Saturday 30 April 2022

Doubling Down?

How, exactly, would Liz Truss define a Ukrainian victory? Or, indeed, a Russian victory? Precisely what difference would either of them make to Britain? And why?

Truss seems to care an awful lot about two countries the borders of which she publicly did not know until very recently indeed.

Under The Viaduct

At Tiverton and Honiton, Labour is well behind the Conservatives, with the Liberal Democrats some way behind that. But the same was true at North Shropshire, which the Lib Dems took easily.

Anyone who voted Conservative in 2015 liked the Coalition, or did not dislike it enough to vote against it, while anyone who dislikes this Government on policy grounds has no reason to vote for Keir Starmer.

In Durham's heavily student Viaduct area, who photographed Keir Starmer partying at the window of the Miners' Hall? Why, it was James Delingpole's son, and thus Telegraph Group family to Boris Johnson.

Downing Street has known about this story the whole time, and it has allowed Starmer to hold forth week after week in the knowledge that it would strike at the right moment. Here we are.

There may well be more to come. All of the hotels were closed except to business travellers, so where did Starmer stay the night in Durham, 300 miles from his home? Electioneering is not work.

Chris Grieve Watch: Day 194


I have never heard of you, and I was not in Durham that Thursday evening. Or any evening in that period. I was on a tag.

Why do people feel the need to suck up to Kamm like this?

This post will appear daily until you account for yourself.

Adam Langleben Watch: Day 194


I have never heard of you, and "JLM" sounds like a pop group, although not one with which I have ever communicated.

Why do people feel the need to suck up to Kamm like this?

This post will appear daily until you account for yourself.

Labour Candidate Watch: Day 225

225 days after the Cabinet reshuffle that called a General Election for May 2023 (even if it may or may not now have been put back a year), there is still no Labour candidate at North West Durham, which in 2019 Labour lost for the first time and by only 1,144 votes.

By contrast, I have been a candidate for North West Durham at the next General Election since even before the last one, fighting 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. Contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.  

Or contact nwdclp.campaigns@gmail.com if you wanted permanent austerity at home, if you wanted forever war abroad, and if you did not want a mixed-race MP for this seat. This post will appear daily until someone had proven to be so pro-austerity, so pro-war, and so racist, that even the Labour Party was sufficiently impressed.

The Adrian Hilton Challenge: Day 265

Adrian Hilton, I had to Google you, and I still have little or no idea who you are, so when, exactly, have I ever "stalked" you at all, much less "for longer than [you] care to remember"? 

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Oliver Kamm Challenge: Day 265

Oliver Kamm, whose signature to this do you claim that I forged? Name the name.

Oliver Kamm, when, exactly, have I ever been found to have accused anyone of child abuse?

Oliver Kamm, when, exactly, have I ever called for anyone to be murdered?

And Oliver Kamm, since I am a declared and active candidate for the parliamentary seat of North West Durham, are you? If not, why not?

I could go on at very great length, but these questions will do for now.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 265

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 of North West Durham 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.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 265

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.

Since, as private citizens, none of them has resigned as a Patron of my parliamentary campaign at North West DurhamI invite each and all of the 12 archbishops and diocesan bishops of the Red Wall dioceses of Birmingham, Hallam, Hexham and Newcastle, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Northampton, Nottingham, Salford, Shrewsbury, and Wrexham, 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.

And since none of them has resigned as a Patron of my parliamentary campaign at North West Durham, I invite each and all the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Franciscan Custos of the Holy Land, the Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, the Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarchal Vicar in Jerusalem, the Ethiopian Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, the Maronite Patriarchal Exarch of Jerusalem and Palestine, the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, the Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, the Syrian Catholic Patriarchal Exarch of Jerusalem, and the Armenian Catholic Patriarchal Exarch of Jerusalem and Amman, 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.

The scandalous allegation against me on 2nd March 2020 was recanted under oath at Durham Crown Court on 11th of that month, calling gravely into question my convictions the next day by exposing that key character witness as unreliable, a fact that was not mentioned in closing statements or in summation. Unless, as is widely assumed, the real reason for them is the content of this book, then the sanctions imposed upon me in my absence on 2nd March 2020 are void. I had not received a written apology by 30th September 2021, nor was any such thing to be published in full in The Northern Cross.

Financially, I would then have settled for the reimbursement of my victim surcharges. One would not wish to have to sue the Church. But while I am not yet in a position to act on it, I must now declare my intention in principle to do so. And if I were to be defeated at the next General Election, then I would seek to have that result overturned in the courts on grounds of undue spiritual influence by the Safeguarding Office of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, naming all relevant persons in the court papers. It has come to this.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Friday 29 April 2022

Vigilate

What were the British Virgin Islands called before Richard Branson bought them? And to the direct rule of whom are they to be subjected? Michelle Mone, whose house has been raided in connection with PPE fraud? Rishi Sunak, whose Green Card was apparently compatible with being a Member of Parliament and a Minister of the Crown?

Is that also the view of the American authorities? Was being a Member of Parliament and a Minister of the Crown compatible with holding a Green Card? Sunak ought to be asked about that when next he sought to enter the United States.

All tax havens under British jurisdiction should be closed by an Act of Parliament that declared independent any British Overseas Territory or any Crown Dependency that had not complied within three months.

Window Dressing Down

There are no local elections in County Durham this year, so there is nothing that a Fixed Penalty Notice might be said to be influencing unduly. In any case, how would such influence be undue?

A monument to once and future wealth and power, the fabulous Miners' Hall is in the Viaduct area of Durham, which these days is almost entirely student. Durham being Durham, that means that it is full of Tories.

Drinking at a window during lockdown, in full view of the neighbours, was pure amateurism, and on its own worthy of resignation. Keir Stramer is an extremely inexperienced politician, and it shows.

The White Man's War


Fourteen years ago, when Boris Johnson was a mere twinkle in the British electorate’s eye, I wound up shadowing the then MP for Henley-on-Thames as he campaigned to become Mayor of London. He won, of course, then bagged a second mayoral term and, while still mayor, acquired another safe Tory seat. Along the way he had a few affairs, sired several children, and said some rather horrid things about black people. Then he became Prime Minister. Say what you like about Johnson, he’s a serial winner, albeit mainly of one-horse races.

One rare moment of excitement during that first Mayoral campaign occurred when Johnson’s team shipped in a bunch of Ugandan politicians and dumped them on the streets of south London to spice up the optics of an otherwise all-white campaign. Some years later, while on the Obama campaign trail, me and Suzanne Moore were similarly used as effnik stooges at a John McCain rally in Richmond, Virginia. We were plonked just feet away from the presidential wannabe to add a multicultural couple to an otherwise sea of white.

Today, however, the fine line between racism, tokenism and cynical opportunism is being revealed as the war in Ukraine enters its third month. Amid the exodus of five million people fleeing the Russian invasion, several expat African, Asian, and Middle Eastern students, as well as non-white Ukrainian nationals, have reported how the authorities are giving white citizens free passage out of the beleaguered country while holding back “foreigners”. Having spoken to legions of black friends, relatives and colleagues in my Caribbean bolthole, across the diaspora and back home in the UK, such accounts appear to confirm the Afro-cynical view that the Ukraine conflict is a white man’s war and one black people would do well to keep out of.

For many in the African diaspora, myself included, the sight of Poland’s EU commissioner pledging to shelter Ukrainian refugees in his own home, and of the UK government creating a “Homes for Ukraine” scheme, and of the US opening its doors to 100,000 Ukrainians smacks of Eurocentric self-interest — a self-interest that reinforces a sense of black cynicism and resentment.

As Trevor Noah pointed out during one of his monologues on The Daily Show at the start of the war: “It is interesting that Eastern Europe has been so willing and able to accept a million people coming into their countries in just a few days, when, just recently, they didn’t seem to have any space for a different group of refugees.”

We’ve all seen countless images of Syrian refugees in convoy zigzagging their way across Europe in search of safe haven, while the EU pays off Turkey to keep them from getting to Greece. We’ve heard the Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki state publicly that “we will not be receiving migrants from the Middle East and North Africa in Poland”. We’ve seen Hungary’s 13ft razor-wire fence stretching 115 miles along its border with Serbia designed to keep out refugees like wild dogs. And we’ve seen the gut-wrenching images of migrants’ corpses washed up on our shores or packed into the back of container lorries like dead meat, while successive prime ministers galvanise the sort of “hostile environment” immigration policies that led to the Windrush scandal and the bizarre outsourcing of asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Helping to prosecute this “narrative” is a Western news media which black readers, viewers and listeners have become all too adept at decoding for dog whistles and subtexts and racial bias that don’t seem to matter in the context of expressing solidarity with Ukraine.

“It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed,” Ukraine’s Deputy Chief Prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze, told the BBC. “This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan… This is a relatively civilised, relatively European city,” reported CBS foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata.

“Just to put it bluntly, these are not refugees from Syria; these are refugees from neighbouring Ukraine. These are Christians, they are white, they’re … um… very similar to the people that live in Poland,” intoned NBC News correspondent, Kelly Cobiella. “Now the unthinkable has happened to them. This is not a developing, third-world nation. This is Europe,” gushed one ITV “reporter”.

Add to this the weight of history, Europe’s discriminatory migration policies, and the existence of various neo-Nazis on both sides of the frontline, and it comes as no surprise that very few black people have been inspired to take up arms and join President Zelenskyy’s International Legion of Ukraine. There are two notable exceptions: Malcolm Nance, a 61-year-old former US intelligence officer and ex-MSNBC analyst, and Ben Grant, a former Royal Marine and eldest son of Tory MP Helen Grant, have both signed up to the Legion.

While Nance has been tweeting furiously, giving interviews and posing for macho photos since he took off for Ukraine over a week ago, little has been heard of 30-year-old Grant since he left for the frontline in early March. Even in the case of Nance, despite his relatively high profile, the comparative lack of interest in both his and Grant’s welfare — from blacks and whites alike — further illustrates a growing and widening “not our war” indifference that black people caught earlier but one suspects will soon become the British norm.

If “black Twitter” and the global Afritariat are anything to go by, Robert Downey Jr donning blackface in Tropic Thunder is more likely to get a round of applause on the streets of Harlem or Brixton than either Nance or Grant. The historic ill-treatment of black personnel in the US and British militaries is something the diaspora isn’t about to forget in a hurry, not least because even tokens such as Nance and Grant are so thin on the ground that black people literally see themselves as having no stake in the war, despite the ripple effects of rising fuel and food prices affecting them as much as anyone else.

Whether it’s tokenism, racism, or plain old indifference, the uncomfortable truth is that black whataboutery concerning the West’s interest in the sanctity of Ukrainian life over that of Afghanis, Iraqis, Yemenis or Congolese belies a romantic view of Russia as my enemy’s enemy is my friend. This is, of course, naive. Yet, to paraphrase Muhammad Ali’s apocryphal draft dodging line: “No Russian ever called me nigger.”

Having grown up during the Cold War, the son of parents who toiled under the British colonial yoke, at the very least I speak for a generation that believed that the only bulwark against American imperialism, or the suppression of black sovereignty, or European neo-colonialism, or support for British and South African apartheid was the existence of a nation with the balls to stand up to Western decadence. But life has moved on. It’s time Russia showed more heart and less balls, and at the very least called a ceasefire. Perhaps it’ll end up being nothing more than a token gesture, but at least it will be one the diaspora can support.

Chris Grieve Watch: Day 193


I have never heard of you, and I was not in Durham that Thursday evening. Or any evening in that period. I was on a tag.

Why do people feel the need to suck up to Kamm like this?

This post will appear daily until you account for yourself.

Adam Langleben Watch: Day 193


I have never heard of you, and "JLM" sounds like a pop group, although not one with which I have ever communicated.

Why do people feel the need to suck up to Kamm like this?

This post will appear daily until you account for yourself.

Labour Candidate Watch: Day 224

224 days after the Cabinet reshuffle that called a General Election for May 2023 (even if it may or may not now have been put back a year), there is still no Labour candidate at North West Durham, which in 2019 Labour lost for the first time and by only 1,144 votes.

By contrast, I have been a candidate for North West Durham at the next General Election since even before the last one, fighting 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. Contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.  

Or contact nwdclp.campaigns@gmail.com if you wanted permanent austerity at home, if you wanted forever war abroad, and if you did not want a mixed-race MP for this seat. This post will appear daily until someone had proven to be so pro-austerity, so pro-war, and so racist, that even the Labour Party was sufficiently impressed.

The Adrian Hilton Challenge: Day 264

Adrian Hilton, I had to Google you, and I still have little or no idea who you are, so when, exactly, have I ever "stalked" you at all, much less "for longer than [you] care to remember"? 

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Oliver Kamm Challenge: Day 264

Oliver Kamm, whose signature to this do you claim that I forged? Name the name.

Oliver Kamm, when, exactly, have I ever been found to have accused anyone of child abuse?

Oliver Kamm, when, exactly, have I ever called for anyone to be murdered?

And Oliver Kamm, since I am a declared and active candidate for the parliamentary seat of North West Durham, are you? If not, why not?

I could go on at very great length, but these questions will do for now.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 264

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 of North West Durham 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.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 264

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.

Since, as private citizens, none of them has resigned as a Patron of my parliamentary campaign at North West DurhamI invite each and all of the 12 archbishops and diocesan bishops of the Red Wall dioceses of Birmingham, Hallam, Hexham and Newcastle, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Northampton, Nottingham, Salford, Shrewsbury, and Wrexham, 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.

And since none of them has resigned as a Patron of my parliamentary campaign at North West Durham, I invite each and all the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Franciscan Custos of the Holy Land, the Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, the Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarchal Vicar in Jerusalem, the Ethiopian Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, the Maronite Patriarchal Exarch of Jerusalem and Palestine, the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, the Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, the Syrian Catholic Patriarchal Exarch of Jerusalem, and the Armenian Catholic Patriarchal Exarch of Jerusalem and Amman, 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.

The scandalous allegation against me on 2nd March 2020 was recanted under oath at Durham Crown Court on 11th of that month, calling gravely into question my convictions the next day by exposing that key character witness as unreliable, a fact that was not mentioned in closing statements or in summation. Unless, as is widely assumed, the real reason for them is the content of this book, then the sanctions imposed upon me in my absence on 2nd March 2020 are void. I had not received a written apology by 30th September 2021, nor was any such thing to be published in full in The Northern Cross.

Financially, I would then have settled for the reimbursement of my victim surcharges. One would not wish to have to sue the Church. But while I am not yet in a position to act on it, I must now declare my intention in principle to do so. And if I were to be defeated at the next General Election, then I would seek to have that result overturned in the courts on grounds of undue spiritual influence by the Safeguarding Office of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, naming all relevant persons in the court papers. It has come to this.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Thursday 28 April 2022

Channelling It Properly

What is so wonderful about the Channel Four Television Corporation as it is?

What matters is who buys it.

Be at the table, or be on the menu.

Identity Politics

Two million people have just lost the vote, and on the same day it has been made illegal to protest. But which voters were they?

The poor now split evenly between Labour and the Conservatives, whereas the rich are now more likely to vote Labour. The poor are more numerous than the rich, and here we are. It is no wonder that Labour is keeping quiet about this mass disenfranchisement. Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake.

If the argument is that photographic identification to vote already exists in Northern Ireland, then the Government is expressing an existential fear of at least half the electorate, although, as set out above, it is quite wrong to have such a fear. The silent Opposition, on the other hand, has every reason.

Requiring photographic identification to vote is not about electoral fraud. It is only partially about even voter suppression. This is about identity cards, which have been the Home Office's solution in search of a problem for as long as I can remember.

And identity cards obtained from whom? The Passport Office and the DVLA, documentation from one or other of which is now required in order to exercise the franchise, are about to be privatised. Who is going to buy them? Infosys? The foreign states that have bought the utilities and the rail companies? Who, exactly?

The Next Steppes

If Britons have died in Ukraine, then, while they themselves were to blame for having gone there, Liz Truss is also to blame for having incited them to do so.

European companies and even states are finding ways to pay in roubles, and more and more will do so. If you do not pay the gas bill, then you get cut off, and the gasman would not take payment in chocolate buttons just because you happened to have them.

In Europe, at least, the sanctions regime is very vulnerable indeed. We are going to have to live between the neo-Hamiltonian America that is coming after Joe Biden, and the Bonapartist Eurasia that is emerging before our very eyes. Good luck to both of them, in fact.

That does raise the question of the Soviet-style economies and cultures of Donetsk, Luhansk, Transnistria, and no doubt Kherson very soon. Those hoping for incorporation into Russia are probably going to be disappointed, and those fear-mongering about it are probably going to made to look fools.

Most Russians have never heard of Alexei Navalny. The main opposition to Vladimir Putin is the Communist Party. Whatever he might do with his new territories, he can do without giving their inhabitants the vote in Russia.

Ukraine and the Battle for Eurasia

Like me, Jan Krikke has no doubt been saying this for years:

30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is erecting a new Iron Curtain in Ukraine, deep in the heart of the former Soviet Union.

Ukraine’s eastern border, 2,000 kilometers from Berlin, was on a longitude just east of Moscow. In 1943, Adolf Hitler’s army shifted it to a few hundred kilometers past the Donbas region.

The conflict in Eastern Europe closely follows a script written a century ago by British geo-strategist Halford John Mackinder. His paper “The Geographical Pivot of History” predicted a battle over the “World-Island,” the Eurasian continent.

The center of the World-Island, said Mackinder, is the Heartland, the region from Eastern Europe to Siberia. Protected from Western naval power, Mackinder called it “the ultimate citadel of land-power.” 

In his 1919 publication Democratic Ideals and Reality, he wrote: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”

Mackinder developed the Heartland Theory when Britain ruled the proverbial waves. Like rival colonial powers Portugal, Holland and France, Britain’s power was based on naval power. But Mackinder concluded that the railroad could change the global battlefield. Naval powers had the advantage of surprise; land-based powers using railroads had the advantage of speed.

The Heartland identified by Mackinder is a sparsely populated area. For centuries the region was controlled by the Huns, Mongols and Turks, and the Manchus. The Mongols conquered most of the Heartland, but never the Rim Lands, the coastal areas of the World-Island.

Similarly, the naval powers never conquered the Heartland. The region has imposing natural defenses – arctic ice in the north, the Gobi and Mongolian desert in the southeast, the Himalayas in the south, and the Zagros and Carpathian mountains in the west.

The only unimpeded route to the Heartland was the northern German plains into Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. Mackinder believed that Germany had the potential to dominate the Heartland – but he could not have known that Nazi Germany would try simultaneously to overcome the naval powers in the west and land power Russia in the east.

Having been invaded from the west three times, the Soviet Union threw up an Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe. The ensuing Cold War was punctuated by proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Serbia and Afghanistan, all countries at the periphery of the World-Island.

From the 1970s, the architect of US foreign policy was Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to president Jimmy Carter. Brzezinski, a fervent anti-communist of Ukrainian-Polish descent, persuaded Carter to support Islamic rebels fighting Afghanistan’s communist government.

In 1979, the US Central Intelligence Agency launched Operation Cyclone, the most expensive covert operation it had ever conducted. Funding for the operation started with $695,000 in mid-1979 but reached $630 million in 1987. The CIA initially supplied antique British Lee-Enfield rifles; by 1986, the Afghan resistance received Stinger surface-to-air missiles.

In later years Brzezinski claimed that Operation Cyclone was meant to provoke a Soviet intervention. The Soviets would have their own “Vietnam,” he said. The ploy worked and after an eight-year war, the Soviets retreated.

Brzezinski is the author of The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, a 1997 book on geopolitics that was based on Mackinder’s Heartland Theory. Brzezinski argued that the US could retain global supremacy only if it prevented the emergence of a single power on the World-Island.

The Brzezinski Doctrine remains influential in the US foreign-policy establishment. His protégés, among them Ukrainian émigré Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs, are a powerful voice in the US State Department.

In 2014, during the height of the Maidan protests in Kiev, Russian intelligence intercepted a phone call between Nuland and then-US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussing the formation of a new Ukrainian government. Showing her disregard for Europe in executing US strategic policy, she is heard telling the ambassador “F*ck the EU.”

In the years after Maidan, the US followed the Afghanistan script by pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid into Ukraine, with the desired result: a Russian response. Brzezinski succeeded in Afghanistan, and his protégés succeeded in Ukraine.

Cutting Europe from the Eurasian continent is the most consequential geopolitical event since World War II. It will likely shape the 21st century. Mackinder was partly right. The railroad was a threat to naval powers, not in military terms but in commercial terms. This put China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the crosshairs of US policymakers.

The BRI could have transformed the World-Island, from Shanghai to Rotterdam, into one large economic region. It could only be stopped by fomenting unrest and instability along its route and by challenging the key players. After Ukraine, Taiwan is likely to be the next target of the Brzezinskians.

The West has morally cut itself off from the world’s two most populous countries as well as Russia. This triangle will play a key role in shaping the 21st century. With China in the lead, they will develop a new monetary system parallel to the dollar-euro system as well as alternatives for the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other international institutions that enforce the Western-designed “rules-based system.” 

The Ukraine crisis could not have come at a worse time for Russia’s opponents. The US, Japan and the European Union are struggling with never-before-seen debt levels together with record-setting inflation. The latter can’t be tamed with higher interest rates without causing a wave of bankruptcies and even sovereign defaults.

Some economists predict the Ukraine crisis will lead to the end of the dominance of the dollar-euro system, the backbone of Western military power. Asia with its nearly four billion people will develop a parallel financial system and lessen its dependence on the West. This scenario was perhaps inevitable, but Mackinder would have been surprised at the way the West has hastened its own decline.

A Rogue Operator


The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, is playing with fire. On Wednesday night she described Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a “rogue operator” lacking rationality, and with “no interest in international norms”. As a result, she said: “We will keep going further and faster to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine.” She is clearly revelling in her imagined proxy war on the Russian bear and no one in Whitehall appears able to restrain her.

The use of the word “we” publicly identifies Britain’s interests with Kyiv’s. Truss calls for ever more economic and military aid to be sent to Ukraine, and such aid now teeters on the brink of overt engagement with Russia. She appears to want Russia’s other dissident neighbours, Moldova and Georgia, to join the alliance. Though Putin is irrational and unreliable, Truss argues that he is susceptible to deterrence and will not react recklessly to her escalating belligerence. She nowhere mentions the risk involved in her desired escalation, let alone the possible compromises of peace. Hers is tabloid diplomacy.

Before his stunt visit to Kyiv this month, Boris Johnson also instructed Volodymyr Zelenskiy not to make any concessions to Putin, a line Truss is clearly seeking to rival. It is not unknown for democratic leaders to play war games to excite their electorates, but this must be the first Tory leadership contest fought on the frontiers of Russia.

It is hard to imagine a more delicate and dangerous time for such antics than now. Ukraine is seeing some of the most appalling atrocities since the second world war and the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. There is no conceivable excuse for what Putin is doing to his neighbour. But the burning issue is not the awfulness of war. It is what can be done to stop it.

It naturally suits a desperate Ukraine to claim the present conflict threatens to spill beyond its borders and into Europe more broadly. In reality, Ukraine has for eight years experienced a separatist conflict. That conflict did not necessitate the involvement of the rest of Europe or the US. But Truss declares that Putin wants to inflict “untold further misery across Europe”. She offers no evidence for what is a gross and alarmist assumption, with the implied need for western military retaliation.

Putin may be a monster and a liar and we are right to send aid to the people he oppresses, but a strategist should look beyond insults to assess risks and probabilities on the ground. This moment of maximum danger demands all the judgment and skill that narrowly resolved Cuba in 1962. We should remember then that both sides had to climb down.

So far in this dispute, Nato has operated with impressive self-discipline. It has laid down the parameters of its aid to Ukraine and stuck to them. Two decades of highly provocative Nato encirclement of Russia halted at Georgia and Ukraine in the knowledge that going further would permanently inflame Moscow. Nato stayed aloof from Russia’s Crimea and Donbas occupations. Putin’s assault on Kyiv this spring was of a different order, but again Nato calibrated its response. It was able to present a united front to Russia while not inviting Moscow to retaliate beyond Ukraine’s borders.

Neither western sanctions nor military aid to Ukraine appear to have deterred Putin one iota. They have vastly increased the cost to Russia of his invasion, but as western democracies know well, the cost of military adventures doesn’t always impact policy. Putin will settle as and when he feels he has reached his military limit, which is why there is good reason for sending Kyiv weapons. It is also a reason for the common humanity of welcoming Ukrainian refugees, which Johnson’s immigration policy has hypocritically denied. None of this is a reason for willing the conflict to continue, let alone risking Nato being drawn into the fight. Apart from anything else, a war with Nato would hugely reinforce Putin’s domestic popularity.

As was indicated in the Minsk negotiations of 2015 and mooted in Istanbul in March, there will have to be compromise if this is not to become an ongoing agony. An eventual deal will have to embrace Ukraine’s security and a degree of autonomy for Donbas. This will be messy. It cannot award Putin victory but it would probably acknowledge the “Russian-ness” of Crimea and south-east Ukraine, if not of Odesa. There have been indications that Zelenskiy will accept something of this sort. Yet it is precisely such an outcome that Johnson and Truss now oppose, hoping to boost support from belligerents – and defence lobbyists – within the Tory party.

The cruelties inflicted by states on other states should always be condemned by the wider world. But condemnation is one thing, fighting another. When states interfere in the affairs of others it is usually, if not always, bloody and unsuccessful. Ukraine appears to be approaching what could be a final battle with Russia in the south, possibly followed by stalemate and some sort of settlement. The worst thing Zelenskiy could face is western allies in the US and Britain both led by politicians, Joe Biden and Johnson, who feel they are too weak domestically to support him in the compromises of peace.

Johnson and Truss have not declared that a Ukrainian deal is for Zelenskiy and his people to decide. They want him to keep fighting for as long as it takes for Russia to be utterly defeated. They need a triumph in their proxy war. Meanwhile anyone who disagrees with them can be dismissed as a weakling, a coward or pro-Putin. That this conflict should be hijacked by Britain for a squalid forthcoming leadership contest is sickening.

To Talk Rather Than Fight


Few people in the west doubt that Ukraine is fighting a just war. Russia’s invasion was entirely unprovoked.

Whatever complaints it may have had about Nato expansion or Ukraine’s mistreatment of Russians in Donbas, nobody had attacked Russia, and nobody was planning to. Vladimir Putin launched a straightforward war of aggression and territorial conquest.

It follows that supporting Ukraine is the right thing to do. But it is not at all clear that the kind of support we are giving (and not giving) is the right way to go about preserving the Ukrainian nation.

The longer this war rages on, the more Ukrainians will flee their homeland, and the more devastation will be wrought upon their homes, cities, industry and economy.

Yet the west’s current approach of supporting Ukraine’s war aim of defeating the aggressor, and providing arms for that purpose while pointedly avoiding direct military intervention, is guaranteed to prolong the war.

Russia’s progress may be slowed, but it’s highly unlikely to be stopped, far less pushed out of Ukraine, and in the meantime the grinding destruction and hideous war crimes will continue.

No day goes past without some senior western politician proclaiming that Ukraine will be “successful” and that Russia is “failing”. This is certainly morale-boosting. But it is clearly nonsense.

The fact is, as time goes on, more towns and cities are destroyed and then fall to the Russians. In two months, the area under Russian control – originally just the breakaway parts of Donbas – has grown to perhaps five times the size.

If Russia continues to suffer “defeats” at this pace, then in another two months the entire south of Ukraine will be in ruins, cities such as Odesa will resemble Mariupol, and thousands upon thousands more Ukrainians will have died.

Worse, as the war goes on, and more towns are destroyed, it becomes less likely that Ukrainians who have fled to other countries will ever return, because they will have no homes or workplaces to come back to. How many citizens of Mariupol will ever return? If Russia’s aim was to exterminate the Ukrainian nation, then the west’s approach is helping to do just that.

Surely, if the lives of Ukrainian people are our concern then the west has to do something to stop the war – now. Encouraging the Ukrainians to continue, however just their cause, is merely making their country uninhabitable.

The trouble is, there are only two ways to stop the war quickly, and neither is palatable to most western leaders.

One would be for Nato to enter the war and make a quick, massive and decisive strike to cripple Russia’s invasion forces. Unlike with Russia’s actions, it would have every right under international law to do so.

When Putin intervened in Syria, he very carefully framed this as a response to a request from Syria’s legitimate and internationally recognised government. The west could do the same in Ukraine. Putin himself has no such justification for his invasion.

The other option is to persuade Putin to implement an immediate ceasefire, by inviting Russia to comprehensive peace talks. Western leaders are disinclined to parley with a butcher such as Putin. But they did it with Serbia’s Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević, only months after the massacre at Srebrenica, and the result was the Dayton agreement that put an end to the war in Bosnia in 1995.

To get Putin to the negotiating table at all, everything would have to be up for discussion – including Ukraine’s borders, Russia’s age-old security concerns, perhaps even the very logic of basing today’s international frontiers in that part of Europe on what were internal borders in the USSR, drawn up by communist leaders precisely to prevent Soviet republics and regions from being viable independent states.

The outcome of the talks does not need to be predetermined. The important thing is to talk rather than fight. Western leaders cannot bring themselves to broach these matters, which would seem to reward Putin for attempting to redraw the map by force. 

They would rather fight – or more accurately, let Ukraine fight, in the hope of defeating Russia. But if one thing is certain it is that Putin will never accept defeat. He is already too deeply invested in this war to back off with nothing to show for it.

If western leaders think that their arms-length encouragement of Ukraine will bring about a Ukrainian military victory, then they are fatally misreading Putin’s intentions and resolve. For Ukraine’s sake, we need to stop him now, one way or the other, before nothing is left of the country we want to protect.

How Blair Broke Britain


Tony Blair is hated up and down the land but not in Islington, and not in Labour HQ. Speaking to the FT last summer, Keir Starmer embraced Blair’s legacy. “We have to be proud of that record in government,” he said, “not be arm’s length or distant about it.”

To Labour’s Right wing, Blair remains the closest thing to a living saint. The former PM is their yogi, whose “rare interventions” — on Brexit, on Covid lockdowns, on higher education — are holy writ. But for normal people, who do not dream of May 1997 each night, Blair is a scoundrel.

To some extent this is to be expected. Blair governed for a decade. His mistakes were made in the public gaze — a gaze that tired of seeing his grin in the newspaper every day or his studied sandbagging on the evening news. Thus it is somewhat unfair to compare him to Alan Johnson, a Labour figure who is liked not because of any political accomplishments but because, to most, he is an affable TV raconteur. The same applies to Ed Balls and his ongoing rehabilitation via Strictly Come Dancing and Good Morning Britain.

The hatred Blair inspires is much more reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher, a similarly divisive yet successful politician who remade both party and country. Yet a decade after her death, she sits among the most popular of all Prime Ministers. She retained admirers, even as she was savaged by her enemies, and savaged them in turn.

Blair was much more ameliorative than Thatcher, or at least he tried to be. Here was a mainstream leader who consciously aimed for the centre of public opinion. What Blair wanted, more than anything, was to be loved. So why is he so widely reviled?

The most common answer is Iraq. Without that war, moderates often argue, Blair would be remembered as a successful national leader. But even if we remove Iraq — the gravest British military blunder since the days of General Gordon — from an assessment of Blair’s legacy, he was a failure. One could argue he is even oddly fortunate that the scale of the debacle both there and in Afghanistan overshadows his domestic record.

Yes, there was Sure Start, and the introduction of a minimum wage (though that one belongs as much to John Smith as Blair). And yes, Blair funded the NHS properly for the first time in decades — though it belies the limits of his tenure that this was wiped out in a few years of Tory austerity.

Today, Blair’s most overwhelming legacy, and the one that affects millions of ordinary people in Britain every day, is housing. In 1997, as Labour won their largest ever parliamentary majority, the average income was £15,000 a year while the average property cost £65,000.

By 2007, as Blair left office, average pay had risen to £20,000 — but house prices had surged to an extraordinary £190,000. In other words, relative to wages, and under a Prime Minister who spoke relentlessly of expanding opportunity, the cost of housing had doubled.

Given this, it is unsurprising that Gen X pundits, more socially liberal than boomers but whose cultural zeitgeist was defined by unprecedented property price rises, are the Blairite vanguard across much of the media. As any Marxist will tell you, conditions (often) determine consciousness. For Britain’s Gen X, the New Labour rise in property values — with its attendant sensation of prosperity — still feels like a successful project which merits defence. Yet the flip side to that phoney progress is today’s housing crisis, with home ownership falling from 70.9% in 2003 to 63.9% in 2018, and those between their mid-30s and mid-40s three times more likely to rent today than 20 years ago. The phrase “property-owning democracy”, on which the popular conservatism of the last century rested, is withering on the vine.

For now this remains primarily a problem for younger adults — although the ONS recently warned that the majority of older people will be living in rented accommodation in the future. Those same people burdened with thousands in student debt, another New Labour bequest, are increasingly likely to give up to half their post-tax earnings to a landlord. The Blairs, meanwhile, own a property portfolio worth approximately £35 million. Cherie Blair now oversees not one but two property management companies, including dozens of one-bedroom flats.

The surge in house prices after 1997 was no accident. Buy-to-let mortgages increased 30-fold under Blair while his government built fewer council homes than Margaret Thatcher. And while Blair certainly isn’t the prima causa of today’s housing crisis — the policy of right-to-buy in the Eighties was the catalyst, while supply issues are a major variable — it is remarkable that something as elementary as home ownership was permitted to become a luxury under a Labour government.

Alongside this abysmal record on housing, New Labour oversaw a historic collapse in British industry. Between 1997 and 2007, output from all manufacturing, value adjusted for inflation, fell by 3% — while a million workers lost their jobs. Despite the post-industrial paeans of New Labour this was not inevitable: over broadly the same period, between 2000 and 2006, manufacturing output rose in the US, Germany and France. Most striking of all, manufacturing as a share of the overall economy fell more under Blair than Thatcher and Major combined.

All this was presented as a cause for celebration. For New Labour, deindustrialisation was a necessity. A small bump on the road to the “knowledge economy” that Britain must become. At the the turn of the century, Blair’s ambition was that Britain would become the best country in the world for “e-commerce”. The land of Newcomen, Watt and Bessemer, transmuted to a nation powered by lattes and online shopping.

Whether Blair had the faintest idea what he was talking about is unclear. This was a man, after all, who didn’t use a mobile phone until 2007 and whose first text message to his fixer Alastair Campbell read: “This is amazing, you can send words on a phone.” So Blair’s evangelism for the digital age wasn’t the result of any acquaintance with the possibilities of the internet. Rather he had found a compelling story to distract from the continued, and indeed intensifying, disintegration of national industry. Conveniently, this same story allowed Blair to present himself as modern and the blue-collar base of his party as backward.

A mixed domestic record is leavened by a series of foreign policy disasters. Blair is synonymous with Iraq and Afghanistan, and always will be. Britain spent £37 billion in Afghanistan, and lost more than 450 military personnel. For what? Two decades later, the Taliban have returned and the country is facing widespread starvation. In Iraq, the most secular country in the Arab world at the turn of the millennium became a hothouse for sectarian militias, then ISIS. Mission accomplished.

In the long-run the New Labour project, and Blair’s stewardship of it, can only be seen as a failure. The broader economic context of the Long Nineties — a goldilocks era of cheap energy, low inflation, and high growth — could not have been more kind to New Labour’s Nero. And yet, as Chinese consumer durables flooded the West, and cheap credit fell from the skies, Blair and Brown praised themselves for abolishing boom and bust. At the very least, New Labour might have built council homes, a national network of high speed rail, and prepared for climate change. They did none of it.

When asked about her greatest achievement Margaret Thatcher replied: “Tony Blair and New Labour.” The real legacy of Blair is that he not only cemented much of the Thatcherite settlement but, worse, made many believe that doing so was somehow progressive. Until that’s recognised for the mistake it was, Britain’s broken economic model, not to mention its housing crisis, will only get worse.

Chris Grieve Watch: Day 192


I have never heard of you, and I was not in Durham that Thursday evening. Or any evening in that period. I was on a tag.

Why do people feel the need to suck up to Kamm like this?

This post will appear daily until you account for yourself.

Adam Langleben Watch: Day 192


I have never heard of you, and "JLM" sounds like a pop group, although not one with which I have ever communicated.

Why do people feel the need to suck up to Kamm like this?

This post will appear daily until you account for yourself.

Labour Candidate Watch: Day 223

223 days after the Cabinet reshuffle that called a General Election for May 2023 (even if it may or may not now have been put back a year), there is still no Labour candidate at North West Durham, which in 2019 Labour lost for the first time and by only 1,144 votes.

By contrast, I have been a candidate for North West Durham at the next General Election since even before the last one, fighting 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. Contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.  

Or contact nwdclp.campaigns@gmail.com if you wanted permanent austerity at home, if you wanted forever war abroad, and if you did not want a mixed-race MP for this seat. This post will appear daily until someone had proven to be so pro-austerity, so pro-war, and so racist, that even the Labour Party was sufficiently impressed.

The Adrian Hilton Challenge: Day 263

Adrian Hilton, I had to Google you, and I still have little or no idea who you are, so when, exactly, have I ever "stalked" you at all, much less "for longer than [you] care to remember"? 

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Oliver Kamm Challenge: Day 263

Oliver Kamm, whose signature to this do you claim that I forged? Name the name.

Oliver Kamm, when, exactly, have I ever been found to have accused anyone of child abuse?

Oliver Kamm, when, exactly, have I ever called for anyone to be murdered?

And Oliver Kamm, since I am a declared and active candidate for the parliamentary seat of North West Durham, are you? If not, why not?

I could go on at very great length, but these questions will do for now.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 263

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 of North West Durham 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.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 263

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.

Since, as private citizens, none of them has resigned as a Patron of my parliamentary campaign at North West DurhamI invite each and all of the 12 archbishops and diocesan bishops of the Red Wall dioceses of Birmingham, Hallam, Hexham and Newcastle, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Northampton, Nottingham, Salford, Shrewsbury, and Wrexham, 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.

And since none of them has resigned as a Patron of my parliamentary campaign at North West Durham, I invite each and all the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Franciscan Custos of the Holy Land, the Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, the Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarchal Vicar in Jerusalem, the Ethiopian Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, the Maronite Patriarchal Exarch of Jerusalem and Palestine, the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, the Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, the Syrian Catholic Patriarchal Exarch of Jerusalem, and the Armenian Catholic Patriarchal Exarch of Jerusalem and Amman, 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.

The scandalous allegation against me on 2nd March 2020 was recanted under oath at Durham Crown Court on 11th of that month, calling gravely into question my convictions the next day by exposing that key character witness as unreliable, a fact that was not mentioned in closing statements or in summation. Unless, as is widely assumed, the real reason for them is the content of this book, then the sanctions imposed upon me in my absence on 2nd March 2020 are void. I had not received a written apology by 30th September 2021, nor was any such thing to be published in full in The Northern Cross.

Financially, I would then have settled for the reimbursement of my victim surcharges. One would not wish to have to sue the Church. But while I am not yet in a position to act on it, I must now declare my intention in principle to do so. And if I were to be defeated at the next General Election, then I would seek to have that result overturned in the courts on grounds of undue spiritual influence by the Safeguarding Office of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, naming all relevant persons in the court papers. It has come to this.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Wednesday 27 April 2022

Ring of Steel?

An unlawful act has caused the deaths of 20,000 people.

How can that not be manslaughter?

Sanctioned Thinking

Last year's local elections were a catastrophe for Labour, which lost huge numbers of seats that it had retained or gained in 2017, when, for example, it had picked up a seat in this ward. Labour lost control of several major local authorities, including this one, which was the first that it had ever won, and which it had not lost in the intervening century. This year, Labour is briefing that 2018 was a high water mark that it could not possibly hope to reach again. Who was the Leader of the Labour Party in 2017 and 2018?

Confining itself today to MPs in receipt of the Conservative and Labour Whips, Russia sees that Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Yvette Cooper, Wes Streeting, Thangam Debbonaire and Rachel Reeves are not worth sanctioning (although Reeves's sister is, which must sting), but that Diane Abbott, Richard Burgon, Dan Carden, Ian Lavery, Ian Mearns and Lloyd Russell-Moyle are. It sees the long term. With or without the Labour Party. The fate of the French Socialist Party awaits that.

In Full View

Watching pornography would be a sacking offence in any other workplace. And why do MPs need their phones or other devices in the chamber? So little time do most of them spend there that switching those off would be no sacrifice for them.

Musky Thinking

Who owned Twitter before? The Salvation Army?

The hysteria about Elon Musk is like the hysteria about Rupert Murdoch, which has resurfaced in relation to the launch of TalkTV.

Musk or Murdoch is bad compared to whom, exactly? How is any of the others any better?

Built On The Sands

Following the sale of what was to have been the new County Hall in Durham, the new administration on Durham County Council is sending some of the work to Stanley.

Not only is that welcome, but it is also funny. If you know, you know.

By the way, Google is once again locating me in the ward of the previous Leader of Durham County Council. I have never lived there, and no one else has ever owned this computer.

Chris Grieve Watch: Day 191


I have never heard of you, and I was not in Durham that Thursday evening. Or any evening in that period. I was on a tag.

Why do people feel the need to suck up to Kamm like this?

This post will appear daily until you account for yourself.

Adam Langleben Watch: Day 191


I have never heard of you, and "JLM" sounds like a pop group, although not one with which I have ever communicated.

Why do people feel the need to suck up to Kamm like this?

This post will appear daily until you account for yourself.

Labour Candidate Watch: Day 222

222 days after the Cabinet reshuffle that called a General Election for May 2023 (even if it may or may not now have been put back a year), there is still no Labour candidate at North West Durham, which in 2019 Labour lost for the first time and by only 1,144 votes.

By contrast, I have been a candidate for North West Durham at the next General Election since even before the last one, fighting 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. Contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.  

Or contact nwdclp.campaigns@gmail.com if you wanted permanent austerity at home, if you wanted forever war abroad, and if you did not want a mixed-race MP for this seat. This post will appear daily until someone had proven to be so pro-austerity, so pro-war, and so racist, that even the Labour Party was sufficiently impressed.

The Adrian Hilton Challenge: Day 262

Adrian Hilton, I had to Google you, and I still have little or no idea who you are, so when, exactly, have I ever "stalked" you at all, much less "for longer than [you] care to remember"? 

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Oliver Kamm Challenge: Day 262

Oliver Kamm, whose signature to this do you claim that I forged? Name the name.

Oliver Kamm, when, exactly, have I ever been found to have accused anyone of child abuse?

Oliver Kamm, when, exactly, have I ever called for anyone to be murdered?

And Oliver Kamm, since I am a declared and active candidate for the parliamentary seat of North West Durham, are you? If not, why not?

I could go on at very great length, but these questions will do for now.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 262

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 of North West Durham 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.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 262

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.

Since, as private citizens, none of them has resigned as a Patron of my parliamentary campaign at North West DurhamI invite each and all of the 12 archbishops and diocesan bishops of the Red Wall dioceses of Birmingham, Hallam, Hexham and Newcastle, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Northampton, Nottingham, Salford, Shrewsbury, and Wrexham, 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.

And since none of them has resigned as a Patron of my parliamentary campaign at North West Durham, I invite each and all the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Franciscan Custos of the Holy Land, the Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, the Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarchal Vicar in Jerusalem, the Ethiopian Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, the Maronite Patriarchal Exarch of Jerusalem and Palestine, the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, the Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, the Syrian Catholic Patriarchal Exarch of Jerusalem, and the Armenian Catholic Patriarchal Exarch of Jerusalem and Amman, 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.

The scandalous allegation against me on 2nd March 2020 was recanted under oath at Durham Crown Court on 11th of that month, calling gravely into question my convictions the next day by exposing that key character witness as unreliable, a fact that was not mentioned in closing statements or in summation. Unless, as is widely assumed, the real reason for them is the content of this book, then the sanctions imposed upon me in my absence on 2nd March 2020 are void. I had not received a written apology by 30th September 2021, nor was any such thing to be published in full in The Northern Cross.

Financially, I would then have settled for the reimbursement of my victim surcharges. One would not wish to have to sue the Church. But while I am not yet in a position to act on it, I must now declare my intention in principle to do so. And if I were to be defeated at the next General Election, then I would seek to have that result overturned in the courts on grounds of undue spiritual influence by the Safeguarding Office of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, naming all relevant persons in the court papers. It has come to this.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Germany Calling?

Into whose hands will all those arms to Ukraine fall? Germany is now arming Ukraine while continuing to buy vast amounts of Russian gas. That is playing both sides of the street.

But even the United States, never mind anywhere else, is hardly going to sanction Germany. And Britain has no need to play either side of the street. Therefore, it should not do so.

Marriage Guidance

As the legal minimum age of marriage is raised to 18, we have won the argument. Now we need a criminal offence of sexual activity with any person under the age of 18 who was more than two years younger than oneself, with a maximum sentence equal to twice the difference in age, and the abolition of different rules for “positions of trust”.

We need to ban abortion and contraception for those under 18 at least without parental knowledge and consent, just as they thankfully cannot now be given puberty blockers. What sort of parent would want to put his underage daughter on the Pill, anyway? There is only one possible reason for doing so. 

And we need to rule out the legal possibility of being a specifically sexual assailant below an age of consent that had been raised to 18, thereby correcting the anomaly that has existed since 2003.

In that year, a male heterosexual age of consent of 16 was created by default due to political horsetrading among the feminist and gay groups around Harriet Harman, of all people, which insisted that both sexes and all acts be treated in exactly the same way. 

That would be fine, except that the age of criminal responsibility remains 10, meaning that boys can be prosecuted for rape, itself significantly redefined in 2003, six years before they can legally have consensual sex. And they are. Indeed, boys who allege abuse by women are routinely accused of having raped them.

Tuesday 26 April 2022

Crossing and Uncrossing

The Mail on Sunday's claim about Angela Rayner was deplorable.

As is the suggestion that the Editor, as such, is answerable to a politician, as such.

Even if that politician is the Speaker of the House of Commons.

Chris Grieve Watch: Day 190


I have never heard of you, and I was not in Durham that Thursday evening. Or any evening in that period. I was on a tag.

Why do people feel the need to suck up to Kamm like this?

This post will appear daily until you account for yourself.

Adam Langleben Watch: Day 190


I have never heard of you, and "JLM" sounds like a pop group, although not one with which I have ever communicated.

Why do people feel the need to suck up to Kamm like this?

This post will appear daily until you account for yourself.