Sorry have been out of touch the last few days, have been helping run the Eden Festival and will be here till about Wednesday. Will try not to end up in hospital this year. But while I am down here…
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Craig, I wanted to say something here, which I hope may help the cause of Scottish Independence. It is only my thesis on the matter. Perhaps this is not practical or I am wrong. I feel now that it may be possible. So here goes:
There are four individual nation states in the British Isles, which are essentially made up of the islands of Ireland and Great Britain. These are: England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales.
The Queen is the Head of State of the individual nation states of the Commonwealth. These currently include: The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and others.
The Queen does not dictate to the individual nation states of the Commonwealth. Nor do the individual nation states exert executive control over each other. (It seems bizarre that the flags of Australia and New Zealand have little flags of the United Kingdom in their corners).
The Queen speaks with an English accent, but where do her personal (political) loyalties lie? Well, we don’t know, because she is not permitted to in any way influence the political landscape of the individual nation states that make up the commonwealth.
The Queen is the granddaughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, a very long and noble Scottish lineage. Her husband holds the title of Duke of Edinburgh. Her eldest son and the heir to the Scottish (and English) throne Charles (perhaps not a bonnie prince) was schooled at Gordonstoun and her second son is Andrew. Her grandson and future King the of Scotland (and England) attended St Andrews University, where he met his future wife. Her favourite home is perhaps Balmoral.
Can it be assumed then that Queen Elizabeth’s loyalties – if put to the test – would be to the grasping Tory machine in London?
In my humble opinion the sooner all Scottish Nationalists realise that it is Westminster and not Windsor that is their enemy, the sooner Scotland (and England) will again be independent nation states.
The United Kingdom is not a republic. It is an independent sovereign nation with the Queen as Head of State. This is a very important point to understand.
The United Kingdom is a perverse amalgam of the four individual Kingdoms that make up the British Isles. The Queen would be unable to accept (constitutionally) the status of Scotland as a republic. She must act to protect the Commonwealth. Thus, if Nicola Sturgeon and her colleagues tried to form a Scottish republic, the Tories of Westminster would ask the Queen to give them permission to act and impose martial law on Scotland and she would have to give her consent.
If Nicola Sturgeon and her colleagues declared Scottish independence and asked the Queen to continue to be Head of State, and for Scotland to continue to be a Commonwealth nation, the Tories of Westminster would again ask the Queen to give them permission to impose martial law on Scotland.
However, I believe that for once in her 60 plus year reign as Queen she would exercise her overall veto power (a power which she has, but is obliged never to use) and would refuse the Tories permission to impose martial law on her beloved Scotland, and Scotland would once again be a fully independent Kingdom in the Commonwealth of nations.
The Queen showed her true colours on Scottish independence when she purred with delight that yes had lost. Hopefully the Queen will be the last with regards to Scotland.
Oh behave RoS! Cameron made that claim. You trust his word on anything? I wouldn’t.
Yes unaware that he could be heard, do you honestly think Cameron woulve said it out loud? I think not.
I repeat, I wouldn’t trust Cameron as far as I could throw him.
RoS, I do not oppose a republic on grounds of prejudice. I just don’t think it’s a realistic possibility.
Could Scotland not have a system similar to that of Canada or Australia? They are not republics. The Queen is their head of state. Westminster does not tell them what to do. Ultimately, that is surely what is desired – autonomy from Westminster. Scotland cannot be parted physically from England, but in governance terms it is perfectly possible.
John.
Why on earth do we need a monarch as head of state at all? Other countries function perfect well without the need for a finance draining monarchy, not to mention the skewed baggage that comes along with royals in general.
Liz isn’t a monarch; England has been a republic since 1688, read the Coronation Oath Act. When thick Eddie tried to get what he wanted in the 30s, Baldwin forced him to choose, that’s what monarchs do.
@RoS – Out of interest, which of the following two options would you prefer?
1. A sovereign republic of Scotland which (by choice) is not independent but part of a union of four republics making up Britain.
2. A kingdom of Scotland which is independent, as promised by the SNP.
“The United Kingdom is a perverse amalgam of the four individual Kingdoms….”
—————-
It is an even more perverse amalgam of TWO Kingdoms, a Principality and an Irish sub-province.
Get the basic facts right if you want your analysis taken seriously.
Wales was quite straightforwardly annexed in the 1540s. Was it a principality?
A truly skilled troll would mention Cornwall, and how “Anglia et Corbubia” was nonchalantly replaced with “Anglia”.
Ford Corbubia just doesn’t have the same ring.
If we could get Gordon Brown to print enough QE, Ford Corbynia might do.
The irony of Wales is they annexed England as the Tudors took the throne, but being much smaller, England de facto annexed Wales.
No, a Welshman became King of England. Similar story with James VI and I, he became King of England, but that didn’t mean Scotland annexed England
I was speaking in broad terms to illustrate a point, smarty pants. I know Wales is referred to as the “Principality of Wales”, but perhaps Welshmen might prefer it to ultimately be referred to as a kingdom.
Nope – this welsh person would prefer a republic if it’s all the same 🙂
Re Sinister Bert
Nice one!
All power claimed by or over someone you don’t know personally is illegitimate.
Flak blag
Why would it be ok if you did know them?
“she is not permitted to in any way influence…”
That’s not true. It’s how she has chosen to reign, but previous monarchs were more outspoken. There’s nothing binding her but her own practice.
To add to that mix ie, an independent Scotland, a united and independent Ireland, an independent Wales, we want an independent Wessex free from the tyranny of London:
http://wessexregionalists.info/
Do you ever come down to London to do such talks?
Hi Craig have a great time. Any thoughts on the emerging spat between Ireland and Scotland over Rockall fishing rights? My own first take on it is that the Irish boats are well within their rights but I am prepared to bow to your superior knowledge.
There did not ought to be an argument. As an uninhabited rock Rockall cannot generate any fishing rights but can be relevant to a continental shelf mineral rights claim. The UK/Ireland treaty boundary which I negotiated in approx 1991 ought to be respected by an Independent Scotland.
uninhabited?
it’s another thriving guanocracy which puts in US territory
Thank you Craig. If I’m correct somebody in the Scottish Government has gone off on a solo run by threatening to arrest any Irish boat fishing within twelve miles of Rockall. This could lead to embarrassment on Scotland’s part. Hopefully not.
Independent headline : Scotland warns Ireland ‘unwise to pick a fight’ as two countries clash…
Scotland behaving like ‘Little Englanders’ . Farage will be up there if they keep this up. lol
Possibly.
“As an uninhabited rock Rockall cannot generate any fishing rights”
How far out from inhabited land must an uninhabited rock or island lie for that to be so? Can all countries fish near North Rona?
Under British law (Island of Rockall Act 1972, as amended in 1973), Rockall is part of the Western Isles of Scotland and Scottish law applies there.
Up to a point. Rockall might be in UK waters but as it is not an island – as it can be totally underwater at times – it is only a feature of the seascape no more significant than a reef or underwater hazard to shipping.
At the height of the last glacial maximum it would have stood four hundred feet higher above sea level, so most undoubtedly been an island.
Rockall has multiple significances.
One of the significances are the cold seeps and the cold water corals.
In the not so far future, this rock will be in need to be marked with a bouy of sorts to protect shipping in rising sea levels. Just saying.
Rockall is seventeen metre above sea level, so yes, sometimes waves may break over it but it would be disingenuous to suggest ” it can be totally underwater at times”
It is nonsense to suggest that global warming will cover Rockall by a rising sea level, the highest figure, I have heard quoted is a one and a half metre rise, if the world warms by eight degrees.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected a high end estimate of 60 cm (2 ft) through 2099,
but their 2014 report raised the high-end estimate to about 90 cm (3 ft). A number of later studies have concluded that a global sea level rise of 200 to 270 cm (6.6 to 8.9 ft) this century is “physically plausible”.
So over one hundred years the IPCC most aggressive speculation is a rise of nine feet.
So Rockall would still be forty eight feet above the new nine feet higher sea level.
I don’t think it is ever completely underwater. There are many small Scottish islands that have a lower highest altitude than 17 metres – and some of them got a lot of weather!
“Totally underwater”
Not according to Wikipedia, which just says exceptionally large waves sometimes wash over it. That’s not the same as being submerged.
I must say, I hadn’t realized what a tiny, ugly thing Rockall was.
The first Irish skipper to return from Rockall since a fishing dispute erupted has said it is a “political stunt” by the Scottish Nationalist Party
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48616917
The move by the Scottish government was aimed at winning votes, Mr McClenaghan told the BBC’s The View programme.
Just out of interest in relation to the Lockerbie disaster and my cynical head.
1. Has anyone sought to look at who was meant to be on the plane and who decided not to get on it?
I remember reading that some S African goverment officials missed the flight for some reason. Also that it took an unscheduled detour via Frankfurt.
The flight originated in Frankfurt. It’s a murky affair and Dr Jim Swire who lost a daughter does not believe the official version of events which blames Libya. There has never been a public inquiry. I think the CIA thought the bomb was heroin and let it through as was normal practice due to some Middle Eastern skullduggery.
There was no Lockerbie bomb. It was an old plane flying above Scotland to its flight height to America in bad weather.
There was a fault in the cargo door that slightly opened which was enough for the slip stream to tear the door off resulting in catastrophic explosive decompression, as evidenced by the cockpit detaching from the plane in 3 seconds and knocking off engine 3 and the plane subsequently disintegrated, all recorded by radar.
The cover-up was primarily for commercial reasons and blaming defenceless and friendless Libya was deemed the safe option, which back-fired and its still an on-going legal situation in Scotland.
See John Barry Smith independent aircraft investigator for more information.
Rubbish.
From what I’ve read, in my opinion the bombing of flight Pan Am 103 was a successful assassination of Brent Carlsson. At the expense of innocent people lives.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernt_Carlsson
Might I recomend the book “Adequately Explained By Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies” by Morag G. Kerr
Kerr’s book is a bit of nonsense to try and explain a Heathrow injection of the ‘bomb’ and she was posted to help the Justice Campaign after a long time defending the official 9/11 bunkum.
Her book agrees with the official description of the ‘bomb’ but says it was loaded at Heathrow rather than Malta and only deadly due to where, by pure chance, it was placed in the luggage container.
Except, a small ‘bomb’ hidden in a suitcase only makes sense if the plot is to pass through customs at Malta, but Kerr’s Heathrow plot has the same ‘bomb’ being smuggled past customs!
If so there is no need for a small hidden ‘bomb’, because by-passing customs allows a large bomb that fills the case to be loaded that guarantees destroying the plane, if that’s the plan, which the official story claims.
The added nonsense is the evidence of a ‘bomb’ officially described as an ‘Improvised Explosive Device IED’, was some burnt clothing (impossible to identify but needed to ‘identify’ Megrahi) and a thumb nail piece of circuit board (faked but needed to ‘prove’ an IED) proves there was no ‘bomb’, because they wouldn’t have survived an explosion big enough to destroy the plane in 3 seconds.
It appears the Justice Campaign operates with a gentleman’s agreement with the State to focus on the Who rather than the What. That is their priority is to overturn the miscarriage of justice to redeem the Scottish Judiciary, (the Judges announced Megrahi was innocent when delivering their guilty verdicts) and leave the What to painless posterity, although it was used as an excuse to destroy Libya.
Fabulous conspiracy theory. Ranks with the best.
Thanks. The official conspiracy theory was shot through by all observers of the ‘trial’ the day the guilty verdict on Megrahi was announced (and its still a live legal issue in Scotland) and the official report into the crash (there was no public enquiry), never covered the status of the forward cargo door. Faulty cargo doors are common, but usually at times when there is no danger to the plane.
Perhaps I could recomend “Cover up of Convenience” by John Ashton and Ian Ferguson.
Ok. But it did stop off somewhere not on the schedule.
No it did not
Lockerbie?
Andrew: Pan Am flight 103A indeed started in Frankfurt. It was a ‘feeder’ flight for flight 103. All passengers and baggage on flight 103A were off-loaded at Heathrow, and those passengers who were continuing to New York and Detroit transferred to another aircraft (named ‘Maid of the Seas’) whose flight number was PA 103. There was already a number of passengers on Maid of the Seas who had booked from London. The transfer baggage from Frankfurt destined for the USA was off-loaded at Heathrow and re-loaded into a container which was waiting on the tarmac. The waiting container already contained some pieces of baggage which had started their journey in London. The container was then loaded into the new aircraft which took off on its doomed flight.
Mod: I know this part of the thread is OT, so I can’t object if you delete it! Best regards, Coldish.
Coldish: I have no problems with your account of those events as I was speaking from my memory of the event. Flight numbers and where the service originated are mere detail.
As I understand it the “Maid of the Seas” took off from Heathrow as flight 103 with a bomb in the hold. My belief is that the bomb passed airport security (somewhere) un-inspected, as the security services shepherded it through the system believing it contained heroin, as had several other suitcases on previous 103s in some Oliver Northish Middle Eastern skullduggery, except that on that night it was not heroin. Where the bomb/suitcase entered the system is still the subject of debate and I don’t pretend to know.
I don’t know how to delete anything on this site/blog.
If you’d give me that know-how I do have a double/duplicate post in mind.
—
[ Mod: You can’t delete published comments. But you can make a request to the moderators, specifying both instances and which one you would like removed. ]
@ Andrew Ingram June 8, 2019 at 16:22
The only ‘witness’ whose ‘testimony’ tied al-Megrahi to the ‘bomb’, Maltese Tony Gauci, got $2 million ‘reward’ for his testimony.
Almost worth lying for….
@Paul Barbara.
I’ve always thought al-Megrahi is innocent. I loved the concept of a Scottish court/trial in Holland but felt let-down by the outcome. The finest criminal law system on the planet betrayed by those entrusted to administer it.
Mod, thank you for letting this slightly OT discussion continue – and thank you, Andrew and others for continuing it.
Regarding the heroin suitcase: I can quite believe that controlled shipments of heroin were a regular feature of PanAm east-west transatlantic flights. However it doesn’t necessarily follow that the bomb suitcase was substituted for a (or ‘the’) heroin suitcase. After the explosion local farmer Jim Wilson found a suitcase containing a substantial quantity of white powder in one of his fields. This find was subsequently hushed up and it was officially denied that any drugs other than cannabis were found at ‘the crash site’.
As Andrew points out, there is no doubt that the aircraft hold contained a bomb in a suitcase when it left Heathrow. The bomb suitcase was identified by forensic people from its remains as a ‘bronze’ coloured Samsonite. Prior to this identification, Heathrow baggage handler (strictly speaking ‘loader driver’) John Bedford had already reported to police that on the late afternoon of 21 December, while he was away on a tea break, a ‘brown’ suitcase ‘of the type that Samsonite make’ (Bedford’s words) had ‘mysteriously’ (my word) appeared in the baggage container into which he had already placed several London-sourced bags for flight PA 103. He assumed that one of his colleagues had added the Samsonite-type bag while he was away. The feeder flight from Frankfurt had at this stage not yet landed. When it did land, baggage from Frankfurt was transferred into the container that Bedford had been loading with London-sourced bags. It was later established that the bomb suitcase had been situated low down within that same container on the side of the container closest to the skin of the aircraft, which is exactly where Bedford had described seeing the ‘extra’ suitcase.
The trial judges decided that the suitcase seen by Bedford was not the bomb suitcase, which in their view had started its fatal journey in Malta and had been transferred to feeder flight PA 103a in Frankfurt. If the judges were right the question remains: what happened to the brown Samsonite-type case recorded by Bedford? All other cases known to have been close to the Samsonite bomb suitcase were recovered, some but not all severely damaged, on the ground near Lockerbie.
Lockerbie is relevant to the Julian Assange case. After many years of pushing for a prosecution the Scottish prosecutors eventually got the two guys they wanted in custody, and then they said they needed more time to prepare a proper case against them, and that therefore an exception should made to the usual limitations rule! Others can doubtless fill in the details. I thought of this in connection with the latest Swedish move in the Assange case. What the f*** are prosecutors doing, pushing for a prosecution when they haven’t got a proper case yet?
There have been multiple theories on Pan Am 103, some which were created by the very source of the crime. Beware.
On the flight (or a feeder flight, originating in Beruit) was an intelligence group called the McKee Team consisting of a joint taskforce of DIA, CIA and other agents who were working on discovering intel on the kidnapping of US citizens there. McKee was Defense Intelligence, a man named Gannon was CIA, as I recall. Apparently, what they found was displeasing to the powers in Washington and the group returned (attempted to return) without permission. McKee had apparently been a part of a meeting back in 1980 in connection with the October Surprise, which made him doubly dangerous to the Reagan-Bush administration. The day after Pan Am 103 happened an Israeli agent present at the 1980 meeting died in a small plane incident (can’t remember his name, if the plane crashed or he was pushed out) in Mexico. Two passengers who were ushered off the flight at Heathrow was the son and daughter-in-law of Vince Cannistraro, FBI’s chief of terrorism at the time. A team of apartheid negotiators heading for a meeting in New York changed their flight plans as well.
Just as an aside from this string of asides, organized crime in the US has long been a subsidiary of the actual inhabitants of the corridors of power. Many organized crime operations function with the help of the government. Robert Mueller has done much of the coverups over his career. Peter Dale Scott once examined Jack Ruby, whose history extended back to being a runner for Al Capone as a boy. He ran guns to Cuba. He was the man to see if you were moving heroin through Texas and he was given the job of shutting up Oswald. Plus, he ran a strip joint and was very well-connected with Dallas Police. He certainly was part of organized crime. Organized crime has been working hand-in-glove with the government at all levels, just as the most headline-grabbing terrorists have been working with governments. Whether you want to put the mafia over the oil companies, banks, political parties et al, or you want to put them down with the other groups is your choice. But one hand works with the other.
Good point, N_! As I understood it, the defence team in the Lockerbie case could have stopped the prosecution in its tracks by objecting to the requested postponement on the ground that 11 years was enough time to prepare a case if there was one to prepare – but were so confident of winning the case that they failed to object.
Thank you, Craig, for drawing attention to the injustices suffered by Assange, among which is the excessively long delay imposed by the Swedish legal and British political authorities after an EAW was issued and before he was given an opportunity to answer any questions. I get the impression that the Swedish side knew that they had only a very weak case if any, and that their objective was to get Assange into Swedish custody – where, as Craig has emphasised, if any charges were raised against him, proceedings would be in secret and evidence could be withheld from the defence.
As I said elsewhere in the thread the son and daughter-in-law’s the chief for the FBI’s anti-terrorism section was escorted off the plane on the tarmac at Heathrow. Also, a South African delegation of the then-current apartheid government changed flight plans.Who was on it speaks more to the authors. There was a mysterious white powder found on the ground among the wreckage. I believe that belonged to a guy named Jabar or Jabbar who was an alleged mule for Monzer al-Kassar.
Dame Edna Everage said he would stand for Head of State if Australia became Independent. I think he and the likes of Screaming Lord Such as MP’s would do a better job than the Sir Richard Rich’s of today. Most of the world is under siege and suffering all we can do is prattle on about split condoms and appointing a new PM who makes Julian look like a Celebat. Gove says he regrets taking cocain. He however does not regret Iraq, Libya and Syria. I am sure he will vote for Iran. Meanwhile the the ruling elite will indulge themselves in all manner of decadence floating on a sea of lies, hypocrisy and blood. After reading the quality, wisdom and knowledge of the posts on Craig’s site, I despair why you can’t you our be MP’s ? The country is floundering.
I’d vote for Barry Humphreys and I think that Sir Les Patterson would make a far better Foreign Secretary than Boris ever did.
Past examples of “the people” having a laugh by electing joke candidates haven’t ended well. Which is not to say that “the people” haven’t had good intentions.
For example… ?
Here’s an example, although the ‘monkey’ mayor was okay…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1965569.stm
Apparently, Johnny Rotten of Sex Pistols fame, missed the flight. There is a widespread belief that a warning was received at an embassy in Finland two weeks prior to the Lockerbie tragedy, which led to many passengers transferring to other trans Atlantic flights, which were in high demand just befoore the Xmas holidays. For some reason Pan Am flight 103 had loads of spare seats.
Ridiculous
pyewacket: the Finland US embassy warning (received by telephone on 5 Dec 1988) and subsequent posting of a official notice for staff in the US embassy in Moscow on 13 Dec 1988 regarding a possible bomb attack during the following 2 weeks on a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the US are recounted in the book ‘Cover-up of Convenience’ by John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, pp 35-38. The notice reminded the embassy staff that while it was up to individual travellers to decide whether to alter their travel plans or to change to another carrier, they would still be obliged to fly an American carrier.
It seems that the warning did not specify an exact date, flight number, or US destination.
An interesting article about J F Kennedy.
https://theduran.com/forgotten-battles-against-the-deep-state-part-2-jfk-vs-the-empire/
Chemical Britain. Thanks for that article in The Duran by Anton Chaitkin. JFK really tried to steer the world to peace and development. However the bankers, Imperialists, Dulles, CIA and British Intelligence, as today, assassinated any chance of that. Very disturbing essay.
Anton Chaitkin (history editor of EIR) in the Duran, how interesting. Can anybody tell us anything about Anton Chaitkin and Jeffrey Steinberg, for example? What were these old-line Jewish Leftists, almost Communists, doing working for Larouche?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Intelligence_Review
jfk was the empire. pushing war, running to the right of nixon. if he were a peacemaker he wouldn’t have made so many warlike moves or associated with the likes of joe mccarthy, famous red baiter and cold warrior.
@ pretzelattack June 9, 2019 at 13:38
JFK was already boxed into Vietnam when he assumed the Presidency.
He had promised to ‘bring the troops home’ if he was re-elected (a slam-dunk surety, if he hadn’t been assassinated).
And he was mellowing out with experience: he had promised to retire J Edgar Hoover (FBI); eliminate the CIA and replace it with an ‘accountable’ intelligence agency; he had started printing USG dollars, bypassing the Federal Reserve scam; and he was intent on stopping Israel getting nukes. He was going to tax Big Oil more appropriately (they had been getting off with peppercorn taxes), and he (and his brother) was going to go after the Mafia. He was in secret peace talks with Castro.
Which of those issues do you find objectionable?
He most certainly was not perfect – he was a serial womaniser; he was almost certainly closely associated with the murder of Marilyn Monroe; and had OK’d many attempts to assassinate Castro.
Even Jack Ruby, when he had been injected with cancerous material in jail, and who had killed the innocent Oswald under Mafia orders, said the JFK assassination was the end of American democracy. And so it was.
All those wonderful things he might have done and yet when he was alive in the Whitehouse he did the opposite.
JFK escalated in avietnam, significantly too. It wasn’t forced on him, he was the President. I’ll happily provide details.
Over Cuba, he nearly took the world to Armageddon. To suggest he came out of that on peaceful constructive terms with Castro is an insult to people who read this blog. The truth is he had CIA mongoose squads spreading disease and causing mayhem.
What you say about his opposition to Israel getting nukes seems odd. I’ll look into that. Israel was a newly formed state and hadn’t collided in any major way with other countries in the region in the early 60s.
I blame Oliver Stone for this sort of junk.
Hatuey:
“Israel was a newly formed state and hadn’t collided in any major way with other countries in the region in the early 60s.”
Are you joking?
A reminder to Hatuey that Nakba Day, May 15th, has just passed. That commemorates the Day of Catastrophe when Palestine was occupied by the Zionists with the aid of Balfour and later the UN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba_Day
Israel refers to the date of the Occupation as their ‘birthday’.
Bevin, no I’m not joking. What country had Israel gone to war with before say 1963?
Sharp Ears, i’m familiar with and sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians. When I said that Israel had not collided with any other countries in the Middle East, I was of course aware that they had basically ethnically cleansed Palestine etc. But, sadly, Palestine isn’t a country.
May I suggest you read Jim DiEugenio’s latest edition of Destiny Betrayed. Much of what people today take for JFK’s positions on numerous subjects have been distorted in the media, in part to make his death more digestible to the gullible. The same with DiEugenio’s essay on the posthumous assassination of JFK’s character.
Enjoyed this, thanks. https://vimeo.com/123051554
it’s not character assassination to point to his running to the right of nixon, nor the tax cuts (neoliberalism) nor the vietnam escalation, nor the unsavory association with mccarthy, nor the near fatal confrontation with russia over there placing some missiles in cuba to counterbalance u.s. missiles in turkey.
@ Chemical Britain June 9, 2019 at 00:53
Wow! Great article! I learnt a lot of new aspects of JFK from it. Great find, and I am sure part 1 will also be great:
‘Forgotten Battles Against the Deep State Part I: John Diefenbaker’s Northern Vision Sabotaged by Rhodes Scholars’:
https://theduran.com/forgotten-battles-against-the-deep-state-part-i-john-diefenbakers-northern-vision-sabotaged-by-rhodes-scholars/
Any one that thinks JFK was anything other than another crook in a long line of crooks has been at the liberal cool aid.
Here is Bill Blum on the two gangster brothers. RFK making it quite clear that JFK had no intention of ending the Vietnam War
https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/07/jfk-rfk-and-some-myths-about-american-foreign-policy/
@ Shatnersrug June 10, 2019 at 09:35
‘…Here is Bill Blum on the two gangster brothers. RFK making it quite clear that JFK had no intention of ending the Vietnam War…’
But the article also goes on: ‘…1. Robert Kennedy contradicts the many people who are convinced that, had he lived, JFK would have brought the US involvement in Vietnam to a fairly prompt end, instead of it continuing for ten more terrible years. The author, Stoll, quotes a few of these people. And these other statements are just as convincing as RFK’s statements presented here. And if that is not confusing enough, Stoll then quotes RFK himself in 1967 speaking unmistakably in support of the war…’
RFK was angling for a Presidential election – perhaps he judged the mood in the US would not have taken kindly to a Presidential candidate who was anti-Vietnam, as they were smarting from the defeat.
I think JFK’s intentions were clearly stated that he would bring the troops home, and believe that his own quotes are stronger than his brothers’ four years after JFK’s assassination.
As I commented above to @ pretzelattack June 9, 2019 at 13:38
‘JFK was already boxed into Vietnam when he assumed the Presidency.
He had promised to ‘bring the troops home’ if he was re-elected (a slam-dunk surety, if he hadn’t been assassinated).
And he was mellowing out with experience: he had promised to retire J Edgar Hoover (FBI); eliminate the CIA and replace it with an ‘accountable’ intelligence agency; he had started printing USG dollars, bypassing the Federal Reserve scam; and he was intent on stopping Israel getting nukes. He was going to tax Big Oil more appropriately (they had been getting off with peppercorn taxes), and he (and his brother) was going to go after the Mafia. He was in secret peace talks with Castro.
Which of those issues do you find objectionable?
He most certainly was not perfect – he was a serial womaniser; he was almost certainly closely associated with the murder of Marilyn Monroe; and had OK’d many attempts to assassinate Castro.
Even Jack Ruby, when he had been injected with cancerous material in jail, and who had killed the innocent Oswald under Mafia orders, said the JFK assassination was the end of American democracy. And so it was.’
I repeat the question to you: ‘Which of those issues do you find objectionable?’
Nobody is perfect (even me!).
rfk was running well to the left of jfk, he wasn’t running to the right. he wasn’t distorting jfk as pro vietman, he was just finally telling the truth about it. he escalated in vietnan, not drew back. all this is just based on some hagiography by his supporters. the electorate was more than ready for an anti vietman president at the time, you may recall the riots and demonstrations which caused lbj to eventually decide not to run in 68.
I think it was that famous loser, Napoleon Bonaparte, who said that history is a series of agreed-upon lies. JFK has been accused of being to the right of everyone. Thus the winners after JFK’s assassination wanted, and still want, to portray him as this or that. JFK wanted the US to not get into a war in Southeast Asia. His objections went back to a trip he took in the early fifties. That the powers that be wanted to tangle him into that mess was proven when almost a decade after JFK’s assassination E. Howard Hunt was forging documents to blame JFK for the coup against Diem should have some resonance with people who are reconsidering JFK today. Paul Barbara, in defending JFK, accepts that he may have been a womanizer. I would again suggest reading DiEugenio’s essay of CIA posthumous attacks, here: https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-posthumous-assassination-of-john-f-kennedy
Donald Spoto, who did the most detailed bio of Marilyn Monroe, blows that myth out of the water, and DiEugenio shows the falsities of the Exner story et al. And the group of reporters and investigators who presented these stories were in the circle of propagandists for the Mighty Wurlitzer.
Not only had JFK been opposed to a war in Vietnam. He was opposed to US actions against non-aligned nations, a good example being Sukarno in Indonesia. The problem for JFK was that the CIA, essentially an international version of the coal and iron police, were more powerful than the President.
People who are lied to and kept in the dark about deep machinations of today’s political battlefield have been lied to since the formation of the CIA. It’s part of their business, and some of the commenters here are useful idiots for their rulers.
Anyone concerned about the lies and omissions of Russiagate have a moral obligation to at least reexamine what they accepted from the media at a more tender age.
Good parting advice there Bob.
I recommend everyone carefully read the supposed speech that JFK was en route to give as his motorcade route and usual protection was changed so that he wasn’t able to.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/dallas-tx-trade-mart-undelivered-19631122
(Curiously the original link i had to it at the Post Gazette seems to have gone dark.)
Looking at the evidence it seems the CIA had gone rogue and were not taking orders from their civilian superiors and subverting the military prescence there.
http://www.jfklancer.com/dallas05/ppt/conway/Intra-administration%20conflict-%20the%20CIA%20v.%20the%20state%20department%20in%20South%20Vietnam%20during%20the%20Kennedy%20years.html.webarchive
John Kenneth Galbraith also confirmed that JFK was NOT going to put troops in and the ungiven speech alludes to that. There was a clear arm wrestle going on to get the CIA under control in the months leading up to the assassination – which allowed the CIA to continue with its imperial adventurism… all the way to today.
When you talk about putting troops in, do you mean Vietnam?
Kennedy sent 16 thousand military advisers, basically taking over the running of the south Vietnam military, he also sent in 400 Green Berets to conduct special operations, and was singularly responsible for the ‘strategic hamlets’ program.
I could go on, and on, and on.
Yes I am talking about SE Asia pre the full on Vietnam deployment.
If you read through the links (and there are plenty more there) you would see the testimony of regular military about how the spooks were there in extreme large numbers, their dealings with the SV leadership, etc. Basically moving towards the full on deployment. A deployment that JFK was going to say was the wrong way to defend democracies in far away places in the speech. There is big difference between that and the various guerrilla actions and special forces across that region since the end of WW2.
It is hard to deny Galbraith’s testimony.
Lol so rather than go along with escalation he escalated massively. Great argument.
I’m not disputing Galbraith, I’m stating irrefutable facts and basing what I say on sources who were actually involved.
Hatuey: There is a mistake to believing that everything that happens when someone is President is necessarily the President’s decision or even reflects his policy. The CIA was still trying to overthrow Castro after JFK ordered them to desist, and Kennedy was running two back channel attempts to forge a peace with Cuba.
Also, in regard to Vietnam, the US was involved in Vietnam since before Dien Bien Phu. I knew an army ranger there during JFK’s tenure. The army has a thing called TDY, temporary duty, where soldiers are assigned for purposes elsewhere (say, Vietnam) but show up as, say, being stationed at Fort Gordon or Fort Dix. Before his death JFK had written the NSAM 263 to withdraw all troops from Vietnam.
Also, to blame the strategic hamlets op, a part of the CIA’s Phoenix Program, is foolish when JFK was battling the CIA to get out of Vietnam. Plus, the Phoenix Program wasn’t operational until a few years after JFK’s assassination. Better to blame Daniel Ellsberg, who was with the CIA in Vietnam. Read Doug Valentine’s THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME.
Kennedy was battling his own intelligence agencies and military and eventually lost.
Try reading Schlesinger and you’ll see Kennedy was very keen on CIA involvement in Cuba, poisoning crops etc. Chomsky quotes him extensively. Schlesinger was right there at the table, unlike Oliver Stone which your fantasy is based on.
Hatuey: Perhaps you have an irrational grudge against the assassinated President or you haven’t read as much as you should have to speak so confidently about JFK’s actions and intentions in Southeast Asia. By now it should be clear to any rational student of the subject that JFK was trying to extricate the US out of Vietnam. In 1951 Kennedy visited Vietnam and met with a diplomat named Edmond Gullion who explained that the struggle was not communism versus democracy but colonialism versus nationalism.
NSAM 263 announced the beginning of JFK’s withdrawal from Vietnam, which was immediately countered within days of Kennedy’s assassination by NSAM 273 which gave the CIA free reign in Vietnam and eventuated into the 1965 escalation.
Fairytale.
Hatuey, your need to attack JFK is shared by America’s intelligence networks. That you align yourself so closely to the CIA narrative only diminishes your credibility. Invoking official historians is not persuasive. Referencing Chomsky is laughable. His book thirty years ago was filled with lies arising from the same cesspool. His argument about NSAM 263 is laughable and was thoroughly debunked by Peter Dale Scott thirty years ago. Chomsky, at about that time, wrote to a friend of mine in response to JFK’s assassination and the problems with the single-assassin theory by saying that perhaps two jealous husbands shot at him at the same time. Perhaps he was making a joke. However, about six weeks prior to the assassination two different men who were not Oswald impersonated him. There are photos. A lone assassin doesn’t hire impersonators to link himself to enemy states of the US prior to assassinating the President.
The need to twist JFK’s foreign policy post mortem, as well as damaging his reputation, are what America’s secret police do. I can think of only two reasons for you to continue being wedded to old American intelligence inventions in a thread that had nothing to do with JFK originally. Neither one of them is flattering to you.
Speaking of Lockerbie, it was Robert Swan Mueller III who was handed the investigation of Pan Am 103. He steered it away from the PFLP-GC cell in Frankfort because they were alleged to have gotten the bomb from Monzer al-Kassar, an arms dealer involved in Iran-contra as well as a supplier of twenty percent of the heroin going into the US. Instead, he prosecuted two Libyans who had no discernable connection to the crime.
Mueller went on to prosecute Manuel Noriega without noticing CIA money-laundering and arms and cocaine shipments going in and out of Panama.
Verb: Festivaling
To Festival: To go stage to stage, listening to music you don’t know whilst doing drugs. It is estimated that 90% of attendees at outdoor summer festivals are festivaling and in fact have no idea what music they are there to listen to.
Urban Dictionary. True or false?
Probably Depends which Festival Sharp Ears
One of my Lingering memories from Last year’s DTRH was Going on 11pm on the last night ( Sunday ) A sea of teeny tots upon parents shoulders..Wonderful sight
Cheers for the Chris Hedges Nils Melzer link in the last Thread.
Mike Pompeo : “It could be that Mr Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected,” he said on the recording. “It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”
This is absolutely outrageous.
Outrageous and par for the course, Goose.
This press will downplay this.
But coming from a former CIA Director it’s very serious, especially the “too risky” bit , What(?) is too risky …,can only imagine.
And what is ‘the gauntlet’?
Presumably he means the billionaire owned press and crooked media establishment : BBC, ITV, Sky, Ch4?
…to ‘run the gaunlet’ : to endure an onslaught or ordeal.
“Running the gauntlet” used to mean a form of military punishment in which the victim was forced to run between two parallel rows of his comrades, who were required to beat him as he passed. You get punished by your own comrades. Perhaps a suitable punishment for stealing the water/rum ration?
Seems apposite, in view of the fact that it’s Labour MPs that are landing blows on Corbyn (I don’t mean the bit about the rum ration).
Tonight’s (Monday’s) PLP meeting was apparently a brutal affair, with Corbyn being “shouted down” repeatedly according to reports by political journos on twitter. Certain MPs raised the alleged antisemitism of the newly elected MP (she liked a post that referred to Zionists). It’s amazing how animated some MPs become about the slightest whiff of antisemitism, yet hundreds of unarmed or lightly armed protestors can be shot dead on the Gaza border, including women, children and even someone in a wheelchair, and their twitter accounts never even mention it. Talk about having a warped perspective on what’s the most serious crime.
Goose, it’s amazing how perspective can be warped when a few million quid are splashed around.
Since it was made to an audience of ‘Jewish leaders’.
There’s a chance, Pompeo’s just really badly-informed and actually believes the crap being promoted by Corbyn’s critics in the UK, that he (Corbyn) somehow represents a threat to Jews – a totally preposterous idea btw.
Goose
Can a politician actually believe anything? Yes they have to have total recall of all their own and all their colleagues’ lies, remember where all the skeletons are in 3 D space and time.
Also they have to always sound as though they actually believe the entirety of the total bollocks they totally don’t believe.
Today a Birmingham politician said publicly and I agree with what he said, that they should leave off teaching kids at school they have a choice of menu about their sex.
But did he believe that, or did being a white English ethnic minority in Birmingham sway him from his actual to his electoral really beliefs?
Giyane.
I have a rather different take on this. I actually agree with you that the vast majority of people are clearly born one sex or the other. But if they want to act and be treated as a different sex, or even be surgically or chemically altered, I see no reason at all to disapprove. And if someone wants to believe they are a different sex to that which they are, why should that not be allowed.
Given the MP involved – an old reactionary, I reckon he was being totally true to his own beliefs.
I’m strangely neutral on this issue. I consider myself socially liberal, but there’s something doctrinaire(authoritarian) even forced about teaching , possibly burdening, 4 year olds same sex relationships. The left can be just as authoritarian as the right when it comes to enforcing social and racial justice.
Craig
I agree with you but in our local school the council is pushing a LGBT agenda onto primary school Muslim children. If I was a parent of such young children I would refuse to let them go to school. They should leave the children to be children and discuss it in class when they’re older.
When I was at school I was very clear in my own mind about my sexuality and sexual morality. Thirty years later the state forced me to change my mind by forcing me to take Lithium based psychotropic drugs.
I just suspect that forcing children to know about the different view from their own cultural background will be followed later by the same Fascist brute force as I received.The Liberal State is determined to utterly crush and destroy Muslim values in every manifestation and by extremely violent means.
Although I entirely agree with Craig, it’s not quite that. A person born of one sex genetically may prefer to live the life of the other. That happens, and should be admitted. It is a question of how you want to live your life. There are women preferring the life of a man, there are men preferring the life of a woman. If you want that, why not?
Typically, though, men don’t like men becoming women, though they’re not bothered about what women do. Homosexuality was illegal, Lesbianism wasn’t.
Giyane.
I agree, it’s the age appropriateness that’s at issue here. A four years of age, the brain is highly malleable. A LGBT activist teacher may be the the parents worst nightmare, but any sex education and relationship teaching at that age carries a huge responsibility.
Some of the most illiberal, intolerant people in the Labour party i.e., it’s Blairite feminist wing, are most adamant and uncompromising in their insistence this teaching must go ahead. These MPs oppose the relaxation of drug laws, the legalisation of prostitution; they want to censor the UK’s internet to the point where academic research isn’t even possible.
Yet here, they insist primary school kids are taught about same sex relations and want parents arrested for protesting? There is nothing progressive about their agenda.
The promotion of Soros LBGT+ is intended to be divisive and offensive rather than about equality, tolerance and good manners. Its an opportunity to criminalise gender-ism, alongside all the earlier and other forms of ism to criminalise everyone , except the Witch-finder General, and is intended as the excuse for social imperialist attacks on traditional societies. Otherwise you would simply promote we’re all different shapes and sizes at a later age.
I have strong reservations about allowing self identifying women born as men, who have not had a sex change operation, to be treated wholely as women. Sport is one example where I think it a mistake. Women’s prisons another and indeed many of the safe spaces women have only achieved by a long struggle. I think we need a third category in sport for intersex, self identifying as the opposite sex and transitioning men and women. I personally have no desire to share a public toilet with the male sex.
Just some thoughts.
“And if someone wants to believe they are a different sex to that which they are, why should that not be allowed.”
Of course it should. I see LGBT etc evolving as a sub-category of identity politics rather than the personal and social sphere it should perhaps occupy. I’d be curious to hear your views in more depth in an article, when you have time.
Anyway, let’s take the example, extreme and perhaps hyperbolic, but not implausible. What might happen if a man with a working penis but who identifies as a woman could become legally entitled to access female public toilets or changing rooms? What if some women object to a man identifying as female but with a working penis being allowed into their toilet or public changing room? What happens to them?
Will they be censured or prosecuted for hate speech? Will they be ridiculed? Ostracised? Lose their job? Hounded on social media? Forced out of their homes? Or will there be separate facilities for women who (understandably enough) might feel vulnerable in the above scenario? I know which outcome I think is more likely.
And what if some of those women are children? Clearly some thought must be given to how such things are allowed to progress.
With entire categories of discussion currently being delegitimised, I can see left leaning, socially progressive groups not only being divided on this but trapped within a gender version of Anti-Semitism where any answer is the wrong answer, I see signs of this already. Further iterations of identity politics are on the way. Those in favour of more discussion and learning are already being edged out of the frame of discourse where asking for discussion on a ‘settled matter’ is viewed as suspicious, indicative of tacit trans-phobia or something else.
Meanwhile our hypothetical women objectors might find themselves excluded first as women and second as political entities. We may even be expected to ignore anything further they have to say. The treatment of Germaine Greer springs to mind.
The history of corporations, governments, education systems and public relations are a testament to the desire to control ideas and demonstrate our susceptibility to such ideas. From a basic working idea of who and what we are to our entire conception of the world, how it works and why it is as it is, we learn it all first in institutions if we learn it at all, then spend the rest of our experience unlearning everything.
We know some of these organisations are feeding separate targeted streams of ideas and ‘content’ via innumerable platforms to multiple political, economic, racial, religious, gender and age demographics, and they are also skilled in creating everything from movements to brands. Integrity initiative is one we know about. Bell Pottinger was another.
Young LGBT kids will to some degree identify with, accept and buy into some of these streams of information and activity. All those who can exploit the politics of LGBT groups are undoubtedly currently doing so, and as far as I can see, in order to sow the seeds of future political division and even potentially ‘inverse intolerance’ where currently there is none.
Reply to Mary Pau!
Are you Chinese, or do you just have a tendency towards typos? I only ask, as here in Ireland all the women’s toilets I’ve been in have separate, private cubicles.
Other than when washing hands, putting on make-up/adjusting your weave/other “Narcissussing” in the mirror… the presence of men in public toilets (whether full-fat standard-issue, or a Thai ladyboy) is of very little concern to me.
I know things are different in China, where the “privacy” of individual “cubicles” is a low brick wall and a mere fig-leaf. Assuming you’re in UK, arrangements are pretty similar to those over here. It’s the men I feel sorry for. The idea of a transitioning dyke, or screaming shirt-lifter having a festival of cocks to admire at the urinals seems, mutatis mutandis, most unfair!
Mary Pau!
Well said, I totally agree that people can identify how they wish, but that should never compromise the health and safety of the majority.
We now have the ridiculous situation, due to self ID, where a man can simply state they they are a “woman”, without having any surgery whatsoever, and then demand access to women’s sex based spaces.
It should be noted, that only 5% of transgender people have any surgery at all.
We also have the absurd situation, where male bodied people are winning women’s business awards and are being promoted to women’s officer in political parties.
You have to admire the sheer gall of Muslims: “How dare they start teaching my 4-year old daughter revolting nonsense about same sex relationships! I’ve barely had time to start teaching her that it’s literally true that Allah hates disbelievers so much that he’s going to burn their skins off, and then keep giving them new skins so he can burn them off too!”
Opponents of vaccinations believe that this is just their own business. But this is not so. Since one lives in a society, so this problem concerns the collective immunity.
I do not like that adults hammer their ideas into children, be it religion, gender identity, or vaccination. I prefer that children make these grand decisions when they grow up. Untill that moment, let the kids just live safely and study the world.
andyoldlabour
“It should be noted, that only 5% of transgender people have any surgery at all.” I’m not sure I believe that figure. Those who are genuinely transgender tend to do something to change their appearance, even if they don’t have their bits cut off. I suspect you’re thinking of transvestites.
Laguerre
The percentage is probably far less than that, particularly as the numbers of transgender people in the UK are between 150,000 and 300,000. The following article shows how many surgeries have been carried out over the years.
In the government advice page, they reckon there are between 200,000 and 500,000 trransgender people in the UK, yet only 4910 have been issued with a gender recognition certificate!!!
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/721642/GEO-LGBT-factsheet.pdf
https://www.bournemouth.gov.uk/councildemocratic/Statistics/Documents/JSNA/GenderReassignment.pdf
Siobhan. Welcome to London home of the gender neutral loo. This particular one has become notorious.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6813503/West-End-theatre-slammed-gender-neutral-toilets.html.
In another case the toilets in a theatre space have been adapted into gender neutral with cubicles and gender neutral with urinals.
This has apparently resulted in nearly all the women who visit choosing those with cubicles, which they now have to share with men. So in order to accommodate the needs of the LBTG community, men’s overall choice has been expanded at the expense of women’s . Am I alone in finding this unfair?
Andy
“In the government advice page, they reckon there are between 200,000 and 500,000 trransgender people in the UK, yet only 4910 have been issued with a gender recognition certificate” That just shows how inaccurate the guesses are. All the seriously trans people I know have had something done. But they may not have a certificate.
Mary Pau!
You’re obviously doing a Bindel. We have to suffer women coming into the male toilets all the time, and we’re not supposed to complain. I guess the theatre gender-neutral toilets you’re talking about have urinals and cubicles in the one, and cubicles only in the other. The whole point of making them gender-neutral is to allow women to use the cubicles in the urinal loo, and thus have to wait less time than if strict separation were maintained. Sounds like a positive move to me. Used to be like that in our institute, then they brought in gender-separation, and all that meant was fewer possibilities for men, as the women continue to go in all the toilets.
That is not at all why it is done LaGuerre, as you very well know. It is done to be “woke,”. To accommodate those members of the community who do not identify as the biological sex in which they were born and struggle to use facilities for binary men and women. . I have no problem with this in isolation. What is happening though is that to accommodate this group, women’s current rights are being encroached and men’s extended. “Binary” women are the losers in this. I have yet to read that they have been consulted.
“And if someone wants to believe they are a different sex to that which they are, why should that not be allowed.”
Please distinguish between the right to believe something and the right to demand that nobody says the belief is false or sick.
The whole “LGBT” push reeks of the Thatcherite idea that “there’s no such thing as society”.
I happily know little of the issues you appear frustrated by, Mary Pau!
I see you’re not Chinese, but note with interest that your concern applies to toilets in London. As my previous contribution indicated, I find little by way of bones of contention on this knotty subject personally, and remain non plussed that anyone might regard this as a problem worthy of any reflection, let alone contributing to blog fora.
I’m utterly lost here by the value of discussion, at the least in terms of (as a minimum) the extent to which otherwise rational, intelligent, and presumably normally-adjusted people go to have arguments, more or less, about nought.
I suppose if mine host will persist on putting up non-posts, this is what should be expected. I was genuinely surprised my comment elicited a reply, Mary P!, and I’m sorry for your indignation and evident inability to rise above utter trivia, but rather that you have a bizarre proclivity towards shouting at the moon.
Outside China, there really is no issue. Inside China there’s also no issue, as they don’t (yet) go in for this first-world utter shite. I think we should, perhaps, all get out more… but avoid the public conveniences.
(apologies for different Gravatar. I’m new here, have several active emails, and forgot what I’d used)
The problem is not merely that of gender free toilets. There is a very real issue over the extent to which individuals born and raised as binary men, can decided in adulthood to self identify as women and then be treated entirely as women. Women’s sport is one example. There are some high profile cases in the US of binary sized adult men, taking testosterone suppressing tablets for 12 months (the IOC requirement) and then entering women’s races.
There have been some cases in the UK where male prisoners who self identified as women, were allowed to transfer to women only prisons and then sexually assaulted female prisoners. I have a young female friend who recently entered a talent cost with substantial cash prizes for a man and a women. On the day the prizes were awarded to a man and a man identifying as a woman who had entered the women’s category.
It is easy to say it works both ways. In practice there are a lot more men identifying as women out there, than the reverse. When such men are allowed into women’s previously restricted areas, this means the territory of binary women is being reduced. You might not object to men in your public toilets but lots of women do. They are not consulted. (Recently it surfaced in a UK government department that there were complaints from those women prepared to share, that men left their cubicle doors open.)
@Tatyana
Supporters of most mass vaccinations are full of crap and parroting pharmaceutical company propaganda. In Britain medics get paid extra money if they “achieve” over a certain amount of “coverage” with vaccines (98% I think it is), so of course their “minds” follow their wallets and they all “think” that 98+% coverage is the greatest thing ever, and that opponents of mass vaccination are “antisocial”. Most propaganda comes down through “experts”. Pharmaceutical companies spend far more on propaganda than they do on research, development and production combined.
But I agree with you there is such a thing as the public good, and that it is not in the public good for gay sexuality to be propagandised as “normal”. It is not normal and that is not an opinion but a fact.
Individualism and egoism are like a plague. Literacy is falling, most written material is written semi-literately or illiterately, and I’ve even noticed that many newsreaders on the BBC can’t read properly – they read every two or three words as a chunk without their minds working to link them together in what used to be the normal way, and they often end up parsing phrases wrong. Meanwhile most people aged under about 50 spend several hours a day picking their phones. That’s stupid. It’s also antisocial. They’re thickos. But we aren’t supposed to criticise any of this muck because it’s only “people doing what they want”. “Do what you want” has been the main message of advertising for about 100 years, but never mind that. The idea corresponds of course to the postmodern “theoretical” muck that says that everything is as true and as valid as everything else. Nobody even bothers asking whether children are better off being raised by two parents who are of different sexes (for example their actual parents – because we all had two actual parents who reproduced sexually, and only a man and a woman can do that), or with two “parents” who are of the same sex. Mustn’t ask that. That makes a person like Hitler apparently.
There’s definitely an “Emperor wears no clothes” side to the preposterous “trans” propaganda in countries such as Britain, where no journalist dares step out of line to deny that men can give birth to babies.
Why the idea that a person should be free to do something implies that everything that everybody does is equally valid is never explained or even questioned. Few “lefties” openly say they think “society” should be based on “everyone doing whatever they want”, but this is a right-wing idea that most of them haven’t got the guts to question or challenge.
Politically we can describe the following development: Labour under Blair adopted the Thatcherite line of cutting back the welfare state (including for example with regard to students) and promoting the idea that everyone should look after themselves; even if Labour under Corbyn isn’t quite as bad as that, it still buys into the Thatcherite idea that “there is no such thing as society”. That’s why men who think they’re women get a dozen mentions in the Labour manifesto but inherited wealth doesn’t get a look-in. Personally I hope the ludicrousness of the idea that there should be three or more different kinds of toilets because supposedly “gender is not binary” gets understood at some point in the future the same way that the ludicrousness and vileness of the idea that paedophiles are an oppressed group, which was espoused by figures such as Harriet Harman in the 1970s, is widely recognised today. It has to be observed that the idiots who didn’t stand up and say “this is total bullsh*t” when the idea was spread about that paedophilia was an acceptable “preference” have their heirs in today’s idiots who believe that “gender is binary” and that gay men who are friends of the royal family should “marry” men 30 years younger themselves and “adopt” young male orphans if that’s what they “want”.
Of course every fashion-following idiot thinks that last year’s fashion-following idiots were idiots. E.g. they will say “Remember last year, when we all rolled our jacket sleeves up, wore shoulder pads, etc.? Weren’t we stupid?”
Mary Paul and Siobhan Walsh,
I think that the problem of gender neutral toilets is greatly exaggerated.
Look, the purpose of a WC is – natural needs. Well, while visiting a WC we don’t intend to study someone’s believes, or how they identify themselves, or if they were surgically or chemically altered etc etc. Just do your business and go away.
Doing natural needs involves possibly some exposure of genitalia. Since people physically have only two variations and still not growing the third, fourth etc. kind of genitals, so I don’t see any problem at all. Those with this type should go in one room, those with another type should go to another room, so noone is embarassed and no awkward questions from young children.
It works good for ages.
Those who has type 1 organs but identify as type 2 could do the rest of society a favour, and keep their precious self-expression for other places, more relevant than a WC.
N_
I don’t agree with you on that “Supporters of most mass vaccinations are full of crap and parroting pharmaceutical company propaganda.”
If they want spend money on this good job, so let them do it. Our interests coincide here.
Learn about population immunity, and recent increase in measles cases, and vaccine-controlled deseases, and growing antibiotic resistance.
Anti-vax people serve as live Petri dishes for microbes, that develops resistance to the known treatment. Yet they are a source of infection for those who can not be vaccinated for medical reasons.
A very good point
Tatyana, June 11th 17.11
If we had been giving the masses of the early Industrial Revolution population vaccines
how would immunity have panned out by now?
Goose
Corbyn isn’t necessarily seen as “a threat to Jews”. Rather, he’s seen as a threat to the state of Israel and that is why he is not wanted in Downing Street. His own Party colleagues in the PLP are assisting strongly with smear after smear, with the favourite being the anti-Semitism allegations.
Check out how many MPs right across the Parties are members of the Friends of Israel. Follow the money too. Have a look at personal donations Tom Watson’s received from FOI and from prominent people who chair certain other groups. It’s a real eye opener. You will then, hopefully, see just how many elected representatives in the UK parliament are being paid for their services!
@ Goose June 9, 2019 at 18:28
Straight from the donkey’s mouth – confirmation that all the anti-Semite allegations crap is a plot to derail JC.
Will HMG take steps against this blatant attempt to interfere in British politics by a foreigner? Will they f**k.
Yes, it’s absolutely outrageous, but so is their persecution of Julian Assange, and so is their ‘Regime Change’ rampage around the world, which HMG heartily agree with and join in, and so are all the War Crimes thus engendered.
if you sleep with the devil, a salaciously open other, than you must not be surprised if you get a seeing to.
Outrageous is not the word, he’s the pimp who is telling his women not to dare and sleep with Europeans, dare not to cross him in any way or he will disfigure you and whoever is with you. Pompestic is actively threatening that he will try his best to remove Corbyn before he gets to put his hand on the tiller, what a toxic bunch they are him and Bolten, the scum of the earth at present, our beloved relation ship is blossoming.
this above is a response to Pompeo’s threats to J, further up.
Dave
Yes, not sure Soros owns the rights/ rites to LGBT divisiveness, I agree with you that divisiveness is the intention i.e. divide and rule.
The terms of the discussion are calculated to induce us to blind rage so th st the kleptofascists can continue to thieve from our socialist communal heritage.
Same with brexit, the politicians frame the entire debate solely to cause controversy.
Cornyn is castrated because the divisive rage distracts from the right wing rape of our society. And when common sense is uttered by Rory Stewart it comes with a Tory flag.
Tory common sense in politics is as unhelpful as Liberal commonsense in the LBGT issue.
Nobody can force the Muslims to adopt a different opinion to that expressed by the Creator in the Torah, Gospels and Qur’an.
In our area they bend the speed cameras heads off. I’m quite certain they will bend the council”s heads off.
Unless of course bending the bent puts them back in line.
Giyane
Soros as a metaphor for Globalist agenda. The 1% control 99% by controlling our vocabulary, how we speak, and de facto criminalising the entire population, everyone who gets it wrong, with thought crime, knowing its impossible to get it right, and 1% being in a position to decide who gets prosecuted and who gets a pass, particularly themselves.
Dave
The top 1% are not policing your language. But they are certainly attempting to influence your thinking if you consume the news they control. The message in general is to vote Conservative.
Anthony
Was it David Icke who tried to get us to see the 1% as reptilian aliens?
Naturally we would forgive such creatures their relentless avarice and cruelty because morality on earth is only conceived amongst humanity ( and Jinns )
Like William Blake’ chartered streets and chartered Thames that belong to Finance, not people.
Or the queen having blue blood and other old cons.
I have a friend who dyes his beard black. Laying to ones’ self is a fairly harmless occupation. Cornyn could renationalise Boris as the toilet mop on Paddington Station and Mrs may as the bongos of Big Ben.
“Was it David Icke who tried to get us to see the 1% as reptilian aliens?”
I’ve said this before, but provided we treat David Icke’s concept of reptilian aliens as metaphors for the slithering, cold-blooded elite controlling the planet, then he’s not far wrong!
“More than anything else,” he told Blitzer. “This isn’t about my feelings or about retribution. Look, the lizard brain that I have says I hope bad things happen to this man because he has been so destructive to our Republic, to the concept of democracy, to the concept that internationally we are a light unto the nations.”
Jim Himes (Democrat)
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-intel-dem-the-lizard-brain-that-i-have-hopes-bad-things-happen-to-trump
> Was it David Icke who tried to get us to see the 1% as reptilian aliens?
Probably, but I always think of John Carpenter / “They Live” first.
I’m aware it’s unpopular to admit this, but Icke has been spot on right on pretty much everything so far.
The hacked European election with landslide wins for the German Greens being the latest development to prove his point about the global green agenda (“Wollt ihr den totalen Neoliberrrralismus??”).
If Assange and Manning do not get the nobel peace prize they so deserve, then Icke should get one.
And since that will most likely never happen, a so-called alternative nobel prize should be the least.
While we’re at it.. remember Rosalie Bertell. It’s all out there in the open.
They are policing language with “hate crime” legislation that soon morphs into “hate speech” in which everything can be perceived as “hate”. This is a deliberate policy to protect the powerful under the guise of protecting the weak.
If for example you only heard about “anti-Semitic hate”, it would soon be recognised as over the top and contrived, but when everything becomes “hate” it becomes part of a general sense of world gone mad, but that’s how the 1% maintain their power, by deciding who gets prosecuted and who gets a pass and indeed who get accused of “hate” and who doesn’t.
@giyane
Re: Rory Stewart – I don’t see him as offering ‘common sense’. His approach is just as likely to cause division as any of the others, albeit through confusion. He *voted to remove the the ECHR from our law , despite the fact it’s integral to the Good Friday Agreement Given his v. posh background his man o’ the people shtick is laughable. The guardian reported a US interview in which he was asked if he’d been at MI6 and he said “that’s an unfair question”, no it’s not , it’s ‘yes or no’. Craig has also commented on this in the past . Former CIA people in the US who stand for office are open about their pasts . Given his likely intelligence background(possibly present), things like the Integrity initiative and JTRIG’s online psyops(incl. poll manipulation) can anything be believed about the social media ‘likes’ and the effusive btl comments his campaign is attracting? And why is he getting so much publicity as an outsider to win? Everything about him seems phoney and staged.
*On 13 Jun 2018: Rory Stewart voted against largely retaining the EU “Charter of Fundamental Rights” as part of UK law following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
*On 26 May 2016: Rory Stewart voted in favour of repealing the Human Rights Act 1998;
It does.not matter in this class A drug contest what we think, but what the 0.08% of populace likes the old favourite policy of cuyting taxes.
Virtually no other policies ate being suggested in this self servile duck shooting contest.
We are being persuaded that their past behaviour is something to be judged by a different law to that which punishes us all for such behaviour. ‘Dont look at what we did….judge us by the taxcuts we are prepared to give a small minority.
And not a word from the law enforcers or the judiciary. Meanwhile the right honourable drug dealer Mr. Atkins MP is tending to his 40 acres of cannabis cartel, safe and secure.
Imho, there is not one politician that has not taken drugs in the past.
Time to start talking about decriminalising all drugs with a view to legalise. Or rip society to shreds.
Thanks Goose, that voting record is enough to change minds. There is really no choice whatsoever , so lets assume that the taxcuts will get most coverage, whilst Alexander keeps as quiet as possible.
The ECHR and the EU’s CFR are not the same thing. The former predates the latter and incorporates the whole of Europe, not just the EU.
There was no reason not to carry over the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights into UK law as we leave. In fact, the CFR is more extensive in some areas than the ECHR.
After numerous judgements against mass surveillance in the ECJ ( using the CFR) and ECtHR (using the ECHR) it looks like Rory was just voting on behalf of the intel services.
Re Goose on “Rory Stewart – I don’t see him as offering ‘common sense’.”
Indeed, I agree, not that I have a say in it, it’s up to the Conservatives to decide which millionaire they want to be at the tiller.
It put me in mind of the article I read in the Jacobin today: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/rich-people-philanthropy-inequality-wealth
The article is headed ‘the world would be a better place without the rich’ and says
“They coarsen our culture, erode our economic future, and diminish our democracy. The ultra-rich have no redeeming social value.”
Brutal but true.
Rory is fighting to save the Tory party from what he sees as an existential threat of the hard Brexiter ‘no deal’ people.
But he comes across as a deeply deluded individual – he thinks there is some untrodden path out of their predicament. He talks about putting together a citizens’ assembly and making them sit until they thrash out a way out of the Brexit impasse. The UK would be reduced to more of a laughing stock than it is already in the EU. What if the assembly couldn’t agree? And any solution would still have to go before the HoC and the clock is ticking.
Read the Telegraph’s comments; even many Tories view him as just plain weird. He’s an old Etonian going around high-fiving random people in the street to look popular. Posh people faking the common touch is just offensive.
Pete
Personally, I’ve nothing against the vast majority of those who are rich. How do you define ‘rich’? A self-made person who starts a company, or someone sells a highly valued skill he or she has taken the effort to perfect; someone develops some product and patents it to make a profit? I say well done and good luck to all those.
I’m not a fan of those who’ve become billionaires from trading though. Those using: inside information; market rigging and other casino-type capitalism including complex financial instruments the hedge funds, or profiteering from debt misery and/or disaster capitalism. I think there may be a case for a total wealth cap when some are amassing tens of billions while others work three jobs but yet can barely make ends meet. Something is clearly wrong in any society, when you’ve got extreme wealth and extreme poverty living side by side like that.
The real question is why have things got so out of whack since the more equal 1970s? in terms of incredible wealth inequality and sky-rocketing CEO pay compared to that of ordinary folks. I think a lot of it is to do with the end of communism; the more extreme elements basically were set free to drive their ‘greed is good’ agenda without fear of people reaching for the political alternatives.
Or mass-immigration undermined social solidarity!
One reason for accelerating wealth inequality is the vast scope of the social security system.
The costs of social security long ago ceased to be capable of being supported by tax revenues. No-one is either brave or sane enough to rein the scope of these programs in, and they have therefore been financed by debt. Vast debt enables the peddlers of debt to become rich and it ensures that debtors become poor.
In 2007/8 debt reached such a magnitude that it collapsed the entire financial system. At this juncture market economics was promptly abandoned and replaced with targeted socialism for the finance sector. All western economies are now fully focused on inflating asset prices, and naturally this has necessitated more debt. Thus peddlers of debt continue to get rich as do the holders of assets. Anyone that does not peddle debt or did not hold assets prior to 2007/8 are getting poorer.
The rich are only rich because they hold assets. If they tried to monetize their wealth then the value of their assets would fall. The poor by definition have no money. So who is paying for the vast and expanding system of social security and socialized health care? Answer no-one. It is being funded by debt and debt serves to exacerbate wealth inequality.
Funding things with debt means that you no-longer need taxpayers and so who cares what tax payers think? Answer no-one. This obviously has implications for the ideal of representative democracy. Hence you see governments pursuing a range of policies that are either not supported by or demanded by the electorate. Most people are against bombing foreign people. Most people are against mass immigration and most people are against the deliberate hollowing out of the societies in which they live. Most people have no interest in identity politics. Most people despise politicians and most politicians despise their electorates.
Some people seem to think that this will all work out without any harm befalling them.
“The real question is why have things got so out of whack since the more equal 1970s?”
That’ll be Thatcherism.
Or rather Milton Friedman; Friedman was an academic who influenced both Reagan and Thatcher (through her advisor, Keith Joseph); and more indirectly, the extreme libertarian philosopher Friedrich Hayek. These people made a case that anything the state did, would be done worse than if it were done by private enterprise.
Remember: Thatcher was elected PM at a time when nationalised industries such as British Leyland, British Coal and British Rail were beset by strikes for higher pay. The strikes were targeted against taxpayers; who else was supposed to pay these higher wages? Who was being damaged by their withdrawal of labour?
I was appalled by the attacks on trades unions at the time. The effect ofthose attacks has been dismal. The privatisation of the NHS proceeds apace; it is now impossible for me to get a GP appointment in less than a month. My local CCG has been heavily criticized for selling off MRI services to some private company that doesn’t operate in my local hospitals.
Funding for local authorities has been reduced over the last 30 years; the roads around here are now full of potholes. The repairs that the council do are minimal; they break up again within a year. The council is spending serious money on accident claims from cyclists who have crashed because of submerged potholes. Council housing (and cooperative housing, for that matter) has been sold off under successive pieces of government legislation. As a consequence the streets of our cities are full of sleeping bags and beggars. Drug and alcohol services are desperately underfunded.
Police are hardly ever seen on the street; they only investigate the most serious crimes. The police have always complained that they’re underfunded; well, they were crying wolf. Now there’s a real wolf. Good luck if your £700 bicycle got nicked, even if you know who nicked it – the cops don’t have time for bicycle theft. Or burglary. Or motoring violations. Even rape and child sexual abuse are dealt with in a pretty crummy way: they pick on celebrities, and investigate the hell out of them. But ordinary folk with complaints about sex attacks – good luck with that.
Hayek and Friedman have been a disaster for nearly the whole world. They’re dead now; so are Thatcher and Joseph, but their impact on UK politics continues. All the candidates for the position of PM are effectively Thatcherites.
Goose,
The reasons for the rising inequality since the 70’s:-
1. Assets (capital/wealth) moving overseas.
Specifically the many family trusts – that have been used to evade Inheritance tax. Look at the recent Westminster Grosvenors IHT bill. Up until the 70’s – there were many regular stories of Aristos going bust because they couldn’t afford their IHT.
2. Reduction (elimination!) of the top rates of tax.
3. Big bang.
Re Goose, thanks for the reply and being so polite.
I believe I understand the problem with the blanket hatred of the Rich by the Poor. The article in the Jacobin made me laugh as it made no differentiation between what you might call the good rich and the bad ones. That’s what the debate about George Soros on this blog seemed to revolve around as it seemed to be about how he uses his wealth and how that might be characterised or interpreted.
My lower middle class origins seem to have made me prejudiced against the absurd level of economic inequality that abound around the world, it is a problem of the economic policy of the advanced nations, tied as they seem to be to a laissez-faire ideology. .
At the moment I am clinging to the possible illusionary notion that we will one day get a reformed political system, proportional voting rights and a free press, clearly I am deluded.
“The real question is why have things got so out of whack since the more equal 1970s?”
The Mont Pelerin Society conspiracy – “neoliberalism” – Thatcher.
Goose. Re Rory Stewart. I think he is the educated, articulate, born to rule in India type. Charming with a friendly smile and words for both the native tribes. A real Lawrence of today.
He was involved, not that long ago in that alleged ‘bullying’ of Diane Abbott on the BBC’s Question Time. He, Isabel Oakeshott and the ever -snide, sneery Fiona Bruce, were basically doing an impression of the film ‘mean girls’ ganging up on Abbott. A really ugly side to Rory was revealed.
The calm, reasonable, articulate Rory is just a front. I’ve read other comments from his constituents claiming he has a ‘nasty side’ too.
He has the air of someone who looks as though he’s about to pop it.
Will he last? that’s what the Tory members should think about.
Boris would last because even if he was dead – he would pretend he wasn’t.
The line up looks like a most Unwanted rather than Wanted list.
In festival of Village Idiots all 11 could represent a City each.
And people think Corbyn’s bad.
Blimey.
Ken Kenn
The lack of talent, considering how many are standing, is odd. Of those touted, or highly publicised: Gove is just plain obnoxious certainly not to be trusted; Boris is gaffe prone; Stewart has a puny, wizened look of a man far beyond his years – as you say he looks ill, certainly not Prime Ministerial and his overweening, superior manner is irksome. Hunt is a boring mid-managerial type ‘May in trousers’ – possibly competent but totally untrustworthy and disliked by NHS staff, impossible to warm to. Raab is Mr. Angry and seems to lack good judgement.
Rory Stewart is a Conservative MP .. case closed.
Ah, but he used to be in Labour (which is a rare thing for an Etonian) and says the reason he joined the Tories was because of the Blair ‘lies’ surrounding the Afghan and Iraqi invasions. Which begs the question; what about the Cameron/May lies that led to the destruction of Libya and the attempted regime change in Syria?
Deb O’Nair
Yeah, I read that too, in the guardian article. Quite a strange reason for quitting; but there again, many on the Tory moderate right would’ve been comfortable in a party led by Blair with senior ministers like Straw and David Miliband, Jacqui Smith et al. New Labour and Tory were basically interchangeable circa 2001-2010, weren’t they. Blair even stated his hope was to turn the Labour party into a UK version of the US Democrats. Which I read as a desire for a no choice, one-party state.
He’s now saying he is the ONLY candidate who can beat Boris Johnson.
His plan, in the highly unlikely case were he to become leader, is to find a way, via a citizens’ assembly recommendation of bringing May’s deal back before parliament. He’d use that recommendation from the rigged citizens’ assembly to force parliamentarians to support it.
Let’s face it, only a rigged citizens’ assembly would want May’s deal. All polling on it from the moment it emerged has consistently shown it to be deeply unpopular among both remainers and leavers and even neutrals.
Goose
Rory Stewart has understood the total illegality of torpedoing the Irish backstop.
Boris , glowing with post-coital ignorance, doesn’t give a shit about it. Even neck-chewing pit-bulls grin when they’re not chewing ladies” necks.
The former, MI6 Scottish Tory is facing facts which is a good start towards solving problems. The latter oaf has never been famous for letting facts interfere with what comes out of his mouth.
giyane
We elect politicians to keep a check on the intelligence services, to make sure they’re respecting our rights while carrying out their responsibilities. Oversight has improved dramatically, but would we really want a spook as our PM? And even if we – the UK population- will accept that , haven’t we a right to know who’ve got as the leader and PM of the UK?
I wonder if the main reason for some of these Tories challenging for the leadership is the pension it will earn them and their elevation to the Lords at the end of it. It’s a poisoned chalice they’re after and it may last only a few months before a general election is called. But in that time they’ll earn a Prime Minister’s pension payable at 55, and for some that could be several million pounds extra for what may be a short sit.
That’s interesting about Rory Stewart. I didn’t know he may have been in MI6. His father Brian Stewart was deputy head of MI6, so it would fit. His father then went to Racal which had big contracts in the military sector.
But Jeremy Hunt was head boy at Charterhouse.
I will be so pleased if a nerd is reading this who can reference previous former head boys of Clarendon school who have been in the cabinet.
Is it true that Boris Johnson was head boy at Eton? I thought he wasn’t. A few sources say he was, but they don’t look reliable.
Anyway we have
Johnson – Eton and Oxford
Stewart – Eton and Oxford
Hunt – Charterhouse and Oxford
Gove – Some school or other (SSO) and Oxford (Pres of the Union)
Raab – SSO and Oxford and Cambridge
Hancock – SSO and Oxford and Cambridge
Harper – SSO and Oxford
—————————–
Leadsom – SSO and Warwick
Javid – SSO or other and Exeter
McVey – SSO or other and Queen Mary, City, and Liverpool John Moores
Summary: all 6 of the white males among the 10 contenders went to Oxford, and half of those attended Clarendon schools before they started at Oxford
Correction: all SEVEN of the white males among the 10 contenders went to Oxford.
Come on, Owen Jones, if you’re reading this – write something useful!
“… Owen Jones, if you’re reading this … ”
I very much doubt that he is. After all, why would Jones want to read comments from a bigoted fake Marxist like yourself?
That’s such a cheap remark, Glenn, and it demeans you. This is one of the most followed Britain-based political blogs and I would not be surprised if Owen Jones follows it. I wasn’t suggesting that he avidly follows my comments in particular.
If you don’t think it’s interesting that 7 out of the 10 Tory leadership candidates, who happen to be all of the white males, went to the same elite university, you don’t have to!
N_ – your occasionally valid contributions would attract a bit more gravitas if you hadn’t “queered the pitch”, if you’ll forgive the phrase, with your incessant and unprovoked attacks on everyone who is not a straight up-and-down hetrosexual.
Your brand, if you will, has seriously taken a dent – to the extent that it has been suggested (and not by me, but I fully agree) you might have a liking for pink triangles to be pinned onto LGBT people. And for good reason, given your hateful campaign here. How does that grab you as a supposed and self-proclaimed Marxist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_triangle
As a Marxist-Leninist rather than Euro-Communist I think N is promoting class-politics rather than the new progressive identity politics, hence the comments about LGBT are angry attacks on “Left” heresy rather than homosexuals et al.
Rory Stewart : Eton, PPE at Oxford, the Foreign Office, OBE, FRSL, FRSGS, ETC. PP.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2010/nov/08/rory-stewart-career-mi6
The article even mentions someone called Craig Murray(?)
Quote : Asked by the magazine whether he had once worked for MI6, the 37-year-old MP for Penrith reportedly said: “It’s an unfair question” while “his mother, when asked, smiled, and said, ‘I wouldn’t begin to know’.” The article’s author, Ian Parker, wrote that Stewart “later suggested phrases that I might use – such as his career ‘giving the appearance of’ such a path”.
Semper Occultus renders his response understandable. But he surely even he realises the scrutiny involved were he to become PM wouldn’t allow for answers like “it’s an unfair question.”
There is no Tory PM candidate, or it seems a single Tory MP, that is saying they would take their policies to the electorate to gain the legitimate mandate. Why not?
Not a single report of any interviewer/journalist asking whether any candidate that question. Why not?
The excellent Steve Bell’s ‘If’ has been allowed back today, after being banished for the State visit by potus – a bunch of dinosaur types launching themselves at us, to become our leader, without asking us?
The strip is reminisient of the last Blackadder episode, just as the line of Funny Tingers sent over the top into oblivion, they all know they are doomed!
Lol. A General Election will be their extinction event! Happy days are coming…
As you said.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2019/jun/10/steve-bells-if-tory-leadership-dinosaurs-on-the-march
Steve Bell’s work is the only good thing in the Guardian. A year or two back, the Lightbox Museum in Woking had an exhibition of his cartoons. On display there were many little sketch books which he takes into the HoC to closely record his subjects.
“Why not?”
Turkey, Christmas, voting.
I would like someone to ask the simple and obvious question about how Michael Gove got through positive vetting before taking a cabinet seat. It’s a simple enough question, i.e. did he lie or was he (and his family, friends former work colleagues etc.) never asked? Either way it stinks, if he lied he should be immediately prohibited from any further public office, if he was never asked then what the f*ck are the security services doing and who else has slipped through their net?
There has been a poll which suggests that if Boris Johnson were to be elected as leader of the conservative party and if parliament blocked Brexit, Johnson would go to the country and win an overall majority of 140
Hope they believe it! Bring on the election.
Unfortunately I have had my donation returned, this is very disappointing.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/saving-syria-s-children-did-the-bbc-lie#/
It seems extraordinary that so few people are interested in exposing this outrageous BBC fake film on Panorama.
Ditto. My small contribution was numbered “57” which indicates the appeal didn’t attract many donations.
Giyane: “…pushing a LGBT agenda onto primary school Muslim children…”
There’s a bit of a lack of self-awareness in the above.
For one thing, what is the “LGBT agenda” supposed to be – turning all kids queer, I suppose? God forbid they should just be asking for acceptance, not to have the hell beaten out of them, discriminated against at every turn, and having to live in terrified secrecy about their real identities. I guess that’s asking a bit too much from some people.
The other thing, Giyane, is your description of “our Muslim children”. Hmm. Did they get born Muslim? Or did it take years of indoctrination about the absolute truth of one particular form of religious mumbo-jumbo, without any genuine question ever being allowed to enter into the discussion.
I assure you, no child was born to any particular religion – they had it drummed (and very often beaten) into them before they could possibly think for themselves.
Perhaps there’s a bit of projection going on here, and religious bigots think “the LGBT agenda” works the same way as religious indoctrination works for them.
Hey glenn_nl
I am completely in accord with your remark. I have for a very long time been opposed to the teaching of religion to young children. At times in my life I have held religious beliefs, but I have NEVER thought it was right to impose such beliefs on people whose intellectual abilities were insufficient to evaluate what they were being told. UK state schools are required by law (still) to present a religious curriculum “of a primarily Christian nature”. Less than 30% of the population are Christians; why can’t we simply bring an end to this nonsense?
English, Scottish and international law say that children have to be educated in accordance with their parents’ wishes.
English law: Education Act 1996, section 9, “Pupils to be educated in accordance with parents’ wishes.”
Scottish law: Education (Scotland) Act 1980, section 28, “Pupils to be educated in accordance with the wishes of their parents.”
International law: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”
@Jimmeh – “UK state schools are required by law (still) to present a religious curriculum ‘of a primarily Christian nature’.”
No they aren’t. Where did you get that idea?
I used to be chair of governors of my children’s school.
It doesn’t take much googling: try this.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/281929/Collective_worship_in_schools.pdf
You’re mistaken, @Jimme. It may not take much use of a US advertising company’s services to find support for your view, but it doesn’t take much knowledge and logic to realise it’s wrong. There are Muslim state schools and Jewish state schools in Britain. They are not obliged by law to teach a religious curriculum of a “primarily Christian nature.
The document you link to is from 1994. Since then there has been the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. In its Schedule 20 it refers to “broadly Christian” “collective worship” only in regard to “any community school” and “any foundation school which does not have a religious character”. It also provides that a standing advisory council may disapply said requirement even in respect of a school of one of those types. And it makes clear that no Christian or “broadly Christian” requirement applies to “foundation schools with a religious character” or “voluntary schools”.
I have now spent 10 minutes proving the totally obvious.
In any case it’s all b***ocks and what most schoolteachers and school governors “worship” is the social hierarchy, determining these functionaries’ despicable and headbangingly idiotic view that some children have more “potential” than others.
Jimmeh: Thanks for the reply.
My school upbringing was 100% Welsh baptist Christian. Your question is entirely valid. I find it a severe lacking in my state education, that Christianist propaganda was allowed free rein. We were never told that any other religion even existed, let alone that there might be a valid alternative to the Biblical BS we had forced down our throats on a daily basis.
Less than 30% of the population are Xistans, as you say – and I doubt many of them attend Church regularly, extremely few actually practice the Xian principles, as proclaimed by Christ. Nobody at all lives by “Biblical values”, of that I am 100% certain. So why do we have “Thought for the day” on R4? Why are official occasions still pretending we are a Xian nation – what is it with that lazy assumption?
Why are most Bank Holidays Xian – nothing for any other religious group at all. No bank holiday for the end of Ramadan. That is an insult and a disgrace for our fellow British citizens, who happen to have been duped and brainwashed with a different set of sky-spook delusions based on primitive mumbo-jumbo.
I mean, if people from other religions are also basing their lives on the teachings of “Elders” who didn’t know why it was dark at night, at least they should get their fantasies commemorated in equal measure.
(Personally, I would like to see a “Science Day”, where people are allowed to just think without delusions being allowed to intrude.)
The Muslim belief is that all children are born Muslims, and the meaning of that belief is not that babies are able to describe the duty to carry out acts of charity (zakat) etc., but that all babies are of God rather than being unbelievers or followers of a false religion. Hence the Muslim view that older non-Muslims who become Muslims are “reverts”, not converts. Contrary to right-wing racist lies, Islam is not an ethnic religion.
Of course there is an “LGBT” agenda. Just consider for starters how much media space is allotted to this 2% of the population. Those who didn’t know that gays, lesbians and bisexuals account for only 2% of the population should ask themselves why they didn’t know. And they should do it without shouting out any rationalisation or confirmation bias of the kind that says “actually it’s not 2%, and government statistics are terribly wrong, and you’re just some guy on the internet, and I’m a real free thinker for being so sceptical, and you’re at best gullible and at worst a complete Nazi”. Talking of Nazis, the eugenicist nutcase Marie Stopes loved Nazis. “Liberal” ideology isn’t as “liberal” as it’s presented. So many people have their heads well up their fundaments on these fairly obvious matters.
Is it even allowed to say that gender dysphoria is an illness nowadays, or is it a “right”? “LGBT” is an interesting
brandterm. A gay man is sexually attracted to other men. It happens. A transsexual man believes he is a woman trapped in a man’s body. That sometimes happens too, but it’s a false belief, like thinking he’s a hippopotamus or a tulip.Transsexuality got mentioned about a dozen times in the 2017 Labour general election manifesto. Something’s kinda wrong here, kinda completely batsh*t crazy. Inherited wealth didn’t get mentioned once!
One has to wonder what else people will believe if those higher up the propaganda chain tell them. Will people believe incest is OK if they’re told to? Oh wait…a state body in Germany has already called for that particular practice to be legalised.
In other news, Jeremy Hunt, promoter of homoeopathic medicine, former head boy at Charterhouse, and a man who lined his pockets with British state contracts in the Chinese market to become the richest member of the cabinet, will be the next prime minister.
Where does the figure of 2% come from?
@Twirlip – The 2% figure comes from the Office for National Statistics, sourced from the Annual Population Survey. In 2012 the figures were 1.5% for the whole of the country and 1.8% for London. In 2017 the figure for the whole of the country was a few tenths of a percentage point higher. These are from the largest official surveys ever done of sexual orientation in this country.
(More detailed data is at the ONS site.)
This reminded me of something, ah yes here it is:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/03/geoffrey-coxs-new-legal-advice-on-brexit-incentivises-unionist-violence/comment-page-6/#comment-845846
And you never replied to it there! I’ve reproduced Clark’s demolition of your 2% nonsense here:
Clark wrote:
N_, what you have omitted from the Office of National Statistics is that less than 94% of people identify as “heterosexual or straight”. So if you encounter or interact with, say, a thousand people over the course of a week or a month, sixty of them – like, a whole coach-load – don’t identify as “heterosexual or straight”. Most people have a few hundred acquaintances, so some dozens of people you know are, as you would put it, abnormal. I pity them, for your prejudice, not their sexuality.
And this, O/T sorry, is the early review of the new farming programme, a bomb. Going down the page on the left you will find lots of information, the most important is that 42% of farmers could not make a profit and 16%, very likely those farms who will be sold to larger companies, could not make ends meet despite the profits, are at risk.
https://www.nao.org.uk/report/early-review-of-the-new-farming-programme/
I have only dipped into the mass of info,, not read it all, it would be interesting to know how many of these farms are at risk of storm surges, on low lying grounds and or susceptible to flooding and or rising sea levels,, nor is this info correlated with any of the environmental agencies data on fertility of soils and or wash off rates due to industrial farming.
But somewhere there is an unpalatable truth that will tell us that our economies and endeavours, our unfathomed over consumption are unsustainable and that we will have to change of face more ludicrous resource wars under false pretences which will very likely be the end of us.
the positive note is that it has stopped raining for a few hours before we’ll get some more, finally replenishing the drought conditions here in the east of England, above mentioned farmers are happy, but its an occupation of chances and changes now. I for one understand why farmers are in the highest suicide group.
Enjoy your day.
N_
Ethnicity and Islam.
Most Muslims are under the impression that they are perfect examples of their Faith, whereas they only follow the culture they were brought up in.
The result of this is that they see any opinion thatt is different from their own culture as totally wrong.
The stereotype comes from Asian racism as well as British racism. We’ve lived together side by side for 300 years. Asian Muslims cannot stand us telling them from their Qur’an where their prejudice is wrong.
They know better than us just how dodgy their culture is Islamically. And they always seem surprised that we can’t see how much of their culture is totally devoid of Islam and how much our culture has learnt from the Islamic message of books from before the Qur’an.
All good fun and games
You mean – just like the follower of every other religious delusion – most Muslims don’t think other Muslims are devout enough, or worshiping their sky-spook in quite the right way?
N_ : “Of course there is an “LGBT” agenda.”
OK, what is it then?
@Glenn_NL
“OK, what is it then?”
It is to stomp out the acceptability of the recognition that heterosexuality is not only normal but is biologically natural for our species whereas homosexuality is not only abnormal but biologically unnatural. Vladimir Putin is right that whereas homosexual activity between consenting adults should be legal and nobody should be persecuted for engaging in it, it should not be allowed to be publicly promoted.
The Tories had such a laugh with “Clause 28”.
“Do what you want” and “dog eat dog” (or as it also appears, “there is no such thing as society”) are the replacement ideas.
Cor blimey, you do love loaded statements don’t you?
Your second paragraph is simply a statement of your own bigotry, not any established fact or reasoned argument. OK, so you are homophobic. Too bad for you and anyone you meet. Are there races you detest too?
Your lies about “publicly promoting” homosexuality are every bit as bad as the Tory’s Clause 28, you should be ashamed of putting yourself in the same bag as them. Any genuine Marxist will certainly be ashamed of you, and rather offended that you dare to claim to be one.
Repeating that lie about 2% from the ONS is particularly egregious – either you don’t understand the basics about statistics, even when it’s explained to you, or you are trying to deceive. Which is it?
N_
Putin said it should not be promoted to children. Please be accurate if you quote someone’s ideas.
You can refer to this source in russian
https://tass.ru/politika/626827
Nature abhors your vacuum, N_. It finds many functions where you find only deviance. It’s something you’re going to have to come to terms with. And to be true to your anti-establishment leanings you’d be better served looking at how the establishment is dealing with losing one of it’s major blackmail holds over creative and exceptional young gay men (in particular.) It’s dealing with this loss by politicising them wholesale. By merely loathing them and their culture you lose the oportunity to be any part in the formation of their political understanding.
@Glenn_nl: Speaking of a lack of self awareness (as you do) do you have any reason to suppose that the current dispute in the UK is not intended to lead to material such as this being taught to schoolchildren,
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9njBaZTrCfSRnVWX3h0djhndGhWeC1sbGJpajY5U1lNS3Br/view
Should you be bothered to read this document then you will note that a sexual practice referred to as fisting is on the curriculum. Were you given instruction on fisting when you were at school? If you were not taught about fisting then do you think that this has had a detrimental impact on your life as an adult, If you were taught about fisting as a child then could you explain the beneficial impact that this has had on your life as an adult?
I’m not into following sub-sub-references, Loony, so just cut to the chase, please.
Where do they teach “fisting” as part of the curriculum? When did they do this? Names – places – schools, age-groups. An indirect reference is kind of suspicious, coming from someone as slippery as yourself. Your credibility rests on a solid reference here, Loony – make it good, or you’re dead, son.
*
Don’t forget, just as a single example, you never got back to explain how the great Trump tax cuts had created wonders, but your own reference let slip that the examples of tax cuts quietly paying for redundancies. You’re just not honest enough to be taken for your word, I’m afraid. And I’m not going to go play “Fetch!” for you either.
*
Where? When? I think you are lying. How very Trump of you. You’re are a hysteric, a rabble-rousing wannabe. Prove me wrong with evidence.
The answer to your question is California. It’s scope covers the entire Californian public school system from kindergarten to 12th Grade. I do not believe that the concept of fisting is introduced to early years students.
Were you taught about this at school? if not then how do you think the absence of instruction on fisting has been detrimental to your life. If you were taught about this then in what way has it been beneficial to your life.
I do not actually expect you to answer this. My strong suspicion is that you do not think it is a good idea but that you are unwilling to state this for fear of offending some self proclaimed victim group.
No doubt you content yourself with your ability to keep you and yours well away from this – and refuse to contemplate the horrors inflicted on those not so fortunate as yourself. So much easier to invoke the specter of Donald Trump and call me a Nazi/lunatic/xenophobe/hysterical wannabe or whatever the insult of the day happens to be.
“California” is not a specific example. I challenged you to produce even one example of this actually taking place, and you have singularly failed to do so – to no surprise whatsoever.
You are telling untruths. Ever thought of getting a job as a Whitehouse spokesperson?
Obviously you are correct – California cannot possibly be a specific example of anything for the simple reason that only a fool would believe California to be a constituent state of the United States and located on the west coast of the US., Only a conspiracy theorist would believe that under the Federal system of the United States that California is responsible for the public education system in California.
You have to be completely delusional to ascribe any ,meaning at all to “kindergarten through to 12th grade” What can this possibly mean? Perhaps it is a geological term. I don’t know.
I suppose a naked denial that words have any generally accepted meaning is an alternative to the instant resort of the smear de jour. Perhaps you haven’t been told what it is yet. Why not just call me a Nazi or a lying Nazi if it makes you feel better.
You’d give an example if one existed, Loony. Name one school. You know good and well how absolutely delighted you’d be, if such a thing could be found.
Unfortunately – for you – no such example exists. So thrash around instead.
Name one instance. One school. One class. One teacher. One date. You cannot, and we both know it.
You might wonder how I was able to call you out with such confidence. It’s probably because I know your brand of hysterical, religiously bigoted liars better than you know yourself.
Here you go Glenn – here is a list of public schools in California. Please pick your favorite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high_schools_in_California
Just in case the list is too long for you, here is an article describing a protest against this kind of thing in Sacramento (Sacramento is the state Capital of California). You will note (or perhaps not) the article refers to a petition protesting these laws in the Freemont School District.
No doubt none of this will satisfy you as are ideologically possessed to such an extent that you must avoid recognition of reality at all costs. Were you ever taught about fisting when you were at school? If so how did it help you? and if not how did it hinder you?
Good to see that, entirely without evidence, I have (in your mind) transited from a Nazi into a “hysterically, religiously bigoted liar” Do you regard the protesters in Birmingham as being hysterical, religiously bigoted liars? If so do you have any plans to make this accusation public? Are you aware that if the answer to either of these questions is yes then you qualify as an Islamophobe. Alternatively perhaps you agree with the protests in which case you qualify as both a homophobe and a transphobe.
All of these things are against the law, and so whatever opinion you may hold on this matter is a criminal opinion. Perhaps you are aware of this and this explains your unwavering commitment to avoid the issue and your ruthless determination to persist with irrelevant ad hominem attacks.
Try to remember that the revolution eats itself. Always and everywhere. Ne exceptions.
Apologies – here is the article referred to but linked in the above comment
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-sex-education-california-20190510-story.html
Still no specific examples of a school in which “fisting” has been taught to children?
Thought not. You can throw down a list of every school in that misbegotten country if you like, it doesn’t help if you cannot name a single instance where this has happened.
Oh yes – the protestors at Birmingham are obviously bigots too, religiously deluded bigots at that, which is the worst kind. Thought that would be too obvious (even for you) to be worth mentioning, since that’s what brought up this entire sub-thread.
California is not a country. It is a constituent state of the United States.
Pursuant to a law passed on May 8th by the California State legislature all aspects of sex “education” contained in the document I have already posted (but which you are too pure to read) will be taught throughout the California public school system. I have separately provided you with a list of individual schools that make up the California public school system.
I have therefore answered your questions fully and completely. You however continue to refuse to opine as to whether or not you think it appropriate for this type of material to be taught to children. You cannot possibly be as inane as your comments would suggest, It is therefore probable that your ongoing refusal to address the issues (despite having raised them) is intended to act as cover for a deeply nefarious motive.
I know CA is not a country. I lived there enough years to appreciate that. As ever, distraction with pretence is your tactic.
You still have not provided a single instance of what you implied – children being taught about “fisting”.
Now that came from the lurid, hideous imaginations of Xian zealots, who went straight from “age appropriate sex education” to the most debased practices they could dredge up. As you have done.
It’s remarkable that in the epoch where the sexual abuse of children by warders at young offender institutions, children’s and social services managers, priests and football coaches etc., basically by anyone who has contact alone with children as part of their job, is now “safeguarded” against at almost every opportunity, and when schoolteachers are trained to treat every parent as a potential child abuser (hence no photos at school nativity plays etc.), schoolteachers are sitting pupils down in rooms and “teaching” them about sticking fists up bottomholes for sexual gratification.
The Emperor has no clothes!
N_ : “schoolteachers are sitting pupils down in rooms and “teaching” them about sticking fists up bottomholes for sexual gratification.”
I’ll ask you the same as I asked Loony. Where are they actually doing this? A citation please, otherwise it looks like a fantasy that you’re indulging in here. (Loony didn’t answer either, funnily enough)
I’ll tell you something else – people who obsess about this sort of thing are invariably the ones who are deeply closeted. “Normal” people as you’d have it don’t think about this sort of thing all the time. It says rather more about you, than I imagine you’d care to admit.
I first heard about schools teaching pupils about fisting here, in Loony’s comment. I didn’t read the document he linked to, but I assumed that what he said about it was accurate. I’ve now checked and it does indeed mention fisting. Heather Corinna’s book’s exact relationship to policy or the curriculum I don’t know, nor who exactly was suggesting that the book be featured in a “school-wide” read, nor what success they had. The link mentioned on the first page of the document is to a State of California government website. Perhaps Loony can explain.
I quite agree that an obsession with this sort of thing would be deeply unhealthy. It’s a really cheap arguing technique, when a person says something, to call them “obsessed” with it rather than countering it properly. Maybe they’ve simply thought about it more than you want to. I’ve posted a single comment about it, in response to somebody else’s comment. That doesn’t indicate any kind of obsession.
N_ : “I didn’t read the document he linked to, but I assumed that what he said about it was accurate.”
Maybe you should consider the source occasionally. Loony is a Trump apologist, a paid up champion would be embarrassed at the craven support he gives that far-right white supremacist. Hardly a fellow traveler – come on, you’ve been around long enough to notice.
You know how this works, surely? If you’re dishonest enough, and squint at the subject from just the right angle, you can proclaim (through several rather disconnected steps) that A leads directly to Z, because A might imply B, and B said something along the lines of C, which had sympathies with D, and that _might_ mean E….
If school-teachers had really sat a bunch of kids down and explained to them of the joys of “fisting”, the right wing would – with ecstatic pleasure – be screaming about specific examples, naming and shaming, hauling the supposed victims to cry in front of cameras.
The fact that you were prepared to believe it, and jump into bed for a spot of “fisting” with the likes of Loony, should give you serious pause. Unfortunately, I very much doubt you have that capacity for self reflection.
@Glenn – Your view of “considering the source” is very different from mine. You seem to think the fact that all 7 of the white males standing for the Tory leadership went to Oxford University is uninteresting because it was wicked old me that mentioned it. It could have been Tommy Robinson who mentioned it for all I care, but I should have thought the fact would be of interest to left wing radicals. Meanwhile as far as I know you haven’t looked at the documented Steiner-cult links of the “Extinction” mob.
Many things happen in Britain right in front of people’s faces that they don’t discuss or link to other things because they tell themseves “If that were true, everyone would be up in arms about it”. They wait for those higher up the chain to give them the OK, and when it never comes they never make a move. What they really mean is it’s not talked about on the television. The level of recognition in Great Britain of official corruption is amazingly low, and most are deferential towards e.g. medics and solicitors and whatever idiots from the local council called “Mr” someone or other. This is the reality of caste. This is the success of the school system.
“I very much doubt you have that capacity for self reflection.”
Have you reflected yet on how you were raised in the “end of the world” Jehovah’s Witnesses cult and now, while you dislike the JW intensely, you’re a radical green influencee of the end of the world “Fifth Great Extinction” cult?
N_ – whether deliberately or not, you badly misrepresent what I’ve said to the point of outright falsehood.
There was no mention to you about the source for the Oxford connection here, on a sub-thread concerning Loony’s lurid lies. That is the source I was talking about, which you were happy to believe (and wax on about) without hesitation.
I was not raised as a JW, you have doubtless confused me with someone else. Poor attention to the facts all round.
N_
In the case of the Birmingham schools, the LGBT promoters do believe they have been wrongly prevented by society from expressing their sexuality in all the ways intended by ‘safe guarding’.
It’s the same logic as a rogue gunman shooting 50 New Zealand Muslims because their existence contradicts his freedom not to share his country with others of different beliefs.
I happen to believe that both the ‘ Free to fuck LGBT movement and the NZ shooter are both sponsored by far right wing parties intent on fostering hate and after that authoritarianism. Fascism masquerading as freedom.
But that is because God gave me , through hard experience , a very sensitive BS detector on the end of my nose which stops me being able to read blatant trollery or indeed Tory propaganda on the BBC .My BS sensor is also activated when Muslims who enjoy Western comforts like 24 hour electricity and pure running water preach killing Christians from mosques in the UK.
You are so right when you point out the irony of protecting children from their own parents while simultaneously exposing them to predatory abuse from strangers.
Birmingham’s child care services were recently put into special measures. Presumably because their BS alarms had been disabled by the same people as the promoters of LGBT rights to four year olds
Giyane: “It’s the same logic as a rogue gunman shooting 50 New Zealand Muslims because their existence contradicts his freedom not to share his country with others of different beliefs.”
No, Giyane, it really isn’t. A bunch of queers and lesbians who hope not to have the shit kicked out of them for being seen in public is NOT the same as some religious nut-case or white supremacist going on a murder rampage.
You are one seriously deluded individual if you’re capable of equating these issues.
Glenn
Birmingham Council is deemed unfit to care for children and put into special measures.
It’s like having a Tory party that won’t deliver Brexit but is refusing to call an election in order to get in somebody who can.
We want to bugger your children and we want to bugger our country.
No and No.
Craig, as a nautical man, I’m interested in your opinion on this recent spat : https://youtu.be/P99H2NwkhYw
Why not leave child sex education up to the church? The clergy seem to have got it since they dropped the flaming purifications. Isn’t it a parents right to choose genital mutilation likewise? Who wouldn’t love a castrato singing to bed every night? ( made illegal in the Papal states, the last to prohibit them, in 1870.)
US really have no shame:
Clear-cut meddling? Mike Pompeo promises US will try to stop Corbyn from being elected
https://on.rt.com/9w4d
Any guess it will go unoticed?
Do you have no knowledge of the real world?
US policy has long been to oppose communism. That is why they fought wars in Korea and Vietnam. That is why they opposed the Soviet Union and why they have imposed a multi decade blockade of Cuba, That is why they overthrew Pinochet in Chile and why they oppose the regime in Venezuela.
Are you really so racist as to believe that the British are somehow superior to all of these places. Are you so stupid as to believe that the US will sacrifice blood and treasure all around the world to oppose communism – but that if it comes to the UK they will close their eyes and pretend not to notice,
Corbyn isn’t proposing communism, nor has he ever done so.
Expect the next manifesto to look a lot like the 2017 manifesto- a centre-leftish manifesto by European standards.
Do you honestly believe this PLP – which is still largely Blairite btw – would ever support a communist manifesto?
And besides, to play along with this thought experiment; even if Labour were proposing a ultra far-left agenda; if the British people endorsed that and sought its implementation via an election, that’s our sovereign decision , it’s not for the US to interfere in.
This whole incident will be making Labour supporters question our ties to the US and whether we want their bases here.
loony has no idea what communism is.
You cannot tell much from a manifesto. Both main parties presented a manifesto to the electorate stating that their policy was to leave the EU. The UK has not left the EU and instead both main parties have conspired to create a constitutional crisis. The creation of a constitutional crisis was notably absent from the manifesto’s of all parties.
In British history there has only ever been one vote endorsed by a majority of voters – and that was the vote to leave the EU. It is inconceivable that any government could be elected with over 50% of the voters voting in favor of it. Therefore a majority of voters would not have voted for ultra far left Labour Party.
The US would then be free to intervene claiming that it was acting to protect democracy, and moreover it would be able to co-opt many of the arguments deployed by those so desperate not to leave the EU. Oh the irony of people like Sadiq Khan acting to provide legitimacy to overt US intervention against himself.
‘…they oppose the regime in Venezuela.’ Perhaps you meant that they oppose the ‘government’ in Venezuela?
Venezuela has a democraticaly elected government.
Loony
What do US have to do with the… rest of the world? What does Labour have to do with communism?
Why do you propose foreign meddling in the UK by the US?
I am not aware that I proposed any foreign meddling by the US.
I merely stated as fact that the US routinely meddles in other countries affairs. It does so for a variety of reasons – but a consistent reason is to oppose communism.
Loony
Actually you did, why else did you respond as you did? Wouldnt you agree with me that US should stay out of UK (and other countries)? Because its not apparent that that is what you are really saying.
Also, since you refuse to answer – no Labour is not communists.
Just to be clear I said that US policy is to oppose Communism, and that the US routinely intervenes in other countries affairs for a variety of reasons, and that one of those reasons is to oppose Communism.
Such statements cannot be reasonably be interpreted as my proposing foreign meddling by the US. If I note that swathes of Africa carry a risk of malaria then that does not mean I am proposing anyone should contract malaria.
Yes, it would be better if the US were less interventionist – but the reality is that they are not. There is no way they are going to stand by and let the UK fall to communism. They don’t need to invade the country, just to pull the plug on the vast debt mountain that the UK has so diligently assembled. This is what being in possession of the reserve currency allows you to do.
Who knows what Labour is – just another bunch of liars obsessed with internecine bickering. Corbyn himself is unquestionably a Communist – but he is largely irrelevant as many members of his own party despise him. He will not be able to “purify” the party in time for the next election. In the unlikely event that he wins then his policies will be blocked by his own party. If all of that fails then the US will destabilize the currency, assuming that the present government does not beat them to the draw and preemptively destroy sterling.
Or maybe I am wrong. The UK is a joke country and Corbyn is a joke Communist. Maybe they deserve each other.
Loony
As I expected. Tellingly you do not condemn US interference in UK politics.
Loony@23:42, your tiredness, probably caused by posting so late, led you confuse Allende and Pinochet. The U.S.A. overthrew the former and armed and maintained the latter.
Yes indeed I did confuse Pinochet with Allende.
The fact that you so kindly pointed it out suggests that it did not succeed in confusing you.
If Corbyn is a communist maybe this Communism isn’t such abad thing afterall.
Good of you to admit your confusion, Loony. It takes rather more than your drivel to confuse me.
The Cold War was a cover story. By and large, it was just an excuse for imposing the age-old colonial order on the second and third world. If you look at the various hot zones honestly, Vietnam, Cuba, South America, etc., you’ll see they were more like north-south conflicts than east-west.
In east and south east Asia, the great crescent, the primary aim was to restore the Japanese economic empire which depended upon resources and markets in places like Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines.
Ironic that Japan’s motivation to go to war was driven by denial of access in the area (by the US and Britain) but we aren’t short on such contradictions. Either way, we are talking about very typical colonial conflicts in essence, of the north-south flavour that the area had been accustomed to since about the 17th century.
Haha, loony, you have excelled yourself on this one. Immediately mounting your very high horse of moral rectitude and denouncing all and sundry, while displaying a grasp of UK politics that could only come from the Mail online. Following your own unique use of the syllogism, we can only conclude that you are indeed racist and stupid to believe your own assertions.
And while you’re at it, do brush up your knowledge of South America. Otherwise you run the risk of coming across as stupid. Oops!
I’m pretty sure it’s a parody account
Ian; is this it?
Craig Murray, I think humanity and Scotland would benefit hugely if you were to address the current goings on at Hunterston Nuclear Power station on the Clyde coast.I think when papers like the Daily Mirror and other tabloids are printing warnings like this, it’s time people took notice and engaged;
“Nuclear experts have warned against re-opening a 43-year-old Scottish nuclear reactor riddled with cracks over fears of a meltdown.
“Hunterston B nuclear power plant was shut down last year after it was found that Reactor 3 had almost 400 cracks in it – exceeding the operational limit.
“EDF, which own the plant in Ardrossan, Ayrshire, are pushing to return the reactor to service at the end of June and July and want to extend the operational limit of crack allowed from 350 to 700.”
The timing of this is quite extraordinary given the popularity and success of the TV drama Chernobyl on Sky right now. Nobody who has watched that show could be left in any doubt as to the potential for devastating carnage and here we seem to be walking into a disaster;
“NUCLEAR experts claim that Glasgow and Edinburgh could be forced to “evacuate” if two damaged nuclear reactors are reopened.”
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1137995/scotland-could-nuked-evacuated-edf-nuclear-hunterston-plant
This is serious.
Hatuey
June 10, 2019 at 23:42
That’s just down the coast from me..on the Clyde..The Ferret news has been screaming about this for months.
There is a huge population south West of Glasgow.. Where we live with U.K Nukes
I’m surprised the SNP don’t make more of this.
Hatuey,
there’s the wave of humor and memes on Chernobyl series. Firstly, some Karla Marie Sweet, a british screenwriter, complained in her Twitter that there were no black people in the movie 🙂
https://www.rt.com/news/460958-chernobyl-hbo-racial-diversity-actors/
the best joke I’ve seen is “they should get Will Smith for Gorbachev” 🙂
Surprisingly, the countra-wave discovered Igor Hiryak (in russian)
https://pikabu.ru/story/istorii_interesnyikh_lyudey_30_igor_khiryak_6750881
and produced an interesting article on Fukusima (in russian)
https://pikabu.ru/story/nash_otvet_chemberlenu_ili_nemnogo_o_fukusime_6749944
“… The most interesting thing is that neither the WHO, nor the UN, nor IAEA, not to mention Greenpeace…do not bother … highly radioactive slurry constantly seeping into the sea, traces of cesium, strontium and other delicacies from Fukushima from time to time found in the sea off the coast of even Germany and Sweden… what is left of the nuclear power plant is actively polluting the environment for 8 years.
Well, (*Japan) is a key ally of the United States in the Pacific region, so to claim it is too expensive.“
Tatyana, I read a few Russian reviews on YouTube and they praised the series on historical accuracy. I actually only watched it on the strength of those reviews.
Apparently Soviet stuff is selling fast on eBay because of the show, watches, etc. That’s a strange reaction.
On the lack of black people, I don’t know what is right and wrong on that issue. I often see black people in Shakespeare’s plays etc.
The Fukushima reactor as I understand it made it into the ground water. Ground water would normally make it into sea with terrible consequences but I think they are pumping the contaminated water into huge storage tanks for future generations.
The Three Mile Island meltdown deserves a mention. In the Chernobyl TV show they pay a lot of emphasis on the ability of the Soviet Union to smother the truth but I think the West has proved itself to be at least as capable.
I suspect if Scottish people knew the truth about Dounreay, Hunterston, Faslane & Couplort, and Hunterston, they’d look st the independence question differently. Vast areas of Scotland have been totally trashed.
*Coulport
re. “to smother the truth” from the same article on Fukusima:
” 20 kilometer zone around the station was resettled. But in May 2011 … quite high levels of radiation are observed …in areas remote from the station as far as 40 km. The option to resettle everyone within 40 km from the station was discussed, but it was considered too expensive a procedure. Instead, the Japanese government… changed the sanitary rules, increasing the maximum permissible dose for civilians by a factor of 20.
So, the dirty radiation zone became nothing shitty, but quite clean. For better understanding: the U.S. Embassy recommended its citizens living in Japan not to settle closer than 80 (!) kilometers to Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant. The Japanese are resettled from the 20-kilometer zone, the 30-kilometer zone can be resettled “voluntarily” (without compensation from the government, aha). In short, Japanese women still give birth, or whatever you’re supposed to say in such cases?
“…interesting method of estimating the number of victims … about 20 cases of thyroid cancer associated with the accident were recorded for all this time in Japan (after Chernobyl such cases were 4000). Why so little? Because the Japanese government decided: if the person received less than 100 millisieverts (REM) and got sick, so his illness has nothing to do with Fukushima, and he’d better not say it .
And 100 REM is, by the way, is the lower threshold of acute radiation syndrom, i.e. really never a small dose: the Chernobyl liquidators were supposed to “write off” after 25 REM. You know, this is quite a convenient way to count the number of victims of the accident, it is a pity that the Soviet Union did not know about this.”
—
So, I think if you have a nuclear plant somewhere close to you, you’d better have a honest government.
Good post, tatyana. I’d add that children are particularly succeptible to thyroid cancers as a result of excessive radiation exposure and most of the case caused by Chernobyl and Fukushima would have been in children, probably around 85%.
Depriving children of the vote is one of the most cunning tricks we pulled in this world. If you told a child that nuclear power might harm one single mouse, the child would oppose it.
You raise an interesting question Tatyana, an article in USA today on the subject of “safe doses of radiation” concludes that, generally speaking no dose is safe: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/17/radiation-science-chernobyl-30-anniversary/82971520/
But it also makes the point that scientific opinion is divided on the matter, hence the difference between what constitutes a safe low dose. It is very convenient that the Government can decide what is safe or not in the matter. Hence the concern about the radioactive mud being dumped in the Bristol channel: https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/somerset-news/radioactive-mud-hinkley-point-dumped-672554
pete, I believe that radiation is like alcohol.
It wastes the body’s resource to neutralise a dose, so, there is no a ‘safe dose’.
The rate of consumption matters, this is critical, absorption rate can exceed the neutralising ability of the body.
I belive that humans are able to cope only with natural level of radiation, with no obvious harm.
I am reading “Chernobyl prayer” by Svetlana Alexievich coincidentally. I had no idea of the devastation caused by this disaster, eg more villages in Belarus were evacuated than under the German occupation. The heroism of the clean up workers , the awful consequences.
She equates the disaster with Aushwitz and Stalin’s gulags.
Also, what a near miss it was that the other reactors did not explode, had they done so…bye,bye Europe !
Yes, they estimated 100 million dead in Western Europe if there had been a second explosion at Chernobyl, etc.
Makes you think about the move away from fossil fuels. A 0.5 degree increase in global temperature over the next 200 years seems like a small price to pay right now. Of course, there’s about 5 assumptions there — are they predicting that?
I’ve been asking how we can possibly falsify climate change theory (a basic requirement everywhere else) but nobody seems able to answer.
well we could look at the predictions of the theory. surprising, hatuey, other scientists have, and seen a good record of predicting what occurs, which is why every major scientific organization, of whatever ideology or economic system, recognizes the usefulness of the theory.
Pretzel, I guess you’re specifically talking about “climate change” rather than “global warming”. “Global warming” was dumped back in the 1990s when someone with a thermometer noticed that 15 years had passed without any warming.
Instead of telling me how useful the theory is, I simply want to know what the climate would need to do to disprove the theory. It’s a simple question. If someone suggests “what goes up must come down” and I throw something that doesn’t come down, then I have falsified that theory.
I isn’t asking a lot.
@Pretzel – The way you use the word “scientific” in your argument is both ideological and an instance of the fallacy of “argument from authority”. You might as well say “the Lugal‘s knowers say it, so it must be true“, or shout “God save the king” after every sentence. You should get some perspective on “science”, what it is, what you think might be a reasonable sphere for its use and what might not be, how long it has been around, and how profit determines what is done and said by its office-holders. You might also look at strands of ideas among the super rich and their “thinkers” that have been leading up to an almighty cull (moving on to the next stage in population affairs, scarcity problems, and hygiene) since the early 19th century.
The climate has always changed. On several occasions it has changed dramatically fast. The reasons for the shape of the curve for say average world temperature are not understood. What are these predictions you mention that have come true and that distinguish between human and other causes? And if you know what they are, why didn’t you say?
The latest absolute bullsh*t is the buzzword “extinction”, which derives from an occultist viewpoint. Got to wonder how long it will be before “sustainability” is replaced with the word “survival”? Got to wonder when the idea of “survival of a root race” will come into the open too. The most recent big extinction of species was caused by – do you know what? – by a comet or asteroid hitting earth. Yet of course the propaganda promotes the idea of cycles, even if this isn’t done to an “educated” audience who will understand the ridiculousness of thinking that it’s “time for another big Los Angeles earthquake” or that “heads has come up three times in a row, so the next coin flip is more likely to come up tails”.
@Hatuey: I suppose you could wait 50 years or so while taking no steps at all to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. If there is indeed no climate disaster, you will successfully have proved the predictions wrong.
Do you think it is wise to take such a chance?
Pretzel, I haven’t said anything for or against the theory, whatever the theory is. I’m simply asking that the same scientific standards that apply to everything are applied here.
Geoffrey
we say “if grandmother had (*I’m sorry) male private parts, so it would be not a grandmother, but a grandfather”
I’m happy they evacuated so many people in Chernobyl. Do you prefer them to stay in the dangerous zone?
How many people actually died?
Russian wiki says 31 died in 3 months, 19 more died 1987-2004, and about 4000 deaths due to remote concequence of radiation syndrom.
No, I was not commenting on the rights or wrongs of moving the population, just the enormity of the accident.
Geoffrey, do you feel something wrong about the author’s equating the disaster with Aushwitz and Stalin’s gulags?
Why not equating it with Centralia mine fire? Halifax Explosion? Bhopal disaster? Any other technogenic accident? At last, if she sees no difference between a techno-accident and evil will of a state, then I could suggest Hirosima and Nagosaki.
The saying about grandmas and grandpas refers to “if another reactor would have exploded, then bye-bye Europe”. We even have a special very russian word for this kind of persons – ‘кликуша’, which can be roughly translated as ‘scaremonger’. With all due respect to her writer’s skills and awards, there’s something weird about her logic.
@Tatyana – The usual way of saying that in English is “If my auntie were my uncle”. The fuller version is “If my auntie were my uncle, she’d have a pair of knackers”.
Does anyone know how wide these 400 cracks are? As my old structural engineering lecturer used to explain, 10 cracks one millimetre wide have the same effect as one crack 10 mm wide.
I think their about a millimetre thick. It’s odd that so many have appeared on one reactor so prematurely. It suggests an underlying problem to me but what the hell do I know…
They’re *
According to my sources, 400 of the 6 000 graphite bricks in the reactor core have a hairline crack, which is not the same a suggesting the reactor has the equivalent of a 400 mm crack, everyone should be relieved to know. Unless there is an earthquake, of course.
Various newspapers are saying over 500 cracks. I haven’t seen anyone talking about adding the width of them all together, as you have suggested. I think the graphite bricks serve as sort of insulation and I believe they also accommodate the control rods.
The articles suggest that these cracks are to an extent expected over a certain period of time but in this case they have manifested much earlier than expected.
EDF, rather then replace the cracked blocks as regulations demand, has requested that tolerance levels be changed so that their cracked blocks are deemed safe.
I like to think an independent Scotland would tell EDF to go to fuck. As it is, the Scottish government can do nothing.
Latest news: the reactor core appears to be made up of double decker buses, according to the official explanation, but I didn’t spot how many football pitches the site covers.
https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/graphite-core
On Radio 4 this morning, they were doing a bit about Mrs.Theresa May and her declaration that the U.K. would be Carbon Neutral by 2050.
Then they had this woman on who worked for EDF, she said because of Global Warming we need new Nuclear Reactors if we are going to meet Mrs.May’s target as the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow all the time.
It was very childish stuff from EDF.
As we are looking forward to hedonistic pleasures and weekends at various music events, music that offers some resemblance of communal unity in a sea of chaos, it has to be said that in an age of mass extinction and rebellion has to unify the many causes and NGO’s there are. only together will humanity be able to build something up from anew, a common cause should make us unite and evoke innovative ideas into new realities.
For some this means marrying technology with these aims, for others it means slow go evolutionary change and extinction of many of us. And for those who are pushing the status quo, more overconsumption and defend our grab raids with armed conflict and wars.
here is a thought provoking article from Nafeez Ahmed.
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/escaping-extinction-through-paradigm-shift-83e33d4cb548
Very well said Nevermind …Thanks
And great Article from Nafeez –
” Until we address the question of transforming the very sinews and structures of contemporary neoliberal capitalism-as-we-know-it, the defining economic paradigm of our global civilization, we are speaking the wrong language.”
And this idiot is the favourite to become the next PM. The breaking of the union can’t come quick enough.
https://mobile.twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/1138365968978239489
Oban on Saturday RoS
RoS
The man who dreamed up Duty Free Novichok will be given plenty of time in his retirement gypsy caravan to reflect on everything he destroyed as PM.
The SNP will say that anything in the news is a reason why there should be a decisive swing of votes to the independence cause, away from the other Scottish parties. The Brexit referendum result. Boris Johnson planning to cut income tax south of the border. That’s supposed to be some kind of looting of Scottish pockets by the English. Goodness knows how they worked that one out. Johnson hasn’t promised to alter the Barnett formula.
Boris Johnson won’t win. It will be one of the other old boys from a Clarendon school: Jeremy Hunt or Rory Stewart. I thought Hunt, and I still think he’s more likely, but Stewart (who is Scottish) seems to be quite a force.
Stewart is pals with the insane crown prince. He was a tutor to his sons. “‘He’s remarkable at handling the Prince of Wales,’ a well-placed observer recently said. ‘The Prince of Wales suspends all of his critical faculties when it comes to Rory.'” (What critical faculties?) What next? References to toothpaste squeezing, as routinely get made about Michael Fawcett?
“As a student, Stewart liked to turn the mundane into the extraordinary: when he wounded his hand on a broken champagne bottle, he asked to be stitched without anesthesia.”
Had he been trying to open the bottle with a sabre?
Was he seeking to emulate the myth around former head of MI6 Mansfield Cumming, who is widely said to have cut off his own leg with a penknife?
That’s an amusing piece in the New Yorker. “His name seems nude without a ‘Sir’ in front of it,” writes the fawning Ian Parker. He reveals that Stewart has some kind of saviour complex: “Why would I run an arts school in Kabul? It’s not part of the grand narrative. I don’t think Alexander the Great ran an arts school.” That’s strange thinking. Something isn’t worth you doing because Alexander the Great didn’t do it? What??
Stewart was in the Labour party during his “late teens”. Was that while he was still at Eton? Doubtless that gave him something to talk about at interviews with “Sh – you know who”.
It’s kind of interesting how he treats Britain as if it were Afghanistan, full of “natives” whose pulse he’s an “expert” at gathering intelligence about and understanding. And not just the Penrith area in northwest England, but central London too. I haven’t watched any video of him yet. I’ll have to watch some.
Apparently he attended only a single meeting of the Bullingdon Club before pulling away.
That’s his excuse, then. Cover all bases, eh?
He didn’t get a first at Oxford. “Someone who knows Stewart well described his defining talent as the ability to sound convincing without expertise.” I can believe that. That’s the true way of the British knob class. Some of us remember when Eton and other top schools got caught cheating in exams.
““At the end, when I’m sitting in an Afghan room with a bunch of smelly men, I realize that actually in some very, very small way I feel that I’m justified in being with them. I’ve got a kind of equality with other people.”
Yep, this guy wants to be PM all right. That’s exactly how an Old Etonian politician who is bright (so not Boris Johnson) will view the Cabinet room. It doesn’t mean what it says, of course. It means a lot between the lines. It means you know how to suffer the dirties who weren’t born with lots of land and who didn’t go to Eton. And not only that, but you know how to LEAD them, dear “smellies” that they are. This guy will go far.
My guess is he and Jacob Rees-Mogg will be Brexit Secretary and Foreign Secretary (whichever way round it might be), with the Old Carthusian Jeremy Hunt as PM. The BBC and the rest of the Tory media will sell Stewart as the true Brit who knows how the fuzzy-wuzzy European mind works, just as he understands “the Afghans”, and who can silence “Brussels” with the way he stands, and if necessary, a grenade.
Time to emigrate!!
Goodness knows how they worked that one out.
The proposal was to be party funded by raising National Insurance from 12 pence. In England and Wales this would be straightforward robbing the less well off to the benefit of the rich. The issue is exacerbated in Scotland because Holyrood cannot alter the rate of National Insurance but can alter the bands determining rates of Income tax. Income tax bands in Scotland are already set to be more redistributitive (wealth) than in E & W so the impact of the Boris tax dividend would be in effect taking from the less well off in Scotland to the benefit of the rich in E & W to a disproportionate degree. Boris’ solution is for Holyrood to mirror Westminster in Income tax which obviously negates devolution. I suspect you already know this.
Best to stick with your Lyndon LaRouche inspired conspiracy theories, they’re more entertaining.
“Partly”? What percentage?
I’m no LaRouchie. But I did just search on Lyndon LaRouche and Rudolf Steiner and found some intriguing stuff about Steiner and George Cantor, which may well shed light on Cantor’s Baconianism. Cantor had his reasons for choosing the letter aleph and going on about the abyss. Me, I’m a Stratfordian.
But thanks for the info about national insurance.
Is this the O.T Page
a very good interview By Julian’s dad – Kicks in at 2: 21 Hours –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7GpXSYgdWY
If he didn’t look so ill, Rory Stewart is seeking a sensible compromise that involves leaving the EU but keeping Britain united. But I’m not sure leaving the political institutions but remaining in the customs union, for now, will win over conservative MPs and membership, but I think it would win the conservatives the General Election and its the compromise Corby would like to support, but can’t promote due to his own remainers.
It’s up to Corbyn to persuade his own party. That’s what leaders do. But he’d rather hide away with his little clique of 70’s throwbacks. His party has made it clear what they want, which he doesn’t like, so he ties himself up in knots paying lip service to it while doing his utmost to avoid it. And so you have the farce that is labour party policy, triangulated with all the finesse of a fudge maker at a toffee convention.
Rory Stewart is one of the few tories that has a brain and a decency that escapes most of them. Consequently, of course, he doesn’t have a chance in the circus election.
Rory Stewart is one of the most brazen-faced liars in the Commons, against stiff opposition too. His leadership bid was always about securing a job — he isn’t so deluded as to think he could possibly win, I’ll grant him that.
Corbyn isn’t triangulated and has actually played a blinder. His constructive ambiguity has kept the focus on a government that’s a complete shambles and by keeping the ball in their court he has contributed to the destruction of the Tory Party.
Corbyn’s strategy pays big over the medium to long term and since he isn’t in Downing Street he’s able to sacrifice the short term to an extent. He can shift policy towards “remain” when the Tories are politically dead, which is likely to be by the autumn, in time for a general election.
The next Tory Leader will find himself in the very same conflicted position that May found herself in; on one hand knowing that a “no deal” Brexit is economic Armageddon and on the other facing influential factions and a grassroots that demand it.
Armageddon? Yum yum! Fast profits!
Oh dear, did the food run out? Well here’s a picture of Rory with his sleeves rolled up, carrying a box of food tins with the relief services. And here he is doing a pointing gesture, while wearing the jacket he wore in Afghanistan. Wait…did someone say a couple of British cities have been closed becaused of typhoid? That’s the third article on the BBC news. Download the rationing app now.
Tory head office may tell the Tory grassroots, which in most areas are local businessmen’s clubs, to f*** right off. They won’t let those a*seholes decide national policy or who the prime minister is. If there’s a vote among two selectees – and there may not be – the result will be pre-decided. The constituency chairmen were going to have a confidence thing against Theresa May, but they’re not as powerful as they think.
Ian
Rory’s Brexit plan shifts from one day to the next, as seemingly do his voting intentions( eg. his flip-flopping tonight over Wednesday’s Letwin/Corbyn no-deal motion). As I previously understood his position, he wanted to create a citizen’s assembly that’d be paid and sit 7 days a week until they hammered out new proposals which MPs could then vote on. But tonight, on BBC 2’s Newsnight he talked about simply bringing May’s withdrawal agreement (WA) back unchanged, then using his Jedi-like(?) persuasive powers to get it through? Labour + SNP + LD can never give him, nor any Tory a blank cheque on the political declaration(the bit that’ll decide the future UK-EU trading relationship).
So, if Rory were to win (unlikely) they’ll have removed an elected PM; someone who at least had a mandate from the public in the form a GE, solely because she couldn’t get her deal through; only to replace her with an unelected PM; intent on bringing back the exact same withdrawal agreement for a fourth attempt? then a fifth, then a sixth presumably?
He also wants to completely rule out no-deal.
If you’re won over so easily by his flashy presentation and his smooth-talking, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
A minority government has a popular mandate?
Rory Stewart’s delivery is a bit more thoughtful, but seeking a patriotic pragmatic compromise is the secret to conservative party success and if he I’m sorry to say looked healthier he would have a chance, but the fact he’s the only one offering it is evidence of the demise of a once great party. Not that I vote conservative.
Rory Stewart is getting amazingly uncritical publicity and lots of it in the form of broadcast interview airtime the sort of publicity that you couldn’t buy , it’d be too expensive; he’s clearly the London media ‘remainer’ crowd’s darling. He also seems to have lots of people shilling for him online; it’s reminiscent of the sock-puppetry that’s sadly now found expected on various forums these days the moment anyone takes a govt critical position on security/defence matters – stuff Craig has alluded to.
If he’s the establishment man, it only goes to show how desperate and out of touch the establishment is. Worth bearing in mind that May had establishment support too, otherwise she’d have been gone many months ago.
The establishment is trying to find someone that can deliver a fake Brexit. A real Brexit leads to a massive economic meltdown and the U.K. being dissolved. Without Scottish oil, sterling goes through the floor.
Hatuey
They are, completely out of touch, dangerously so for the country.
Etonian Rory taught Princes’ William and Harry it’s reported. Do you remember how Conservative central office got a phone call from someone at Buckingham Palace the day fellow Etonian David Cameron turned up at CCHQ to enter politics? We can’t seem to get past the ‘place men’ the establishment designate for us. How do their minds function that they think this is sustainable or healthy this ‘pretend’ democracy?
Hatuey
I’ve heard many a Brexiter say they simply don’t care about the consequences; they say, ‘we survived the war, we’ll survive Brexit’. Pensioners obviously, and that’s where Brexit support is concentrated in England. Probably why all the Tory leadership candidates are saying they’ll keep the free TV licenses for the over 75s – they know their oap voting demographic.
Of the 160,000 Conservative party members eligible to vote, 15% are 75 years old or older. I doubt few would be put in penury by the cost of a TV license. Many, I suspect would gladly pay up out of patriot duty to save the BBC, not to mention it’s re-assuring news coverage and comforting repeats of Marple and Midsommer .
https://proza.ru/pics/2013/11/14/64.jpg
Corrupt and based on a pile of lies as it was, I think Brexit needs to be honoured and delivered. And by that I mean a hard Brexit.
It was a democratic vote by the usual standards. That says more about our usual standards than anything else and what we call democracy is in reality a steaming pile of crap.
There are many in their 40s or 50s who take a similar idiotic view, not with reference to WW2 but saying stupid things like “It won’t be as bad as they’re saying, because Europe needs us as much as we need them”. That’s in the same ballpark as “We survived the war and we can survive this”. Thick as pigsh*t. Whenever I hear this idiocy, I point out that Britain hardly produces anything any more and the economy is balanced on top of the City of London.
N, you talk about similar idiotic views then give examples of completely different views.
I have a list of reasons for supporting the hardest of hard brexits. If that’s what the swinish multitude in England voted for, lerrum ‘ave it…
Scottish oil cannot possibly save sterling.
The only thing holding up any western currency is the US$. The only thing holding up the US$ is the US military. One way or another that game is almost up as neither the Chinese nor the Russians appear overly intimidated. The essential choice is either to fold or go all in with a nuclear war. A nuclear war will not help sterling.
Sterling, along with all other western currencies is doomed. Brexit will not make the slightest difference to the inevitable full spectrum currency collapse.
Thanks, Corporal Fraser. Another piercing insight.
I enjoyed Dr. Strangelove as much as the next, Loony, but really… I don’t think it provides a future roadmap.
Not only does Dr. Strangelove provide a road map, it also makes sense of the recent past. For example the destruction of Iraq and Libya, the fixation on extending war in Syria for as long as possible, the funding and cossetting of ISIS, the love in with the Saudi head choppers and the unrelenting hostile position toward Russia – now expanded to include China.
All the weak countries have been laid west. Only Russia and China remain. Russia is central because of its vast resource base. Will they surrender or will they fight? Russians are not noted for either their abstinence or their propensity to surrender.
Leaving the Russians and the Chinese alone allows people to survive but guarantees the destruction of the US$. Without the $ to protect y’ll then life will get a lot tougher. Are western populations tough enough to take reality? The signs are not promising.
“The only thing holding up any western currency is the US$”
It takes a special sort of tautological stupidity to say a thing like that.
Classic: “Early in 2004, Prince Charles wrote to Stewart in Iraq, suggesting a program that would teach carpentry and other skills to young men who might otherwise join militia groups. Stewart helped to set this up, working with an Iraqi labor union that gave each student coveralls with ‘Charles’ embroidered on them.”
That gave the young men a sense of purpose in life, right? Back in their hovels, did they tell each other “This foreign prince, he sounds all right, he gives us our dinner if we learn carpentry and wear clothes with his name on”?
There are shades here of the Duke of York who eventually became James II. He had his slaves branded with the letters “DY”.
The Stewart effort is way ahead of Rees-Mogg’s “Victorians” shtick.
“He was charged with thinking more about what was fast and photographable than what was long-term and well planned.” Right.
The “Turquoise Mountain Foundation” allowed young British top-notch poshies to practice their “understanding the native mind” leadership and “service” skills. I bet that beats doing voluntary work in the East End!
“(Stewart) ‘What I understand is the way the British government and the American government machines work.’ If he can be outclassed as a regional expert, he cannot be outclassed as an anthropologist of bureaucracies—’what it feels like to be in the Army, to be in the Foreign Office, work with a U.N. agency, manage one of these interventions.’ He added, ‘My anthropology is not of Afghanistan. Insofar as I have an instinct, it’s about what goes wrong around the Cabinet table.’”
Listen to this guy! He’s the new Alexander, the new T E Lawrence – the playing fields of Eton are going to put the world on course. “Anthropology” is a codeword here for crypto-colonialism. Bronislaw Malinowski of the LSE who influenced Jono Kenyatta would have approved. Even the British cabinet is full of natives, and Rory understands how to get them in line!
Incase anyone here is delusional that the punitive Rory is anything but a creature of the status quo – Professor Richard Murphy and others take the psychedic dear prudence sermonisers economic illiteracy to bits.
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2019/06/12/rory-stewart-would-be-a-threat-to-the-economic-well-being-of-everyone-in-this-country/
Highly revelatory and explanatory (or perhaps merely confirmatory).
‘Guardian’s deputy editor @paul_johnson joined state D-Notice committee (run by MOD) after Snowden revelations in sop to British spooks. In board minutes, they thank him for being “instrumental in re-establishing links” between UK mil/intel and Guardian.’
https://mobile.twitter.com/DCKennard/status/1138493594728304640
A very interesting account of the Guardian/Wikileaks interactions, by somebody who knows:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWo_t4CI5Ps
Excellent thread. Carol, Nigel, 1500 D notices, Ukrainian femnazis …
More of the same anti-Putin, anti-Russian propaganda from the Guardian’s Luke Harding. He churns it out to order
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/11/leaked-documents-reveal-russian-effort-to-exert-influence-in-africa?
and on Putin’s ‘chef’ – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/11/yevgeny-prigozhin-who-is-the-man-leading-russias-push-into-africa
Of course the British Empire has never been in Africa, exploiting the people and stealing their resources.
Such a dull story, they downgraded it from the lead to nowhere realising, no doubt, no one was interested – due to lack of clicks I’ll bet.
This is the whole thing with Assange; they(govt and intel officials) say why didn’t WikiLeaks go heavy on Russia and China? Er , because western audiences couldn’t give a shit about stories involving the internal machinations Russia and China perhaps?
Goose;
As I understand it Wikkileaks only publishes stories people send to it, so maybe there is a lack of leakers in Russia and China. Or maybe Russia and China don’t go round denying that they do certain things so it isn’t news if it turns out they do do them.
No one can really change anything in China can they (really hard in Russia too), so what’s the point in revealing stuff, to people who either can’t read it(China)or change things(Russia)?
Exposing the US and UK and western hypocrisy may actually change things, through peaceful democratic means, look at the reforms of the Church Committee 44 years ago, calling CIA Director William Colby to testify on revelations that U.S. intelligence agencies had engaged in controversial covert action against foreign leaders and U.S. citizens. Watergate etc. things can and do change.
These stories keep cropping up. Mostly they amount to absolutely nothing. Lies, rumours and innuendo with the common thread “Putin/Russia is a threat”.
For example, this one, notably by the British journalist, Karen Allen, not a local Africa reporter.
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-04-11-madagascar-exploits-highlight-russian-influence-peddling-in-africa/
In the first Luke Harding article:
The Kremlin has recently stepped up its ground operation in Libya. Last November the Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar travelled to Moscow and met the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu.
Harding fails to note (of course) that Haftar has been supported by the US all along. Just google “Haftar CIA” and you’ll see the whole story. It’s no secret at all.
Harding has written things that can easily be shown as categorical lies, nothing more, nothing less. And not just about the collusion that wasn’t.
Why the guardian still employs him, knowing all this, shredding their own credibility, is a mystery?
The document I linked to above strongly suggests that paper is now a propaganda arm of British intelligence. In spook and MSM circles Harding is deemed a gold standard investigative reporter and truthteller. Not in any way tarnished or unconvincing. The Guardian will be headlining his stuff for many, many years to come.
The guardian’s editor-in -chief, Kath Viner, seems to have brought aboard a lot of, shall we say ‘establishment’ journos; people who previously pumped out propaganda for pro-Tory publications. At the same time, those who were renown in the industry for their steely independence and anti-establishment, foreign policy positions have been let go. There’s really only Owen Jones expressing left-wing viewpoint and he’s a bit of a journalistic lightweight with his obsession with everything ‘woke’. All the journos there seem furious at the mo, because Boris Johnson looks set to win. I guess they’ll find it hard to continue secretly voting Tory?
Whether Guardian journalists personally vote Tory we cannot know. But I’m sure the “regular dialogues” they have with Brigadiers and Air Vice Marshalls at the MOD are not about how they can best help Corbyn.
https://mobile.twitter.com/DCKennard/status/1138793429184503808
frankywiggles
Who do they represent? I’ve never met anyone who supports the idea of the UK ‘projecting power’ and being a ‘big player’ on the world stage, as these top brass and many senior ‘chicken hawk’ politicians do. Most British people would prefer a less bellicose UK; a UK that didn’t see itself as the US’s partner in war crime(s). Many in the UK look at Ireland, Spain; Holland, Italy and the Scandinavian countries and think why can’t we be more like those?
Some of the Tory leadership candidates are even talking up doubling the defence budget.
I don’t know where it comes from, Goose. None of today’s politicians can remember a time when Britain was a serious power let alone the major one. Maybe it’s something that’s still drilled into them in the top schools. I was at Cambridge back in the 90s and it certainly isn’t pumped into you there.
Strange though that for all their big-time posturing they prostrate themselves before the yanks far more cravenly than any of those other countries you mentioned. Imagine the reaction of the media in any of those countries if Pompeo had just said the US would prevent one of their leading politicians from attaining power. Even the Guardian – which styles itself as the most left wing and anti-Trump paper in Britain – didn’t bother with an editorial or even a follow up article on Pompeo’s utterances. I think those MOD documents have revealed a good part of the reason why.
Goose, you write “Many in the UK look at Ireland, Spain; Holland, Italy and the Scandinavian countries and think why can’t we be more like those?” In Russia some think the same.
Recently I met this post:
President of Ireland, Michael Higgins looks like a good wizard from some fairy tale 🙂
https://pikabu.ru/story/milyiy_starichok_6577313
It made me think when Russia would be able to elect a nice kind ever smiling person as a president, without fear of how he/she would deal with some hostile neighbours?
People comment:
“The President of Ireland is like the President of Germany or the President of Italy. So you can be nice and stay.” (c) Starkwr
“Rather like the Queen … Solves nothing, has no effect…” (c) nikolai4
“I can’t understand for what f*ck do they need them if they don’t matter?” (c) Hastwar
“First you should read about the powers of the British Queen, not propagandistic nonsense, then you will not write such nonsense), she can solve anything, can veto any act of Parliament – in fact she is the legislature, because she passes only the laws that she needs, she can solely declare a war and attack any state because it is the Supreme Commander of the country, this is few remembered, she has still very much power. And all the talks that she’s only there for the beauty – fairy tales for hamsters, and someone is on them.” (c) free.alex
the same commentor then apparently answers the deleted comment
“Do you think Parliament will pass a law to be repealed in disgrace by the Queen? They’ve already been told what to pass and what not to pass. And for example the Queen has the right to dismiss any Minister, do you think any Minister will go against the opinion of the Queen in this case? Therefore, she does not apply those sanctions, because everything goes by itself in accordance with the plan, officials are not idiots.”
Look at the most ‘plussed’ comment in this discussion
President of Ireland Michael Higgins, with his dog
https://pikabu.ru/story/prezident_irlandii_maykl_khiggins_so_svoey_sobakoy_6748633#comments
“What I like about small countries is that they have nothing and they have no claim to anything. They live in peace, work, pay taxes, mow the lawn and appoint cats to quirky public positions. They have nothing to protect, it’s pointless at this size and population, it frees up (*much) of funds that can be spent on planting new lawns and inventing new positions for cats. Their presidents don’t fight with the world powers, but good old men from a neighboring house.
I dream to live in such a country.” (c) pixul
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I must say that the statement about “have nothing” and “nothing to protect” is wrong. Probably if he wrote for international audience he would add something like “comparing to my country”. Anyway the statement feels rude and I apologize for this.
Frankywiggles
Don’t know if you caught it, as it’s quite obscure. But Nick Clegg made a good speech before the 2010 election, you know, the Cleggmania election:
‘Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg criticized “the default Atlanticism” of both Labour and Conservative governments, adding “we still too readily put ourselves in a position of unthinking subservience to American interests.”
Then he goes into coalition and votes for war in Syria etc. Now he’s a big noise at Facebook with a multi-million salary, ..go figure.
Tatyana
We get Russians, Latvians and Estonians in England coming for work, mainly warehouse jobs etc. Politics is avoided as you can imagine, but on the few occasions it’s discussed, generally their view is Putin is necessary because of the threats Russia faces from foreign powers and internal ethnic disputes within Russia. One guy was asked, ‘What’s Moscow like?, his response “Moscow is shit!” this resulted in laughter. Russians can be very blunt and direct about what they think, a bit like Germans.
Frankywiggles
On Pompeo’s recorded comments, the PLP and media are dismissing those, by claiming he was just talking about a hypothetical scenario in which Corbyn brought forward anti-Jewish legislation. But that as we know, is a totally absurd suggestion. Corbyn for all his faults hasn’t a discriminatory bone in his body. It’s akin to saying Bernie Sanders would discriminate against black people or something, i.e., a totally ludicrous proposition.
The fact Pompeo talked about making it difficult somehow for Corbyn to get elected, given Pompeo’s close CIA connections should be deeply troubling to all politicians in the UK.
I see the Guardian has gone right back to expressing outrage about Trump today, They really take their readers for plums.
As I’ve been saying since Rusbridger left to be replaced by Katherine Viner, for the current editorial team it’s a win, win scenario. Either the last notionally ‘left’ broadsheet loses it’s entire audience and collapses, or it survives to inculcate in it’s remaining readership an entirely new understanding of ‘leftism,’ one favourable to the oligarchy.
There’s much talk of the Lockerbie disaster on here, but let’s remember the 31st anniversary of the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 is just round the corner and that it is undoubtedly linked to Lockerbie. On the 3rd July 1988, USS Vincennes, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser fired on Flight 655, a scheduled passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai. The aircraft, an Airbus A300, was destroyed, and all 290 people on board, including 66 children, were killed. Coming just months after Flight 655, it’s impossible to ignore that Lockerbie was an act of revenge.
On Iran, it would appear the US has found its Bay of Tonkin Incident, that will allow an excuse to implement a casus beli against it.
Apparently Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have been sneaking up behind oil tankers in swift little boats and attaching mines to the tankers of Norwegian, UAE and Saudi tankers.
They’ve made a official complaint to UN Security Council about the attacks, but Norway hasn’t named the state actor, though America is convinced it was Iran. France of all countries is supposedly monitoring the situation as a independent and neutral onlooker.
Republicofscotland
They talk about ‘Iranian proxies’, i.e. anyone with the intent to frame Iran. For the idea Iran would do this now when trying to preserve the fragile JCPOA, and for no reason, ‘out of the blue’, will convince only the dimmest in society , maybe that’s all they’ll need?
Have you noticed how the Telegraph is ramping up anti-Iranian propaganda output . Talking about the threat Hezbollah poses?
The Tory leadership candidates need asking where they stand on preserving the JCPOA, and if they can imagine any circumstances in which the UK would join the US in an attack on Iran? The idea of one of these morons taking the UK into another murderous, unjustified war is horrific.
And what can the US do? Invasion /occupation is out of the question (t Iran is oo big , too expensive), the US can only bomb Iranian nuclear infrastructure, risking an environmental disaster(presumably they’ll stay away from the Russian operated Bushehr?) So, they set Iran back a few years by occasionally bombing. Then let’s say Trump is voted out in 2020, and Iran is free to develop away with no controls whatsoever.
Pulling out of the JCPOA was utterly stupid.
Seeing as how America is the only country to have used nukes on another, letting America decide who can and who can’t have nukes is like letting Nazis decide who can and who can’t have gas chambers.
Leaving aside the lack of any legal or moral justification.
I just don’t get what John Bolton hopes to achieve in practical terms that’s better than the containment of the JCPOA. Regime change isn’t going to happen; countries tend to unite when attacked and Iran will be no different. So unless the US invades and occupies at huge cost in blood and treasure; worldwide protests and with potentially dire consequences?
A one-off Osirak(iraq) type attack will just strengthen Iranian hardliners and force Iran pull out of the JCPOA and Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT, then go all out to develop nuclear weapons. The US can’t keep illegally bombing forever either to prevent that.
I’d wager that UK officials will have given John Bolton a similar view when he visited with Trump.
It is possible that Iran was responsible for Lockerbie but there is no proof. However we do know who shot down passenger jet 655 and the commanding officer got a medal for it.
Spencer Eagle. Why would the state of Iran take revenge in downing a civilian airliner and murder innocent civilians, men women and children. Lowering themselves to the actions of the state of America, which did. I think this talk of Iran being responsible will be the new talking point in the drum beating by US and Israel and its tools to destroy Iran.
There was no ‘bomb’.
There was no aircraft, and no people. it’s the matrix, man.
In the official report the ‘bomb’ was described as an Improvised Explosive Device IED, an import distinction as the evidence to prove an IED intentionally made to explode is far less than a manufactured bomb.
For example there are bombs made for the military in a factory, but an IED can be things that are harmless individually (gas cylinder) but deadly by exploding in a fire or explosive decompression.
The alleged evidence for an IED was some burnt clothing and a fragment of circuit board. These were allegedly from the ‘bomb’ case, but neither would have survived a ‘bomb’ explosion big enough to destroy the plane in 3 seconds.
The possible answer to your question is that Iran publicly vowed to retaliate for the shooting down of its airliner.
It is known that some 9 months after the shooting down of flight 655 someone planted a pipe bomb in the car of the wife of the US Captain of the Vincennes (the ship that shot down flight 655). The FBI initially attributed a terrorist motive to this incident and then changed their minds for unspecified reasons and then effectively discontinued the investigation.
It is not as though the Iranian regime does not have form when it comes to revenge attacks – take for example the murder of the Shah’s last Prime Minister in Paris in 1991.
I seem to recall that Robert Fisk is of the opinion that the Lockerbie bombing was a revenge attack by the Iranians.
There are plenty of amoral people everywhere. You notice the US because it is so powerful, but if Iran was the hegemonic power and not the US then you would notice plenty of Iranian crimes .
Loony. Your job is to accept that might is right and that the rest of us are wasting our time speaking truth to power. What I cant understand is why you waste your time, as someone so sanguine with the ways things are, coming on this site and saying the same thing over and over again !
Iran suffered terribly during the long Iran/Iraq war and had many public reasons to attack those attacking them and yet never claimed responsibility for Lockerbie (nor did anyone else) no doubt because they never did it and because the downing of IA655 was settled in court with compensation.
…but the US never, and still to this day haven’t formally apologised for the shooting down of flight 655. Compensation is irrelevant, especially to the families of the victims.
Compensation is seen as a sensible way to resolve disputes in most countries. The US hasn’t and doesn’t apologise for their crimes, they never apologised for backing Iran and Iraq and hoping they both lose (Kissinger). But the point being Iran had suffered terrible loses and wouldn’t want to start a new open war with US, just after their war with Iraq had finished, particularly when given (or not) any excuse, US will destroy defenceless countries on a whim/lie e.g. Iraq.
The Boris fan club today. IDS and Priti Patel look at their hero adoringly. Shame about the empty chairs!
https://mobile.twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1138795467884716033/photo/4
Another photo shows little Chloe Smith (the Tory shoe-in who was Craig’s nemesis at Norwich N) and Mr Brokenshire at the same event. Note the ‘I back Boris’ lanyards.
He’s also after votes from you Scots on here. Promises. Promises.
‘Boris Johnson
@BorisJohnson
2h
A brilliant letter from my @ScotsTories friends and colleagues. I am committed to supporting the iconic Scottish whisky industry, vital oil and gas industry, and freeing fishermen from the CFP. As Prime Minister, I will put strengthening our Union at the heart of everything I do.’
The Colonel and Fluffy are in the group photo. https://mobile.twitter.com/timesredbox/status/1138703360935247872/photo/1
Most important, in his little rambling address to those few who will elect him he sumised that should he get elected he “would have a mandate” as PM, to leave the EU, if need be without a deal.
Well Alexander, you bigged yourself up and have not much to show for. Water canons, bendy busses and no respect from your peers as foreign minister.
Now you try and buy votes with taxcuts and threats from you whimsy Ass. Chief whip.
What a bully!
the trouble wit Doris is that he was waiting until someone else ( not him ) had left the EU.
He is like St Francis of Assisi – Make me leader but not yet.
He has been forced to run and possibly explains why he has been under wraps.
Like Farage he doesn’t particularly have an ideological position apart from being adored by his masses as the Messiah.
He just wants to be PM and by any means necessary ( Boris X ) he will work towards that goal.
My hint is to watch Hammond as he is the only sensible ( relatively ) member of the cabinet who could scupper all the No Dealers ambitions.
He will arrive eventually.
Rory Stewart is his emmisary.
Hammond is the only Tory with brains and it is inevitable even if he doesn’t run that he will be very influential.
I see that our old friend Gav ‘Shurrup and go away’ Williamson heads Johnson’s campaign.
Surely disaster looms for Boris.
‘Gavin Williamson, the former defense secretary and one-time chief whip, is co-chairing the campaign alongside former London mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith. Williamson’s experience in the whip’s office, in particular, has proven invaluable at corralling support across the Tory backbenches.’
https://www.politico.eu/article/boris-johnson-is-serious/
The European version of Politico is US owned in combination with Axel Springer SE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politico
Hey Craig and sharp ears here it is – straight from the horse’s mouth from me old mucka Matt Kenard (son of the anti nuke artist peter kenard)
Yep since 2014 (as we’d all pretty much guessed) the guardian is indeed an Mi5 asset.
“Guardian’s deputy editor @paul__johnson joined state censorship D-Notice committee (run by MOD) after Snowden revelations in sop to British spooks. In board minutes, they thank him for being “instrumental in re-establishing links” between UK mil/intel and Guardian. Explains a lot”
Read ‘em and weep.
https://twitter.com/dckennard/status/1138493594728304640?s=21
Those must be the “links” of which chains are made.
Even JFK, the POTUS, could not beat British and European imperialism.
Scottish independence might be the beginning of the end of British imperialism, but it is not going to happen.
The current SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon is completely and utterly incapable of bringing independence to Scotland.
Judging by the weak and totally incompetent way she has handled the matter since the leave EU vote, it almost looks as if she is on Westminster’s side.
What do you think Craig?
Don’t start a new article just to escape answering the question, given your stand as a leading campaigner for Scottish independence.
By the way, Porton Down did it.
Read my link above. Guardian are an asset of SIS. Id dare say sturgeon is too. The only way for a country to stay on top is with an extensive secret service, I’d say the chances of of an uncontrolled opposition are next to zero, when there is one see how the establishment behaves. Look how they treat salmond look how they treat Corbyn – with absolute fear. Remember after the Scot Indy vote Salmond was quite clear that he would remain and fight, as any good leader would. With in hours he announced he was standing down. Why do you think that was? He lost the support of his inner circle. Why would they do that? Everyone knew Rome wasn’t built in a day. They got 46% of the vote, a feat seen as unimaginable even 5 years before. Why suddenly oust him?
It was because someone safe had to be brought in, someone who would continue to support the establishment by offering controlled opposition. I’d say that sturgeons number one directive is to prevent an Indy vote every showing up for serious discussion ever again.
Shatnersrug, I’ve probably criticised Sturgeon on here more than anyone and more viciously too. Her strategy on brexit and her handling of May has been a humiliating failure. I suggested she should resign about 2 years ago over all this and got shot down in flames. Now it seems everyone is attacking Sturgeon and I feel compelled to defend her (to an extent).
Sturgeon isn’t a stooge, she is the wrong sort of politician at wrong time. She’s into gradualism which means try and get Unionists to like her, the British establishment to trust her, and the media to stop attacking her. None of it has worked. Support for independence hasn’t measurably risen and the same people that attacked her 5 years ago continue to attack her now.
There are a few ways to approach the situation Scotland is in right now from a pro-independence standpoint. I can’t think of any circumstances where trying to get your political opponents to like you is going to work over going out and agitating and arguing for independence.
I think I predicted that Sturgeon will be gone by Christmas and I still believe that. Either way, Scotland will have more than one chance to have a referendum on independence in the next few years. Sturgeon’s softly-softly approach achieved at least that much.
Sturgeon is just being sensible based on the polling evidence she sees imho, although the polls may be misleading?
She sees polls showing support for independence not being where they’d need it to be, to be absolutely confident of victory. Now there may be something underhand going on: a thing in the US at the moment, is how many believe polling companies are oversampling older voters to help Biden’s numbers against Sanders, in key primary states – older voters tend to be more conservative obviously and favour Biden. In Scotland’s case, I’d guess older voters are less likely to favour independence?
Wrong on the last point, goose. Older voters in Scotland were so worried about losing their measly British pensions — and they are just about the measliest in the advanced world — that they voted for remaining in the UK in 2014.
Also, generally speaking, older people in Scotland have it in their heads that Britain used to be a somebody in the world, some have fond memories, etc., they’re basically institutionalised, whereas younger people only know Britain as a failed state.
Without the viagra of Scottish oil, Britain wouldn’t exist never mind perform in the world.
The SNP are saying Brexit will be catastrophic, if so, they can’t call a devolution in EU referendum at this time and hope to win, as it will seem like a further leap in the dark to voters, particularly as the Tory austerity they claim to oppose is really EU austerity to save the Euro.
@Dave
A wee atom bomb of a revelation there. One that will silence a lot of critics of the Tory party. For clarity’s sake though, how did the EU force the Tories to impose austerity on Britain? And why did they think it would save the Euro?
Because, Iain, the EU would have rejected any non-austerity budget and forced the UK to re-austeritize, as they have recently done with Italy.
Tony, that is nonsense. The EU has no control over the UK’s budget; austerity is entirely the product of Tory policies.
The agency that is responsible for austerity in Italy is the ECB, which is the central bank for the Euro. Italy is a member of the Euro you see, and the UK isn’t. The ECB therefore controls Italy’s currency, and can impose budget constraints on Italy. I can see how you might have confused the EU with the ECB – they’re both European, after all (so is coq au vin!) – but UK austerity was imposed entirely by our own politicians.
@Tony
The UK government is not required to have its budget rubberstamped by Brussels.
Good job you stopped by today, you learned something big.
As explained before, both Lab and Con governments were promoting austerity to balance the books. But if you control your own money you can balance the books over a short or long period, If you balance over a short period you get austerity, if you balance over a long period you get the money tree!
Lab and Con governments supported balancing the books over a short period to balance the books to keep within the rules for joining the Euro-currency, when it became politically possible to do so.
All I’m saying is I’ll deffo be voting for Rory Stewart. He’s the first politician I’ve ever seen who looks like a Spitting Image puppet of himself.
‘Whoever becomes leader of the Tories from among the current identity parade of villains and chancers,I would bet on Christopher Tugendhat becoming prime-minister by this time next year, after a new winter of discontent ‘and perceived disillusion..
Reports coming in of explosions of two tankers in the waters between Oman and Iran just as Prime Minister Abe visits Tehran. Further demonisation of Iran to nudge us ever closer to the brink?Is this why Pompeo toured the Gulf sheikhdoms before meeting with Swiss pres, Uli Maurer, at the Bilderberg(Switzerland delivers official messages and so ultimatums as US rep in Tehran)while Trump read billy -goat stories in London and Doonbeg?
As the US continues its increasingly aggressive stance towards Iran. China, turns the thumb screws on Hong Kong, by pushing, by proxy, new extradition bills through, that will allow it to snatch anyone back to the mainland who protests against Beijing’s interference in Hong Kong for trial and inevitably sentencing.
Ruth Davidson favourite candidate for PM, Sajid Javid has done it. The home secretary, Sajid Javid, has revealed he has signed a request for Julian Assange to be extradited to the US where he faces charges of computer hacking.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jun/13/julian-assange-sajid-javid-signs-us-extradition-order