This video is great fun, so let’s all enjoy Kwasi Kwarteng being discomfited by his own idiocies.
Best bit for This Writer? When someone congratulates the Tory government on its overnight transformation of 10 Downing Street – from a nightclub to a casino.
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The royal and the republican: King Charles III meets Sinn Fein leader Michell O’Neill. The comments about the largest party in Stormont took place seconds later.
Here’s some good – if well-used – advice for DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson from the owner of the Maximilien Robespierre YouTube channel: “Never meet your heroes; you’ll be disappointed.”
He was referring to the moment when King Charles III met the leaders of the two largest political parties in the Northern Ireland Assembly and mentioned to Sinn Fein leader Michelle O’Neill that he was aware that her republican party now has more members there than any other.
It was a direct snub for Donaldson and the unionist DUP, which had been the largest party from the Stormont Assembly’s inception until its most recent elections, and which is now delaying the resumption of devolved democracy there with a row over the Brexit-related Northern Ireland Protocol.
The Monarch’s words may have been unintentionally harsh – or they may have been a hint that democracy should be respected, the power-sharing agreement should be resumed, with Sinn Fein as (nominal) leader rather than the DUP, and they should sort out their differences by other means.
Or we may all be reading far too much into them.
Here’s the Maximilien Robespierre clip…
What do you think?
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Inferno: the exploding Land Rover damaged the gates beyond repair.
At a time of worldwide animal extinctions and potentially irreparable damage to the ecosystem, what kind of psychopath firebombs the house of a conservationist who campaigns to save our wildlife?
Shockingly, masked intruders parked a Land Rover outside a Hampshire house belonging to TV naturalist Chris Packham last weekend and set fire to it. This was the day before he was due to deliver a 100,000-signature petition to Buckingham Palace, calling for the Royal Family to conserve nature on Crown estates and to reintroduce species like beavers and wild boar.
Mr Packham himself has attributed the attack to online trolls:
Here is one of the good souls on this ailing planet doing his utmost to protect the life in it and on it and yet has to deal with this hate.He needs as much support as we can all give. https://t.co/byNNlxHWpn
He said: “These people are angry at some of the things that I campaign against.” He campaigns against the wilful destruction of our natural environment! How can anybody be angry about that?
Sadly, This Writer can understand and sympathise with much of his experience with online trolls.
It is very easy to whip up extreme hatred on (for example) Twitter. I’m currently fighting a court case against another TV personality, who claims that her own behaviour on that platform didn’t encourage her Twitter followers to bully and intimidate a teenage girl with mental health problems. My question is simple: if she didn’t focus her followers on that girl, who does she say did?
Mr Packham says the social media companies have done nothing to enable justice or prevent hatred from being whipped up, and I am (again) inclined to agree.
But the Tory government is (allegedly) putting legislation through Parliament to change that. The Online Harms Bill will propose penalties for such behaviour.
I am eagerly awaiting it. Depending on what measures are finally imposed, it may be the best thing this Tory government does.
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Realisation dawns: as he reads the passage chosen for him at the Battle of Britain commemoration service in Westminster Abbey, Boris Johnson discovers that the Church of England is trolling him.
Whoever chose the reading for Boris Johnson at Sunday’s commemoration of the Battle of Britain is a genius.
The service at Westminster Abbey celebrated the 80th anniversary of the crucial World War II battle:
A special #BattleofBritain80 service was held this morning at Westminster Abbey to commemorate the 80th anniversary of this crucial battle in World War 2.
The UK’s performing monkey prime minister Boris Johnson attended and gave a reading – but after he reportedly complained about having trouble making ends meet on his more than £150,000-a-year salary, it seems someone responsible for the order of service decided to have a laugh:
“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”
The church should be giving more of this kind of leadership.
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Simon Pegg: This Writer may have looked much the same when I saw some of the responses to his suggestion – but more frowny.
This man deserves better:
Simon Pegg, the actor and writer who brought us Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, has been berated by members of the public for suggesting the rich should pay higher taxes.
He is among 120 signatories of an open letter asking millionaires and billionaires to join calls for higher taxes on very wealthy people, and for international reforms to stop tax dodging.
Writing in The Times, he stated: “Inequality is not inevitable, it’s a policy choice.”
“It’s the product of governments passing policies that favour the very wealthy at the expense of the less fortunate,” he wrote.
He said the rate of poverty reduction had halved since 2013, whereas in the past decade the number of billionaires had doubled.
And he stated that inequality was the driving force behind both societal breakdown and the “climate crisis we face”.
And what response did he get?
It’s always good to see Hollywood luvvies tell us what they think. They’re always so virtuous and right….
Easy to say when the most pro-elite/rich/oligarch/rent-seeker government in decades are in power & you know there's a zero chance of tax increases on the rich materializing…
Some have said that this army of opposition is a classic example of “turkeys voting for Christmas” because it is a contradiction for poor people to demand that an unequal system continues to benefit the super-rich.
But it’s actually worse than that.
I chose the above selection of tweets at random, but take a look at the profiles of the people writing them.
I don’t think any of them are genuine. I think they are all Tory-supporting troll accounts, set up to gaslight us.
The names are (generally) pseudonyms; the profile pictures (if any are there) are of things, not people; the accounts have mostly existed for many years but have few followers and aren’t following many others either.
Those are classic Twitter troll characteristics.
It looks like the (alleged) Conservative Party Twitter army got wind of this story and mobilised the troops to trash it before it could gain traction.
Are you going to let that happen?
How about visiting the itv.com tweet and posting some support for Simon, to counter the flood from nonexistent trolls?
That’s what I’ve done.
I notice the vast majority of responses here are from Tory Twitter trolls, attacking this excellent idea.
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The Burger King fast food franchise has mocked Conservative leader Boris Johnson’s lies – by putting its own whopper on the side of a bus.
The advert has appeared on a red London bus. Alongside a picture of a burger, the text reads: “Another Whopper on the side of a bus. Must be an election.”
It is a dig at Mr Johnson, who supported the false claim of Vote Leave in the EU referendum campaign, that the UK sent £350 million a week to the EU.
Mr Johnson said the money could be better-spent on the NHS.
The claim was false, and was widely criticised with UK Statistics Authority chairman Sir David Nosgrove describing it as a “clear misuse” of official figures”.
A Burger King spokesman said: “As the Home of the Whopper, we felt that if anyone has the right to stick whoppers on the side of a bus, it’s us.”
For details of further whoppers told by Boris Johnson, read the Conservative manifesto.
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Isn't it hilarious that representatives of a party that fixed Parliamentary terms, in order to stay in power for the maximum possible time, is saying we should have an early election – because it's hamstrung by its own rules? #UKPolitics#PoliticsLive#ConservativeConference2019
They triggered a multitude of responses from Twitter users who seemed unwilling to go by their real names, didn’t want to produce a photograph of themselves, weren’t interested in following many people and hadn’t accrued more than a handful of followers, despite having been around, in some cases, since 2011!
Some were extremely ill-mannered so I will not repeat them here.
Then I received this: “I call these trolls #borisbot. If you look back to the first tweets you’ll find there’s nothing political, just ordinary stuff. I guess either hacked or bought accounts, so who’s running them?”
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The editor of the BBC’s live politics programmes, including Politics Live, has made a fool of himself trying to defend Laura Kuenssberg.
Ms Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, caused the father of a sick one-week-old girl to be dogpiled by supporters of Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson (yes, apparently some still exist) when she tweeted that Omar Salem was a “Labour activist”.
In rushed Rob Burley, who edits BBC TV shows which feature Ms Kuenssberg, to tweet the following:
2) The information about their political views would be part of the picture and it’s perfectly proper for journalists to provide that information. It’s not a judgement on the person’s sincerity or argument but a fact.
It’s a very interesting point, coming as it does from the editor of a show that has the opportunity to provide information about the political views of people appearing on Politics Live every weekday and also on Sundays, but doesn’t.
This Writer anticipates a flurry of tweets outing the guests on that show, from now on.
Today (September 20), the show’s listing suggests that panellists will include Sherelle Jacobs (Telegraph columnist, rabidly Leave-supporting), Liam Halligan (Sunday Telegraph economics columnist, right-wing), Zing Tsjeng (executive editor of Vice UK, which refused to recognise the National Union of Journalists when its employees voted to unionise – even though the company’s branches in the US had unionised), and Trevor Phillips (former EHRC chairman, Blairite Labour). Will any of them be listed as such?
And what about Ms Kuenssberg’s own political views? They must also be “part of the picture” and it would be “perfectly proper” for Mr Burley to provide that information. Perhaps he had not carried out his own “thought experiment”, as he has never done so.
What about Jo Coburn’s political loyalties, or Andrew Neil’s? Or Faisal Islam’s, as he was set to host Politics Live today?
And of course Mr Burley failed to acknowledge that Ms Kuenssberg had flagged up Mr Salem’s Twitter address to her followers with the message “This is him!”, so they all knew who to dogpile.
At the very least, as Mike Harding points out, it’s “whataboutery”:
I think it would have been relevant had he been planted there and not been primarily the father of a sick kid. The fact that Bojo stumbled on him while looking for a photo op says it all. In Ireland they call your tweet “whataboutery”. A glib turning of the story to suit oneself.
And it was also a successful bid to drag attention away from the issue that Mr Salem had raised – the diabolical underfunding of the National Health Service, endangering the lives of newborn children, by a government of hypocrites who then used it for a photo opportunity to pretend that everything is hunky-dory.
While Mr Salem has been dogpiled and Ms Kuenssberg reviled, Boris Johnson has sailed away, back into his “la-la land” of lies.
When will he be challenged over the issues raised by Mr Salem?
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Laura Kuenssberg: Rather than report on deficiencies at an NHS hospital caused by Tory underfunding, she triggered a Twitter dogpile on a member of the public who challenge Boris Johnson about it.
Standards of journalism at the BBC slipped to a new low yesterday when political editor Laura Kuenssberg outed a man who challenged Boris Johnson over falling NHS standards as a “Labour activist” – triggering a Twitter dogpile on this man.
Apparently it did not matter to Ms Kuenssberg that Omar Salem was the father of a sick seven-day-old girl and had been terribly worried about his daughter’s well-being. She considered it far more important that the world should know he has campaigned for the Labour Party in the past.
Are you saying he knew about De Pfeffel’s visit, got his daughter to fake an illness and then hung around the hospital all night so that he could ambush him and trick him into lying that he wasn’t their doing a PR when the press was 10ft away? No? Then what does it matter?
Mark’s question is valid. What was Ms Kuenssberg trying to say, exactly? And if it was as he suggested, then should she not be hauled up before the BBC board and sacked on the spot?
It is not the place of any journalist – even the BBC’s political editor – to heap more stress upon the father of a sick child who is only seven days old.
Or, put more succinctly: who the hell does Kuenssberg think she is?
It seems she has not noticed that a campaign was launched earlier this week, calling for people to report the activities of those who troll innocent members of the public in exactly the way she has done.
And consider this: Even a doctor at the hospital has written about the shortfall in care there:
I was one of the doctors who met Boris Johnson today. This was a highly staged press event in a newly refurbished hospital ward at Whipps Cross hospital where the prime minister met a few select members of staff and patients. This event completely brushed over the harsh realities of this chronically underfunded, understaffed and poorly resourced hospital.
I’m so glad that Omar Salem said the things he did. He was just telling the truth about what it is like to be on the receiving end of poor staffing levels and under-resourcing.
Whipps Cross is particularly understaffed and under-resourced so people don’t get the care that they need as promptly as they need.
And this visit was not reflective of the realities of working at this hospital. Johnson was taken to the nicest ward in the hospital; there were flowers on display and classical music was playing in the background. I wish the prime minister could have seen some of the other wards, which are nothing like what he saw today. He should come on a night shift and see how everything doesn’t function at two in the morning.
There are not enough staff on any level – nursing, physiotherapy, doctors. It is just chronically understaffed. The building is falling to pieces. It is either too cold or too hot. I could go on and on.
I love medicine, but you just can’t do your job properly. You don’t have time to talk to patients or families. Everybody is really demoralised. There’s no point in complaining because you know nothing will be done.
Isn’t this exactly what Omar Salem was saying?
But Ms Kuenssberg turned it around and made it all about him being a “Labour activist”. And what does that mean, exactly?
I think she – and the BBC – has a huge amount of explaining to do.
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