UPDATE Social media has got very excited over the fact the young woman is apparently an actress. But why should she not be? In my extensive contact with actors, they are particularly likely to be politically engaged. I should also note that I have received quite a lot of abuse for pointing out that the reason this one person got on the front page of all the newspapers is that she is young and pretty. That is simply true- it is what newspaper editors do. I am criticising the media for this. Opposing the prioritising of media exposure by physical attractiveness is in fact a classic feminist stance, so I have no idea why feminists are attacking me on it. END OF UPDATE.
In one sense, I am delighted that the heavy-handed police action at the vigil for Sarah Everard has brought about public revulsion at the attack on free speech and the right of assembly, just as Priti Patel prepares to bring in the dreadful policing bill which represents the biggest single threat to freedom of assembly in the UK for 200 years. Its foundational principle is that the right of freedom of assembly is subordinate to the right to drive a SUV anywhere and any time you please, without having to detour around people taking part in democratic expression. It has a subsidiary principle that all public manifestations of political dissent will be intimidated by massive police presence, and that the cost of that massive intimidatory presence will in itself be reason to ban the demonstration. Which would be delightfully Kafkaesque were it only a joke.
The excuse for breaking up the Everard vigil was of course Covid. In all but the most extreme circumstances, where public health management conflicts with the most fundamental of human rights, then human rights should avail. The Patel legislation is not a response to Covid, it is a response to Extinction Rebellion. I remain wholly supportive of ER; the need to jolt people out of their complacency and inaction over climate change is a massive political priority, and I certainly hope Extinction Rebellion will be back with a bang in the summer.
But I am afraid to say it could not escape my notice that the protest over the Everard vigil was in stark contrast to the lack of protest at the police breaking up the Assange vigil in Piccadilly Circus, which was much smaller and less intrusive and much better social distanced. Unfortunately the police ,arrested 92 year old Eric who is not a young and pretty woman, so it got no media coverage.
The sad truth is of course that among those vying to be seen in both mainstream and social media to express outrage at the police disruption of the Everard vigil, are many fierce proponents of cancel culture. The outrage over which speech is limited is highly selective. That free speech also extends to Julian Assange or Piers Corbyn is not intuitive to the mainstream media at present. There seems to be a real danger that British society is losing all notion of the idea that free speech is for everybody, not just those you agree with or who are deemed respectable by the media and political class.
I was going to make a joke about freedom of speech extending even to protests without any Duchesses, which led me to recall that there was in fact a bona fide Duchess on the last Assange demonstration I participated in!
Scotland has of course just contributed to this general atmosphere of repression by passing a completely unnecessary Hate Crime Bill. Not only does this outlaw politically incorrect speech even within your own home – and in film and theatrical performances – there is every reason to believe it will lead to an increase in the political prosecutions for which the Scottish Crown Office is becoming renowned. At which point, it is worth noting it is now nearly seven weeks since my hearing for contempt of court, with no sign of a judgement, which seems to me very extraordinary.
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I watched footage of Saturday’s peaceful London vigil for Sarah Everard, being broken up violently by police with mounting rage, which turned to fury when several huge policemen were filmed roughly restraining a slightly built 5ft 2in young lady; some of these thugs – I can’t bring myself to call them police – were apparently sitting on her back. Believe me, I would have been just as outraged had she had been old and ugly, but I am glad the cameras homed in on this very pretty lady. If she is an actress, so much the better. She is already giving interviews and if this elicits more public sympathy and outrage, then good for her and us. Boris and Priti should be hanging their heads in shame, for proposing legislation to give the police even more powers. They will be guaranteed to abuse it. Instead we need to find ways to prevent such police, and dare I say Government, excesses. Covid does not spread in the open air, provided basic precautions are taken, precautions which the police seemed to think did not apply to them. A very large percentage of serious Covid cases were actually contracted in hospitals and care homes. Covid is being used as a convenient excuse to strip us all of our hard won freedoms and human rights.
BTW – I think the small Assange protest was covered in some MSM press outlets. I knew about ‘Eric’, I think from the DM, although this unionist newspaper is not popular with Scottish independence supporters. The DM also covered this story from last September. The lady was older and less good-looking than the gorgeous Patsy, but there was plenty of international coverage and outrage.:-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8777985/Shocking-moment-middle-aged-woman-slammed-ground-police-anti-lockdown-demonstration.html
QUOTE:-
“A woman was slammed to the ground by police during the anti-lockdown protest
Footage shows her grappling with officers after she was pulled off her chair
They then grappled with a walking stick before she was shoved by an officer
Sadiq Khan has come under fire by some for criticising the 15,000 protesting
Earlier this year, he backed the BLM protests before telling people to stay home”
By JACK NEWMAN FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 15:45, 27 September 2020 | UPDATED: 16:56, 27 September 2020
“… I would have been just as outraged had she had been old and ugly, ” It would be sensible to be more outraged where the victim is more vulnerable. Craig might be right but, as a former newspaper editor myself, I would have chosen the picture of a 92 year old man being beaten. rather than that of the young woman . The one being an assault the other being, potentially, a murderous attack.
Would you have been equally outraged had it been, say, a tattooed, skinheaded young man marching for Britain First?
“Britain First is a far-right, British fascist political organisation formed in 2011 by former members of the British National Party (BNP)” Wikipedia
Were such a young gentleman to be robustly restrained I imagine outrage would probably be confined to a very distinct sector of the population.
My observation of them from their marches is that they are chiefly middle-aged, bald (not skinhead!), heavily beer-bellied, and furnished with an expression of great belligerence and stupidity through drink.
So in your case, we have to ask “Would you have been equally outraged had it been a middle aged, bald and heavily beer-bellied?” (hard to comment if one looks intelligent or pacific when police sit on top of the individual).
I said nothing about being outraged or not outraged. My comment was simply about their appearance, contrasting the image of these gentlemen with that of the fit young men that “Dave A” likes to consider them to be.
To make the comparison proportionate, said skin head should have been taking part in this or a similar vigil – presumably making him a non violent supporter of human rights for all. I am sure there are skin heads who are pro feminist supporters of human rights by the way, as I don’t judge books by their covers.
Dave A,
Skinheads were originally a fashion of the emergence of young gay males and females who sought to throw of the chains of self oppression in the 70’s.
Most were also anti racist and into ska.
The taking over of the skinhead haircut by the State backed and set up rightist groups like NF is a revealing story of the mechanics of State capture and control of cultural revolution. Which has led to the anodyne ‘pop culture’ that we are treated to over the last 20 years. The lines of Stock Aitken and Waterman and the sociopaths like Simon Fuller and the endless stream of Frankenstein constructed abhorrences that are passed off as ‘street’!
Where are the ‘popular’ political ditties of the current day?
“…I guess your unease stems from the prevailing cultural consensus that any middle aged man who calls a young woman attractive is a pervert…”
A man either finds another person attractive . Or he doesn’t. If the prevailing cultural consensus is that he should pretend otherwise then that consensus is perverted. To school a society into hypocrisy and the denial of what is evident is to prepare it to do what it is told to do, for fear of offending power.
It is far more dangerous for people to pretend not to notice what they see or feel than for them to find others attractive or otherwise.
Bevin
We spend our ENTIRE lives doing and being what others want. But the soul is programmed to recognise and worship its Creator. You look in the mirror and say to your pot-belly ‘ All paid for, God gave you this’ . Then you look at the red-head being squashed by police and say ‘ outside my price range, God made this beauriful flower for somebody else.’.
The soul that is prevented from accomplishing its duty to praise God for the millions of bounties of Creation, will play up. Millions of Muslims endure war and poverty and yet remain mentally stable, while us Westerners lose our mental health drowning in designer opulence.
The ignored soul can create total havoc.
I don’t think you know much about the stoicism of the Western populace who grew up through the Second World War. Well I do, because they are my parents’ generation.
They endured war, poverty and in many cases, loss of loved ones and they remain mentally stable 70 years on.
Do stop making political points about matters where a cursory glance at historical evidence proves your thesis to be false without need for detailed examinations.
Rhys Jagger
Indeed I don’t. My father’s father was a factory owner Officer who was locked up for 2 years by the Gestapo in Greece and my Mother’s father was a millionaire alcoholic jockey who was assigned the task of looking after Queen Mary because he was of French extraction and not trusted to fight because of normal British xenophobia.
At the time this was still a Christian country. And that faith helped people to survive imho.
With all due respect, Giyane, if I wanted to hear some religious claptrap I would go to hear it from a real professional.
The reason I don’t is because I have no interest in fairy tales about sky-spooks and various other mumbo-jumbo, made up thousands of years ago by people who didn’t know why it went dark at night.
So kindly keep it to yourself, and your fellow deludees – there’s a good chap.
Glenn_uk
Good morning.
Just saying, that’s all. Could we please have less preaching in here? Some of us had more than a lifetime’s worth in school.
The crack down on free speech (depending on who or what group it is) appears to be speeding up.
The likes of Manny Singh, who was imprisoned for starting and organising an AUOB march, an hour later than the city council ordered him to, even though the police were fine with it, looks likely to lose his taxi-cab licence and his income as a result of that, bear in mind at the march there were no arrest and over 100,000 folk attended.
Yet Rangers FC fans the other week gathered in their thousands in the city centre during a pandemic and smashed memorial benches in the city’s George Sq, the police were in attendance, and did arrest 28 people, but no organisers of the gathering were held to account, nor were any official from Rangers FC, who allowed a similar crowd to gather outside Ibrox football stadium taken to task over it.
The abhorrent HCB doesn’t even allow freedom of expression in your own home, and it expands the definition of protection for transgender identity to cross dressers who are not trans identified, and the HCB does not include real biological women in the protected group.
Rangers fans were not ‘protesting’, they were celebrating.
You can argue about whether what they did was acceptable or not.
But you can’t use laws on protest to cover a spontaneous outburst of joy by a bunch who many Scots simply cannot stand……
They didn’t all just spontaneously show up there, just happening to be in one spot at the same time, and then had an “outburst of joy”, did they?
Are you some sort of half-wit, or a wind-up merchant or just racist?
“You can argue about whether what they did was acceptable or not.”
Really? Starting a riot and destroying public property in A ‘celebration of joy’ related to their sectarian, bigoted football club is ok with you?
Seven weeks and still no judgement on a hearing that lasted half an hour? Surely and hopefully it signals acquittal and all these long days, nights and weeks of uncertainty are your punishment. It indicates these are either very sadistic individuals, who feel absolutely untouchable in their positions, or that they are being puppeted from above. Please God you will soon be free from their grasp.
Agreed funny how the Wheels of Justice can be altered, slowed down or set to overdrive in order to suit certain people in society. You would imagine a vocal and well-respected Independence supporter might get a reasonably fair hearing from a Independence supporting government. Aye, Well dream on sunshine vindictiveness runs deep in this particular brand of SNP and it’s not a attractive sight.
If I read the iniquitous HCB bill right, they have put into legislation precisely what they did to Alex Salmond. That is, a group of people can allege ‘hate’ or expressions thereof, at absolutely no cost to themselves, and merely allegations of ‘offence’ and hurt they have suffered. The individual subject to those claims has to fund his own defence, often at very great cost, so is likely to agree to shut up, and is an example to others who might wish to exercise their right to an opinion, who will now be cowed.
Genuine hate crimes were already covered in existing legislation.
Ian
The politicians implementing this woke injustice appear to have forgotten about the ballot box.
Scotland subscribes to the privatised ballot services of Peter Lilley’s Idox. The system which rewarded 10 years of Tory austerity with 80 extra seats in Parliament. Because austerity is fantastic.
When you put a box of tampons in your mouth every morning to stop hate speech coming out, that is when you know the meaning of gender equality.
OK?
Please provide the evidence of vote tampering rather than just smearing a politician you don’t like.
Come on: show me the detailed evidence of those who witnessed the vote tampering.
RhysJaggar
Because of the sanctification of democracy it’s impossible to approach the sanctuary where the secret rites are held, entrails read and omens unveiled.
If you waited to find out about any if the activities of the intelligence services you’d die in blissful ignorance.
By simple logic you can’t overturn a 10 seat shortfall into an 80 seat surplus by fair counting when Remainers would have been perfectly satisfied with Corbyn’s ultra soft Brexit, retaining continuity in trade and harvesters.
If it looks like a scam, walks like a scam , it will forever be a scam by the stories to introduce an agenda of war abroad and fascist control , rape of the land and pillage of the benefits system ,domestically . Agreed , the pre-meditated undercarriage of Tory policy has Bern delayed for over a year by Covid.
But I remember what we were told we had signed up to after they rigged the election. The Right wing junta in power are unremovable , because we voted for the jackboot , didn’t we?
My view is that people should refrain as much as possible from gathering in large masses right now during the pandemic.
However, what I do find telling is the heavy handed attitude the police throughout the western world crack down on certain gatherings. When there were BLM protests last year, the police were very passive in stopping the gatherings.
if by passive you mean cracking skulls, beating people down, arresting them in droves, gassing them, running over them, helping vigilantes kills them, then i suppose they responded passively.
A sight replicated the world over – storm troopers dressed in protective gear and armed to the teeth assaulting people on behalf of apparently the people’s representatives. A comment made on LBC Radio this morning and should be noted by everyone: new laws that have the objective of suppressing people will eventually be used by governments you don’t vote for or approve. Your support for these restrictive measures will fade away when the same laws are used on you, not the people that might annoy you for doing something you personally don’t agree with but you. Who will help you when the laws you supported are used to silence YOU?
Robert Graham
Exactly. After the Tories have dismantled our rights and social freedoms, they have a Brown field site on which to build a Brown shirt fascist system. The presence of Zionists in cabinet deeply disturbs me, on account of the conflation of anti semitism and anti Zionist apartheid.
What we have now is exactly the same as Nazi occupation of France. With a hell of a lot of collaborators and very limited Resistance. Under Hate think legislation quite large numbers will be transported to prison for thought crimes, and rehabilitated using forced psychiatric medication.
That’s what happens already to anybody whose inner reason makes them challenge the system.
What they accuse China of doing to the Uighurs ==> it takes one to know one.
Waves of hysteria on a sea of chaos. It reminds me of two works from my youth “On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain” by Gildas (the corrupt judges are mentioned) and Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach.
The troubling thing is it’s not hard to believe conspiracies when we find the media (free press?) is so corrupted by things like the Integrity Initiative and the Met’s chief seems to have a conflict of interest with one foot in the security services and one foot in publicly accountable policing.
Hardly surprising conspiracy theories emerge and thrive in such a murky, highly secretive political & security ecosystem.
“Hardly surprising conspiracy theories emerge”
I blame people who conspire.
Except the hate speech bill is the ONLY thing that can keep the free speech alive, Craig. Surely you read Popper?
https://miro.medium.com/max/614/1*Rk8NgfKRLzD3CUrwgh37gw.jpeg – best illustration of why in a single picture.
The “”free”” “”speech”” in Poland since 1989 (read – permission to preach fundamentalist, far right extremist hate) led directly to neonazis being in polish parliament, nazi collaborators and outright nazis from 40s (under lipstick-on-pig “cursed soldiers” name) being glorified, total abortion ban with massive police brutality directed on protests opposing it, opposition politicians like Blida or Adamowicz being killed, church pedophiles walking free of any prosecution (thanks to church alliance with far right government), really, the only reason why Poland doesn’t qualify as fascist dictature yet is the fact elections still happen (though less and less free/equal with each passing year). The things that happen in UK now is what happened in Poland 10-15 years ago yet you clamour against people who don’t want to repeat our mistakes.
I will take a thousand hate speech bills any day over this, because they are plainly better than the alternative. And I find it sad you defend people who jailed Assange and dispersed vigil/want to ban Extinction Rebellion with your misguided defence of “free” speech – because what you propose won’t end in it being in any way free. It’s like small grocery stand defending Facebook/Amazon and opposing any limits on it in the name of ‘free enterprise’ without stopping to think it will lead directly to them capturing the whole economy and said grocery stand being booted out of existence by Facebook Foods or Amazon Artichokes duopoly down the line with both laughing all the way to bank…
“the hate speech bill is the ONLY thing that can keep the free speech alive”
These are the kind of weasel words that enabled the Government to pass the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill into law: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2783
“In order to maintain the Rule of Law we must break it occasionally”
It’s the intellectual equivalent of “In order to save the Village, it was necessary to destroy it”. What it actually means is “one rule for us, another for everybody else”.
There can be no kind of freedom without freedom of speech. If someone expresses an opinion that you disagree with or find offensive, challenge it. Argue and refute it. Or ignore it. What you cannot do is make it a criminal offence to express it. The idea behind the expression does not go away. And what if it’s actually YOU who is wrong?
Thank you Stewart.
Coincidence is not causality.
Cop out, your point of view is identical to that of the Catholic Centre Partei when it supported the Enabling Act.
Mr Murray appears to have forgotten that he supported the lockdown measures.
Steve Hayes
When lockdown was the only solution to the virus spreading , all sensible people subscribed to it.
It’s completely absurd imho to complain about protesters wearing masks outside in a park.
The decision to beat up protesters was not Dame Cressida’s. It was the Ice Maiden Patel who gave the order because she’s a fascist bully unfit for public office and wouldn’t be in office if Boris Johnson was not selected by the swivel-eyed Alt Right of the Tory Party , to be a cuddly burgeoning blonde male bimbo totem.
They both follow orders, that is the old set up.
There must be plenty of fragging gerling in the hollowed out HO.
The Met though not so much. It was created as such and is still as ‘corrupt’ as when imagined in the C19th.
Spontaneous vs orchestrated, really is unknowable. From a recent Guardian report quote:
Undercover police officers who adopted fake identities in deployments lasting several years spied on more than 1,000 political groups, a judge-led public inquiry has said.
The level of media interest is probably nearest thing to a reliable way to gauge. As stated, there are many examples of large protests/demos going unreported; look at the huge flash mob who assembled outside parliament, to protest Corbyn and alleged antisemitism in the Labour party, no police intervention iirc? Those involved carrying identical placards, it led the BBC news all day. Spontaneous?
Checked the guardian’s Politics Live blog and comments are closed.
The Guardian’s commitment to free speech these days can be compared to East Germany’s Stasi – an organisation some in the UK appear to take inspiration from?
My comments are pretty much instantly banned from Guardian comments, without explanation, while they are simply factual. My ID is ‘vaccinesnothanks’
It’s been discussed before just how authoritarian they’ve become under the guise of ‘defending social justice’ & ‘woke’ attitudes.
Under the current editorial team, commenting is like a minefield; hidden traps and rules everywhere, no nuance, zero toleration for anything that doesn’t conform to their editorials, or that which is deemed likely to upset some delicate flower. A vigorous, lively exchange of views has been recategorized as abusive – they can’t handle open debate.
I feel utterly betrayed by the Guardian. It is the paper I was brought up with. It is now the worst of all of them. At least you know where you are with the Tory papers.
Comments on the Guardian are decided by the moderators. They prefer live moderators, rather than algorithims. Evidently the moderators, who will be low level, have rules, but personal preference has wide scope. There was a moderator who consistently banned anti-Israel remarks, but that person has disappeared. I myself have been permanently banned for criticising Israel.
Laguerre
The moderators will be low level.
You mean like Bellingcat?
Whatever he finds in his cat litter tray, he sticks on his blog.
I am reminded of a cartoon I once saw of an elephant (I think) with a bulls eye tattooed on his rump who was complaining that he didn’t know why he was constantly shot at.
That commitment wasn’t around 10 years ago. I stopped reading that organ when it started banning comments challenging vitriolically insulting lefties.. They had an absolute commitment to left wing vitriol and an absolute ban of cross-examination of ‘non credible witnesses’.
The Daily Telegraph became pretty similar in the other direction.
It was quite a feat being banned by both the Guardian AND the DT simultaneously.
You could promote mass murder and not get banned. You could be racist and derogatory to wimmin and not get banned. You could call Tories everything under the sun and not get banned and you could be derogatory to men and not get banned.
You just had to say things in the right echo chamber. If you said them in the wrong one, you got banned immediately.
Just two bunches of yobbish football supporters who thought that politics was about a punch up, not a debate.
Goose the Guardian is maybe ok to cite when needed for a mainstream free source. But most of its output, exclusives, are pure bunkum. Concocted by their ii controllers. Every now and then they put a Limited Hangout story to bolster the rep of their ‘journo’ – Caddwallop being the prime example of that filthy noxious stable.
The fuller story of what you are bringing to our attention here is available at DeClassified U.K. who have done the legwork on it.
The government is planning to make important changes to the law that will restrict the right to protest when lockdown restrictions ease.
Here’s a petition for anyone who is concerned about Patel and the Tories chipping away at the right to protest.
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/protect-the-freedom-to-protest
I thought Johnson would at least offer a less illiberal version of Toryism compared to that of his predecessors. On Assange, drugs policy, SpyCops and now this, he’s just as bad.
The deeply authoritarian Home Office , security state power grab seems to continue apace. This is what happens when you get groupthink within organisations, without any challenge. And parliament – the people we elect and who are meant to defend our civil liberties, don’t seem to understand that their role is to represent us, not to aid those who wish to take away hard-won rights and impose ever more laws. Why do UK MPs find STANDING UP for OUR CIVIL LIBERTIES so difficult ? Always one-way traffic, the last ‘liberal-minded’ Home Secretary the UK had was probably Roy Jenkins.
Johnson hasn’t had a deep principle in his life other than ‘Bojo climbing the greasy pole and getting rich doing so’.
Goose
” I thought Johnson would at least offer a less liberal version…”
Johnson was elected by about 120,000 Tory diehards, who objected to Theresa May’s practical compromises with the EU and sacked her.
We are now listening to the foam-flecked ravings of Democratic Party and Tory Party World War 3 posturing against China and Russia
from a China and Russophile prime minister. The Chinese are doing anal covid2 swabs for foreigners because White man speak with forked bum.
This protest would have a lot more credibility if there had been anything similar for hundreds of other victims that have occurred over the last few years. It has all the hallmarks of an issue on the drawing board just waiting for a close enough circumstance to swing into action.
There have been many other murders, and also many other protests broken up, often with significantly more violence.
An entertaining possibility with the Hate Crime Bill, unless it has been very carefully worded, is that the prosecutor in a case brought under it might be liable to prosecution for “stirring up hatred” if they quote the actual words used. On the other hand, if they do not use the actual words used the jury or magistrates will be expected to rely entirely on the prosecutor’s opinion that the accused was “stirring up hatred”.
Wee Jim
The actual words used will have to be presented to any court case.
“… There seems to be a real danger that British society is losing all notion of the idea that free speech is for everybody, not just those you agree with or who are deemed respectable by the media and political class… “
Couldn’t agree more.
I’m just going to posit some thoughts on this story:
Is it just me, or does this whole story stink? Any time a narrative arrives pre-packed and fully formed in the collective social media discourse, alarm bells should ring, and the ‘all men are potential rapists’ one here certainly seems to have had a sudden swell of astroturfing. Genuine ‘viral’ discourse online isn’t as sudden and unified as this, it’s messy by nature, whereas this seems to have been driven in an intentionally divisive trajectory.
There’s half a dozen comparable cases of missing persons in the London area alone at this moment, why the sudden hoo-haa for this particular case? A casual look at any of those comparable missing persons reveal a police force hopelessly inept to the point of disinterest, unable or unwilling to follow basic lines of enquiry.
Coppers don’t beat up their own vigilante style and declare them guilty in a media circus, even when they’ve done reprehensible things, they close ranks and protect them even to the detriment of the institution. Why is this case different from usual? In all, the stellar detective work which must go into catching a killer in their midst looks a bit incompatible and slightly suspect to me.
A public increasingly sceptical of what they are being told in terms of the science justifying continued long term removal of their liberty, have just been thrown a huge contentious identity politics issue to debate, and a literal representative of the state to focus their collective anger against, rather than the state itself.
Does this pressure valve seem convenient to the state to anyone else or is it just me?
Mr Couzens’ career in the Met has certainly been eventful, if brief.
After joining in 2018 (exact date unknown) he has managed to become not only an Authorised Firearms Officer (AFO), but also landed a very cushy number with the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Squad.
Even if he joined on January 1st 2018 (unlikely) he has only been a copper for just over three years. The first two of which he would have been a “probationary”.
So, in the space of just over a year (and possibly much less) he has applied to become an AFO, undergone all of the interviews, psychological evaluations etc. required and completed all of the training successfully.
Not only that, he must have simultaneously applied to, been interviewed for and successfully joined a high profile Specialist Command (Protection) within the Met.
Not only that, he has apparently had an extended period of sick leave at some point in his career.
And a recent complaint made against him that he indecently exposed himself.
And of course, he has now apparently had a complete mental breakdown and murdered a stranger.
If you want a different take on this, I recommend this guy: http://www.frombehindenemylines.org.uk/2021/03/signs-of-a-pysop-wrestling-in-clapham-and-the-duffing-up-of-wayne-couzens/
In other news: Westminster Bridge has been blocked by “Reclaim These Streets” in a totally organic outpouring of grief and anger
You’ll have N_’s conspiracy antennae twitching with that lot. lol
There do seem to be a lot of odd occurrences in this and related events, notwithstanding the girl being an actress. Hard to see what the bigger play could be though when the opposition to the govt’s crime bill is so muted in the HoC and media.
I would guess, the basic idea is distraction with issues of identity politics. While the populace is concerned about those, they don’t notice everyone getting shafted at once. And yes authoritarian measures can be introduced on the basis of protecting the interests of individual demographics.
He had previously been in the nuclear protection constabulary, so would have had particularly relevant firearms and protection of potentially high profile targets training. They may have specifically sought those guys out.
That is true Colin.
I don’t think there is anything suspicious about the police investigation in this case. But we all here on this blog must be careful about speculation about what happened to Sarah Everard when we don’t know the whole story.
The police officer remanded in custody has still to be treated as innocent until proven guilty, beyond reasonable doubt, in a court of law. Which is a position that we would all like to be in if we are accused of any crime.
Yes it looks odd but maybe it is just odd; it is certainly horrible.
The accused worked at the US embassy and Downing street so the potential for it not being as simple as presented is certainly there. A police officer should be more aware of surveillance and better at hiding a crime having inside knowledge so this also seems odd.
absolutely!
Northern,
“Does this pressure valve seem convenient…?”
Absolutely!
Hi Craig,
Extinction Rebellion has been co-opted and used a wedge against the left.
Ben Norton goes into how so called progressive groups like Extinction Rebellion are co-opted for the Empire’s regime change efforts. I think we can all see how R2P is used by Samantha Powell to justify regime change wherever the Empire wants to bomb or invade.
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/06/yaku-perez-pachakutik-ecuador-us-coup/
‘Yaku Pérez and Pachakutik play a similar role in Ecuador, attacking popular leftist forces from the left, thereby opening up space for the right-wing to advance.
As in Bolivia, where Western environmental groups like Extinction Rebellion helped support the 2019 coup on the grounds of green concerns, self-declared anarchists from the ostensibly progressive organization are heaping praise on Pérez.
Extinction Rebellion is joined in its praise for the marginal pseudo-left figure by right-wing corporate lobby groups like the Americas Society and Council of the Americas (AS/COA), which is funded by planet-destroying fossil fuel corporations, weapons manufacturers, and banks that have a vested interest in trying to stop the Correistas from returning to power.’
Dear Mr Murray. I don’t think gender and attractiveness explains it. There has been a growing tendency towards police brutality against protest, esp. when left of centre. There are many videos of women being violently restrained and apprehended when protesting against the direction of COVID policy. I’m not denying COVID or the need for dramatic government intervention, but believe that there should be a right to challenge or disagree, with constructive debate. There happens to be some interesting science for and against our current cOVID measures. unfortunately those who express disagreement are violently suppressed. As a society we can’t collude with police suppressing causes we disapprove off and cry when they suppress what we support. This government are openly trying to suppress left of centre protest as in “war on woke”, XR etc. while fighting for the right of freedom of expression of the very far right.
Richard Kent,
“Extinction Rebellion has been co-opted”
Yaku or Yankee?
His name is Carlos (Yaxley Lennon, anybody?), & he looks like he’d sell his own mother for a condo in Miami,
plus he’s said some truly despicable things (as Norton points out).
Don’t know much about ER, but get the impression there’s a lot of good will & sentiment there, plus they seem potentially very effective.
But it’s the “effective” groups that are most likely to be deliberately co-opted or skewed, which is a danger worth being wary of.
Be interesting to know where the money comes from, in case there was anything dubious from the outset – but I’m merely pontificating here.
As for the Ecuador faux pas, nobody’s right all the time, so maybe it’s not a reason to write off ER. Amnesty & HRW often get it ‘wrong’, but often get it ‘right’, even the BBC & The Daily Mail have their moments.
Cressida Dick is only slightly less insufferable than her predecessor Ian Blair. Both are Oxbridge educated. I offer no comment on UK elitism.
Ian now seems to be on the after dinner motivational speaking circuit as Baron Boughton.
I make no further comment than one cannot avoid the conclusion that in Britain incompetence leads to Titles and Baubles. Lesley Evans must be quaking in her shoes.
Sorry for the avoidance of doubt the former Sir Ian Blair is now Baron Boughton.
I’m not suggesting that he has been bought an sold.
Dick should go, as responsible for the immoral highly sexist treatment of the women at the vigil. But she won’t, because that would be a catastrophe for Johnson.
Not just Oxbridge. Dick is a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford. And the daughter of two Oxford academics.
Lysias
Synthesized, or born naturally?
Sad how children reject the values of their parents, isn’t it? The child of intellectuals becomes Action Man. Happily ordering the murder of Menezes – I seem to remember she definitely gave the order before the shooting started.
It’s not the fact her been an actress I have concerns about, it’s the fact this very same actress was pictured as an injured causality in the Parsons Green bombing.
Been debunked already.
Not the same person.
Goose
I’d’ve thought one Parsons Nose looks pretty much the same as any other.
Ian
March 15, 2021 at 14:41
“If I read the iniquitous HCB bill right, they have put into legislation precisely what they did to Alex Salmond. “
———————————————————–
Ian, what is the HCB bill? I don’t know what the acronym means.
H C B = Hate Crime Bill- now passed into law by the Scottish Parliament.
I suspect that Craig feels as uncomfortable as I do that the only party political opposition to it came from the Tories
The govt’s crime bill isn’t much better. Causing annoyance is a legitimate thing to do in a free society.
Even the police don’t really want a quasi-judicial role interpreting laws and the right to protest; potentially forcing them to take sides against hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people if the Iraq war protests are any guide. Make the wrong decision and the politicians will no doubt make it very clear it was the police that made the wrong decision.
I noticed throughout 2020 anyone who protested against lockdowns were brutally suppressed by the Metropolitan Police. Real savagery against peaceful protesters of all walks of life and ethnic backgrounds yet they were and still are labelled ” far right” ” covidiots”. Some in Scotland cheered the brutal actions of the police against lockdown protesters because many have been programed by Government propaganda. Sarah Everard was an anti lockdown protester, I suspect, organiser and now she is dead. There’s a political angle to this. Her activities as an activist appear to be subsumed by several other political hobby horses such as BLM who stink of Government Agency rentamob.
We do indeed live in a Tyranny with rule by Fiat. We have been a Tyranny since March 2020.
You can’t say no one tried to warn you all. Woof.
Those labels only stick because for some silly reason, the vast majority of the population are stupid enough to trust the media.
Just remember: the media aren’t replaced once a week by people who call Piers Morgan a ‘fascist, self-serving authoritarian whose cock can’t stop wandering outside the marital bedroom’, Boris Johnson a ‘morally vacuous, self-serving bounder who wouldn’t recognise a moral if it were enticing him into the inner sancti of female temptresses….’, are they?
So all the people get are one-sided pictures and never a vilification of the unprincipled idiots who are paid to be governmental prostitutes or prostitutes for tax-dodging non-dom billionaires who are allowed to own our media organs.
So the much photographed arrest of a photogenic young lady at a vigil supporting photogenic young ladies, turns out to be a scripted event. I’m shocked I tell you.
Surprising the bobbies of the metropolis fell for it, but no less surprising than a movement that espouses women’s rights now has their sights set on the dismissal of the first female (and LGBT to boot) Commissioner of said metropolis.
Your trailblazer supervised the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent man on his way to work.
She said, “if you ask me whether I think anybody did anything wrong or unreasonable on the operation, I don’t think they did.”
Then, of course, they made her head of the Met.
Craig, don’t forget to mention that here, there and everywhere, the neoliberalism system can be perpetrated by oppression and repression. More power to the police, more power to the army, less power to people. The rich and elites are very happy with this model. Sad. Very sad
This lockdown is the biggest attack on our freedoms for 5000 years.
Yes that Neolithic policing must’ve been a real bitch.
I am suspicious about Extinction Rebellion. I currently have them in the same category as the White Helmets.
I found it very suspicious that XR held a large rally the very weekend after Julian was seized from the Ecuadorian Embassy. Maybe the timing was purely coincidental, but I couldn’t help thinking how convenient it was that the rally not only created a distraction from Julian’s plight, but also put paid to organizing a spontaneous rally for Julian that weekend following his arrest. I don’t remember any rallying cry for Julian’s release at the XR rally. But maybe I missed that?
If you can find a spokesperson of ER who actually knows what a Milankovitch cycle is, I’d be surprised.
If you could find one who actually knows what Coronal Mass Ejections are and their significance for global weather, I’d be amazed.
If you can find a single one of them that has ever heard of the Madden-Julian oscillation, I’d be astounded.
But who needs to know the basics of climate, eh?
It rained hard last week and the Thames didn’t freeze over this winter, so climate chaos is upon us, eh??
If you think global warming is down to Milankovitch cycles, you would be completely wrong. You demonstrate well how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
I hope that ER are NOT back with a bang this summer. They are a bunch of uneducated urban middle-class do-gooders who are so totally ignorant about hard science but think that that ignorance can be allied to propaganda savvy to distort debate about a subject which should be driven solely by data and not frothy emotions.
The tragedy is that the virtually the entire public sector, political and media classes, right up to the judiciary is brought up on exactly the same semi-transparent propaganda, all of which just conveniently happens to suit their controlling agenda. The miseries they have been predicting for the last 40 years or more, never actually happen, but remain as ghouls and ,monsters just conveniently over the horizon, five years beyond the end of a comfortable and self congratulatory career.
That billions have had their lives incomparably improved since the dawn of affordable and reliable hydrocarbons never crosses their misanthropic skulls, happy as they are to condemn future generations to separation and poverty.
If you think of Anthropogenic Global Warming as a new religion, then it all makes a lot more sense.
If you had any idea what you were talking about, you would make a lot more sense.
Ah, the ad hom, always the killer argument. If you can’t do better than insults, you shouldn’t waste your time. This isn’t the school playground.
I’ll take an ad hominem over your rank hypocrisy any day.
It wasn’t the hydrocarbons themselves that improved peoples lives but the energy derived from them and possibly some of the side products from refining such as plastics. It is mainly about energy though. If there are “cleaner” alternatives to providing energy then why not make the move?
People used to (and still do in many parts of the world) provide their energy to cook, heat etc by having open fires in their mud/tipi/whatever homes. That’s great and all and was better than nothing but those fires also produced smoke which wasn’t all that good for you. So we moved on and learned to use hydrocarbons to produce energy to cook etc that left us free of the smoke in the home. They still produce “smoke” however. We are at a juncture in technological development where we can again move on to a cleaner energy source. Do you really care what energy moves your car? So why not move on?
As an aside, in my view, nuclear energy is the only real alternative.
ET would you say that the results of three meltdowns at Fukushima can be quantified as finite or infinite. How many cancers have and will result? For me the results of the tsunami are finite. You can see how many died. Does the Nuclear industry get guaranteed profits/welfare? Do tax payers pay for secret spills, storage and cancer treatment?
I went off the Green Party when it became pro nuclear.
Like all tech Wikikettle, the design of nuclear power plants moves on too. I believe it was the disruption of the cooling system caused by the tsunami that lead to the core overheating and meltdown. There are newer designs that are inherently safer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElulEJruhRQ
Pollution from burning hydrocarbons also causes ongoing health problems. Nuclear power plant accidents are like plane crashes, namely spectacular with high impact but overall are few. Planes are still statistically the safest form of travel just as nuclear power production is the safest form of power generation overall (in terms of deaths per megawatt produced).
I’d much rather there was another form of energy production that was safer than even nuclear but renewables are probably not efficient enough and to provide what we need currently will take up huge amounts of land which we need for other things like food and our energy needs are only gong to increase over time. David MacKay has sadly died since his TED talk but it’s still worth listening to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o
“We are at a juncture in technological development where we can again move on to a cleaner energy source.”
Unfortunately, that cleaner energy source no only relies on dirty hydrocarbons for the machinery to harvest the energy, but also relies on equally dirty sourcing of minerals for the same end. Nearly all renewable energy sources also have the problems of either intermittency or high environmental impact or both.
The only sensible alternative is the synthesis of hydrocarbon fuels using renewable energy.
ET,
“nuclear energy is the only real alternative.”
If we could get our collective intellect around nuclear fusion, rather than fission, you would be right.
Otherwise, now that we see the importance of closed loop systems & not creating and littering our environment with deadly toxins, nuclear fission energy is the absolute LAST thing we want (unless you need material for shells, missiles, bullets & armor to scatter around the battlefields of the world).
The Fukushima fkup, predicated on faked safety reports in favour of a healthy ‘bottom line’, & Tepco’s ongoing & imminent increase of dispersal into the Pacific, takes the Age of Stupid to stellar levels.
Fusion reactors are unfortunately a long ways off at present though I agree that a collective effort might bring fusion closer to being achieved. It’s kinda the holy grail of energy production.
In the meantime we need a cleaner energy source. For sure nuclear fission reactors produce waste which is highly dangerous but then so do all the other forms of production and there is a lot less of it with nuclear. Thorium reactors rather than uranium reactors might go some way to alleviating that issue. I’d have been dead set against nuclear formerly but I have changed my views. Renewables cannot fix our energy production problem as noted above, “Nearly all renewable energy sources also have the problems of either intermittency or high environmental impact or both.” Add to that how we are going to dispose of all those solar panels when they reach end of life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w
David MacKay linked in an above post explains it well as does Michael Shellenberger linked just above.
ET
“…waste which is highly dangerous but then so do all the other forms of production and there is a lot less of it with nuclear.”
The “highly dangerous” of spent nuclear fuel is orders of magnitude more worrying than the “other forms of production”, with ‘illions of years in half lives & monstrous health implications, which are just mind bogglingly irresponsible to leave to future generations or to risk unleashing on ourselves (again!).
Plus, I think (but I don’t know, categorically) that waste from other forms of production can potentially be ‘dealt’ with or mitigated, some way or another, where nuclear waste cannot. Admittedly, even this is an area where incredible effort & imagination is still needed.
As you mention, the “environmental impact” & “intermittency” problems of renewables are legion but perhaps not so insurmountable, again with some imagination & conviction. Moore’s film “Planet of the Humans” was quite good at flagging these worries up, as are the writings you have referenced.
I understand that because this ‘green’ initiative is, inevitably within our current economic & political structures, dominated by entities unable or unwilling to look further than the bottom line and consider externalities, it can make a temporary nuclear ‘patch’ seem less undesirable.
But it would be disheartening to think that we’d be unable to see beyond nuclear fission power as an appropriate ‘band aid’.
The work & exposes of Greg Palast, Dr Helen Caldicott & the like, offer a stark warning to simply surrendering to the acceptance of more nuclear power stations. In a ‘cost benefit’ analysis, I’d happily go back to candles!
I know, not a helpful comment. But I would be happier to commit to a much more ‘revolutionary’ approach to solving the energy industry ‘crisis’, rather than adopting reliance on such a proven danger to human life & environmental health.
Tepco’s quiet plans to dump all it’s stored water, let alone that which has been continually washing under the reactors for years now, make the BP Gulf disaster & Exxon Valdez oil spills look like……. well, like something really not very terrible, even though they obviously were.
Saying all that, on a practical level & beyond empty rhetoric, I think any worthwhile future requires at least 2 seismic commitments of us.
To ‘sacrifice’ some ‘luxury’ on an individual level, perhaps only in the short term as a species.
And to reimagine how we as interconnected communities envision & realise a solution, outside of nationalism, capitalism & established minorities.
The argument “but in the meantime, why don’t we just…..” feels a bit lazy & insufficient, a missed opportunity.
It might seem a bit ‘dreamy’, but I think it ties into a lot of the other problems that, not to sound too melodramatic, threaten our very existence as a species, let alone our comfort & happiness.
We are a bright & hardy species who, with the barest of nudges, could feasibly head towards another world that is possible.
Or we could just keep on going as we are, mumbling disconsolately as our lives become more mucky & slavish.
I happen to think that solutions are out there, as are thoughtful, willing & active people, it just needs that epochal shift that does happen from time to time over human history, to facilitate or capitalise on that.
It would be nice to think we could achieve or at least reframe our progress towards something that folk generations from now will celebrate.
Perhaps it’s even happening already, bubbling under the surface, useful bits & bytes of electrons bumping one another through the ionosphere.
I hope so, or we’ve fkd it right up.
……….where’s me kaftan & open toed sandals? I’ve got some tofu to roast!
I see the Policing and Crime Bill is awash with repression of Gypsies and Travellers that echoes the early days of the 3rd Reich. What is it with these Tories and Travellers? When their leader in Scotland was asked what one thing you would most like to achieve if you were prime minister he said “tougher enforcement against Gypsy Travellers”. The one thing … He must dancing today.
Have you ever had an encampment of these travellers descend on your area? They stay for a short period – usually until forcibly evicted – and leave behind the most enormous mess for the local taxpayer to sort out. This will include a large amount of human excrement, nappies, general rubbish strewn over an area which was previously not visible due to the vehicles and caravans. You wouldn’t want to check on it before they move on, believe me, if you know what’s good for you.
It doesn’t end there, though. They make money by charging for the clearance of rubbish, rubble, from building works and renovations. This just gets dumped at their site instead of being legally disposed of. So obviously, this has to be picked up by the taxpayer too.
Tales of theft, harassment, missing manhole covers, scamming, pick-pocketing and shoplifting going through the roof in the vicinity is no doubt just coincidence or down to prejudice, you might think, but their presence does not notably elevate the area’s salubriousness.
Of course, not all ‘travellers’ are like this – but just run a search like “Travellers leave mess” and see how widespread a problem it is.
and so we perpetuate their living standards, glennuk, how about using the abandoned airfields littering the east coast and ensure that every county in the UK has adequate sites with water and rubbish skips that get regularly emptied? Did you know that suicide among travellers is six times higher than that of the wider society? that mental health is a great problem for them?
Councils dragging their feet to establish travellers sites for decades surely amount to discriminating and racial profiling of the traveling community.
Have you ever lived near travellers and or spoke to them? found out about their lives and/or problems?
I think glenn_uk just wants to perpetuate stereotypes. Don’t try to confuse him with facts, his mind is made up.
Nevermind: Perhaps you’re not familiar with the utter contempt and disregard such travellers have for the general population. I don’t think you’d be well advised to drop by for a nice chat with them either – the dogs would make shreds of your clothing before you got within a hundred yards. They don’t really throw down the welcome mat for locals.
These people aren’t poor either – the last time they set up shop nearby, their caravans and towing vehicles were hardly bottom of the range. Hiring a skip themselves would not have been beyond them, but that sort of expense would buy them goodwill they’re not interested in. The only reason they finally move on is because even they can’t stand the mess they’ve made any longer.
We simply have to all be utter bigots round here, because I didn’t hear a single person say, “Bless them – poor loves – we should lay on services and facilities to attract a lot more of them.” Tell me that you’d honestly like a bunch to descend on your patch for a bit. These are not roaming travellers, hippies or gypsies. They do not think your life is worth the change in your pockets.
“Perhaps you’re not familiar with the utter contempt and disregard such travellers have for the general population.”
Have you ever stopped to consider that the utter contempt and disregard that so many of the general population seem to have for the travellers, might have something to do with this? Everyone I know who treats the Gypsies just as they would treat anyone else never has any trouble with them, whereas everyone I know who displays the contempt and disregard so blatantly displayed by yourself is subject to the problems of which you complain. Go figure!
Bayard: Try to be serious for a moment.
Are you actually telling me that it is my personal bigotry which caused the local sports-field to be ruined for months by a bunch of free-loading criminals? Do you seriously expect anyone to believe the place would have been left pristine, had it not been for a negative attitude among locals?
I ask you whether you would genuinely welcome such “travellers” onto your patch – and tell me honestly, if you can. All your virtue signalling is fine when it’s left to others to clean up the mess. You would sing an entirely different tune if your neighbourhood had been bedeviled with temporary guests like this.
My remarks about your apparent prejudice, mental laziness and bigotry (and do try not to skim over the word “apparent”) has nothing to do with what travellers may or may not have done near you and everything in the way that you expressed yourself about it. Yes, some travellers make a mess, yes most Gypsies have a dim view of non-Gypsies, (based almost certainly on the treatment handed out to them by non-gypsies over generations and still going on, a point you seem reluctant to engage with), but whatever way you slice the human race, you will always end up with good and bad people on both sides of the divide. Tarring the entirety of a section of the population with the same brush because of the actions of a few, which is what you are happy to do is the favourite pastime of publications like the Daily Mail. Not bothering to look past such prejudice is mental laziness and trotting it out on here is bigotry.
Let’s see… bluster, repetition, insults… but no answer to the very simple and direct question I asked.
Try again – would you -honestly- be happy for a bunch of these travellers to camp out on your patch?
Let it all out mate ..
And befoe you accuse me of not have suffered, we had a motor home torched by Traveller kids outside our house about 15 years ago. Annoying, but strangely didn’t induce a compulsion to attribute the woes of the world to Travellers or to embark on internet searches for them leaving a mess. What is that all about??
What is that all about??
Prejudice, mental laziness and bigotry, it looks to me.
Try not to show such stupidity with every post, Bayard.
You got it right Bayard at 13:53 16 March 2021.
I don’t, for a second, expect glenn_uk to provide the evidence to support his assertion of “the utter contempt and disregard such travellers have for the general population.” But it fits in nicely with the stereotyped view of Travellers.
Sorry, poaching on your preserves!
Ingwe: The evidence of the contempt a particular subsection of travellers have for the general population is there for anyone to see upon their vacating the spot. If you choose not to see it, fine.
Xavi: I don’t think I attributed “the woes of the world” to a subset of travellers, did I?
What I did do, was point out what a shambles of a place they leave behind, and this might give you a clue why they’re not welcomed with open arms.
The rulers deliberately gave large-scale publicity to the Clapham Common protest before it happened and then they organised the police attack on it as part of the same move as their Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.
One of the easiest divisions to create among people is between men and women. They are also dividing the population into half who are pro the police breakup of the protest and half who are anti. They paid pollsters very fast to measure that division. (Please note that this is a different division from the one between men and women.) Government propagandists must be wearing such big smiles on their faces now. Those who are pro the police action will of course parrot the line that protestors or “rioters” are a public hygiene risk. That’s precisely the point of what’s going on. The morons and scumbags who support the police action won’t say “God Bless Enoch Powell”. They WILL say “This is what’s necessary, plague-spreaders!” They will say the same thing when pass laws are imposed too, and when the rights and freedoms of vaccine resisters are restricted.
Here’s how this kind of psychological warfare works…
* If they find (or create) an issue on which they’re on 80:20 then they’ve already won, so why kick at an open door? That’s a waste of resources.
* If they find one that’s 20:80, well they don’t want to barrel in, kamikaze-style. They’re more subtle than that. What they want is…
* somewhere to stick their wedge, somewhere where it’s 50:50 and they can grind away, make it 60:40, then 80:20 – and at that point it’s “OK, we’ve won that one” and they will start pushing somewhere else.
Yes there is a patriarchy, and yes, women are afraid to walk down the street, and yes, many men are complete idiots who while they say they are chivalrous etc. are nonetheless armour-plated against acquiring any kind of clue about what a woman’s experience in this society is actually like. That’s been true throughout my entire lifetime. But this isn’t about that.
On the plus side, we are seeing some resistance – and it’s led by women. Seriously who did people think capitalism’s technofascist domination was ever going to be overthrown by if not by women?
PS The cops are about to be given the authority to clamp down even on one-person protests. That’s in section 60 of the Bill. But an individual person can’t spread a disease to themselves!
The rulers may at some point – not right now but within weeks or months – try to link “vaccine resisters” with “women who won’t shut up” as some kind of single enemy in the male-dominated (but also supported by pro-fascist women) public mind.
A campaign to mass-vaccinate children against SARS would be ideal for that.
The divisions are indeed sad and don’t help most of us in the long run.
For example, I just read things from Jess Philips and Marina Hyde about how many women have been murdered each year. It is moving. But then I found out that, actually, >5 times as many men are murdered each year. So then I find myself being drawn into another camp. All the while distracted from the bigger picture.
N – where is the actual substantive content of the Bill? That just looks like a long contents page.
“Yes there is a patriarchy, and yes, women are afraid to walk down the street, and yes, many men are complete idiots who while they say they are chivalrous etc. are nonetheless armour-plated against acquiring any kind of clue about what a woman’s experience in this society is actually like. That’s been true throughout my entire lifetime.
But this isn’t about that.“That last sentence was totally wrong! Argh! Dunno why I wrote it. Of course this is about the patriarchy!
It’s just that the rulers are waging sophisticated psychological warfare in the WAY they are twining together the PERCEPTION of gender issues with the PERCEPTION of issues to do with lockdown, the pandemic, and the strong state. That doesn’t mean the actual issues aren’t entwined, because of course they ARE very deeply entwined. Perceptions of them SHOULD be entwined, just not how the rulers want them to be.
I doubt Number Ten has really cut all of its links with Dominic Cummings. There’s some serious brainpower behind this.
On the front page of a newspaper today: “10 YEARS FOR A STATUE, 5 YEARS FOR RAPE”.
Most people would agree it’s an outrage that a convicted rapist should be sentenced to only 5 years in prison or even that he should be released after such a short time.
But it can’t be a coincidence that the government right now is proposing a law to introduce MINIMUM jail sentences for some offences.
Similarly the “10 years in prison if you enter Britain and don’t say you’ve been in Brazil” law also had a big propaganda value. It won’t be surprising if this becomes par for the course: something happens…”10 YEARS FOR THAT” decrees the Home Secretary…something else happens … “AND 10 YEARS FOR THAT TOO”… etc. until it becomes look at a policeman the wrong way and he can give you 10 years …
Where it lacks brain power is that bringing in a Police Bill in the context of a cop killer storm has invited the obvious chant “Kill the Bill”.
But it was Charles Walker, not Keir Starmer, who said don’t sack Cressida Dick and don’t blame the police for authoritarian policing and for preventing protest – but blame the Government (of which he is a rebellious backbencher).
“it is now nearly seven weeks since my hearing for contempt of court, with no sign of a judgement, which seems to me very extraordinary.”
Have you considered that they are waiting to see if you intend to stand for election to Holyrood before giving a judgment Craig?
7+ weeks and counting seems excessive considering how short the actual hearing was.