Thursday, 8 June 2023

Corpus Christi

Two down, one to go, on getting back the proper Holy Days of Obligation, as kept by the rest of the world, including the Pope. Check his Twitter feed today if you do not believe me. He knows what day it is. Astonishingly, the Sacred Heart, the date of which is based on that of Corpus Christi, is still being kept on the right day, i.e., next Friday. Do they just not know, or something?

Do many Catholics still believe in transubstantiation? Well, if such things were ever taught in Catholic schools, then more of them might. But anyway, so what? What matters is that the Church teaches it. Catholics who dissent from the Teaching of the Church are just wrong, objectively speaking. That is all that there is to it.

Only the Catholic Church provides such objectivity, which is perfectly encapsulated in transubstantiation. It was only from Christianity in general, and from Catholicism in particular, that science acquired the idea that some propositions were just plain true, so that others were just plain false. And it was only from Christianity in general, and from Catholicism in particular, that science acquired the idea that there was an investigable order in the universe; even if that order is a law of chaos, then the point still stands.

Faced with a changed intellectual environment that denies those foundations rather than simply presupposing them, then science must return to the system that first asserted them in the midst of a former such environment. That system is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular.

Thus, for example, by affirming the objective existence of the substance distinct from the accidents, transubstantiation also affirms the objective existence of the accidents, which are the objects of scientific investigation. Transubstantiation is the bulwark against the Postmodern assault on science. Nothing else is.

Buy the book here.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 671

I invite each and every bishop, priest and deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if he thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me.

Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 671

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Furthermore, I invite each and every other candidate for the parliamentary seat containing Lanchester to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Wednesday, 7 June 2023

Was, Is, And Will Be

Fun and games at Telegraph Media Group, but we are hardly going to buy it, are we? Still, calling itself Lloyds Bank for the purpose, BlackRock and its wider world no longer feel the need for TMG in anything like its present form.

Guardian writers believe the rubbish that is written in The Guardian, and Telegraph writers believe the rubbish that is written in The Guardian. In my experience, distinguished journalists from other English-speaking countries cannot tell them apart in blind tests.

People who thought that they were the better sort of unpopulists no longer need to be boiled like frogs by eccentrist commentators. They are ready to be served up. Fine by us. The eccentrists, the three per cent who voted for Change UK, and the unpopulists, the six per cent who vote for Reform UK where it stands, will carry on doing what they do.

I for one will continue to work to create a thinktank, a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually a fortnightly satirical magazine, all in the service of the other 91 per cent. In good, old-fashioned print, so that no one would be able to press a button and delete them. The thinktank and the weekly magazine need to be up and running at the start of the forthcoming General Election year.

When I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

By Way Of The Fantasy

Out the blue last night, someone whom I used to know well, but about whom I had rather forgotten, posted something utterly bizarre about me on his Facebook page. He even tagged me. Then he blocked me as soon as I corrected him in the comments, so I do not know whether it is still there. But thanks to a couple of friends, here are screenshots of it.





If it is still there, then this is the link, and the text reads:

I have 288 mutual friends with David Lindsay. You might know about his spell inside for putting a bounty on the heads of Durham County councillors & then perverting the cause of justice.

But you should also be aware that, during the 2019 election* (when he stood against Laura Pidcock as an independent) he said that Laura, Daniel (Laura’s partner at the time) and I were part of a terrorist cell - in print, on his blog.

In addition, he completely misrepresented my role in the Durham Teaching Assistant Dispute, calling me Ben Sellout (ok, that was reasonably witty) but spreading ridiculous rumours which were hugely damaging. He also sent a letter to Durham police, Guido Fawkes & Jeremy Corbyn amongst others alleging that I and others at the People’s Bookshop were members of Mossad & MI5.

There are times to laugh about this stuff, and there are times when I think the left are very naive.

*By the way, he got 414 votes (probably some by way of the fantasy that he was the champion of the Durham TAs). Laura lost by just over 1,000.

Here we go, then.

I have 288 mutual friends with David Lindsay.

My friend count had not gone down 24 hours after Ben posted that, when I accepted a request from a left-wing stalwart.

You might know about his spell inside for putting a bounty on the heads of Durham County councillors & then perverting the cause of justice.

That was not in itself why I went to prison. If, as he pointedly does not say, Ben believes in my guilt, then he is the only person whom I have ever met who does, and I have not seen him since before even my first trial, never mind the one at which I was convicted.

But you should also be aware that, during the 2019 election* (when he stood against Laura Pidcock as an independent) he said that Laura, Daniel (Laura’s partner at the time) and I were part of a terrorist cell - in print, on his blog.

I made no such claim about him, or about Laura (whose office manager Ben was when she was my MP), or about Daniel Kebede, the incoming General Secretary of the National Education Union, and none of them has ever mentioned it before. Nor has anyone else. Where is the blogpost to which Ben refers? Search this site for "Laura Pidcock MI5 Mossad", and nothing comes up. Well, of course it doesn't. I happened to run into Laura and Daniel only a few weeks ago, and the exchange was more than civil. It always is with them. At last year's Durham Miners' Gala, Daniel specifically asked me to blog in support of his candidacy for General Secretary. I did.

In addition, he completely misrepresented my role in the Durham Teaching Assistant Dispute, calling me Ben Sellout (ok, that was reasonably witty)

Well, that is a matter of opinion. I advised the Teaching Assistants to campaign in 2017 for the candidates best placed to defeat Labour in each ward of Durham County Council. Ben, still a member of the Labour Party at the time, advised voting Labour, and thus, since most of them were seeking re-election, for the Councillors who were cutting the TAs' pay by 23 per cent. That year, Labour retained control of the Council, and duly implemented the cut. Which of us was right? At the very least, which of us was demonstrably wrong?

spreading ridiculous rumours which were hugely damaging.

Give details.

He also sent a letter to Durham police, Guido Fawkes & Jeremy Corbyn amongst others alleging that I and others at the People’s Bookshop were members of Mossad & MI5.

I sent no such letter, and again, no one has ever mentioned any of this before. I have emailed Guido Fawkes to ask whether he had received it, and how Ben could purport to know who had been writing to him. This is the kind of nonsense of which Oliver Kamm accuses me. Think on.

There are times to laugh about this stuff, and there are times when I think the left are very naive.

Quite.

*By the way, he got 414 votes (probably some by way of the fantasy that he was the champion of the Durham TAs). Laura lost by just over 1,000.

What point is Ben trying to make here? That if all of my supporters had voted for Laura, then she would still have lost? That is of course true, but why would Ben want to say it? Proud though I am to have championed the TAs, if Ben thinks that that there was where most or all of my votes came from, then he really was only passing through the North West Durham constituency. Alas, he had in any case played no small part in their defeat well before December 2019.

Jamie Driscoll should steer well clear of Ben Sellers. Everyone should.

First There Were Neo-Nazis, Then There Were No Nazis, Then There Were


I tell you, serving as a New York Times correspondent these days cannot be easy. You have to convey utter nonsense to your readers while maintaining a straight face and a serious demeanor. You have to suggest the Russians may have exploded a drone over the Kremlin, that they may have blown up their own gas pipeline, that their president is an out-of-touch psychotic, that their soldiers in Ukraine are drunkards using faulty equipment, that they attack with “human hordes” (Orientalism, anyone?) and on and on—all the while affecting the gravitas once associated with the traditional “Timesman.” You try it sometime.

I am reminded of that pithy passage in Daniel Boorstin’s regrettably overlooked book, The Image. “The reporter’s task,” Boorstin wrote in 1962, “is to find a way of weaving these threads of unreality into a fabric that the reader will not recognize as entirely unreal.”

Boorstin reflected on America’s resort to imagery, illusion, and distortion as Washington geared up its gruesome follies in Vietnam. The reporter’s task is a whole lot harder now, given how much farther we have wandered into illusion and distortion since Boorstin’s day.

And now we have the case of Thomas Gibbons–Neff, a square-jawed former Marine covering the Ukraine war for The Times—strictly to the extent the Kyiv regime permits him to do so, as he explains with admirable honesty. This guy is serious times 10, he and his newspaper want us to know.

Tom’s job this week is to persuade us that all those Ukrainian soldiers wearing Nazi insignia, idolizing Jew-murdering, Russophobic collaborators with the Third Reich, gathering ritually in Nazi-inspired cabals, marching through Kyiv in Klan-like torch parades are not what you think. Nah, our Tom tells us. They look like neo–Nazis, they act like neo–Nazis, they dress like neo–Nazis, they profess Fascist and neo–Nazi ideologies, they wage this war with the Wehrmacht’s visceral hatred of Russians—O.K., but whyever would you think they are neo–Nazis?

They are just regular guys. They wear the Wolfsangel, the Schwarze sonne, the black sun, the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head—all Nazi symbols—because they are proud of themselves, and these are the kinds of things proud people wear. I was just wearing mine the other day.

The slipping and sliding starts early in “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History,” the piece Gibbons–Neff published in Monday’s editions. He begins with three photographs of neo–Nazi Ukrainian soldiers, SS insignia plainly visible, that the Kyiv regime has posted on social media, “then quietly deleted,” since the Russian intervention began last year. “The photographs, and their deletions,” Gibbons–Neff writes, “highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II.”

Complicated relationship with Nazi imagery? Stop right there, Mr. Semper fi.  Ukraine’s neo–Nazi problem is not about a few indiscreetly displayed images. Sorry. The Ukrainian army’s “complicated relationship” is with a century of ultra-right ideology drawn from Mussolini’s Fascism and then the German Reich. As is well-known and documented, the neo–Nazis who infest the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the AFU—among many other national institutions—have made idols of such figures as Stepan Bandera, the freakishly murderous nationalist who allied with the Nazi regime during the war.

This history is a matter of record, as briefly outlined here, but Gibbons–Neff alludes to none of it. It’s merely a matter of poor image-making, you see. In support of this offensive whitewash, Gibbons–Neff has the nerve to quote a source from none other than Bellingcat, which was long, long back exposed as a CIA and MI6 cutout and which is now supported by the Atlantic Council, the NATO–funded, spook-infested think tank based in Washington.

“What worries me, in the Ukrainian context, is that people in Ukraine who are in leadership positions, either they don’t or they’re not willing to acknowledge and understand how these symbols are viewed outside of Ukraine,” a Bellingcat “researcher” named Michael Colborne tells Gibbons–Neff. “I think Ukrainians need to increasingly realize that these images undermine support for the country.”

Think about that. The presence of Nazi elements in the AFU is not a worry. The worry is merely whether clear signs of Nazi sympathies might cause some members of the Western alliance to decide they no longer want to support Nazi elements in the AFU. I am reminded of that Public Broadcasting news segment last year, wherein a provincial governor is featured with a portrait of Bandera behind him. PBS simply blurred the photograph and ran the interview with another of the courageous, admirable Ukrainians to which we are regularly treated.

I hardly need remind paying-attention readers that the neo–Nazis-who-are-not-neo–Nazis were for years well-reported as simply neo–Nazis in the years after the U.S.–cultivated coup in 2014. The Times, The Washington Post, PBS, CNN—the whole sorry lot—ran pieces on neo–Nazi elements in the AFU and elsewhere. In March 2018, Reuters published a commentary by Jeff Cohen under the headline “Ukraine’s Neo–Nazi Problem.” Three months later The Atlantic Council, for heaven’s sake, published a paper, also written by Cohen, titled, “Ukraine’s Got a Real Problem with Far–Right Violence (And no, RT Didn’t Write This Headline).” I recall, because it was so surprising coming from the council, that the original head on that paper was “Ukraine’s Got a Neo–Nazi Problem,” but that version now seems lost to the blur of stealth editing.

Then came the Russian intervention, and Poof! There are no more neo–Nazis in Ukraine. There are only these errant images that are of no special account. And to assert there are neo–Nazis in Ukraine—to have some semblance of memory and a capacity to judge what is before one’s eyes—“plays into Russian propaganda,” Gibbons–Neff warns us. It is to “give fuel to his”—Vladimir Putin’s—“false claims that Ukraine must be de–Nazified.” For good measure Gibbons–Neff gets out the old Volodymyr-Zelensky-is-Jewish chestnut, as if this is proof of… of something or other.

My mind goes to that lovely Donovan lyric from the Scottish singer’s Zen enlightenment phase. Remember “There Is a Mountain?” The famous lines went, “First there is a mountain/ Then there is no mountain/ Then there is.” There were neo–Nazis in Ukraine, then there were no neo–Nazis, and now there are neo–Nazis but they aren’t neo–Nazis after all.

There are a few things to think about as we consider Thomas Gibbons–Neff’s story, other than the fact that it is horse-droppings as a piece of journalism. For one thing, nowhere in it does he quote or reference any member of the AFU—no one wearing a uniform, no one sporting one of these troubling insignia. Various image-managing officials speak to him about the neo–Nazis who-are-not-neo–Nazis, but we never hear from any neo–Nazi-who-is-not-a-neo–Nazi to explain things as a primary source, so to say. I wager Gibbons–Neff never got within 20 miles of one: He wouldn’t dare, for then he would have to quote one of these insignia-sporting people saying that of course he was a neo–Nazi. Can’t you read, son?

For another, Gibbons–Neff resolutely avoids dilating his lens such that the larger phenomenon comes into view. It all comes down to those three unfortunate insignia in those three deleted photographs. The parades, the corridors of neo–Nazi flags, the ever-present swastikas, the reenactments of all-night SS rituals, the glorification of Nazis and Nazi collaborators, the Russophobic blood lust: Sure, it can all be explained, except that our Timesman does not go anywhere near any of this.

Gibbons–Neff’s story follows by 10 days an even more contorted piece of pretzel-like rubbish published in The Kyiv Independent, a not-independent daily that has been supported by various Western governments. This is by one Illia Ponomarenko, a reporter much-lionized in the West, and appeared under the headline, “Why some Ukrainian soldiers use Nazi-related insignia.”

This is the kind of piece that is so bad it tips into fun. “No, Ukraine does not have ‘a Nazi problem,’” Ponomarenko states flatly, and this is the last flat sentence we get in this piece. “Just like in many places around the world, people with far-right and neo–Nazi views, driven by their ideology, are prone to joining the military and participating in conflicts,” he writes. And then this doozy, where begins a riot of irrationality:
It is, of course, true that, for instance, the Azov Battalion was originally founded by neo–Nazi and far-right groups (as well as many soccer ultra-fans), which brought along with it the typical aesthetics—not only neo–Nazi insignia but also things like Pagan rituals or names like “The Black Corps,” the official newspaper of Nazi Germany’s major paramilitary organization Schutzstaffel (SS).
But worry not, readers. It is merely an aesthetic, part of a harmless, misunderstood “subculture”:
In the oversimplified memory of some around the world, particularly within various militaristic subcultures, symbols representing the Wehrmacht, Nazi Germany’s Armed Forces, and the SS are seen to reflect a super-effective war machine, not the perpetrators of one of the greatest crimes against humanity in human history.
But of course. SS insignia, Wehrmacht iconography: Seen it everywhere people admire super-effective war machines. Remember this logic next time some liberal flamer proposes to persecute a MAGA supporter who partakes of this “subculture.”

Has Tom Gibbons–Neff given us a rewrite job? Having been around the block for a good long time, I have seen this kind of thing often enough—correspondents scoring off the local dailies to look deep and penetrating back on the foreign desk. It is also possible, assuming for a moment Gibbons–Neff’s editors still read other newspapers, that they asked him for just such a piece after seeing Ponomarenko’s. Either way, we get this in Ponomarenko’s recognizably illogical style
Questions over how to interpret such symbols are as divisive as they are persistent, and not just in Ukraine. In the American South, some have insisted that today, the Confederate flag symbolizes pride, not its history of racism and secession. The swastika was an important Hindu symbol before it was co-opted by the Nazis.
If you are going to reach, Tom, may as well reach for the stars.

We have a New York Times correspondent quoting Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and Bellingcat, an intel cutout that is part of a NATO think tank, and then rather too closely, I would say, aping a Western-supported newspaper in Kyiv. Yes, Virginia, I believe we all got ourselves one of them there echo chambers, just the way the Deep State likes ’em.

Last March, Gibbons–Neff was interviewed by The New York Times. Yes, they do this sort of thing down there on Eighth Avenue, where they simply cannot get enough of themselves. It is enlightening. The unfortunate Times reporter assigned as the straight man asked, as our intrepid correspondent self-aggrandized, “What have been the biggest challenges in covering the war?” Gibbons–Neff’s reply is pricelessly revealing.

“Wrestling with access and being allowed to go certain places to see things that you need the press officer for, or permission from the military unit,” the fearless ex–Marine explains. “Ukrainians know how to manage the press fairly well. So navigating those parameters and not rubbing anyone the wrong way has always been tough.”

Forget about bombs, missiles, gore, the fog of war, courageous sergeants, trench stench, grenades, or any of the other horrors of battle. Gibbons–Neff’s big problems as he pretends to cover the Ukraine war are maintaining access, getting the Kyiv gatekeepers’ permission to go someplace, and avoiding annoying the regime’s authorities.

Does this tell you everything you want to know about our Timesman or what?

It is always interesting to ask why a piece such as this appears when it does. Dead silence for months on the neo–Nazi question, and then suddenly a long explainer that does its best to avoid explaining anything. Always interesting to ask, never easy to answer.

It could be that a lot of stuff on these awful people is sifting out from under the carpet. Or maybe something big is on the way and this piece is preemptive. Or maybe either Gibbons–Neff or his editors saw the Ponomarenko piece as an opportunity to dispose of one of the Kyiv regime’s most embarrassing features.

Or maybe the larger context counts here. As mentioned in this space last week, The Times’s Steve Erlanger recently suggested from Brussels that NATO might do a postwar Germany job with Ukraine: Welcome the west of the country to the alliance and let the eastern provinces go for an indefinite period, unification the long-term objective. Late last week Foreign Affairs ran a fantastical piece by Andriy Zagorodnyuk, formerly a Ukrainian defense minister and now, yes indeedy, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council. It appeared under the headline, “To Protect Europe, Let Ukraine Join NATO—Right Now.”

Zagorodnyuk’s argument is as loopy as his subhead, “No Country Is Better at Stopping Russia.” But these kinds of assertions, dreamily hyperbolic as they may be, have a purpose. They serve to enlarge the field of acceptable discourse. They inch us closer to normalizing the thought that Ukraine must be accepted in the North Atlantic alliance for our sake, the sake of the West, no matter how provocative such a move will prove.

This suggest that Gibbons–Neff’s piece, along with the one he followed in the Kyiv paper, are by way of a cleanup job. The Western press, working closely with intelligence agencies, did its best to prettify the savage jihadists attempting to bring down the Assad government in Damascus, you will recall. Remember the “moderate rebels?” Maybe Gibbons–Neff is on an equally dishonorable errand.

Semper fi, huh? Always faithful to what?

After Some Miscommunication

Will Caroline Farrow be standing for Parliament at home in Surrey Heath, against Michael Gove? Or will she be standing a touch further south, at Fareham and Waterlooville, against Suella Braverman? Caroline writes:

Please do not speculate with names. But I think what is happening to me is important. I am not prohibited from talking about things in general terms.

On Monday afternoon, my solicitor received a bizarre communication from Surrey Police solicitors. He thought it had to do with my civil claim against them. After some miscommunication, they sent through a bundle for a court hearing. I am due in court tomorrow morning.

The Police asked that “physical paperwork” relating to the court hearing against me in 2 days, was withheld from me. They wanted me to go to a court hearing without access to the accusations and alleged evidence.

Surrey Police have applied for a stalking protection order as a result of material I have posted on Twitter. On page 1 of the bundle repeated misgendering is cited. Here are the prohibitions they are seeking tomorrow morning.

I will be assigned an “offender manager”. I will not be allowed to use any Social Media, Social Networking, Gaming, Dating (lol) site without this person’s written permission and having supplied them with usernames and passwords for all sites within three days.

In addition the following requirements are added:

1. Allow Police Officers to enter your registered address(es), between the hours of 8am and 8pm, to conduct a risk assessment, monitor devices, and manage compliance of the order.

2. Provide your Offender Manager with any mobile, digital, or internet enabled devices for examination, review, and monitoring purposes, immediately upon request. You must also your provide your Offender Manager with any access PINs, passwords, or patterns. Examinations may be completed manually on scene, or could entail them seizing your device(s) for examination by agencies contracted by the police for that purpose. Failing to disclose the existence of a device in your possession to your Offender Manager will count as a failure to comply with this condition.

3. Re-register home address every 12 months at a Police Station, within 365 days of last registration.

4. Provide your Offender Manager with list of all mobile, digital, or internet enabled devices that you own or have access to use. The list must be provided within three days of the order being granted or within three days of any changes.

5. Possessing, owning or using more than one mobile phone and one SIM card, unless with written permission from your Offender Manager in the area that you reside. You must provide the telephone number and unique identifying numbers of all device(s) within three days of this order being granted or within three days of and supplying any changes within three days of any such change.

The Police Officer says this: “I believe that while presenting a significant interference with the respondent’s privacy rights, it is an appropriate course of action in the circumstances.” Signed by Surrey Police Superintendent, “I consider that in accordance with paragraph 2 of Article 8 of HRA, an interference by this force as a public authority is in accordance with the law and is necessary.”

The Clergy Challenge: Day 670

I invite each and every bishop, priest and deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if he thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me.

Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 670

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Furthermore, I invite each and every other candidate for the parliamentary seat containing Lanchester to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

A Lot Of Smoke, But Very Little Fire?

The anti-Corbyn bandwagon made some very improbable people famous, but that was only ever going to be fleeting. Go through the MPs who left the Labour Party at least ostensibly because of Jeremy Corbyn. Not only had you never heard of them before, even though some of them had been in Parliament for decades, but nor have you heard of them since they all either stood down or lost their seats.

Professor Arif Ahmed is the new Free Speech Tsar, since the Tsars were so noted for their commitment to free speech, and that has horrified an anti-Corbyn grifter of yesteryear, one John Mann. Since 28th October 2019, back when anyone would have made such an appointment, Mann has been the Anti-Semitism Tsar, since the Tsars were so noted for their opposition to anti-Semitism.

But it is no longer about bogus claims of anti-Semitism; the EHRC found all of two specific examples, and both of those are subject to judicial review. It is now about mostly bogus threats to free speech; nothing gets you a platform like being deplatformed. So Professor Ahmed's non-subscription to the IHRA Definition is a positive advantage. Except to Mann, who is a creature out of time. Similarly, The Times and the Daily Telegraph have given rave reviews to Roger Waters. The world moves on.

There is a forlorn attempt to revive the glory days against Jamie Driscoll, but even within the Labour Party, no one is joining in who has ever been elected to anything. Shadow Ministers "do not know the details of the case". Oh, yes, they do. Andy Burnham, Steve Rotheram, the Labour members of Jamie's Cabinet, and the entire trade union bureaucracy, are lined up with Simon Clarke, Nadhim Zahawi, Ben Bradley, and the Conservative members of Jamie's Cabinet.

Someone called Paul Richards has to come on the BBC and accuse Ken Loach of having said "odious and repulsive things", but no one asks him what they were, because they know that he would have no answer. Did a hall full of 2000 anti-Semites give Ken a 15-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival? The third episode of The Labour Files is The Hierarchy, about the hierarchy of racism in the Labour Party, and it recently won the Gold Award for documentaries at the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards. Those awards, those festivals and that city may be many things, but it is fair to say that they are not anti-Semitic. Nor is the Cannes Film Festival. And nor is Ken.

Kim McGuinness has adopted the novel election-winning strategy of going into purdah. It will be a preferential voting system for Mayor. If Jamie did not win on the first round, then he would win on the second. Keir Starmer's Labour Party is going to be humiliated from the left, a few months before the General Election. Let's keep up that momentum.

When I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Tuesday, 6 June 2023

The Basic Structure

Agree or disagree, but the Russians regard the Nova Kakhovka dam as their own infrastructure, serving their own nuclear power station at Zaporizhzhia, and safeguarding their own water supply in Crimea.

In those terms, why would they attack it? It could have been either side in Ukraine. And that is why we should be on neither side in Ukraine.

Expedite The Process

Nile Gardiner and I were colleagues once, but it gives me no pleasure to be on the same side as him and the Heritage Foundation.

Between that and the Department of Homeland Security, what is there to call? Still, here we are.

And why stop at Prince Harry? Everyone catches up with this site.

Burst

In the argument over who attacked the Nova Kakhovka dam, notice that no one would put it past either side.

With no strategic interest in which country Zaporizhzhia should be in, we should not be on either side in Ukraine.

Prophesy Deliverance

There is no debate that would not benefit from the participation of Cornel West, on whom see herehere and here. He would make a better President than any Democrat or Republican in the field. But of course he is not going to win.

Meanwhile, there is to be no debate with Marianne Williamson or with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., even though whatever may be said of either of then, they have not gone third party as West has. They are Democrats seeking the Democratic nomination, and each of them is more popular than Ron DeSantis. Yet there are to be Republican debates, but not Democratic ones. Perhaps Williamson and Kennedy should arrange to debate each other? Over to Elon Musk?

After four years of Joe Biden, then Donald Trump would beat him even, and perhaps especially, from a prison cell, and would in fact make a better President either than the ailing Biden or than Kamala Harris. Mike Pence could well beat Biden. Even DeSantis would stand a good chance of doing so. Kennedy, or Williamson, or West is not the Republican decoy candidate. That is Biden.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 669

I invite each and every bishop, priest and deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if he thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me.

Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 669

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Furthermore, I invite each and every other candidate for the parliamentary seat containing Lanchester to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Monday, 5 June 2023

Back To Basics

Proposed by Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman, and defended on Politics Live today by Tim Stanley, the Universal Basic Income is being trialled under a Conservative Government.

The simple existence of Universal Credit, and previously also of the furlough scheme, has already conceded the principle. It is going to happen, simply because it is cheaper. The key will be to do Modern Monetary Theory's Job Guarantee as well, both by means of mass reindustrialisation, and as the means to it.

Traditional conservatives, just imagine. Nothing to stop the BBC licence fee from being made voluntary. No more questions about whether or not jurors had a stake in society. No more conceivable excuse for prostitution or for low level drug-dealing. Only the Labour Party will hold out, to defend the basis of its members' and its core voters' spiteful power over the lower orders. But no one would try and repeal it once it were already in place.

And when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Calling Attention To The Iconography

Boxes are ticked here in ways that would rightly attract derision and outrage in any other context, but even in The New York Times, Thomas Gibbons-Neff now writes:

Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year, the Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted, then quietly deleted, three seemingly innocuous photographs from their social media feeds: a soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench and an emergency worker posing in front of a truck.

In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups.

The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II.

That relationship has become especially delicate because President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has falsely declared Ukraine to be a Nazi state, a claim he has used to justify his illegal invasion.

Ukraine has worked for years through legislation and military restructuring to contain a fringe far-right movement whose members proudly wear symbols steeped in Nazi history and espouse views hostile to leftists, L.G.B.T.Q. movements and ethnic minorities. But some members of these groups have been fighting Russia since the Kremlin illegally annexed part of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014 and are now part of the broader military structure. Some are regarded as national heroes, even as the far-right remains marginalized politically [oh, to be so marginalized politically].

The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism. In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Mr. Putin’s propaganda and giving fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be “de-Nazified” — a position that ignores the fact that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish. More broadly, Ukraine’s ambivalence about these symbols, and sometimes even its acceptance of them, risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate.

“What worries me, in the Ukrainian context, is that people in Ukraine who are in leadership positions, either they don’t or they’re not willing to acknowledge and understand how these symbols are viewed outside of Ukraine,” said Michael Colborne, a researcher at the investigative group Bellingcat who studies the international far right. “I think Ukrainians need to increasingly realize that these images undermine support for the country.”

In a statement, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said that, as a country that suffered greatly under German occupation, “We emphasize that Ukraine categorically condemns any manifestations of Nazism.”

So far, the imagery has not eroded international support for the war. It has, however, left diplomats, Western journalists and advocacy groups in a difficult position: Calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian propaganda. Saying nothing allows it to spread.

Even Jewish groups and anti-hate organizations that have traditionally called out hateful symbols have stayed largely silent. Privately, some leaders have worried about being seen as embracing Russian propaganda talking points.

Questions over how to interpret such symbols are as divisive as they are persistent, and not just in Ukraine. In the American South, some have insisted that today, the Confederate flag symbolizes pride, not its history of racism and secession. The swastika was an important Hindu symbol before it was co-opted by the Nazis.

In April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted a photograph on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head.

The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.

The patch in the photograph sets the Totenkopf atop a Ukrainian flag with a small No. 6 below. That patch is the official merchandise of Death in June, a British neo-folk band that the Southern Poverty Law Center has said produces “hate speech” that “exploits themes and images of fascism and Nazism.”

The Anti-Defamation League considers the Totenkopf “a common hate symbol.” But Jake Hyman, a spokesman for the group, said it was impossible to “make an inference about the wearer or the Ukrainian Army” based on the patch.

“The image, while offensive, is that of a musical band,” Mr. Hyman said. The band now uses the photograph posted by the Ukrainian military to market the Totenkopf patch.

The New York Times asked the Ukrainian Defense Ministry on April 27 about the tweet. Several hours later, the post was deleted. “After studying this case, we came to the conclusion that this logo can be interpreted ambiguously,” the ministry said in a statement.

The soldier in the photograph was part of a volunteer unit called the Da Vinci Wolves, which started as part of the paramilitary wing of Ukraine’s Right Sector, a coalition of right-wing organizations and political parties that militarized after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.

At least five other photographs on the Wolves’ Instagram and Facebook pages feature their soldiers wearing Nazi-style patches, including the Totenkopf.

NATO militaries, an alliance that Ukraine hopes to join, do not tolerate such patches. When such symbols have appeared, groups like the Anti-Defamation League have spoken out, and military leaders have reacted swiftly.

Last month, Ukraine’s state emergency services agency posted on Instagram a photograph of an emergency worker wearing a Black Sun symbol, also known as a Sonnenrad, that appeared in the castle of Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi general and SS director. The Black Sun is popular among neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

In March 2022, NATO’s Twitter account posted a photograph of a Ukrainian soldier wearing a similar patch.

Both photographs were quickly removed.

In November, during a meeting with Times reporters near the front line, a Ukrainian press officer wore a Totenkopf variation made by a company called R3ICH (pronounced “Reich”). He said he did not believe the patch was affiliated with the Nazis. A second press officer present said other journalists had asked soldiers to remove the patch before taking photographs.

Ihor Kozlovskyi, a Ukrainian historian and religious scholar, said that the symbols had meanings that were unique to Ukraine and should be interpreted by how Ukrainians viewed them, not by how they had been used elsewhere.

“The symbol can live in any community or any history independently of how it is used in other parts of Earth,” Mr. Kozlovskyi said.

Russian soldiers in Ukraine have also been seen wearing Nazi-style patches, underscoring how complicated interpreting these symbols can be in a region steeped in Soviet and German history.

The Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in 1939, so it was caught by surprise two years later when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine had suffered greatly under a Soviet government that engineered a famine that killed millions. Many Ukrainians initially viewed the Nazis as liberators.

Factions from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its insurgent army fought alongside the Nazis in what they viewed as a struggle for Ukrainian sovereignty. Members of those groups also took part in atrocities against Jewish and Polish civilians. Later in the war, though, some of the groups fought against the Nazis.

Some Ukrainians joined Nazi military units like the Waffen-SS Galizien. The emblem of the group, which was led by German officers, was a sky-blue patch showing a lion and three crowns. The unit took part in a massacre of hundreds of Polish civilians in 1944.

In December, after a yearslong legal battle, Ukraine’s highest court ruled that a government-funded research institute could continue to list the unit’s insignia as excluded from the Nazi symbols banned under a 2015 law.

Today, as a new generation fights against Russian occupation, many Ukrainians see the war as a continuation of the struggle for independence during and immediately after World War II. Symbols like the flag associated with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Galizien patch have become emblems of anti-Russian resistance and national pride.

That makes it difficult to easily separate, on the basis of icons alone, the Ukrainians enraged by the Russian invasion from those who support the country’s far-right groups.

Units like the Da Vinci Wolves, the better-known Azov regiment and others that began with far-right members have been folded into the Ukrainian military, and have been instrumental in defending Ukraine from Russian troops.

The Azov regiment was celebrated after holding out during the siege of the southern city of Mariupol last year. After the commander of the Da Vinci Wolves was killed in March, he received a hero’s funeral, which Mr. Zelensky attended.

“I think some of these far-right units mix a fair bit of their own mythmaking into the public discourse on them,” said Mr. Colborne, the researcher. “But I think the least that can and should be done everywhere, not just Ukraine, is not allowing the far right’s symbols, rhetoric and ideas to seep into public discourse.”

Wasted

Having been directed by the judge to attend a day early in case the opening speeches had run short, then would any other witness who failed to turn up be let off because it had been his or her daughter's second birthday the previous day?

When he did return to these shores, then Prince Harry ought to be arrested for his Class A drug offences, and his United States visa ought to be revoked to preclude his flight. When he was so out of it that he thought that he was having conversations with a pedal bin, then he was surrounded by some of the most carefully vetted Police Officers in the world. They often are.

Last May, Michael Gove was described in edited Fleet Street copy as having been on " a cocaine binge". He and Boris Johnson, who is no longer an American citizen, have lied on their United States visa applications, as has Harry. They are not the only ones, although presumably no one will bother in future. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng was obviously off his face at the funeral of the late Queen. The Truss Government was so awash with cocaine that it scandalised the servants.

There cannot be a "free" market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a "free" market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today.

We need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. I no longer believe in prison sentences that include the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is.

We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one's premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And Peter Hitchens's The War We Never Fought should be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely. But drugs-based blackmail is fundamental to political power in this country.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Nothing To Lose But Our Chains

Ken Loach will be in his place on the platform of the Durham Miners' Gala, so is the whole of trade union royalty going to be expelled from the Labour Party? In my experience, they should be so lucky.

And have you ever seen a Blairite on an anti-racist or anti-Fascist demonstration? No, nor have I. It is not even that they do not organise such events; that is always, always the Left. They never, ever attend, including large confrontations with what has been a significantly resurgent Far Right here in the North East at several points this century. For that, you have always needed Jamie Driscoll, and you always will. People who do not stand on picket lines, do not stand against Nazis. People who do, know why.

Speaking of the North East, I believe that it is correct to say that the last three feature films to have been set and filmed here at all have been the three that have most recently been directed by Ken. Oh, yes, he will be at the Big Meeting, all right. Again, have you ever seen a film by a Blairite? Would it be worth attempting to make one as a joke, or would the satire have to be too broad? As the nearest thing to art that that sort would ever think to attempt, Matt Forde was involved in the recent revival of Spitting Image. How was that?

My trade union, Unite, has come out in support of Jamie. Will it be disaffiliated from the Labour Party? Again, we should be so lucky. But we have also denounced Keir Starmer's lunatic scheme to ban new oil and gas licences in the North Sea. If Unite were still affiliated in 2026, and if no one with a higher profile had stepped up to the plate, then I would be a candidate for General Secretary, in support of an all-of-the-above energy policy, and to secure disaffiliation both from the Labour Party and from the ILGA. Join Unite Community here.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 668

I invite each and every bishop, priest and deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if he thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me.

Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 668

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Furthermore, I invite each and every other candidate for the parliamentary seat containing Lanchester to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Sunday, 4 June 2023

A Constructive, Non-Partisan Approach

Simply as a matter of fact, Ken Loach was not expelled from the Labour Party for anti-Semitism. And he can afford to sue. The Blairites have never otherwise heard of him, of course. They have certainly never seen any of his films. One could never encounter a more aggressively uncultured subculture. They rank with the Thatcherites, and they are as rank as the Thatcherites.

Now that they have come out in support of Jamie Driscoll, will Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram be, well, what, exactly? Jamie has not been expelled from the Labour Party. He has not been suspended. He has not been anything apart from kept off a longlist. Yet if the grounds for that were sound, then neither he, nor anyone who supported him, could possibly be permitted to retain membership of any respectable organisation, or even of the Labour Party.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

The More We All Know About This Crisis


There’s a fascinating fact (one of many) in Serhii Plokhy’s book about the Ukraine War which I review today on page 9 of our TV&Critics section. He says that General Mark Milley, chairman of the USA’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, tried to work out some rules for avoiding World War Three in Ukraine.

One of them was ‘Contain war inside the geographical boundaries of Ukraine’. You can see why. Russia will not react against the West even if it knows or suspects strongly that it is fighting Western-backed forces in Ukraine.

But if it believes attacks on its own territory are equipped or trained by Western nations, as some recent reports suggest it may do, it may take this as a pretext to hit back at Nato nations in some underhand way.

Ukraine reasonably itches to attack Russian targets and appears to have started doing so. But was General Milley right? Is this wise? Should we encourage it?


Even the title of this book is wrong. It describes a war between Russia and America, on the soil of Ukraine. Yet it calls it The Russo-Ukrainian War. Without the deep, decades-long involvement of the USA, and without its military aid, Ukraine would not be able to fight and Russia would not have invaded Ukraine. To leave America out of the title is like leaving the Hound out of the Baskervilles, Ant out of Dec and Morecambe out of Wise.

This is not to say that it is a bad book, or that it is inaccurate. Anything but. It is just to say that it omits huge and important parts of the story. Professor Plokhy, himself a Ukrainian, is a fine, crisp writer and does brilliant research. He does not hide the fact that Ukraine is not the perfect law-governed democracy that so many sentimentalists, new to the region, like to pretend.

Evaluating that democracy rather politely as ‘viable but chaotic’ he admits the existence of serious corruption and other wickedness. He writes (for example) about an inconvenient journalist who annoyed those in power and whose headless body was then found in the woods. He recounts the fate of the sinister minister of Internal Affairs who committed alleged suicide by somehow shooting himself in the head twice. These, like the recent arrest of a Supreme Court judge on charges of corruption are illuminating correctives to the modish view that Ukraine is somehow so well-run that Russians envy its way of life. In my experience, they don’t.

Yet in general the book is dominated by the conventional wisdom of ‘West Good, Russia Bad’ which does not actually aid understanding. To find out more about the rough edges of Ukrainian politics, I would recommend Professor Richard Sakwa’s very different Frontline Ukraine (published by I.B.Tauris) as a good companion volume. To see an alternative view of the origins of the war, Ben Abelow’s short online book How the West Brought War to Ukraine is a powerful corrective to fashionable thought.

The Ukraine crisis is only the latest expression of a century-old struggle for mastery in Europe. Yet you would not know from Professor Plokhy’s book that modern Ukraine’s existence as a state began when the German empire violently tore it from the grasp of the Russian empire in 1918. Surely this one fact illuminates the whole terrible controversy and indeed the murderous history of the region ever since, and the furious, often cruel passions unleashed there.

And Prof Plokhy’s bland description of the 1940s Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera and his Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) does not really explain why so many Ukrainians (and Jews and Poles) loathe his very memory and that of the OUN, whose red and black flags can still be seen in street demonstrations in Ukraine.

Bandera was a fanatic, imprisoned in pre-War Poland for his part in the assassination of a government minister. He was also a racial bigot, and beyond doubt an anti-Semite, who sought to collaborate with Hitler and whose followers and sympathisers undoubtedly engaged in murders of Jews and Poles. Nor does it explain why other Ukrainians put up statues to him, thanks to his enduring popularity with the fiercer factions of Ukrainian nationalism, whose continuing prominence is an embarrassment to that country’s civilised democrats.

But the book does describe the important and connected truth, ignored by so many commentators, that there is more than one kind of Ukrainian. In fact, until 2014, the very large difference between the two halves of the country - roughly north-west versus roughly south-east - gave Ukraine that priceless advantage, a narrowly balanced electorate. This permanent tension meant that governments could and did fall – and could be peacefully replaced by democratic votes. It also meant that there was always a strong opposition.

Ukraine was the most competitive, evenly-divided democracy in the lands of the former USSR. And this was largely thanks to the split between eastern voters who spoke mainly Russian and did not wish to join the EU or Nato, matched against a more nationalistic and more EU-oriented west. That is why Ukraine escaped Russian-style despotism. But when the eastern-backed (and fairly-elected) President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in an illegal, violent convulsion in February 2014, that all changed. 

Large chunks of the country were swiftly grabbed by Russia and its proxies. What was left of Ukraine was much more united, and much more Ukrainian, as elections since have shown. But is it perhaps also less free? Gone are the noisy but democratic days of strong oppositions, close elections and narrowly-balanced parliaments. The key event in all this was the overthrow of Yanukovych, a much-disputed moment.

Prof Plokhy’s description of this process is creditably detailed and researched. And his timeline is inconvenient for those who still pretend that the legitimate President was lawfully removed. Two serious attempts were made by Yanukovych to reach a peaceful, constitutional deal with the protestors and the opposition. The first such compromise was actually under way on February 18. But the protestors destroyed it by attacking and torching Yanukovych’s party HQ. Two days later EU Foreign Ministers brokered a second deal, including early elections. Again the protestors rejected it, some threatening violence.

Was this because they did not think their faction would win those early elections? Who can say? But Prof Plokhy’s account of Yanukovych’s behaviour over the following few days shows beyond doubt that the President was still in Ukraine when Parliament voted illegally to remove him (it lacked the votes needed to do so under the constitution, but went ahead anyway).

Those who condone the removal (including the British government) have tried to justify this lawless act on the grounds that Yanukovych had fled the country. Now they cannot say this. There is so much more here to inform this huge and important debate that I can only urge anybody who cares about the matter to buy and read the book. The more we all know about this crisis, the more hope there is of bringing it to a civilised end.

Across In Abundance

Over on the Blue Team in support of Jamie Driscoll, Simon Clarke is a serving Minister, Nadhim Zahawi is a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Ben Bradley is the Leader of a major local authority. They all retain the Conservative whip. But then, the Left is less partisan and factional than the Labour Right. Everyone else is.

An old co-imbiber confirms my suspicion, illustrated by those links, that the Blue Team had been working so well with Jamie that, entertaining no hope of winning the thing, it had invented the position of Mayor of the North East specifically for him.

Things have probably gone too far to call a halt now, but the latest heiress of T. Dan Smith and of Andrew Cunningham, a dragged up or dragged down version of Nick Forbes and of the people who had in 2021 been removed from the running of Durham County Council, need not bother expecting a call back from Whitehall.

And when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Enhanced Disclosure and Barring

This is your weekly reminder that there has been a liberal coup in the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle. See also this, this, this, this, this, thisthisthis, thisthis, this, thisthis, this, this, this and this. At least in the public sphere, I alone have fought back. I have done so to the cusp of the victory of which we have now had a foretasteWhere is Carol Lawrence's report?

The Northern Cross is late for the second month running, and weekly parish sheets are no longer bothering to beg for applicants to become Administrator or Senior Administrator of the totally discredited Diocesan Safeguarding Office. Either those positions have been filled in a week, or no more effort is being wasted on trying to fill them. Parish notices will soon be imploring anyone retired to come in for one or two days per week, as a favour to the Church. No one will.

On 15th December, Pat Buckley wrote to the then Apostolic Nuncio to Great Britain, Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, to report an alleged sexual assault by Bishop Robert Byrne CO, and on 20th December, Archbishop Malcolm McMahon OP of Liverpool wrote back to confirm that the Police had been notified.

It does not take five and a half months to decide whether or not to make an arrest pursuant to one allegation of sexual assault by an adult against another adult, and Bishop Byrne will be assisting at his uncle's funeral on 16th June. That is public ministry, so His Lordship must hold an Enhanced DBS check. He certainly would not hold one if he were subject to a Police investigation for sexual assault, or probably if he ever had been.

It has been established that there has never been a Police investigation into His Lordship. He should now sue every media outlet that had suggested that there was one. An Oratorian does not take a vow of poverty, and the English Oratories have friends who could afford any lawyer in London. I alone have publicly defended Bishop Byrne. I have done so from the very start.

Not Playing?

"Clearly incompatible with our promise to have zero tolerance," you say? Has Jamie Driscoll been expelled from the Labour Party, then? Have the Labour members of his Cabinet been expelled from the Labour Party? Have the Conservative members of his Cabinet been expelled from the Conservative Party?

How come none of them, nor Simon Clarke, nor Nadhim Zahawi, has ever noticed that Jamie was a "Trot", or an anti-Semite, or whatever? Is Kim McGuinness likely to be so "refreshingly non-partisan", so "professional", and so noted for "not playing politics"? Are such traits generally observed in the right-wing Labour machine, or specifically in the right-wing Labour machine in the North East?

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.