David Lindsay: 2023

Thursday, 28 September 2023

The Wood For The Trees

Has Kim McGuinness blamed the Gypsies for the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree? Perhaps not in public these days.

Stand against such attitudes by going to see The Old Oak. And by supporting Jamie Driscoll.

Fit and Proper?

The Mail has just sacked Dan Wootton. The Rothermere bid for the Telegraph is on. The same would have applied the other way round.

Those newspapers railed against the Leveson Report, which was far from faultless. But you need Government permission to own them.

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 80

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Board of the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency, currently Nazir Afzal, Amanda Ellingworth, Wesley Cuell, Bishop Paul Mason, Carol Lawrence, Jenny Holmes, Sister Frances Orchard CJ, and Sir David Behan.

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Committee, currently Monsignor Andrew Faley, Gail McGregor, Paul Weatherstone, Father Christopher Hancock MHM, Father Jeff Dodds, Canon William Agley, and Catherine Dyer.

And that purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Team, currently Meriel Anderson, Ian Colling, Paul Brown, Lisa Short, Yvonne Brown, and Robert Appleby.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and the allegation at the base of any outstanding charge has been made in order to incite my suicide. I should emphasise that there is absolutely no risk that I might ever give anyone the satisfaction of my suicide.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 80

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of its organised persecution of the opponents and critics of Keir Starmer, which is its principal national priority.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a thinktank 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.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service out of the same racism that has caused it to refuse to prosecute the Police Officers in the case of Stephen Lawrence.

And I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to incite my politically motivated murder, a murder that the CPS has already decided would never lead to any prosecution.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Board, currently Max Hill KC, Monica Burch, Rebecca Lawrence, Mark Hammond, Simon Jeffreys, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan, and Kathryn Stone.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the CPS senior leadership, currently Dawn Brodrick, Steve Buckingham, Mark Gray, Sandra McKay, Gregor McGill, Grace Ononiwu, and Baljhit Ubey.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Audit and Risk Assurance Committee, currently Simon Jeffreys, Mark Hammond, Michael Dunn, and Deborah Harris.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Nominations, Leadership and Remuneration Committee, currently Max Hill KC, Rebecca Lawrence, and Monica Burch.

And each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the 279 members of staff of the CPS North East Area, by definition including, but not restricted to, Chief Crown Prosecutor Gail Gilchrist, and the Area Business Manager, Ian Brown.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 783

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

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

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 783

This post will appear daily until further notice.

More Heat Than Light?

From 36 minutes in, Ken Loach shuts down the ludicrous Sarah Montague, who has previously been noted for her failure to challenge Louise Ellman's claim to be able to read Jeremy Corbyn's mind. Montague then admits that the interview has been heavily edited, so let us hear the full footage.

But anti-Semitism is so last decade. The scam these days is misogyny. There is nothing to call between Laurence Fox and Ava Evans. Both are tasteless character acts, with Evans laughing at male suicide while encouraging schoolgirls and female undergraduates to do their bit for the Cause by making false allegations of sexual assault. She cannot be in earnest. Can she?

GB News is Ofcom's only ever target. It makes no attempt to hold the BBC to any standard of balance, unless you count members of two or more political parties saying exactly the same thing. And it sees nothing objectionable in the slew of filth, now sometimes pitched at and even featuring children, from the Channel 4 that seeks to destroy the Russell Brand that it created.

A couple of hours ago, effectively confirming that the wheels were already in motion, Adam Boulton used Newsnight to call for GB News to be "shut down" because it was disrupting the "broadcast ecology". I have predicted from the start that there would be an attempt to take it down before next year's General Election campaign got into full flow.

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

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

The Maple Leaf As Fig Leaf

This has been coming for years. Just after the War, showing your SS tattoo was a guaranteed way of getting into Canada, because it proved how anti-Soviet you were. As late as the 1990s, old Nazis whom the Americans wanted to deport just moved to Canada, which let them in, and where they carried on drawing their German military pensions.

Justin Trudeau's father protected thousands of these people as Prime Minister almost continuously from 1968 to 1984, and the present Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, is the granddaughter of Michael Chomiak, who edited Krakivski Visti, a Nazi paper in occupied Krakow, printed on a press confiscated from a Jewish newspaper.

Wednesday, 27 September 2023

See The Double Standards

Sholto Byrnes writes:

Many have wondered why the Global South has not been a firmer ally of the US-led coalition backing Ukraine against Russia. Why, in general, are they advocates of a swift peace, rather than fighting as long as it takes for Ukraine to regain all its territories? Further, why do some consider it to be an American “forever war”, or an essentially European dispute that has little to do with them?

Several events during and around the week of the UN General Assembly have provided clarity, as the myths of the black and white narrative that casts Kyiv as a democratic David against Moscow’s neo-imperialist Goliath begin to evaporate.

Firstly, there are many overwhelming challenges facing developing countries, not least climate change. But as the UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly admitted while in New York for UNGA, his counterparts in the Global South often feel that all they hear from G7 leaders is “Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine”.

Colombia’s president Gustav Petro made the point in a blistering speech to the assembly. “They have called us to war,” he said, referring to US president Biden’s maximalist allies in Europe and North America. “They call for men to go to battlefields. They are forgetting that our countries were invaded several times by the very same people who are now talking about fighting invasions. They forgot that to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals all wars must be brought to an end.”

Mr Petro then turned to the unfulfilled pledge made at Cop15 in 2009. “They broke their own promises to finance adaptation to climate change. They don’t have $100 billion to give to countries to defend themselves from floods, storms and hurricanes. But they do have that money, in a single day, so that Russians and Ukrainians kill each other.”

The myths of the black and white narrative that casts Kyiv as a democratic David against Moscow’s neo-imperialist Goliath begin to evaporate.

Second, the “Russia must be defeated” party has told us again and again that the invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” and that it had nothing to do with Nato’s expansion eastwards. But speaking to the EU parliament just before the UNGA, Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg “committed a Washington gaffe”, as Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs put it – “meaning that he accidentally blurted out the truth”.

Russian president Vladimir Putin wanted the treaty organisation to sign a promise “never to enlarge Nato”, said Mr Stoltenberg. “That… was a pre-condition to not invade Ukraine. Of course, we didn’t sign that…. So he went to war to prevent Nato, more Nato, close to his borders.”

Ah, so it turns out that this war may have been avoidable after all. That isn’t surprising. As far back as 1997 the fabled US geo-strategist George Kennan warned that “expanding Nato would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era”.

Third, the war has been described as democracy facing “a test for the ages”, as Mr Biden put it on September 15. But Republican Senator Rand Paul undermined that notion in a speech to his colleagues last week. “Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries on the planet, maybe second only to Russia,” he said. “Some say the war in Ukraine is a fight to save democracy. But those who say that need to be honest with themselves.” The country has cancelled its next presidential election, whereas America still held one during its civil war, he pointed out. “We’re going to send $100 billion to a country that now has what, a president for life? This is not the only concerning development. He has banned the political opposition.” (Eleven parties were suspended just after the invasion for alleged links with Russia.) “How do you have a democracy if you’re not going to have elections and you ban the opposition?”

Indeed, if it really is about democracy, why isn’t Mr Biden more concerned about Georgia? Two years in a row I have seen the country’s prime minister, Irakli Garibashvili, dolefully remind delegates at Qatar Economic Forum that, just as in Ukraine, Russia occupies 20 per cent of his country. Freedom House actually rates Georgia as freer than Ukraine. But the fate of its democracy is evidently less pressing.

In fact, the more that emerges about Ukraine – from the admission that Nazi imagery is more commonplace than previously admitted, to the revelation that a force of far-right Russians is fighting on their side – the less of a paragon of liberal democracy the country appears to be.

This is in no way to condone the invasion. It was unequivocally wrong, and it seems certain that appalling war crimes have been committed. But Global South countries can see the double standards. They can also see what US defence secretary Lloyd Austin stated as far back as April 2022 – that the Biden administration’s real aim is to “weaken Russia”. To that end, conflict in Ukraine can apparently go on and on. According to the historian Niall Ferguson, the director of planning and command at the German defence ministry, General Christian Freuding, told a conference in Kyiv earlier this month, “No one expects the war to be over within six months.” His government was planning with a “time horizon of 2032”.

Calling for an early resolution to the war, by means of a ceasefire or whatever else, can lead to accusations of cynicism and amorality. Mr Putin would be rewarded for his aggression, would be the charge. But what I find far more cynical and amoral is allowing hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians to die in what everyone thinks is now going to be a long war of attrition. All for what? To bring to its knees Russia, a country that many in the Global South regard as an old friend in the anti-colonial struggle and which may be America’s enemy – but is in no way theirs.

Why should they back the US in the latest edition of what Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr calls the “forever wars” to which it is still addicted? No wonder they want no part in it. Colombia’s president Petro spoke for many in his speech, when he asked if it wasn’t time to end all wars, “and take advantage of this short time to build paths to save life on the planet”.

The Man Whose Name They Dare Not Speak

Kenny MacAskill writes:

Raising the issue of Julian Assange’s incarceration in Westminster recently was the political equivalent of releasing a bad smell. Heads turned away, papers were shuffled, and after what seemed a stunned silence, a non-answer was given by a minister. But why should that be?

There are rightly loud denunciations of the incarceration of Alexei Navalny, the treatment of Ai Weiwei and even the plight of Jagtar Singh Johal.

But of Julian Assange there’s virtually none. Yet he languishes not abroad under a despotic regime but in Belmarsh maximum security prison in London, where he’s been detained since April 2019 and even denied attendance at proceedings related to him since January 2021.

He’s the man whose name they dare not speak. It’s fine to condemn the actions of others, especially regimes that are rightly condemned for their totalitarianism. It’s quite another to address actions being taken here by our own authorities, never mind those of the US.

For what crime has Assange committed? The only offence he has been convicted of in the UK is a minor breach of bail when he sought sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy. A relatively trivial offence, given the context and circumstances, and one which would rarely merit a custodial sentence, let alone detention for this length of time or in these conditions.

And I write that not from the perspective of a politician but as a former defence agent for 20 years, never mind justice secretary for nearly eight.

His real crime, of course, is to have been the father of WikiLeaks, the website that exposed war crimes and challenged not just the narratives but actions of governments. That ranged from the brutality of helicopter gunships murdering innocent civilians through to the connivance of governments both powerful and not, in keeping vital information from their people.

I used the site myself when seeking information about Lockerbie for a book written when I’d stepped down as justice secretary. It was information I’d never have obtained from the US or UK and certainly painted a different picture.

The sham of the supposed “war on terror” was revealed by Wikileaks along with the hypocrisy and barbarism of the term “collateral damage” being exposed in all its horror. Similarly, the collusion, obfuscation and downright lying of administrations of many political hues was also laid bare. Tentacles of deceit ran far and wide and the lies and connivance of governments and the powerful there for all to see. Julian Assange’s initiative and courage did democracy a great service.

And that’s why the US is seeking revenge and other countries including the UK are openly conniving in a manifest injustice. There appears to be credence to the suggestion that the CIA has sought to assassinate him. But currently it’s just hunting him down through legal process which if he’s extradited could see him face a sentence of 175 years. Belmarsh would be benign to the regime he’d then be incarcerated in.

Of course, as with others, my view of Assange was challenged by allegations of rape made against him. These weren’t just personal insults but formal proceedings in Sweden. Now that’s a country I’ve long both admired and respected, surely nothing would go amiss with the judicial system there?

But it did and that is why all proceedings against him have since ended there. Questions remain, though, about why they were initiated at all and how due process there seems to have been manipulated, never mind by who or for whom.

Any doubts I had about Assange’s innocence and the connivance of states to not just prosecute but persecute him were removed by reading Nils Melzer’s book The Trial Of Julian Assange.

The author was the UN special rapporteur on torture and has an extensive hinterland beyond that, being an advocate in international law, a legal adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross and senior security policy adviser to the Swiss government. A man with both specialist knowledge and integrity.

Melzer details the manipulation of the judicial system in Sweden and then goes on to narrate continued connivance by the US in other states and legal systems. The asylum provided to Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy ending when there was a change of government in that country and an administration closer to the US came to power. Influence was exerted and out he was to go.

Manipulation, though, with Assange hasn’t been restricted to judicial proceedings as in Sweden or with governments like Ecuador. Like many I was shocked by the photos and footage of him being detained when he left the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

While not as insidious as rape allegations, pictures of him with wild hair and heavily bearded were designed to create an unfavourable image. But as the book detailed, this was another set-up. His appearance wasn’t through personal choice. Instead, he’d been denied access to razors and scissors for months.

That manipulation of the press put me in mind of what I’d managed to find out myself through the information disclosed by WikiLeaks. After my decision to release Megrahi back in 2009, both myself and the Scottish Government were pilloried for an apparent hero’s welcome given by Libya on his return.

However, WikiLeaks and other sources subsequently showed that there had been none. Gadhafi’s son had feted him on the plane when it arrived, but the apparent jubilant crowd scenes were at an event entirely unconnected and where no-one knew of his release. But the film was spliced, and a false narrative given. One in which the British and Americans colluded although they knew that it had never been.

So, after Sweden and then Ecuador, now it’s the UK where both government and judicial proceedings seem to have the fingerprints of US involvement all over them. The delay and treatment as deplorable as that of despotic regimes.

Julian Assange is guilty only of exposing war crimes and the deceit of governments. It’s why he’s being persecuted and why supporting him is about defending democracy – not just him.

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 79

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 79

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 782

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

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

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 782

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Tuesday, 26 September 2023

Hunka Down

I am waiting for information on and from Nagorno-Karabakh, but at least no one in the whole business is going to be called "the new Hitler", since apparently you can now have been a goodie even in the Waffen SS. Whatever the complexities of life in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, there was only one possible reason to join that.

Life was complicated in Western Europe during the War, but would you make excuses for the Dutchmen, Frenchmen and Belgians who joined the Waffen SS? Or for its British Free Corps, originally called the Legion of St George? There were others besides, and in every case the argument was the same, that the real enemy was the Soviet Union. If Yaroslav Hunka was a hero, then so were they. Including Hunka's Galician brothers-in-arms who ended up in Britain, which had been planning a surprise attack on the USSR from no later than 22nd May 1945, and which therefore needed all the Hunkas that it could find.

There is talk of a bid to extradite Hunka to Poland, which has stopped arming Ukraine. We tried to tell you about Ukraine, but of course the Poles have always known. That said, they also want the rest of Galicia back, as Hungary, another member of NATO, wants Transcarpathian Ruthenia. Among a lot of other places. Never question NATO, though. You used to be an anti-Semite if you did that, and now you are a rape apologist. Yet I defy you to name any greater anti-Semitism or rape apologism than even the most partial defence of a man's having voluntarily joined the Waffen SS. That presumably still includes all parties in the British and Canadian Houses of Commons, although Ed Davey's Leader's Speech today pointedly never mentioned Ukraine. Even The Times has reported the lengths to which Ukrainian men were going in order to avoid conscription. UEFA has just let the Russian under-17s back in. Little things are shifting.

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

Value Added?

What would the imposition of VAT on private school fees be supposed to achieve? There are other ways of raising £1.7 billion, not quite two per cent of the education budget. But when asked, as only they ever are, how they would pay for this or that, then Labour frontbenchers always now reply that they would impose VAT on private school fees. That is supposed to pay for everything.

Now, no one is scrimping and saving to find anything from £15,000 to £50,000 per year. Anywhere on that scale, you either have that kind of money, or you do not. Even HMRC, which is of course the State itself, admits that 50 per cent of workers in Britain have gross annual incomes of less than £20,000. Two in five adults do not reach the income tax threshold of £12,570, just over one thousand pounds per month. And yes, that does include benefits and everything else.

But the pretence that VAT on school fees would pay for every policy under discussion at the given time, proves only that neither it nor they would ever be attempted in actual fact. Moreover, this levy could not be both an inexhaustible source of revenue, and a device for closing down the hated private schools. It would obviously not be the former, and it would no less clearly fail to be the latter. The customer base would perfectly easily absorb the small additional cost and carry on.

You could go so far as to ban private schools by law, and they would set up abroad. Furthermore, their continued existence is utterly unrelated to what, if any, educational provision the State may make. The Labour Party has proposed a privately schooled Prime Minister at the last two General Elections and at five of the last seven, as it will again next time, and it has proposed a privately schooled Chancellor of the Exchequer at all of the last four. Those schools are not especially academic. They are often still using the IGCSE, which has been banned in the state-funded sector for being too easy. But they are selling social connections.

Consider Hamish Falconer, who has been parachuted in as the Labour candidate for Lincoln, where the Conservative majority is only 3,514. Falconer's father is said to have refused to move his children to state schools, thereby preventing his selection as a Labour candidate, and thus compelling his old flatmate, Tony Blair, to raise him to the peerage in order to make him first Solicitor General and then Lord Chancellor.

Believe that if you like, although such arrangements have not precluded other people's advancement in the Labour Party, but the point is that it is now stated entirely matter-of-factly that the younger Falconer, who has a thoroughly spooky CV, would be a Labour Defence Secretary within two years of election, and a Labour Foreign Secretary within two years of that, precisely because he had gone to a major public school. Glamis, Cawdor, and King hereafter? Well, Leader of the Labour Party, perhaps. But he was at Westminster, and no male product of a mixed secondary school has ever become Prime Minister.

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 78

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 78

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 781

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 781

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Monday, 25 September 2023

14 Weeks On

Nominations have been closed for 14 weeks, so when is the election?

If you know, you know.

Going Ahead

We need an all-of-the-above transport policy as one of the fruits of an all-of-the-above energy policy. Only the State can do this. This kind of thing is why we have a State. And if the Go-Ahead Group can run the Bee Network in Greater Manchester, then it can settle the dispute and avert the planned strikes here at home. Indeed, it must do so, if it is to aspire to any part in Jamie Driscoll's Total Transport Network. I very much hope that Jamie will say that explicitly.

Rishi Sunak has not made the slightest move away from Net Zero. He has pretended to have cancelled measures that never existed, and he has followed the EU in pushing back a target from when he would probably have left office to when he will certainly have done so, although the likes of Nissan are in any case going to stick to the old one. The Government writes the King's speeches, and both on this and on the Greens' first war in Ukraine, the content of the one in Paris was as much the voice of Sunak as were the EU flags by which the King would never have been flanked without the permission of his Prime Minister. We are following the EU on both issues. Our involvement in its war in Ukraine keeps us enmeshed in the EU's institutional life.

Expect nothing from Keir Starmer, of whom Peter Oborne has the measure. But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

Stepping Back?

The Crown Prosecution Service asked for me to be put on the unconditional bail that I therefore enjoy, so I have nothing against it. The attempt by Suella Braverman to bully it is as contemptible as the bullying to which she is being subjected by the Armed Police. And is the Home Secretary's intervention in this murder trial not illegal?

But what says the Official Opposition, led as it is by a former Director of Public Prosecutions? So far as one can tell, the Labour Party has absolutely nothing to say, either about any of this, or about the impending deployment of the Army on the streets of London.

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

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 77

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 77

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 780

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 780

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Sunday, 24 September 2023

So The Last Will Be First, And The First Last

Here is your weekly reminder that this could not have been an executive summary of this. That would have been impossible, since they bear no resemblance to each other. It is all here, including on the ludicrous definition of "grooming" that was used to hound Canon McCoy to his death, and including on the nonsense about Timothy Gardner. Something has changed since 3rd May. What is it? And where is the original report?

I do not resile from this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this,this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this or this. Rather, I reiterate every word of each and all of them. There was no cathedral sex party. The move from the old Bishop's House to the new one made a profit. There was no allegation of sexual assault against Bishop Robert Byrne CO, who should sue every media outlet that had suggested one. Although I am often asked, I know neither where nor how Bishop Byrne is. But I am often asked.

I may not, but I may, accept the present report when Bishop Byrne had done so, and to the extent that he had done so. His Lordship has yet to do so to any extent. At least while that remains the case, then I reject the whole thing out of hand, and so should you. The sum total of the charge sheet against Bishop Byrne is that he did not automatically do as he was told by the hired help. But Pat Buckley does not like Bishop Stephen Wright, so Bishop Wright must be all right.

Indeed, His Lordship preached well at his Enthronement. He clearly has a deep spirituality. There was also a speech by a self-identified survivor of clerical sexual abuse, one Maggie Vickerman. Neither her case, nor those to which she referred, had anything to do with Bishop Byrne, if they really happened at all. How do we know? At most, they were long before his brief time in this Diocese. If anything, certain people with some responsibility for them were in that sanctuary. Nor did Ms Vickerman make any attempt to disguise her theological agenda. Well, nor do I make any attempt to disguise mine.

Beset On All Sides

Very many thanks for all the kind birthday messages, sadly far too many to reply to them all individually. Yesterday, I attained the age that Samuel L. Jackson was in Pulp Fiction. I'm sorry, did I break your concentration?

The average male life expectancy in Britain is 81, so I am well past halfway, and I am therefore adept at spotting cant. Let us begin with those who have been dancing on the grave of the still living Rupert Murdoch while continuing to pay homage to Tony Blair, whom Murdoch and his media supported fanatically at the time. Neil Kinnock rails against The Sun, yet he infamously repeated one of its anti-Liverpudlian lies. Liverpool City Council did not sack anyone when it hired taxis to hand out redundancy notices. Those notices were an accounting device. No job was lost.

With Channel 4 and the BBC, the Murdoch media, if admittedly not so much The Times and the Sunday Times, created the unpleasant popular culture that defined and was defined by New Labour, and exalted as its personification Russell Brand. He was briefly both a presenter on the most popular radio station in Europe and a star of Hollywood films, living with Jemima Goldsmith in London and married to Katy Perry in Los Angeles. No one ever got that big either by accident or on his own.

You can search this site and find that I disliked Brand when that position was exceedingly unfashionable. Like Prince Harry, like at least one senior member of the present Cabinet, and like numerous members of recent ones including the Prime Minister before last, Brand has flagrantly lied on his United States visa application. Whatever his habits, his views on drugs have not changed. As to his more recently acquired opinions, I remain an unapologetically intolerant anti-anti-vaxxer, with a particular aversion to pro-drugs anti-vaxxers, for whose position I can scarcely find the words.

But no one said a word about Brand until he stepped out of line politically. More than a week after the hitjob, there has been no arrest, and the only Police investigation is into an unconnected allegation from 20 years ago. Those anonymised, voiced up women do not exist. Prove me wrong. Yet the whole thing is being intentionally mixed up with, for example, a bizarre claim by the University of Edinburgh, and once again reported in The Times, that one in 10 men had committed a sexual offence against children because, out of a small and self-selected field, one in 10 reported having had sexual contact with an under-18 while aged 18 or over, so with a girl who might have been one day younger than him on his eighteenth birthday, putting her a year and 364 days above the age of consent. The Brand-baiters who are making hay with this are being played. The purpose of this report is to make sexual contact with children seem so normal that nothing could be done about it. One man in 10 is a paedophile? More people than live in Wales, and far more than live in the North East of England? That is obviously rubbish. But if it were true, then what be the point of trying to fight it? And there you are. As of course the Brand-baiters know.

There are plenty of other steaming hypocrites at the moment, as there are at every moment. Law and order hardwoman Suella Braverman wants the Police to feel free to open fire without consequence, and she is therefore interfering illegally in an impending criminal trial while she prepares to deploy the Army on the streets of London. Rishi Sunak affects to be reconsidering Net Zero when in fact he has merely pretended to have cancelled things that were not happening, and followed the EU in pushing something back from when he would probably have left office to when he will certainly have done so. The sound money Conservatives have tripled the National Debt since 2010, as they quadrupled it between 1979 and 1997. There is endless rattling about gender self-identification from the party on whose watch the concept has emerged from the outermost fringes of academia.

On that party's own fringes, people who always held the absolute infallibility of the Bank of England, the City, the money markets, and the American Administration of the day, have spent nearly a year bewailing those forces' removal of the worst British Prime Minister that they had ever seen even as a realistic possibility, never mind as an actual fact. Those same individuals had considered it an unanswerable argument against Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell that those forces would never have stood for them. If their expectations in relation to Liz Truss were anything to go by, then they would have been wrong about that. The Bank, the City and the markets have been wargaming a Labour Left Government forever. They would have got by, as they still would. It was the mini-Budget that they could not countenance.

Keir Starmer gushes over Joe Biden, but he would sack him from his frontbench for standing with striking workers. Starmer mutters about HS2, but he will not consider the nationwide extension of Andy Burnham's reregulation of buses. Labour presents itself as the alternative to the Government's undeniably atrocious economic policies, but on the bizarre grounds that it would implement whatever those policies happened to be in a year's time. It has reneged on its commitment to incorporate into law the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Whose vote is that supposed to attract? Those are my rights. You are only ever one illness or accident away from their being your rights.

The entire Canadian Parliament has just given a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Nazi collaborator, but so many of the same SS Division ended up in Britain that, for example, on Sunday 16th November 2014, there was a march in their honour from Trafalgar Square to the Cenotaph, where a wreath was laid. To a Division of the SS. At the Cenotaph. One week after Remembrance Sunday.

People who bang on about Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands, neither of which is under any meaningful threat, deny that there is a Chagossian people, because those Islanders' ancestors had been taken to those Islands as slaves before 1814 (when the French ceded that atoll specifically as a dependency of Mauritius), thereby justifying their eviction as recent immigrants, if recent immigrants may legitimately be so treated, between 1968 and 1973. Would they try that line in the Caribbean? Perhaps so, since, while professing to be history buffs, they imagine that Britain's only role in the slave trade was to end it.

Just as they imagine the National Trust to have been founded by and for Tories. The circles of Octavia Hill, John Ruskin, FD Maurice, Henry Mayhew, Dame Henrietta Barnett, Sir Robert Hunter and Hardwicke Rawnsley are obviously a closed book to them. If you do not find that funny, then there is something wrong with you. The same goes for Boris Johnson's recent column on the Chagos Islands, of which the highlight was the assertion that they were too far from Mauritius and ought therefore to belong to Britain. A close second came the argument that Diego Garcia had been central to the oh so successful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the party of Denis Healey and David Miliband, the party that launched those wars no doubt agrees.

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

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 76

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 76

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Thursday, 28 September 2023

Wednesday, 27 September 2023

Tuesday, 26 September 2023

Monday, 25 September 2023

Sunday, 24 September 2023

About Me

Links

Blog Archive

Followers