support system into a mechanism for brutalising the poor.

It is on his watch that millions of unemployed, sick and disabled people developed a phobia of the infamous brown envelopes.

They became terrified of opening the letters, fearing that they contained announcements that their benefits were being sanctioned, cancelled altogether, or that they were to be re-assessed.

Now Mr Duncan Smith has received an intimidating brown envelope of his own.

It contained the decomposing remains of a rat – presumably a comment about what the sender thinks of the recipient.

But if it was intended to be intimidating, it didn’t work. Mr Duncan Smith simply used it to play the victim – and to blame the Labour Party and its supporters.

The reference to “kinder, gentler politics” is a clear attack on Jeremy Corbyn’s aspiration, when he became Labour leader in 2015, to encourage the Conservatives to be less confrontational and divisive.

Mr Corbyn’s wish did not come true because of people like Iain Duncan Smith.

None of Mr Duncan Smith’s complaints can be laid at Labour’s door and some are plain hypocritical.

The Tories are masters of smear tactics; we know that Mr Corbyn is the most-smeared UK political leader of all time.

(For example, when I used a search engine to find a reference to the smears against Mr Corbyn, look what was top of the results – because the Tories had paid for it to be there:

Hypocrisy.)

This writer does not approve of what happened.

Stunts like this simply give Mr Duncan Smith the opportunity to demand sympathy; he’s the victim here, right?

But he also has much to answer for, and should be brought to justice.

The best way to do that is to ensure he is voted out of Parliament.

Then we can seek justice for all the misery and death his policies have caused.

Source: Iain Duncan Smith is sent dead decomposing rat in post | The Independent

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Pendle councillor posted racism when she meant to delete it? Don’t dis-‘respect’ our intelligence, Brandon Lewis!

Brandon Lewis: If you can say whatever you like and expect to be believed in a post-truth world, he’s living evidence that we’re living in it.

If there’s one thing Conservatives do well, it’s standing their ground – especially in the face of undeniable evidence.

Consider Brandon Lewis, the Tory chairman who tore up his own ‘respect’ pledge  –

– by supporting Rosemary Carroll, newly re-elected councillor for Pendle, who compared people of Asian origin with dogs.

Mr Lewis told Sky‘s Sophy Ridge: “This was a situation that occurred last year, actually, in June last year. Her position has been from the very beginning that she accidentally posted something she wanted to delete. She was suspended by the party at that point – for three months.”

So she has been a Conservative councillor again for eight months? That is not what we have heard! And the claim about the post itself is handled very well by David Lammy:

That it is.

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Ministry of Justice loses secret information that was sent through the post

The death of Mark Duggan (inset) led to the riots of 2011 [Image: Daily Telegraph].

The death of Mark Duggan (inset) led to the riots of 2011 [Image: Daily Telegraph].

The Ministry of Justice has admitted that data from three semi-secret inquiries has gone missing on discs that were – get this – lost in the post.

According to the BBC, the missing material – which the Ministry of Justice says went missing after being sent in the post – relates to three investigations that examined the roles of police in the death of members of the public.

Two inquiries relate to fatal police shootings of crime suspects in London – Mark Duggan and Azelle Rodney. The third relates to the 1997 murder of Robert Hamill in Northern Ireland, which campaigners allege involved the collusion of police officers.

In each inquiry there were witnesses, including police officers, who were given anonymity because of possible threats to their safety – but officials have refused to confirm whether any of the missing documents include personal information relating to these witnesses.

This is yet another bungle by a failing Ministry of Justice under a failing Justice Minister – in fact, his nickname is an admission of this: Chris ‘Failing’ Grayling.

The Azelle Rodney case involved a mid-level career criminal who was shot dead by armed officers of the Metropolitan Police on April 30, 2005. In July 2013 a judicial inquiry found that the Authorised Firearms Officer who fired the fatal shots had “no lawful justification” for opening fire. The case was referred to the Crown Prosecution Service to determine whether a prosecution should be launched. On July 30, 2014, the CPS announced that they had made the decision to charge the officer with murder.

We should all remember the case of Mark Duggan. He was the young man whose death sparked the riots in London – and subsequently across the UK – in the summer of 2011. The official story of Duggan’s death has undergone numerous changes, drawing criticism and suspicion from Duggan’s family, residents of Tottenham, and other supporters. These critics accuse police of misconduct and of failing to cooperate with investigating Duggan’s death. Shortcomings in the police response have also been blamed for stoking the riots, and for fueling ongoing discontent, with Duggan’s supporters stating “there can be no peace without justice”.

(Information on both these cases is from Wikipedia).

If this writer was entrusted with the delivery of documents that may include material identifying key witnesses who had been given public anonymity, the last thing I’d consider is sending it via the recently-privatised Royal Mail!

There is huge potential for – let’s call it – mischief in this matter – and we cannot discount the possibility that the Tory-run Ministry of Justice is behind some of it.

We may await the ‘outing’ of some of these anonymous witnesses with a sense of inevitability.