A Bad Job

Laugh all you like about the latest Boris Johnson story, but sexual activity at work is a sacking offence from any proper workplace.

How did the then Carrie Symonds even get into the Foreign Office for that purpose?

Begins At Home?

There always was a whiff of grift about that Captain Tom business.

And if we could potentially afford a war with Russia, then why are there "NHS charities" at all?

On This Rock

Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam Meam.

Considering the claims that the See of Rome makes, then, while individual Popes might be or have been charlatans or lunatics, the institution itself is either telling the truth in making those claims, or else it is indeed the Antichrist, and any professing Christian who does not submit to Rome on Rome’s own terms must believe it to be so.

Who will call good evil by pointing to the Papacy’s defence and promotion of metaphysical realism, of Biblical historicity, of credal and Chalcedonian orthodoxy, of the sanctity of human life, of Biblical standards of sexual morality, of social justice, and of peace, and by then saying, “Behold, the Antichrist”? That is the question.

Ah, Faith of Our Fathers. Father Faber, like a striking number of Tractarian or Tractarian-influenced converts, had an ancestry that was largely Huguenot, as is part of mine, although another side is Highland Catholic. So his “fathers chained in prisons dark” were not quite as his thoroughly rousing hymn would suggest. I have no idea why people think that that hymn is Irish. Faber actively disliked the Irish.

Buy the book here.

Heinous and Predatory

We are expected to believe that Ghislaine Maxwell trafficked all those women and girls to nobody.

Even from his cell, Jeffrey Epstein was still making donations to "Petie" Mandelson.

Hey ho, like Epstein before her, Maxwell is now on suicide watch.

Killing Kelly

Last night, I was in Newcastle for the first time since the Before Times, to see George Galloway show his unmissable film, Killing Kelly. It is a test of the credibility either of GB News or of TalkTV, which does after all feature Piers Morgan prominently, whether or not it will show this desperately important, but not very long, piece.

Around 10:30, the train from Newcastle to Durham called at Chester-le-Street. As a man in his eighties, completely unknown to me, was getting off, he looked at me and announced, in the unmistakable tones of the old miners, "Brother Lindsay, you might meet a very sticky end, but you'll definitely never starve to death." It must have been the suit.

Once In A Generation

The Parliament of the United Kingdom should enact primary legislation to rule out any referendum on Scottish independence before 18th September 2044, 30 years after the last one.

Parliament cannot bind its successors, but this would make the point.

In The Bag?

When it comes to dealings with the rancid Gulf monarchies, then Prince Charles is the least of our worries.

A British republic would not be less corrupt, any more than it would be classless. Less corrupt like which existing republic, exactly? Classless like which existing republic exactly? And who do you think would win a British Presidential Election? Jeremy Corbyn?

The republican and the monarchist cases are both rubbish, but the monarchy is what we have, so we should make the best of it by seeking to exercise the Royal Prerogative in the causes of economic equality and international peace. The whole of the Royal Prerogative, that is. Here's to our direct appointment of certain Oxbridge Heads of House, and of the Poet Laureate.

From Here To Maternity?

Such things as the lack of paid maternity leave existed in the United States throughout the time that Roe v. Wade was the law. Its overturning ought to be a spur to their introduction.

Imagine that the states without the fallback of abortion were to enact far more pro-family welfare and employment provisions than the states with abortion, where those provisions are also woeful as things stand. Much as they are in heavily aborted Britain, in fact.

But dream on. Churches are one thing, but state legislatures are controlled by the Republican Party, and while that does have some history of being relatively sound on such matters, those days were a long time ago. Rather than harness the power of the State in support of the family, then it will eventually, and quite soon, bring back abortion.

Say it again that these issues are also abysmally addressed in the blue states. What is all this blather about "woke capitalism"? Some of us have been telling you forever that that was just capitalism. The Democrats are one of its two parties in the United States. It has a lot more than two in Great Britain, which, arguably with the partial exception of Alba, also has no parliamentary party opposed to it.

They would be unable to name a country of which they remotely approved and where the abortion laws were determined by the courts rather than by elected politicians, but London's grand liberal commentators have a great deal to say about abortion on another continent. Yet they have either nothing positive, or nothing at all, to say about their compatriots who are striking for nothing more than wages that kept pace with price inflation.

Like a columnist on The Guardian or The Times, a Member of Parliament could not imagine living without a salary that went up by a lot more than that every year. Yet the Labour Party is preparing to discipline the handful of its MPs who had stood on picket lines, while the Liberal Democrats want to break the strikes by sending in the Army. Liberalism is not the Left. It just isn't.

Pange Lingua Gloriosi

I am very glad that the Corpus Christi Festival at Ushaw College went well last Sunday, and I was touched that quite so many people missed me, in several cases recalling my role in the event's revival rather more years ago than I had realised. You know how this one goes. Once again, certain persons had been planning to attend in order to have me arrested for being in the same room as them. Once again, the plan had been that I would have been back in prison that night. The last time that I had been there, then they had put a hit on me, but the hitman had taken such a liking to me that he had given them their money back. They must have found a more reliable one this time.

Although one dares to hope that a dip into the waters of Eucharistic Adoration may have had some effect on them, there is no faction more vicious than either the liberal wing of the Catholic Church or the right wing of a nominally leftish party. In the English-speaking West, those are symbiotically related, essentially and effectively a single entity in what were once their common heartlands. Here in the North East of England, at least, that machine wants me dead, and it wants me sent to prison for the purpose of killing me. Not for the first time, I can only wish it better luck next time.

It has all been burned as per, but over 50 priests, mostly young or youngish, independently wrote to me in prison, often saying exactly what they thought of, well, let's not. On my release, there were emails in my inbox from three times that many, including from every diocese in Great Britain and from every continent except Antarctica. And that was just the priests. Then there were the political activists, also mostly young or youngish. In both cases, I was surprised that a lot of those letters ever reached my cell.

I had had no idea until then, having always assumed myself to have been a romantically obscure figure who might at best have hoped to have become influential in death, but it turned out that my decades of beavering away in the cause of Catholic orthodoxy as the only reliable basis for the radical politics that in turn followed inescapably from it had not gone unnoticed. I had known that I had had at least played some part in the conversions of a certain number of orthodox Catholics to the struggle for economic equality and for international peace, and of a few activists on the Left to Catholic orthodoxy. I had also been told from time to time that meeting or reading me had crystallised what people had already been thinking. But it came as a complete revelation that I was so valued by hundreds, most of them younger than I was.

It turns out, however, that the Liberal Catholic-Labour Rightist Mafia was perfectly well aware of who and what I really was. It has someone lined up for the Labour nomination here at North West Durham, in which Ushaw College is located, although of course its main focus is on Consett, a place that it clearly does not understand. I know who that candidate is. I found out this time last year, while I was in prison. It is not clear that that person is aware of it even now, but if it is offered to you, then that will let you know. Among other things, it will let you know that you were the puppet for whom they were prepared to bump me off in order to give you a free run against Richard Holden.

Much will be made of the fact that, unlike me, you were a cradle Catholic. Your theological opinions will falsely be presented as being in line with present Papal Teaching while mine, it will be asserted, were not. And you will of course be presented as part of the far, far wider division and weakening of the Left by means of the proposed reversal of Brexit, the astroturfing of purported support for the elite's preferred wars and regimes, the anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy of the Green agenda, the treatment of identity politics as equal or superior to class politics, the treatment of gender identity as equal or superior to biological sex, the cancel culture of which our people have always been the principal victims, the erosion of civil liberties, the stupefaction of the workers and the youth, the indulgence of separatist tendencies in several parts of Great Britain, and the failure to recognise that a sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency had as much of that currency as it chose to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore needed to be under democratic political control.

Be in no doubt, though. We are the future, one way or another. In 50 years' time, the very latest that I might remotely realistically be alive, either we shall have won, or we shall have been driven underground or into exile, those of us who were not in prison or martyred at the hands of your economic and social liberalism that enforced itself by the use of very hard power at home, while also deploying that in order to spread itself across the whole wide earth. And 50 years after that, and 50 years after that again, and so on until we had prevailed.

The Wood For The Trees

Anyone who doubts that Boris Johnson has always intended to be a three-term Prime Minister need look no further than his scheme to build his two-year-old son a tree house in the grounds of Chequers, where he clearly plans to be living for at least another 10 years.

The people who say that Johnson is delusional have been saying for quite some time that they were moving against him. They never seem to move very far. For much of her first term, Margaret Thatcher was massively unpopular with the public and with significant sections of her party. For much of her second term, too.

Speaking of three-term Prime Ministers, Johnson's openly and publicly corrupt relationship with Lord Brownlow makes me quite nostalgic for the man whose tied cottage was Chequers from when I was a little short of 20 to when I was a little short of 30. Would that I had kept my clothes from the days of Lord Levy and the Hindujas.

Talk about the Magic Money Tree. Brownlow offered Breadline Boris more than twice the salary of an engine driver, and very nearly twice the salary of Mick Lynch, to get little Wilfred onto the property ladder. And of course it is not the engine drivers who are in dispute. In many a Red Wall town, a non-tree house can cost less than £150,000. But if you were, for example, a striking railway worker, then you would still be unable to afford one.

Yet David Lammy and Keir Starmer denounce their fellow Members of Parliament who stand on picket lines with the RMT, even though they themselves rightly stood on the picket lines of the University and College Union, which is no more affiliated to the Labour Party than the RMT is, and which unlike the RMT never has been.

Unite, which is my union, remains affiliated, yet Lammy has today given "a categorical no" when asked to express his solidarity with our comrades at Heathrow. Believe it when you see it, but if a further six Conservative MPs really are going to defect to Labour on, as ever, no policy grounds whatever, then will they be joining Lammy and Starmer on the picket lines of their fellow barristers? Or will the position of all eight remain that "a serious party of government does not join picket lines", but seeks instead a Progressive Alliance with the Liberal Democrats, who have today called for the Army to break the strikes?

In Proposing The Universal Call To Holiness

Today is the Feast of Saint Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei. Pope Francis, who is the first Pope to have dealt closely with Opus Dei while he was a diocesan bishop, has called Saint Josemaría “a precursor of Vatican II in proposing the universal call to holiness”. I am a convinced admirer of Opus Dei, both as a practising Catholic and as a man firmly of the Left. 

Corporal mortification, to get that out of the way, is an integral part of Catholic spirituality. Catholics need to re-learn moderate self-denial on Fridays, on the Wednesdays of Lent, during Holy Week, on the eves of the Church’s greatest Solemnities, and before receiving Communion, as well as the considerable exigencies of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

These are of a piece with the cilice, which is a spiked chain worn around the upper thigh, and with the discipline, which is a small whip used on the back. Convents manufacturing such items still do a roaring trade, and the rise of Opus Dei is itself a sign that the decadent period of disdain for asceticism even within the Catholic Church is an aberration now mercifully coming to an end.

In any case, people who suggested that Ruth Kelly wore the cilice to work merely demonstrated their own ignorance. Both the cilice and the discipline are used by numeraries, who are celibate, live in Opus Dei centres, and give most of their salaries directly to Opus Dei. Kelly was and is clearly a supernumerary, as are 70 per cent of Opus Dei members, and so presumably mortifies the flesh in ways more acceptable to clever-clever opinion, though none the worse for that. 

Opus Dei believes in the sanctification of the world, thus first anticipating and then implementing the Second Vatican Council. By contrast, its opponents believe in the secularisation of the Church, falsely presenting that as “the Spirit of Vatican II”. Therefore, they oppose corporal mortification as they oppose other Opus Dei practices: beginning the day by offering it to God, daily Communion, the Rosary, the Angelus, daily examination of conscience, invocation of the Angels and the Saints, ejaculatory prayer, use of holy water, and so forth.

That is because they disagree profoundly with Opus Dei about sanctification of and through ordinary work, not least because they so look down on the people who do a great deal of ordinary work. They disagree with Opus Dei about living a contemplative life in the middle of the world, taking everything one does with liturgical seriousness, and recognising, as any orthodox Catholic must, that every experience of the true, the good and the beautiful is in fact a religious experience.

Instead, they would rather that even the Liturgy were treated with no more, or even rather less, seriousness than most people attach to a pop concert or a football match, and that even the most obviously ecstatic mystical experiences were somehow explained away by pseudo-scientific, avowedly anti-Christian means.

They disagree with Opus Dei’s, which is the Catholic Church’s, definition of Christian freedom in the Aristotelian yet profoundly Biblical terms given definitive Catholic and commonsensical articulation by Saint Thomas Aquinas, according to which the only true freedom is in accordance with the Will of God. Instead, they would define it in secular and Modern terms, as the freedom of the individual to do as he will, provided that he agree with them, and that he do so as the end in itself.

They disagree with Opus Dei’s (again, simply the Church’s) doctrine of divine filiation, of recognising oneself and every other human being as a Child of God. Adopted by God’s grace and thus in some sense ipse Christus, “Christ Himself”, everything we do is therefore in some sense part of the world’s redemption: the mundane is transcendent. Instead, they would rather make the transcendent mundane. 

They disagree with divine filiation’s very high understanding of the dignity of each and every human life, and with its strong imperative towards evangelisation. And they disagree with its inherent imperative, both to take up the Cross, and to experience a profound joy quite unlike any momentary chemical or sexual “high” of their own formative years. 

Instead, they would rather “modernise” on abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic stem-cell “research”. They would rather trim Christianity and Catholicism to suit every other system of belief, though even then not with a view to converting anyone. And they would rather have instant gratification, on the cheap in every sense. 

Sanctification through work, the living of a contemplative life in the middle of the world, Christian freedom correctly defined, and the recognition of divine filiation: these are the principles calling all Catholics to rediscover and renew, ever-more-deeply, our beginning the day by offering it to God, our frequent Communion, our daily examination of conscience, our ejaculatory prayer, our use of holy water, and our devotion to the Mother of God, to the Angels and to the Saints. And, yes, our practice of corporal mortification. 

All of this is whether or not we experience any vocation to join Opus Dei, undoubtedly God’s instrument in renewing the Church in this way, but even more clearly so if this renewal becomes the norm among Catholics generally, including our witness to ecumenical partners. 

So much for admiring Opus Dei as a Catholic. But how can a man of the Left possibly do so?

Far from being indifferent or hostile towards the poor, Opus Dei runs ELIS in Rome, the Midtown Center in Chicago, the Moluka medical clinic in Kinshasa, the Los Pinos educational centre in Montevideo, the Braval programme of professional formation for immigrants in Barcelona, the Laguna care centre in Madrid, the Harambee 2002 project, Condoray in Cañete, the Institute for Industrial Technology in Lagos, the Guatanfur agricultural and stock raising school in Temza, the Anauco medical dispensary in Caracas, the Centenario medical clinic in Monterrey, the Informal Sector Business Institute in Nairobi, and many more besides. Google them. 

Ruth Kelly was the most prominent Opus Dei politician in the world; I am not sure who now is, but it ought to be emphasised that Rick Santorum is not a member. The United Nations Secretary-General, former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and former President of the Socialist International, António Guterres, has a long history in Opus Dei.

Its ranks included the late Squire Lance, Saul Alinsky’s chosen successor in Chicago. They also included the late Jorge Rossi Chavarría, sometime Vice President of Costa Rica, and co-founder of that country’s National Liberation Party (PLN), the Costa Rican vehicle for social democracy, affiliated to the Socialist International. Rossi co-founded the PLN as an outgrowth of his work as legal advisor to the Costa Rican Confederation of Workers of Rerum Novarum, Rerum Novarum being the 1891 founding text of Catholic Social Teaching with its very strong critique of unbridled capitalism, a critique continued and expanded by every Pope since. 

Opus Dei included the late Antonio Fontán, the apostle of press freedom against the Franco regime, and the first President of the Senate after the restoration of Spanish democracy under a Constitution that he had co-authored. The strongly anti-Franco academic and journalist Rafael Calvo Serer was also a member of Opus Dei. It still includes, among others, Paola Binetti, Llúis Foix and Mario Maiolo. We may or may not count the Catalan nationalism of Xavi Casajuana as part of the Left, but it is undeniably a very long way from Franco. Most of the Chilean “Chicago Boys” were not members of Opus Dei. Pinochet himself never had any affiliation with it.

So, insofar as it has a political orientation, Opus Dei’s would seem to be towards the Left, if anything. Much like the Catholic Church Herself, in fact. That is yet another reason to hope, work and pray for the Catholic Church at large to become much more like Opus Dei.

After all, it was greatly admired by Saint Óscar Romero, as explained by Filip Mazurczak in an article that I have been quite unable to cut, and to which I have added emphasis:

On March 24, 1980, Archbishop Óscar Romero was shot during the celebration of Mass by the death squadrons of El Salvador’s military government. Today his reputation is undergoing a second assassination: Critics have responded to the floating of his name for beatification by wrongly charging the man with supporting violence, communism, and heresy. Those who would make the archbishop a radical hero have offered their own version of these claims in approving tones. Both are wrong.

Murals and t-shirts showing Romero alongside Salvador Allende and Che Guevara are common in Central America, yet his visage sits somewhat uncomfortably beside theirs. Romero did not hesitate to condemn capitalism, but at the same time he was an anti-communist. In his sermons he cautioned against the dangers of atheistic, materialist Marxism. In one of his homilies, Romero chastised leftists for criticizing American imperialism while turning a blind eye to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 

While the left has come to glorify Romero, right-wing politicians in El Salvador have accused him of inspiring leftist guerrilla violence. In reality, Romero sought a peaceful solution to El Salvador’s troubles. In his third pastoral letter, written in 1978, Romero condemned leftist guerrilla violence as “terrorist” and “seditious.” In the fourth letter written one year later, the archbishop of San Salvador reminded the nation that violence was justifiable only in extreme situations when all other alternatives have been exhausted, citing Catholic just war theory.

The twentieth century was a difficult one for the Latin American Church. In the 1970s and 1980s, military juntas ruled most of the region. In Argentina, the bishops’ close ties to the dictatorship of Jorge Videla and their silence on the tortures and disappearances in the country led many Argentineans to lose their trust in the Church. By contrast, in Nicaragua many clerics supported armed revolution against the Somoza dictatorship and supported the Marxist Sandinistas.

Even a man as saintly as Dom Helder Camara, he bishop who defended Brazil’s poor against the country’s military dictatorship, believed that Marx should do for Christianity in the twentieth century what Aristotle did for medieval Thomism. By contrast, in a 1978 homily, Romero said: “Since Marxist materialism destroys the Church’s transcendent meaning, a Marxist church would be not only self-destructive but senseless.” 

Romero avoided the blinkered anti-communism of Argentina’s bishops and defended the vulnerable against military violence, seeing the hypocrisy of rulers who claim to be Christians yet persecute the people. At the same time, he understood the dangers of Marxism, condemning the Marxist guerrilla movement that terrorized El Salvador’s ruling class. Ernesto Cardenal, the Trappist monk who in the 1980s was a minister in Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, wrote that before becoming a Christian, one first must become a Marxist-Leninist. Romero rejected this: His personal hero was Pope Pius XI for resisting fascism and communism at the same time.

Romero also stood apart from liberation theology, distinguishing between the liberation of communism and the liberation Christ offers. In the 1980s, some Latin American priests inspired by Marxism wanted to deny Communion to the wealthy. Romero resisted this saying in a 1979 homily: “We are not demagogically in favor of one social class; we are in favor of God’s reign, and we want to promote justice, love, and understanding, wherever there is a heart well disposed.” 

Few know that Romero received spiritual direction from an Opus Dei priest and personally knew the future saint and Opus Dei founder Josemaria Escriva. When the latter died in 1975, he wrote a letter to Paul VI asking the Pope to jumpstart his canonization process, writing: “Monsignor Escriva . . . was able to unite in his life a continuous dialogue with Our Lord and a great humanity; one could tell he was a man of God, and his manner was full of sensitivity, kindness, and good humor.” As recommended by Opus Dei priests, Romero wore a cilice on Fridays as a form of self-mortification until his death. 

One of the firmest supporters of Romero’s beatification has been Pope Benedict XVI. Both before and after his election to the papacy he has expressed his enthusiasm for the cause, going so far as to say that he has “no doubt” that Romero will be declared blessed someday. 

During his 1983 pilgrimage to El Salvador, John Paul insisted on visiting Romero’s tomb despite the pleas of Latin American bishops and the Salvadoran government. John Paul II asked local priests to open the door of the cathedral which was locked up by the military. He immersed himself in prayer for a long time in front of Romero’s tomb.

John Paul II again demonstrated his affection for Oscar Romero by insisting “again against the wishes of many churchmen” that during the 2000 Jubilee Year celebration in Rome’s Coliseum Romero’s name be mentioned among the great martyrs of the Americas.

It is a name we are likely to hear again.

Óscar Romero was indeed beatified on 23rd May 2015, and canonised on 14th October 2018. Ora pro nobis. And Saint Josemaría Escrivá, ora pro nobis.

Buy the book here.

Where There’s Life?

The Supreme Court of the United States has not banned abortion. It has merely sent the matter back to the states, where few, if any, of the trigger bans will now survive more than a few electoral cycles. Several of them are not what they are cracked up to be, and in any case Republican no less than Democratic economic policy, not there is a difference, depends heavily on abortion.

The Court may now send other issues back to the states on much the same principles, but the states would then leave them all exactly as they were. No political movement of any importance would any longer try and change any of them by legislation, if at all.

The pro-life movement did not take over the Republican Party. The Republican Party took over the pro-life movement. The economic and foreign policies of both parties will always result in at least as many abortions as there have ever been, and in numerous other horrific deaths besides. The GOP will soon enough stop pretending.

The Democratic Party is just as cynical. It never codified Roe v. Wade into legislation, because it was too useful for campaigning and fundraising purposes. For all the disappointments of Bernie Sanders, if it had not been for Hillary Clinton’s Wall-Street-and-war challenge to him to 2016, then Donald Trump would never have become President. Nor would Roe v. Wade have been reversed, but there would have been far fewer abortions, and far fewer killings in general. In having anything other than contempt for the Clintons, then those who ordinarily idolise Christopher Hitchens, even to the point of claiming to have been entrusted with missions from him on his deathbed, are as far removed from him as they are on abortion.

The American Founding Fathers were Deists, and their position is exemplified by The Jefferson Bible, from which Thomas Jefferson excised all reference to Christ’s Divinity, Resurrection or miracles; copies were presented to all incoming members of Congress until the 1950s, a practice that Hitchens rightly wanted to revive. However, the phrase “the separation of Church and State” does not occur in the Constitution. Rather, the First Amendment’s reference to religion was designed to stop Congress, full of Deists as it was, from suppressing the Established Churches of several states, although they all disestablished them of their own volition later on precisely because they had fallen so completely under the Founding Fathers’ influence. The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, “of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary”, was submitted to the Senate by President John Adams, was ratified unanimously, and specified that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”. Although he attended Episcopalian services with his wife, George Washington did not receive Communion. This is a house built on sand.

The fundamental and ultimate answer is not the Tenth Amendment, but the Gospel. Ay, there’s the rub. Red state resistance to abortion depends on Protestant opposition to abortion, but that is mostly recent, and it is institutionally weak. American Evangelicalism’s embrace of Zionism, although there are exceptions to that, has made it even less well-disposed towards perennially and robustly pro-life Catholicism and Orthodoxy than it was before, and has given it a deference to Judaism, which, as part of its formative and definitive reaction against Christianity, has long since departed from Jeremiah and the Psalmist to contend instead that we were neither alive after we had drawn our last breath nor alive before we had drawn our first. All that, and the fact, which cannot be repeated too many times, that both parties were committed to economic policies that directly depended on abortion, as well to foreign policies that depended on the normalisation of mass slaughter. See you in 15 years’ time.

They May Not Mean To

It is said that John Keats, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen and Philip Larkin are to be "taken off" the GCSE syllabus.

All that I am saying is that way back in the last century, I did English Literature all the way to A-level during the fourth term of a Conservative Government. I was in the Upper Sixth before I ever did Larkin, and I never did any of the others.

If Mail readers would want their August-born offspring, weeks or even days after having turned 14, to come home with Larkin, then they have obviously never read him.

Chris Grieve Watch: Day 252

Liar. 

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 252

Liar.

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 283

283 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 Clergy Challenge: Day 323

Blogger will no longer publish this. It is taken down automatically. Do take a look.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Adrian Hilton Challenge: Day 323

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 323

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 323

Blogger will no longer publish this. It is taken down automatically. Do take a look.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Staying On Track

Another day of the rail strike. Against compulsory redundancies, and in favour of wages that kept pace with price inflation. That's it. What would be the point of any trade union that did not fight for those two causes? But if the RMT lost, then no union would ever again be able do so, and trade unionism in Britain would be dead.

Of course, if the RMT won, which would necessitate concessions to it by the Government that heavily directed the railways, then the present Leadership of the Labour Party would look absolutely ridiculous, having held out obstinately while the Conservatives had not.

Fares on the heavily subsidised railways nevertheless go up in line with the Retail Price Index, so why not wages? Executive salaries certainly do not fail to keep up with the cost of living. This dispute does not involve the drivers, but what if it did? They are not overpaid. They are well-unionised. Get yourself well-unionised.

And the staff in the ticket offices are invaluable to the safety of elderly and disabled passengers. No robot will ever be able to do what they did. Human interaction will never be obsolete. If we saved it here, then we could restore it elsewhere. But if we did not, then we could not.

A Boil, A Plague Sore, An Embossed Carbuncle

1.7 million people were estimated to have had Covid-19 in the week ending on 18th June. That was around one in 35 people, an increase of 23 per cent on the previous week.

Monkeypox turns out not to have been made up by Chris Morris back in the day. Polio is back. And now, so is foot and mouth disease. This really is Britain, right now.

All Bridges Have Been Destroyed?

And so Ukrainian forces have been ordered to withdraw from Severodonetsk. Crimea has gone back to Russia. The parts of the Ukraine that the largely Ukrainian Soviet elite had put into the Ukrainian SSR in order to make its independence impossible are going to become Russian satellite states, although they are economically and culturally too Soviet for today's Russian Federation.

No additional state, including Sweden or Finland, is ever going to be allowed into NATO. A much more stable and coherent Ukraine will become constitutionally neutral, and all of this will require the denazification that no one any longer disputes is necessary to some extent, nor did anyone dispute that at all until very recently, although denazification is not being made a condition of potential EU membership, because it never is; being in the EU subjected us to the legislative will of many of the most terrifying people.

All of this was on the table before the Russian invasion. This war has been going on for eight years. But in the stage that the world has admitted to having noticed, it is now on the brink of turning out to have been completely avoidable even in its own terms.

The Court Shoe On The Other Foot

The Government that enacted the Human Rights Act waged a sustained campaign against civil liberties. Both that Act and the European Convention on Human Rights were powerless against that assault, as they have been against most of the austerity programme, against the wars, in the cause of Julian Assange, and so on.

I myself was convicted after a judge had specifically instructed a jury to "disregard" the concept of conviction beyond reasonable doubt, and then imprisoned because my enemies had been politically well enough connected to have me charged with an offence to which there was no defence, so that all that mattered was to be well enough in with the highly politicised Crown Prosecution Service. All in all, much as with the EU and workers' rights, or the monarchy and whatever it is that that is supposed to be for, it is impossible to see what the fuss is about.

Little involving Winston Churchill and almost nothing involving David Maxwell Fyfe ought to endear itself to us. The lately revived suggestion that they never intended the Convention to apply to Britain serves only to illustrate its roots in the "Wogs Begin At Calais" mentality of the old Imperial elite, which never quite gave up on the idea of extending the Empire deep into Europe, all the way down to daft 1980s stories that the Queen was going to become "Queen of Europe", and to no more sensible suggestions that Tony Blair was going to become its President.

But in fact Churchill and Maxwell Fyfe were even more concerned to check social democracy and the advancement of the lower orders in Britain than anywhere else. Notably, they made no attempt to patriate the interpretation of the Convention. For that, it took Blair. Still, when both the High Court and the Supreme Court declined to injunct the Rwanda flight, then they knew that Strasbourg would do so, and the Supreme Court would not otherwise have granted leave to appeal. If the option of kicking things upstairs had been removed, then our own judges would just do what the ones across the Channel would otherwise have done. Nothing would change.

Calmly And Without Rancour

The Rolling Stones have been the biggest band in the world for as long as there has been a biggest band in the world, but one day that will be someone else.

Whereas the House of Windsor has been the most famous family in the world for as long as there has been a most famous family in the world, and it always will be, entirely regardless of its constitutional status in this or any other country.

The republican windrush through the Caribbean makes it all the more imperative that the Windsors be given something to do other than becoming, as they very well might even in spite of themselves, a global lightning rod for Anglo-Saxon disaffection wherever and whenever there were disaffected Anglo-Saxons. 

One such better use would be as the personification of a Royal Prerogative that was in reality being exercised in the interests of economic equality and international peace. We might with great profit resume the direct appointment of Regius Professors, for a start. A British republic would be no more classless than Ireland, or France, or Germany, or Italy, or the United States.

Wading Through

I do not know who has more to fear today. The Republicans, that the white Evangelicals and the Catholic working class could now go home. Or the Democrats, that the white Evangelicals and the Catholic working class could now come home. In any case, all that the Supreme Court has done has been to send abortion back to the states. Put not your trust in princes. This ruling is welcome enough, but it is very far indeed from being sufficient.

Each and every individual human life is absolutely sacred from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death. That principle is the foundation of all morality. We struggle against evils that include direct abortion, indirect abortion at least except where any other course of action would result in the loss of both lives, euthanasia, assisted suicide, destructive experimentation on embryonic human beings, human cloning, human-animal hybridity, “saviour siblings”, capital punishment, and unjust war, if any war be just, but certainly including total war, preemptive war, the international trade in arms, and the manufacture, possession or use of nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological weapons. Their victims are disproportionately working-class people and people of colour.

Therefore, we struggle against evils that include poverty, racism, sexual promiscuity, pornography, eugenics, marginalisation of people with disabilities, lack of due respect for old age, refusal to celebrate the infinite beauty of every human being as the image and likeness of God, refusal to respect the dignity of parents as the first educators of their children, classification of human beings solely or primarily as economic units, and policies likely to give rise to armed conflict. Their victims are disproportionately working-class people and people of colour. And while they remained, then there would always be at least as many abortions as there were now, if not even more.

Everything Was Moving Slowly

In the very New York Times, Christina Caron writes:

Elysse was 14 when she first started vaping cannabis. It didn’t smell, which made it easy to hide from her parents. And it was convenient — just press a button and inhale.

After the second or third try, she was hooked. “It was insane. Insane euphoria,” said Elysse, now 18, whose last name is being withheld to protect her privacy. “Everything was moving slowly. I got super hungry. Everything was hilarious.”

But the euphoria eventually morphed into something more disturbing. Sometimes the marijuana would make Elysse feel more anxious, or sad. Another time she passed out in the shower, only to wake up half an hour later.

This was not your average weed. The oil and waxes she bought from dealers were typically about 90 percent THC, the psychoactive component in marijuana. But because these products were derived from cannabis, and nearly everyone she knew was using them, she assumed they were relatively safe.

She began vaping multiple times per day. Her parents didn’t find out until about one year later, in 2019. “We got her in a program to help her with it. We tried tough love, we tried everything, to be honest with you,” Elysse’s father said of her addiction.

Starting in 2020 she began having mysterious bouts of illness where she would throw up over and over again. At first she and her parents — and even her doctors — were baffled. During one episode, Elysse said, she threw up in a mall bathroom for an hour. “I felt like my body was levitating.”

It wasn’t until 2021, after a half dozen trips to the emergency room for stomach illness, including some hospital stays, that a gastroenterologist diagnosed her with cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, a condition that causes recurrent vomiting in heavy marijuana users.

Although recreational cannabis is illegal in the United States for those under 21, it has become more accessible as many states have legalized it.

But experts say today’s high-THC cannabis products — vastly different than the joints smoked decades ago — are poisoning some heavy users, including teenagers.

Marijuana is not as dangerous as a drug like fentanyl [really?], but it can have potentially harmful effects — especially for young people, whose brains are still developing.

In addition to uncontrollable vomiting and addiction, adolescents who frequently use high doses of cannabis may also experience psychosis that could possibly lead to a lifelong psychiatric disorder, an increased likelihood of developing depression and suicidal ideation, changes in brain anatomy and connectivity and poor memory.

But despite these dangers, the potency of the products currently on the market is largely unregulated.

‘I felt so trapped.’

In 1995, the average concentration of THC in cannabis samples seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration was about 4 percent. By 2017, it was 17 percent.

And now cannabis manufacturers are extracting THC to make oils; edibles; wax; sugar-size crystals; and glass-like products called shatter that advertise high THC levels in some cases exceeding 95 percent.

Meanwhile, the average level of CBD — the nonintoxicating compound from the cannabis plant tied to relief from seizures, pain, anxiety and inflammation — has been on the decline in cannabis plants. Studies suggest that lower levels of CBD can potentially make cannabis more addictive.

THC concentrates “are as close to the cannabis plant as strawberries are to frosted strawberry pop tarts,” Beatriz Carlini, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Addictions, Drug and Alcohol Institute, wrote in a report on the health risks of highly concentrated cannabis.

Although cannabis is legal for recreational use in 19 states and Washington, D.C., and for medical use in 37 states and D.C., only Vermont and Connecticut have imposed caps on THC concentration.

Both ban concentrates above 60 percent, with the exception of pre-filled cartridges, and do not permit cannabis plant material to exceed 30 percent THC. But there is little evidence to suggest these specific levels are somehow safer.

“In general, we do not support arbitrary limits on potency as long as products are properly tested and labeled,” Bethany Moore, a spokeswoman for the National Cannabis Industry Association, said in a statement. 

She added that the best way to keep marijuana away from teens is to implement laws that allow the cannabis industry to replace illegal markets, which do not adhere to age restrictions, state-mandated testing or labeling guidelines.

The Food and Drug Administration has sent warnings about various cannabis products, including edibles, but so far federal regulators haven’t taken action to curb potency levels because cannabis is federally illegal, said Gillian Schauer, the executive director of the Cannabis Regulators Association, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that convenes government officials involved in cannabis regulation across more than 40 states and territories.

California lawmakers are now considering adding a mental health warning label to cannabis products specifying that the drug may contribute to psychotic disorders.

National surveys suggest that marijuana use among 8th, 10th and 12th graders decreased in 2021, a change partly attributed to the pandemic. 

However, over the two-year interval from 2017 to 2019, the number of kids who reported vaping marijuana over the last 30 days rose among all grades, nearly tripling among high school seniors.

In 2020, 35 percent of seniors, and as many as 44 percent of college students, reported using marijuana in the past year.

Elysse got sober before entering college but soon found that seemingly everyone on her dorm floor habitually used weed.

“Not only carts,” she said, referring to the cannabis cartridges used in vape pens, “but bongs, pipes, bowls — absolutely everything.” 

Each morning, she found students washing their bongs in the communal bathroom at 8 a.m. to prepare for their “morning smoke.”

After a few weeks, she began vaping concentrated THC again, she said, and also started having dark thoughts, occasionally sitting alone in her room and sobbing for hours.

“I felt so trapped,” said Elysse, who has now been clean for nearly two months. “This is not fun in any way anymore.”

Teens are particularly affected by cannabis.

Michael McDonell, an addiction treatment expert at the Washington State University college of medicine, said that more research is needed to better understand how much more prevalent psychosis and cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome have become among teenagers and others using high potency products.

Even so, he added, “we definitely know that there’s a dose-dependent relationship between THC and psychosis.”

One rigorous study found that the risk of having a psychotic disorder was five times higher among daily high potency cannabis users in Europe and Brazil than those who had never used it.

Another study, published in 2021 in JAMA Psychiatry, reported that, in 1995, only 2 percent of schizophrenia diagnoses in Denmark were associated with marijuana use, but by 2010 that figure had risen to 6 to 8 percent, which researchers associated with increases in the use and potency of cannabis.

Cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, which can often be alleviated by hot baths and showers, is also linked to prolonged, high-dose cannabis use.

As with psychosis, it’s unclear why some people develop it and others do not. Dr. Sharon Levy, the director of the Adolescent Substance Use and Addiction Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, said there is “no doubt that higher concentration products are increasing the number of people who have bad experiences with cannabis.”

When her clinic opened in 2000, marijuana was illegal in Massachusetts. At the time, Dr. Levy said far fewer kids came in with psychotic symptoms “and we almost never saw cannabis hyperemesis syndrome.” Now, she said, those numbers are shooting up.

Psychotic symptoms while high can include hallucinations, trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality, strange behaviors (one young man would spend his days tying plastic bags into knots) or voices talking to them in their head, she added.

If a teenager displays these symptoms, getting that person off cannabis “becomes an emergency,” she said. “Because maybe, just maybe they’ll clear up, and we’re preventing someone from developing a lifelong psychiatric disorder.”

‘Oh well, it’s just weed.’

Laura Stack, who lives in Highlands Ranch, Colo., said that when her son Johnny first confessed to using marijuana at the age of 14, she said to herself, “Oh well, it’s just weed. Thank God it wasn’t cocaine.”

She had used marijuana a couple of times in high school and cautioned him that marijuana would “eat your brain cells.” But at the time she wasn’t overly concerned: “I used it, I’m fine, what’s the big deal?”

“But I had no idea,” she added, referring to how marijuana has changed in recent years. “So many parents like me are completely ignorant.”

Initially, her son did not have any mental health problems and excelled in school. But he eventually started using high potency marijuana products multiple times a day, and this, Ms. Stack said, “made him completely delusional.”

By the time he reached college, he had been through various addiction treatment programs. He had become so paranoid that he thought the mob was after him and his college was a base for the F.B.I., Ms. Stack said. 

At one point, after he moved out of his childhood home, he threatened to kill the family dog unless his parents gave him money.

His mother later discovered that Johnny had obtained his own medical marijuana card when he turned 18 and had begun dealing to younger kids.

After several stays at mental hospitals, the doctors determined that Johnny had a severe case of THC abuse, Ms. Stack said. He was prescribed an anti-psychotic medication, which helped — but then he stopped taking it.

In 2019, Johnny died after jumping from a six-story building. He was 19. A few days before his death, Ms. Stack said, Johnny had apologized to her, saying that weed had ruined his mind and his life, adding, “I’m sorry, and I love you.”

A recent study found that people who used marijuana had a greater likelihood of suicidal ideation, plan and attempt than those who did not use the drug at all.

Ms. Stack now runs a nonprofit called Johnny’s Ambassadors that educates communities about high-THC cannabis and its effect on the adolescent brain.

There’s ‘no known safe limit.’

It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how much THC enters someone’s brain when they’re using cannabis. That’s because it’s not just the frequency of use and THC concentration that affect dosage, it’s also how fast the chemicals are delivered to the brain.

In vaporizers, the speed of delivery can change depending on the base the THC is dissolved in, the strength of the device’s battery and how warm the product becomes when it’s heated up. Higher doses of THC are more likely to produce anxiety, agitation, paranoia and psychosis.

“The younger you are, the more vulnerable your brain is to developing these problems,” Dr. Levy said. Youths are also more likely to become addicted when they start using marijuana before the age of 18, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Furthermore, there is growing evidence that cannabis can alter the brain during adolescence, a period when it is already undergoing structural changes. Until more is known, researchers and clinicians recommend postponing cannabis use until later in life. 

“I have kids asking me all the time, ‘What if I do this just once a month, is that OK?’” Dr. Levy said. “All I can tell them is that there’s no known safe limit.”

Dr. McDonell agreed that avoiding drug use entirely is always the safest option, but said that some kids might require a more nuanced conversation.

He advised having open discussions about drugs with middle-schoolers and teenagers, while also educating them about the dangers of high potency cannabis products compared to those that are mostly made of CBD.

“I think that’s something we’re all struggling with as a community,” he added. “How do we get this information to parents and kids fast enough?”

By The Byes

Oliver Dowden is a real loss to Boris Johnson, of whom he had hitherto been one of the strongest supporters. But along the Red Wall, Keir Starmer's Labour has so far managed only a score draw, losing Hartlepool while winning back Wakefield.

Labour barely has won back Wakefield, a seat that in any case it had held until two and a half years ago, meaning that there should be no chicken-counting up here. Labour has just taken eight thousand fewer votes at Wakefield than it did in 2019, and its lowest number of votes there since 1931, because there is no policy reason to vote Labour rather than Conservative, or indeed vice versa. It is purely a matter of whether or not you like or respect Johnson, and even that advantage for Labour, insofar as it is one, is one fixed penalty notice away from being blown to smithereens.

By the starkest of contrasts, the result at Tiverton and Honiton is the most sensational since North Shropshire, which was the most sensational since Chesham and Amersham. Thatcherism at the time was a force both of and for social liberalism, and it was ferociously Eurofederalist, with any opposition to that project derided as "Loony Left". The Thatcherite heartlands became the backbone of the Coalition, and they expressed their approval of its record by giving its Prime Minister an overall majority in 2015.

The South then largely voted Remain, in accordance with Conservative Party policy at the time. That party installed a Thames Valley Remainer as Leader and Prime Minister without any sort of election, but it replaced her with Johnson, so that if the 2015 Parliament had run its course, then scores of seats would have turned from Blue to Yellow in 2020. It is no surprise that they are now preparing to do so in 2024.

Imagine the Conservatives as the third party in a hung Parliament, having to chose between a Labour and a Lib Dem Leader as Prime Minister. That will not happen next time, or the time after that, but it could happen. There was wishful talk of their coming third in the Blair years, but they never lost Chesham and Amersham, or North Shropshire, or Tiverton and Honiton, in the Blair years.

Then again, coalitions between the CDU and the SPD are normal in Germany, while Blue-Red and Red-Blue arrangements, often to keep out the Lib Dems, have existed in local government forever. It was a coalition with the Conservative Party that gave the Leadership of Derby City Council to Chris Williamson.

And why not? We who seek 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, could and should hold the balance of power after the next two General Elections, before winning a third outright. We would be more than capable of cutting a deal with a clique that believed only in its own birthright to rule. That would be preferable to trying to deal with a faction that believed, as first principles, in permanent austerity at home and in forever war abroad.

The former runs the Conservative Party at the moment, while the latter is trying to take it over while already controlling the Labour Party, the Lib Dems, and the SNP. After these by-elections, then the coup is no doubt back on to restore to hegemony the economic and social liberalism that the use of soft power where possible but hard power where necessary had made unquestionable at home, so that the use of soft power where possible but very hard power where necessary could spread it across the whole wide earth by means of an unquestionable alliance between the European Union and the United States, an alliance with Britain at both its cultural and its military heart. 

This coup offers us nothing, and we must do nothing to cheer it on. On the contrary, after everything that will have happened by the end of this Parliament, then it is by Johnson that the Labour Right must be defeated. It would never be able to recover from that humiliation. I am not advocating a vote for the Conservatives. We need to get enough of our people elected to create a hung Parliament either next time or the time after that. Then we could tell the smug and entitled Labour Party to get lost. Who is to say that we would get less out of the other side? Less than the nothing that we had always got out of Labour? How? Just so long as the other side had never again been led by those who were planning their return at the moment. This coup is against our interest.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 322

Blogger will no longer publish this. It is taken down automatically. Do take a look.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Chris Grieve Watch: Day 251

Liar. 

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 251

Liar.

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 282

282 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 322

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 322

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 Clergy Challenge: Day 322

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 Durham, I 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.

Chris Grieve Watch: Day 250

Liar. 

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 250

Liar.

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 281

281 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 321

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 321

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 321

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 321

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 Durham, I 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.