Wednesday 31 May 2023

De Facto Leading?

Vladimir Putin will not be arrested when he visits Johannesburg for the summit of the rapidly expanding BRICS, the GDP of which is already far greater than that of the dying G7.

The only predominantly non-white countries to have sanctioned Russia are the American military colonies of Japan and South Korea, plus Taiwan if you count it. India has still yet to condemn the invasion of Ukraine. At all. Across Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific, bad undergraduate smirking and giggling about "anti-imperialism", or simple ignorance of the terminology, does not cut it among those who remember The Struggle, insofar as it has ever ended. They certainly remember in South Africa.

Even the BBC has to admit that Ukraine is now partially proving Putin's point that it is the threat and the aggressor. Volodymyr Zelensky never goes there, so who is running the place? Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Battalion, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, and all the rest of them. As ever, really. At least in their terms, Ukraine evidently functions perfectly well without Zelensky. Will he ever set foot there again?

If, and all history of these matters advises the most extreme caution, Iran really is expanding any supposed stockpile of highly enriched uranium, then most of the world would cheer it on, while the rest could hardly blame it. And even in the United States, Britain's participation in Ukraine's and its Russian Nazi proxies' war inside Russia is regarded as going too far. Dmitry Medvedev is only stating the obvious. Of course we are making ourselves a target. And no one, including the Americans, is queueing up to protect us. Yet our entire political and media elite cheers this on, and wants to make the same sort of enemy of Iran or even of China, if we have not already done so. Iran is now allied, not only to Russia, but also to Saudi Arabia.

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

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

Unwise But Not Illegal?

ITV must answer to the higher moral authority of Members of Parliament. And why not? Boris Johnson has now done so. Subject to the passing on of his material by the Cabinet Office, which is in practice the Prime Minister. Over to Rishi Sunak, then. Fun and games.

Although Johnson is only the Prime Minister before last, this story is being commendably well-covered. He appears no longer quite to count as a journalist, or all the stops would be being pulled out to protect him. On what was once Fleet Street, only the Daily Telegraph has covered the story of Nick Cohen.

If the chance to stick it to The Observer, and thus to The Guardian, was the reason, then so be it. But beyond that, only The National, so essentially the SNP, and Novara Media, a very particular iteration of post-Corbynism, have thought this at all newsworthy.

So much for Guardian Media Group and #MeToo. Feminist opponents of gender self-identification have also accepted Cohen as what they must have known was a purely opportunistic ally, using them as cover. He even blames the other side of that debate for his predicament. Along with the Russians, of course. And the booze, as if that were an excuse. Ordinarily, such as in relation to motoring offences or breaches of health and safety at work, drunkenness is considered an aggravating rather than a mitigating factor.

Also, notice that at least one of Cohen's victims was his unpaid intern. At GMG. His rather good articles and book chapters on issues of economic inequality, sadly from rather a long time ago, do need to be seen in the light of such employment practices. Everything on such issues in The Guardian and The Observer needs to be so regarded.

Similarly, the resurgent right-wing Labour machine's capture of ITV, tellingly at what must be the insistence of the giant corporate advertisers that are its sole source of revenue, needs to be seen in the light of the Phillip Schofield carry on, of which what is already being said cannot be a tenth, or there would be no story. Although not even Schofield made his next wife pregnant while his then wife was being treated for cancer. And when Johnson was keeping a harem at public expense, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer was Sunak.

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 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.

Spit Hood

Hunting council estate boys for sport. Locking up protestors and mere passers by at the Coronation. Tasering a 91-year-old black woman and putting a mesh spit hood over her head. Shooting two dogs. Arresting Kit Klarenberg and interrogating him for five hours about his political opinions. They are already preparing for Keir Starmer and for Yvette Cooper, even with the better part of a year and a half to go.

Starmer whipped abstentions on the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act and on the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, neither of which he would repeal, and between which nothing that either Freddie Scappaticci or Wayne Couzens did would now be illegal. Couzens used his valid warrant card, and his Police issue handcuffs, so nothing that he did with them could ever now be a criminal offence.

Why enact those measures, or the Public Order Act, or the Nationality and Borders Act, or the Elections Act, or the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act? Why seek to enact the Online Safety Bill, or the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill, or the National Security Bill? Why empower the Home Secretary to strip people of their British citizenship without having to give any reason, and even if that rendered them stateless, and now without even having to tell them?

The only possible reason is so that those powers should be used. Where they already exist, then they are already being used. Labour would not repeal any of them. It would use them to their full extent, and it would turn a blind eye when they were exceeded, if they could be.

The Rwanda scheme was never designed to be implemented. It was designed to annoy all the right people, either by existing in theory, or by never coming to pass, apparently in capitulation to the first lot. But the monster detailed in The Starmer Project does not play games, and nor does the Wicked Witch of the Work Capability Assessment. Only Paul Kagame's financial relationship with Tony Blair might permit any of their victims to dream of the luxury of Rwanda.

The concerted redefinition of contempt of court to include unstated but obvious appeals to juries to exercise their right of nullification is both a recognition of the increasing prevalence of political prosecutions, and a preparation for the restoration of capital punishment. A preparation for Starmer and Cooper, indeed. As Director of Public Prosecutions, he will have caused thousands of deaths. The legacy of her time as Work and Pensions Secretary is a daily rising body count of hundreds of thousands. All as intentional acts of the State.

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 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.

Professor Sakia Sassen and I have already called publicly for the scalp of the night: "As a Commonwealth citizen who is not serving a term of imprisonment in the United Kingdom or in the Republic of Ireland, Julian Assange is eligible to contest a British General Election. We hope that he will do so for the seat of Holborn and St Pancras, which is presently occupied by Keir Starmer. We hope that he will be elected. And we hope that the neighbouring constituency of Islington North will return its Member of Parliament since 1983, Jeremy Corbyn."

Moreover, Cooper was first elected in 1997 with a majority of 15,246, and it was 14,499 as recently as 2017, but last time it fell from that to 1,276. In 2024, it will be high time to say goodbye and good riddance.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 663

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 663

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.

Tuesday 30 May 2023

Possibly Preventable?

Ah, Freddie Scappaticci. Everyone always knew. The old IRA was riddled from top to bottom with Police informants, MI5 assets, and so on, as the curious life story of Sue Gray illustrates.

As was the Real IRA, and as at least has been the much older Continuity IRA, which goes back to the split over abstentionism in 1986. The ongoing case of the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell lends ever-more credibility to what has always been the school of thought that the New IRA was a false flag operation.

Dear old Auntie Sinn Féin herself is still so shot through, so to speak, with British Establishment payroll voters that they have first swung her behind the EU and now, if only in all but name for the time being, they have swung her behind NATO, of which whether Ireland was in fact a member has always been the non-Yes-No question that British membership of the EU has also become.

In either case, if you think that the answer is a straight "No", or even "No" at all, then you are not in the club. Sinn Féin wants to be in the club. It has lately received the President of the United States before attending the King's Coronation, so it already is. It knows the rules. Like the Greens wherever there are Greens, Sinn Féin is thoroughly gung-ho for the war in Ukraine, to which even the existing 26 County State, never mind the 32 County Republic, is not formally a party. Oh, yes, Sinn Féin is in the club, and it knows the rules.

The United Kingdom can no longer keep up any pretence to be anything other than a full participant in that war, now that British-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles, long-range attack drones, so-called air defence missiles, and depleted uranium, which is a weapon of mass destruction, are being deployed both by Ukraine itself and by these people. Those Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus are now pointed straight at us. We need to get the hell out of this situation while we still can, if we still can. We are not the only ones.

For example, the Irish will be doing something. They always are. If not, then what did Sinn Féin spend all those years demonstrating against? These days, it demonstrates in favour. In favour of what? "Is Ireland a member of NATO?" Notice that anyone feels the need to ask. Likewise, "Is Britain a member of the EU?" Notice that anyone feels the need to ask. Notice that Brexit is still an issue, rather than a given. The same people are behind both the Irish and the British situations.

Thus, "Brexit has failed, says Farage" is absolutely everywhere. It does not matter what Nigel Farage really meant, or even what he really said in full. He is never going to live that down. He has been in politics a very long time, so he has no excuse for having walked into this.

And since it could not now be him, then who would lead the campaign to keep out? Although it is not as if there is going to be another referendum. Well-connected commentators in their forties who were last year saying that Britain would not re-join the EU in their lifetimes are now saying "not in 20 years", which is a 50 per cent reduction. This time next year, it will be "not in 10 years".

So in 12 years' time, we are already going to be back in the EU, on absolutely any terms that it had cared to set, without a referendum, and with that reaccession's having been opposed by no party that had stood the slightest chance of providing either the Prime Minister or the Deputy Prime Minister.

The "Brexit bonfire" has been cancelled by Kemi Badenoch, so there was obviously never really going to be one. (Hers would have been the wrong one, but that is another story.) We are to remain as closely aligned as possible with EU law, but while having no say over its content, until someone, bang on cue, pointed out that that was outrageous, and therefore called for us to re-join.

Until then, as now, all parties would officially be committed to "making Brexit work". From that moment, though, they would all be committed to getting back into the EU as quickly as possible and at any cost. I shall be 46 this year. Far from my being dead before Britain stopped pretending to have left, I shall be a good decade short of retirement.

Assuming that there were anything left by then. Kosovo is back. We were right about it the first time, but the people who were wrong about it then are already wrong about it again. We said that intervention in Sierra Leone would make nothing any better, and we were right. We were right about Afghanistan. We were right about Iraq. We were right about Syria, where our enemies' humiliation is absolute. We were right about Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has made complete fools of all of those enemies, as it is also doing over Sudan, as well as over Iran, about which we were right. Why would we be wrong about Ukraine?

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 I say again that 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.

Food For Thought

No grown man is standing outside a pub smoking a bright pink, bubblegum-flavoured vape. Alcopops were deliberately designed both for children's price ranges and for children's palates. Here we are again.

But the State cannot intervene in these matters, can it? Look how brief was the period in which it looked as if the Government might act against food profiteering. In the process, it might have guaranteed the interests of its own party's core-of-the-core supporters.

Yet no. Toryism had to yield, as if the Conservative Party had the constitutional commitment to the "free" market that Labour had had since 1994, and which the Liberal Democrats had had since their foundation in 1988. No such commitment appears in the Conservative Party's constitution. It just behaves as if it did.

As important as holding the economic policy line, and of course inseparable from it, is holding the foreign policy line. Do that, and you can even be Nick Cohen. Would the Jewish Chronicle have employed anyone else who thought that kosher slaughter ought to be illegal?

Even David Aaronovitch is better, exposing the Kahanist roots of National Conservatism. The Thatcher Government banned Rabbi Meir Kahane from Britain, but now two members of Rishi Sunak's Cabinet pay court to his heirs, who also sit in the Israeli Cabinet. Therefore, is Aaronovitch a member of the Labour Party, since he would be liable to expulsion from it for this sort of thing?

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 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.

Take Stock

As we count the minutes to Gender Wars, note that Rishi Sunak is still saying only that Professor Kathleen Stock has the right. He is not saying that she is right. Do not vote for any parliamentary candidate who will not say that, or whose Party Leader will not say it. Of the parties in the present House of Commons, that would leave you with only Alba and the DUP. Sunak's objection to the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill remains purely constitutional. Keir Starmer takes the same view, and he openly says that a man can have a cervix.

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.

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.

Ratbiter? Rat Bitten

Jane Bradley, an investigative correspondent in Britain, interviewed more than 35 journalists at The Guardian and The Financial Times to examine sexual misconduct in the British news media, an industry she has worked in for 15 years. She writes:

Inside the Financial Times newsroom this winter, one of its star investigative reporters, Madison Marriage, had a potentially explosive scoop involving another newspaper.

A prominent left-wing columnist, Nick Cohen, had resigned from Guardian News & Media, and Ms. Marriage had evidence that his departure followed years of unwanted sexual advances and groping of female journalists.

Ms. Marriage specialized in such investigations. She won an award for exposing a handsy black-tie event for Britain’s business elite. A technology mogul got indicted on rape charges after another article.

But her investigation on Mr. Cohen, which she hoped would begin a broader look at sexual misconduct in the British news media, was never published. The Financial Times’ editor, Roula Khalaf, killed it, according to interviews with a dozen Financial Times journalists.

It was not spiked because of reporting problems. Two women were willing to speak openly, and Ms. Marriage had supporting documentation on others. Rather, Ms. Khalaf said that Mr. Cohen did not have a big enough business profile to make him an “F.T. story,” colleagues said.

Mr. Cohen’s departure and the death of Ms. Marriage’s article offer a window into the British news media’s complicated relationship with the #MeToo movement. Leading American newsrooms — Fox News, CNN, NBC, The New York Times and others — have confronted misconduct allegations. British journalism has seen no such reckoning.

For Lucy Siegle, the death of the Financial Times article hit especially hard. In 2018, she had reported Mr. Cohen to the Guardian for groping her in the newsroom, but nothing had happened. Now it seemed the whole industry was protecting itself.

“It just amplified this sense that #MeToo is nothing but a convenient hashtag for the British media,” Ms. Siegle said. “The silence on its own industry is just really conspicuous.”

The British news media is smaller and cozier than its American counterpart, with journalists often coming from the same elite schools. Stringent libel laws present another hurdle. And in a traditional newsroom culture of drinking and gender imbalances, many stories of misconduct go untold, or face a fight.

In July 2016, for example, the Daily Mail reported that a court had granted a domestic violence restraining order against a former Financial Times executive, Ben Hughes. The article vanished from the internet without explanation.

Then, in 2019, The Sun reported that a former Guardian executive, David Pemsel, had sent messages to a former employee, pestering her for a sexual relationship. After he complained, the newspaper apologized and, though it did not say the article was inaccurate, deleted it.

In an email, Ms. Marriage said she could not comment on “F.T. decision-making” and referred questions to a spokeswoman for the newspaper, who would not comment on internal discussions. “Some reporting leads to published stories,” the spokeswoman said, “and some not.” Ms. Khalaf did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Cohen spent two decades as a columnist for The Observer, The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper. He won a prestigious award for writing about right-wing politics in the run-up to Brexit. His book “What’s Left” was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, Britain’s top political journalism award. Inside the newsroom, he was seen as influential, colleagues said, someone who could help your career.

His resignation in January cited “health grounds.” Secretly, the newspaper group paid him a financial settlement for quitting and agreed to confidentiality, according to three colleagues and an editor with whom Mr. Cohen spoke.

In his farewell, editors praised his “brilliant” and “incisive” coverage.

Seven women told The New York Times that Mr. Cohen had groped them or made other unwanted sexual advances over nearly two decades. Four insisted on anonymity, fearing professional repercussions. In each case, The Times reviewed documents or otherwise corroborated their accounts.

Ms. Siegle recounted Mr. Cohen grabbing her bottom in the newsroom around 2001. Five other women described similar encounters at pubs from 2008 to 2015. One said Mr. Cohen had pressed his erection against her thigh and kissed her uninvited when they met to discuss her career. A seventh said Mr. Cohen had repeatedly offered to send her explicit photographs in 2018 while she worked as an unpaid copy editor for him.

Mr. Cohen’s reputation was widely known in the newsroom, according to 10 former colleagues, both male and female. One former colleague said she and other female journalists had used a different entrance to a pub to avoid being groped by him. Another woman said she had avoided the bar downstairs from the newsroom after Mr. Cohen grabbed her knee during work drinks.

“There is so much sexism in a lot of British newspapers, and it seems, unfortunately, that many women believed sexual harassment was something you just had to put up with,” said Heather Brooke, an investigative journalist who told The Times that Mr. Cohen had groped her at an awards ceremony in 2008, before she had a high profile.

Guardian News & Media did investigate Mr. Cohen, but only after Ms. Siegle wrote on Twitter in 2021 about her experience.

Even then, it was a story that few in the British news media wanted to tell. The Guardian signed a confidentiality agreement with Mr. Cohen. The Financial Times spiked its story. Even the investigative magazine Private Eye did not cover his departure. When a reader emailed asking why, the editor replied: “Coverage of Nick Cohen’s departure from The Observer is obviously more problematic for The Eye than the others that you mention due to the fact that he used to write a freelance column for the magazine.”

Mr. Cohen’s departure got a mention only in The Press Gazette, a media trade website.

In a phone interview, Mr. Cohen said he did not have the “faintest idea” about Ms. Siegle’s accusation and questioned why she had waited so long to report it. He said the conversation with the copy editor was “joking” among friends. He blamed their accusations on a campaign by his critics, including advocates for Russia and for transgender rights.

Informed that seven women had come forward with sexual misconduct complaints, Mr. Cohen exclaimed, “Oh, God.”

“I assume it’s stuff I was doing when I was drunk,” said Mr. Cohen, a recovering alcoholic.

In a subsequent email, Mr. Cohen did not respond to specific accusations. “I have written at length about my alcoholism. I went clean seven years ago in 2016,” he said. “I look back on my addicted life with deep shame.”

Many of the women and their colleagues were especially disappointed in The Guardian because of its extensive #MeToo reporting. One week before Ms. Siegle’s complaint in 2018, it solicited tips about workplace sexual harassment.

“We take all allegations of workplace harassment extremely seriously and aim to support victims in all circumstances,” a Guardian News & Media spokesman said in a statement. “We have processes which anyone can use to raise complaints so that they can be fully investigated.”

The company did not respond to specific instances identified by The Times. It said that only Ms. Siegle had complained to senior managers about Mr. Cohen, and that she had chosen not to pursue the complaint — something she denies. As soon as Ms. Siegle went public, the company said, it opened an investigation.

Mr. Cohen left the newspaper and told The Times that he had accepted a deal after considering the financial implications for his family, in particular his son who has autism.

“I’m the only person whose life is turned over because of this,” he said.

The Least Powerful Person

The #MeToo movement was sweeping through society on Feb. 1, 2018, when Ms. Siegle met with the Guardian’s managing editor, Jan Thompson, to report her experiences with Mr. Cohen.

Ms. Siegle had started at The Guardian around 2001 as an editorial assistant. She described standing at a photocopier when Mr. Cohen appeared behind her, cupped her bottom with both hands, grunted and breathed heavily into her ear.

Ms. Siegle remembers returning to her desk, humiliated. She never considered reporting him. “I’m literally the least powerful person in the entire newsroom,” she said.

For 14 years, as she advanced at The Observer, she said she avoided his desk and chaperoned interns “like a mother hen crossing a busy road.”

At the Feb. 1 meeting, Ms. Siegle said Ms. Thompson responded by talking about the abuse that Mr. Cohen faced for his political views, according to notes Ms. Siegle wrote afterward. She described the meeting as a “chaotic mess of defensiveness and attack.”

The Guardian spokesman said Ms. Siegle, who was by then a freelancer for the newspaper, had opted not to pursue her complaint. Ms. Siegle says an investigation was never offered. A week after the meeting, Ms. Thompson emailed to let Ms. Siegle know that she was “here if you want to discuss further.” Ms. Siegle declined.

In interviews, former Observer and Guardian managers said they knew Mr. Cohen had a drinking problem but could not remember anyone reporting sexual misconduct. “In a way, I’m puzzled,” said Chris Elliott, a former managing editor of both papers. “Because I should have heard something about it on the grapevine.”

Jean Hannah Edelstein, an assistant at The Observer from 2007 to 2009, said Mr. Cohen was not alone in his behavior. She recalled her editor hitting her with a sex whip as she walked by. Over one boozy lunch, she said, the same editor offered to help her career and suggested that she pose naked to promote her book.

Several journalists said Mr. Cohen’s reputation for groping was far from secret, and five women said he had groped them after work at pubs, including one who said he had groped her “five or six” times in 2008.

Another woman, a freelance journalist who had recently been homeless and had depression, said she had met Mr. Cohen at a pub in 2010 to discuss her career. As they chatted, she said, he suddenly kissed her on the mouth and pressed his erection against her thigh. She said she fled.

“I just remember walking along Waterloo Bridge and thinking, ‘I can’t go to The Guardian with this. Who would they believe?’” she said. “He was one of their stars, and I was a freelance journalist with mental health issues.”

Ms. Brooke, the investigative journalist, said she had initially dismissed her encounter with Mr. Cohen at the 2008 awards ceremony as “a one-off drunken mistake and didn’t take it further.” (“Nick Cohen got drunk and slapped my ass … ugh!” she wrote in her diary the next day.)

But she said that “now I know that this is a pattern of behavior over 20 years. I think it’s really important to speak out.”

Rebecca Watson, a writer and commentator, said Mr. Cohen had grabbed her bottom at a book party in 2009. Her now-former husband said he had witnessed it but did not confront Mr. Cohen because he did not want to cause a scene.

“To sexually assault a stranger at a book launch, to be one of the more prominent people there, and to just assume there will be no comeuppance,” Ms. Watson said.

Not long after Ms. Siegle lodged her 2018 complaint with The Guardian, records show that Mr. Cohen began working with a freelance copy editor, a single mother with autism.

She worked remotely for Mr. Cohen, unpaid. On June 29, 2018, a work conversation over direct messages on Twitter became punctuated with mutually flirtatious jokes. Mr. Cohen offered to send an explicit photograph. The woman declined. Mr. Cohen persisted and she deflected again.

In the following days, the copy editor said, Mr. Cohen turned cold. In messages, she apologized if she had misread the situation. Eventually, she told him continuing to work together “would be at a cost too high for my own mental health.”

Mr. Cohen, in his email to The Times, said this was the only accusation to surface since he quit drinking and said it had been misrepresented. “It involves a friendship with a woman I never met that, sadly, went badly wrong,” he said.

In 2019, the copy editor asked The Guardian’s human resources team about the process for raising sexual misconduct claims, emails show. She described the incident without naming Mr. Cohen, saying she felt “huge pressure” to go along with his “banter.”

Because she was not a Guardian employee, the copy editor said she was told that she would not be informed of the investigation’s outcome. Being frozen out of the process terrified her, so she backed off.

Going Public

In fall 2021, Ms. Siegle wrote on Twitter about her experience. Her lawyer, Jolyon Maugham, began making noise. Ms. Thompson immediately emailed.

“Given that you have now tweeted publicly,” Ms. Thompson wrote, “I hope that it means that your position has now changed, and that you would be willing to provide further information so that we can investigate the matter fully.”

Ms. Siegle said that was misleading, that The Guardian had not offered to investigate in 2018. 

Eventually, Mr. Cohen was suspended and The Guardian hired a law firm to carry out an independent inquiry. Neither Ms. Siegle nor the copy editor agreed to participate.

Mr. Cohen confirmed that he signed an agreement to leave the newspaper, but would not discuss the terms.

Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, said he had discussed the terms of The Guardian’s deal with Mr. Cohen, who no longer writes for Private Eye. “Instead of any conclusion,” Mr. Hislop said of the Guardian investigation, “it ended up with a secret agreement and a big cash payment.”

Inside The Financial Times

In December 2022, the Financial Times editor, Ms. Khalaf, emailed the newsroom about the coming year’s priorities. Among them were Ms. Marriage’s investigations into abuses of power.

Publicly, the newspaper had declared “no topic or scandal off limits.” Privately, there were limits.

Ms. Marriage had already begun investigating Mr. Cohen and sexual misconduct across the British news media, but Ms. Khalaf shackled the investigation, telling Ms. Marriage not to contact any new sources, according to two colleagues with whom Ms. Marriage spoke. Her team had already interviewed five of Mr. Cohen’s accusers.

In February, Ms. Khalaf said she would not run the investigation as a news article, several journalists recalled, and suggested that Ms. Marriage file it as an opinion piece. She did, but it still did not run.

A half-dozen Financial Times journalists said they saw it as part of a wider reluctance to expose bad behavior within its industry.

The Financial Times, like others, has wrestled with gender issues. In June 2020, 56 female staff members wrote to Ms. Khalaf about a “bro culture” that excluded women from decision-making.

Ms. Khalaf was sympathetic, one employee said. Since becoming the newspaper’s first female editor in 2020, she has increased the number of women in senior positions.

A native of Lebanon, Ms. Khalaf is not a British media insider. Colleagues described her as a cautious editor, and some said the Cohen article had fallen victim to an institutional conflict between the newspaper’s investigative aspirations and its conservative, business roots.

Days after Ms. Marriage’s article was dropped, the newspaper ran an investigation into sexual harassment claims against a former TikTok manager. The next month, it ran 23 articles about sexual misconduct accusations inside Britain’s business lobbying group.

Jane Bradley is an investigative reporter covering the United Kingdom for The Times. She is based in London, where she focuses on uncovering abuses of power, financial crime and corruption, and social injustices. @jane__bradley

The Clergy Challenge: Day 662

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 662

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

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

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Monday 29 May 2023

Just

The attack on the Nord Stream pipeline, which caused Liz Truss to text Antony Blinken that “It’s done”, has sent Germany into recession. But Dale Vince of Just Stop Oil has given £1.5 million to the Labour Party, because Just Stop Oil are the sort of people who have £1.5 million to give away. So Keir Starmer has announced that he would block all new oil and gas licences in the North Sea. Just like that.

We must celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. 

That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, so that everyone might enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed.

There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. In Britain, we must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985.

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet now we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with it.

I am strongly in favour of solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, or pipelines, or power stations.

Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

Let us harness the power of the State, and deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of the clean coal technology in which Britain was the world leader until the defeat of the Miners’ Strike, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it.

Say it again, harness the power of the State to bathe this country in heat and light from oil, gas, nuclear, wind, wave, tidal, solar, and that without which there could also be no steel for rigs, pipelines, power stations or turbines, namely coal. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the defeat of the miners in 1985. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right.

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

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

Arresting Developments

The United Kingdom is going to be the worst-performing economy in the G7 this year, so a lid needs to be kept on any popular dissent. It is time for a security emergency, thanks to one or both of the Loyalist paramilitaries and the dissident Republicans. If those did not exist, then our rulers would have to invent them. And at different times, those did not used to exist.

Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries have always been heavily involved in traditional organised crime in general, and in drug-dealing in particular, leading to generations of professional and social interaction of the kind that also takes place routinely among, for example, rival Mafia families, as well, as of course, the sort of merciless bloodshed that goes on in that world.

There has never been any secret that the Loyalist organisations were off-the-books arms of the British State, while the old IRA was also riddled from top to bottom with Police informants, MI5 assets, and so on, as was the Real IRA, and as at least has been the much older Continuity IRA, which goes back to the split over abstentionism in 1986. The recent documentaries about David Rupert, and about "Robert" by the superlative Peter Taylor, undeniably broke ground, and were a reminder of how good the BBC could be, but they could not have surprised anyone.

In March, four Protestants, at least one with known Loyalist paramilitary connections, were arrested in relation to the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, for which the New IRA had already claimed responsibility. Last week, there were a further 11 arrests, including of eight Protestants. There has always been a school of thought that the New IRA was a false flag operation.

There has never been any doubt as to the true nature of the likes of the UDA, the UVF, and Ulster Resistance, which provided the then Queen's Government with confidence and supply from 2017 to 2019. Across that ostensible divide, it is all heating up over there just as it is all threatening to heat up, by our standards, over here.

That is all unconnected to any sincere pursuit of a United Ireland. Sinn Féin is so shot through, so to speak, with British Establishment payroll voters that they have first swung it in favour of the EU and now, if only in all but name for the time being, they have swung it behind NATO, of which whether Ireland was in fact a member has always been the non-Yes-No question that British membership of the EU has also become.

In either case, if you think that the answer is a straight "No", or even "No" at all, then you are not in the club. Sinn Féin wants to be in the club. It has lately received the President of the United States before attending the King's Coronation, so it already is. It knows the rules.

But Sinn Féin still formally believes the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland as the legitimate successor of the Second Dáil, although that Parliament's only surviving member in 1986, Tom Maguire, conferred legitimacy on the Continuity Army Council, so that it was the Continuity IRA that provided a firing squad at his funeral in, almost unbelievably, 1993, and so that it has been Republican Sinn Féin that has held commemorations at his graveside.

Anyway, that is what Sinn Féin believes. That the Provisional Army Council is the sovereign body throughout Ireland as the legitimate successor of the Second Dáil. For all practical purposes, it has functioned as such since 1998 in the Six Counties, whence hail most its members. Anyone doubting that need look no further than the funeral of Bobby Storey, followed by the decision of the Police that no Covid-19 regulations has been breached.

Storey's coffin was borne to its rest by Gerry Adams, Martin Ferris, Sean Hughes, Gerry Kelly, Martin "Duckster" Lynch, and Sean "Spike" Murray. At any given time, there are seven members of the Army Council. Of the deceased and his six pallbearers, only Ferris was from the 26 Counties. There, however, Sinn Féin might have entered government if it had fielded enough candidates at the last General Election to the Dáil. It will certainly field enough next time.

Handpicked for Leadership by an Army Council that was based almost entirely in what it never called "Northern Ireland", Michelle O'Neill as First Minister would be a detail, since that Council has effectively been in charge there for 25 years, regardless of how many votes its partisans, who had sometimes included its members, had obtained.

But handpicked for Leadership by an Army Council that was based almost entirely in what it never called "Northern Ireland", Mary Lou McDonald as Taoiseach of what that Council did not regard as the real Republic of Ireland would be a seismic event, effectively extending the exercise of the IRA's claim to sovereignty across the entire territory claimed, and to the means of a sovereign state's participation in international affairs.

Who would need a border poll? Why would the IRA want one? No referendum would ever endorse rule by the Army Council. Once that were established across the whole of Ireland, then the beneficiaries would never wish to give it up, and everyone else would find it practically impossible to make them. That day is now well within sight. But there will always be dissidents of one sort or another. They are too useful for there ever to be allowed not to be.

Questioning The Wisdom

Even the Daily Mail now admits that the miners were right, as Jonathan Webb writes:

It was ten years ago, while interviewing council tenants about the damp in their flats, and lifts used as lavatories, that it hit me – a green agenda is an obsession by the liberal middle classes. It was summed up rather succinctly by one tenant who said to me, 'While I've got mould growing on my wall and a lift that's full of p**s, the council can shut up about spending money on going green. Us tenants are more important than recycling paper and tin cans.'

So, what caused the Government to be brainwashed into adopting a dogma that's seen the UK's coal power stations close and, in most cases, blown up with indecent haste – while China and India embarked on a massive programme of expanding theirs?

Prior to the rise of Greta Thernberg, the most famous thing to come out of Sweden was the pop group Abba – a source I would trust more, regarding climate change. The seeds of destruction can actually be traced back to 2001, two years before Greta was born, with the issuing of the Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD) which aimed to reduce carbon emissions throughout Europe.

What caused the Government to be brainwashed into adopting a dogma that's seen the UK's coal power stations close and, in most cases, blown up with indecent haste while China and India embarked on a massive programme of expanding theirs?

The deadline of January 1, 2008 allowed plants that did not comply with the strict emission limits to opt-out. In January 2008, Britain had 21 coal-fired power stations in operation, which not only employed thousands of staff directly, but also gave work to many thousands of supply staff – such as train drivers, many of which were to lose their jobs as a result of this policy.

Since then it's been a non-stop attack on society from busybodies, who obviously have way too much time on there hands, and lobby groups – with the UK Government seemingly in awe. Where else would an unelected teenager be listened to regarding making policy, while at the same time demonising anyone who questions the logic of such action?

The amount of emissions released by Britain is so minute in comparison to China and India, that if we were to ban fossil fuels in the UK tomorrow, it would make an absolutely minuscule impact on total levels across the globe. Advocates claim that we should lead by example, but I don't see China or India taking any notice, and why should they? What right has the western world, that has benefited for hundreds of years from fossil fuels, to tell rapidly developing countries that they can't have those same benefits?

Last year, construction and planning applications of coal fired plants in China accelerated dramatically – with new permits reaching the highest level since 2015. Capacity will be six time as large as that in the rest of the world combined. Permission for many of these projects are fast tracked, allowing construction to commence within a matter of weeks. Last year permission for the construction of the equivalent of two large power plants a week was granted. Why doesn't Greta go and protest in China, if she feels so strongly about pollution? After all China emits as much CO2 in 12 days as the UK does in a year.

What the ecozealots never say is that what is increasing is the number of deaths due to fuel poverty and the cold – exacerbated by the premature abolition of fossil fuels before a cheap and reliable alternative is in place. Rising temperatures are not the real enemy as the many who have to choose between heating and eating will testify. For them the average annual green levy of £120 is already a huge burden.

President Xi has also pledged that China would reduce coal consumption in the 2026–30 period, but this is increasingly beginning to look like nothing more than lip service, with China accounting for 52 per cent of the 176 gigawatts of coal capacity under construction in 20 countries in 2021. This is only a reduction of four GW from the previous year. This is despite China being told that a halt had to be brought to such projects if climate goals are to be achieved.

Thank goodness that the Government wasn't entirely brainwashed by the woke elite, and was able to warm up coal fired power stations (that were mothballed and not, as is so often the case, demolished) on a number of occasions last winter to keep the 'lights on' in Britain. This, however, came at a great price to British citizens and one that could do much damage to the hopes of any political party that doesn't address it.

Last year, after years of trying to shift away from fossil fuels, the UK was forced to double its coal imports, due to soaring gas prices. In October 2022 more than 560,0000 tonnes of coal arrived in the UK via British ports compared to 291,000 tonnes the previous October. Victor Katona, a senior analyst at Kpler, said 'With gas prices like these, relying on natural gas for power generation is a no-go zone for anyone who can switch between fuels.'

The reduction in living standards, coupled with soaring energy bills – due to the west deciding it doesn't want buy Russian gas or coal – are coinciding with strong signs that war fatigue is setting in. Western governments that were once overwhelmingly supportive of Ukraine are now looking nervously at the polls, none more so than America – the biggest donor of funds – with elections looming next year. Ironically, the west has no reservations about doing business with China, and other autocratic governments, while at the same time demonising Russia.

Even the predicted lowering of energy bills by around £450 in the UK will probably do little to stop people questioning the wisdom of a government that is happy to pour endless millions into a war that has no positive side for western citizens, but many negatives. It was the UK and members of the EU who de-industrialised themselves, making themselves dependent on foreign energy imports such as Russia and and manufacturing and materials – especially those from China.

Retired American police officer and republican voter Jeremy Snyder is typical of many. While initially being 'all for' sending aid, he now says, 'Ukraine keeps asking for more money when we need more money at home.' The results of a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research show that overall, support for aiding Ukraine has fallen from 60% to 48% over the last 12 months, with a recent NBC News poll revealed only one third of Republicans think sending more money to Ukraine is a good idea.

Similar attitudes are becoming more prevalent in the UK, but there are still some who are so brainwashed, you have to wonder if there was ever a brain to wash to begin with. I asked one left-leaning lady in her seventies what she thought about rumours that Zelensky's wife had been on a spending spree in Paris and she replied, without a moment of hesitation, 'So bloody what? If it's true she bloody well deserves it!'

We were lucky last winter, as it wasn't a particularly cold one in Britain – enabling a lot of households to have to cope with steep, but not budget breaking energy bills. We will not be so fortunate if this winter is a bitter one. 'Freeze for Ukraine' is never going to be a winning election slogan and many more will question what purpose is served by the UK getting involved in a war with Russia – one that puts it within range of Russian missiles.

Plan 75: The Banality of Euthanasia

Kevin Yuill writes:

Plan 75 is a new sci-fi film, directed and co-written by Chie Hayakawa. It is set in an alternate version of present-day Japan, in which the authorities have come up with a solution to the ‘problem’ of an ageing population. This solution, called Plan 75, involves encouraging citizens over 75 years old to sign up for an assisted death in return for $1,000.

In one particularly striking scene, we see a medical clinic waiting room full of elderly people. A Plan 75 advert appears on a screen. ‘Being able to decide when to die has left me with peace of mind’, says a smiling senior on the screen. ‘People will say that she led a good life on her own terms.’ A patient in the waiting room, tired of the propaganda, gets up and turns the screen off.

Plan 75 plays it close to the bone. This fictional plan echoes the messages and sentiments of real advocates of assisted dying. For example, UK campaign group Dignity in Dying (formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society) talks blithely of ‘planning our own death’ and the ‘peace of mind’ that can bring.

The American assisted-suicide advocacy group, Compassion and Choices, wants to ‘empower everyone to chart their end-of-life journey’. It says it wants to ‘help you and your loved ones “finish strong” by planning for an end-of-life experience that matches the life you’ve enjoyed – defined by love, purpose and agency’. Reading such glossy schmaltz, it’s easy to forget that these groups are campaigning for people to be helped to poison themselves to death.

This is what makes Plan 75 so powerful. It holds an unflattering mirror up to today’s campaigns for euthanasia and assisted suicide. It exposes the gap between the activists’ hype and the sad, banal reality. It makes for a sombre, melancholy film, which treats its audience with respect. There are no lurid or melodramatic scenes. There aren’t any baddies. Even those who work for Plan 75 are reasonable, friendly and respectful to their clients.

Plan 75 encourages the viewer to question his or her assumptions about euthanasia. Its approach is subtle – too subtle for some reviewers, it seems. One critic thought the film was ‘quietly determined to stand up for the individual’s right to choose’, but wondered where the equivalent to Plan 75 was for those stricken by disease. Another complained that all the characters signing up to Plan 75 are portrayed as feeling ‘pressured by the sense of being a redundant burden to those around them’.

That, of course, is the point. Plan 75 captures well the pressures put on those opting for assisted suicide today. According to Oregon’s 2021 report on assisted suicide, 54.2 per cent of people who died by assisted suicide were afraid of being a ‘burden on family, friends / caregivers’ – compared with just 26.9 per cent who cited ‘inadequate pain control or concern about it’.

Plan 75 challenges the romanticised image of euthanasia promoted by its advocates. It depicts the banality of an assisted death. And in doing so, it gives the lie to advertising slogans about ‘finishing strong’ with an ‘end-of-life experience that matches the life you’ve enjoyed’.

Plan 75 also provides a damning portrait of modern ageism. When we dehumanise the elderly, and speak of them largely in terms of their costs to the state, it is not beyond the realms of imagination that assisted dying could be proposed as a solution to our economic troubles. It also shows how assisted-dying legislation is a slippery slope. So in Plan 75, assisted dying for the over 75s proves so ‘successful’ that a Plan 65 is mooted.

This is no flight of fancy. In places where assisted dying has been legalised, the categories of those eligible are always expanding. Euthanasia and assisted dying in the Netherlands have been legal since 2002. Now the ‘tired of life’ campaign is calling for all those over 75 to be allowed the right to die.

In Canada, where assisted dying has been legal since 2016, Dr Louis Roy recently told the House of Commons’ Special Joint Committee of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) that an assisted death can be appropriate for seniors ‘sliding into existential suffering or emptiness’.

This all shows that, from the perspective of the state, euthanasia can all too easily become a tool to solve social-care problems. Plan 75 deserves a wide audience. It exposes the sad reality of assisted dying that its advocates are only too keen to ignore.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 661

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 661

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

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

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Sunday 28 May 2023

Situations Vacant

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

Weekly parish sheets are begging for applicants to become Administrator or Senior Administrator of the totally discredited Diocesan Safeguarding Office, which now goes through staff at the most hilarious rate. Has advertising anywhere else become simply pointless, or simply unaffordable? Probably both.

It does not take five months to decide whether or not to make an arrest pursuant to one allegation of sexual assault by an adult against another adult, and all rumours as to what Bishop Robert Byrne CO was now doing presuppose that he holds an Enhanced DBS check, which he certainly would not hold if he were subject to such a Police investigation, or probably if he ever had been.

In any case, even Pat Buckley has downgraded the alleged allegation to one of having been "sexually inappropriate", whatever that may mean. An off-colour remark? What, exactly? Although even that could imperil an Enhanced DBS check. If anything, a man who had been asked to leave the Oratory 30 years ago set out for revenge but had his bogus claim rightly dismissed. Even that, though, has not been established.

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

One Spirit, One Body

The whole Church was baptised with the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, which we celebrate today, and She manifests that baptism through a rich plurality of gifts, the charisms. The whole Church, and thus every member, is therefore both Pentecostal and Charismatic.

Every gift is a charism, and each is always given for the good of the whole body, in response to Her evangelistic activity, in the context of Her sacramental life, and subject to Her gift of discernment. She exercises that gift within Her institutional life, because the institutional Church and the charismatic Church are inseparable, being two aspects of a single reality.

It is wholly unscriptural to impose any requirement that anyone exercise any particular charism in order to be considered a full, believing member of the Church. There has never been the slightest doubt that the charisms include healing, exorcism, prophecy and words of knowledge, nor really even that they include speaking in tongues.

Furthermore, healing is here understood as even those of us not raised in the Charismatic Movement understand it: it is the restoration of the human person to wholeness, which might or might not take the form of healing as understood by medical science, depending on what is known best to the Holy Spirit, Who is the Wisdom of God. Similarly, the performance of exorcism is restricted to suitably qualified people, and it is only ever used against the power of that objective evil which we can but thank God that we do not fully understand.

Prophecy is recognised as the gift of being able to read the signs of the times and to communicate effectively what is thus read, so that there is always foretelling in the forthtelling, while words of knowledge are always relevant, always wise counsel and always independently verifiable. Speaking in tongues is never without the interpretation of tongues, and together they make it possible to understand where such would not otherwise be the case.

By contrast, glossolalia is not a Biblical word, but a twentieth-century running together of two such words in order to describe a twentieth-century phenomenon associated with the denial that those who do not exercise it have been “baptised with the Holy Spirit”, with the degeneration of worship into banality and incoherence, with the refusal of legitimate ecclesial authority, with the denial or minimisation of doctrine, and with the transfer of ecclesial authority to parachurch leaders.

For example, as well as having been miraculously healed, the great Dominican Saint Vincent Ferrer was also blessed with the gift of tongues. Other than Ecclesiastical Latin and despite his English father, he had no language but Limousin, which was what they spoke in his native Valencia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet he was a tireless itinerant missionary, preaching to tremendous effect in Aragon, Castile, Switzerland, France, Italy, England, Ireland and Scotland.

Whereas glossolalia is, it is worth repeating, a twentieth-century running together of two Biblical Greek words in order to describe a twentieth-century phenomenon that does not occur in the Bible. Is it Saint Paul's “tongues of angels”? There is nothing in Scripture to support that view. The true gift of tongues is as manifested by Saint Vincent Ferrer OP, Biblical scholar, philosopher, thus doubly informed and doubly informing theologian, and thanks to that ongoing formation a gloriously successful preacher of the Gospel, not least to the Jews, precisely as an ordained priest and a solemnly professed Religious in perfect unity with the See of Peter.

These and the other charisms serve to re-root Theology in experience, and to call the whole Church to watch at all times for the Second Coming. They restore the integrity of the Liturgy by freeing it from over-formality and over-conventionality. And they release the ministries of women, young people, the poor, and others who experience marginalisation and oppression. Yet there is never any question of any one gift’s being used to decide whether or not someone has been “baptised with the Holy Spirit”, because it is the whole Church that has been so baptised.

Nor need there be any degeneration into banal and incoherent services; indeed, any such degeneration, like any refusal of legitimate ecclesial authority, or any denial or minimisation of anything taught by the Magisterium, is a sign to the institutional Church, in Her exercise of Her charism of discernment, that the spirits being tested are not of God. And nor is there any transfer of ecclesial authority to parachurch leaders, because there is no parachurch. Rather, there is the Holy, Catholic and Roman Church.

The Power of Three

There is obviously more going on here. No one has ever been drummed out of television for having committed adultery with a much younger subordinate. Phillip Schofield met someone who was 15 or younger, arranged a job interview for him when he was 18, and had an affair with him when he was in his twenties. So what? What even is "grooming", and how would this qualify? There is more going on here.

In that case, whither ITV? Donald Trump, or the Wagner Group, or anyone else, could probably now buy it for next to nothing. A consortium of Simon Cowell, Ant and Dec, and the casts of Emmerdale and Coronation Street, would be well-advised to do so this week.

So much for the Labour Right's in-house television station. Funded only by its giant corporate advertisers, clearly that has been what they have wanted. The same is true of LBC, with its guest presenter gigs for Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves, David Lammy and Sadiq Kahn, and with its regular Call Keir feature.

Hence Liz Kendall's hectoring and defamation of Jeremy Corbyn on Peston, hence Richard Madeley's preposterous attempts to take down Mick Lynch, hence Alan Johnson on The Masked Singer, hence Piers Morgan's gushing "interview" with Keir Starmer, hence Morgan's handover of the gig to Derek Draper's wife, and hence his replacement in the morning with Alastair Campbell and Ed Balls.

In his autobiography, Gordon Brown stated matter-of-factly that his protégé, Balls, did popular television as part of a strategy to make himself Prime Minister. Well, it worked for Boris Johnson, and it yet may again. Morgan has fallen a long way since his opposition to the Iraq War unleashed the torrent of personal abuse to which he has been subject ever since. ITV has always been in the vanguard of taking down and keeping down Johnson, because he would have wiped the floor with Starmer.

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 I say again that on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

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

Within A Toxic System

Irvine Welsh, so you have been warned, writes:

Cards on the table: I’m a rampant opponent of white, bourgeois, male privilege. Events such as the Coronation, or another Biden-Trump stand-off, pull this lunacy into sharp focus. Yes, these ludicrous and deranged media-driven circuses may have little to do with women, black, Asian, gay or trans people. But let’s get this straight: they have absolutely fuck all to do with white working-class men either.

According to liberal conventional wisdom, we are in a post-industrial, post-imperial society where shouty (white) men can no longer trumpet their entitled assumptions unchallenged, and perhaps even have to stand in line. Well, if that’s truly the case, thank fuck for it. After all, imperialism and the patriarchy cost a lot of lives, and gave us wars, bad politics and bad art. And nothing’s changed.

Ironically, however, most of those lives lost in Western society were male, white and working-class; basically, those citizens assumed by the paradigm of class-denying intersectionality to be the enemy of progress.

White working-class males are now recast as the establishment’s salivating attack dogs; the overseers of imperialism, enforcing the bidding of their wealthier masters. Their role in securing most of our human rights — through workplace struggle in the trade unions, strikes, demonstrations, wars and riots — is to be erased from our collective consciousness.

Because some sections of the white working class bought into the reductive neoliberalism of unrestrained capitalism through the Thatcher-Reagan revolution, so the entire group was written off. In the “hierarchy of the oppressed” so beloved of intersectional theory, a (white) penis in the underpants is more important than the lack of an arse in the trousers in determining your place in the world.

So, what excludes white working-class men from this LGBT intersectional paradigm? It can’t be race, as white women are permitted. It can’t be class, as working-class women and black men are allowed in. It can’t even be sex/gender, as gay or bisexual white working-class men and women are included. But perversely, white proletarian men are lumped in with their bourgeois “brethren”; outsiders in this rainbow-coloured festival of the oppressed.

In this bizarre schematic model, working-class football supporters in Liverpool are deemed on the same side as rabid establishment mouthpieces such as The Sun’s Kelvin McKenzie, who demonised, vilified and lied about them. Conversely, black teenagers in inner London estates, continually the victims of harassment by the Metropolitan Police and at the bottom of Britain’s opportunity pile, are ludicrously deigned to have common cause with the privately-educated colonial elites placed strategically in the media and commerce through “equal opportunity” positive discrimination schemes.

There’s something about the bourgeois psyche that produces a visceral reaction to that deadly combination of working-class, white and straight — irrespective of the actual views and life experiences of someone in that grouping.

The decline of class politics and its replacement by the schisms of identity is an integral part of the neoliberal order. After all, one unites and the other divides. The class war was won by the elite in Britain, probably as far back as Orgreave in the 1984 miners’ strike, when organised labour was crushed.

Today, capital rules supreme, steadfastly tightening its hold, aided by a rapacious individualism that has now tipped into a demented narcissism, and a technology concentrated in the hands of corporations and its co-opted governments.

Therefore, in the realms of finance and economics, nothing is now contestable, unless it’s national elites using their power (and manipulating the populace) to try to gain more traction and influence at the expense of the interrelated global ones.

What is presented to us as politics is a hollow civil war of the super wealthy, with the rest of us as pawns. Silver-spooned, daddy-issue Republicans, like Trump and his ilk, have long presented as comic-book versions of the most vulgar, dumbass versions of redneck USA.

This is now Right-wing de rigueur, enabling exploiters to “connect” with a politically and socially displaced white America, which embraces grievance and victimhood as eagerly as any grouping that claims to be oppressed. This folksy affectation is only partly strategic: late capitalism has stupefied its winners as much as its losers.

Hollywood has recycled the potty mouth of the ghetto into the boardroom, where the same tropes are now regurgitated in a decontextualised way, with defiant alienation replaced by entitled arrogance, under the depoliticised posturing of “attitude”.

Meanwhile, digital technology and its deployment solely for private profit through capital accumulation has fucked all our attention spans, and our sense of the past, as completely as George Orwell suggested. (Indeed, there’s little point in saying that: the ubiquity of Orwell as just another internet cliché has completely nullified the power of his message.)

In Britain, I believe that the traditional working man — of all colours — has had a bad rap. Recently, I was out with some old pals, and we were talking about how we’ve stayed close friends down the years, despite life, love and work taking us off in varying directions. One friend went on at length about how his partner and her friends were quite surprised at the continuing bond between us all. It’s a recurrent theme with women I know, who ask, perhaps not unjustly: how can you still be bothered with each other?

Men, whose camaraderie can seem frivolous, built on drinking, football and laughing at each other’s embarrassments, paradoxically tend to stick together down the years more than women, who talk of weightier, more emotional subjects. Several years ago, following a relationship breakdown scenario, I went through a phase where I felt like I was done with male company.

I decided I could do without the gung-ho nature of the archetypal male response to such events: “Forget her. They’re all the same. Get another round up. I’ve left a line out for you in the toilets.” As a result, I basically surrounded myself with my women friends. Not for the first time, they were the ones offering real support and genuine insight into my predicament.

Then you realise: it’s not about thesis and antithesis. There’s always got to be room for a synthesis of different ideas and values. Once more, I’m appreciating the narrow, lazy affirmation that belonging to a mob of men can offer.

The best thing about being a man of my generation is that we’re allowed to get the fuck out of the house. Now I feel for youth who don’t do this so much — they really don’t know what they are missing. When they do, the experience is invariably packaged for them. The biggest indictment you can offer our current dystopia is that we’ve created a society where the old pity the young. That’s just not right.

Masculinity (as well as femininity) is tied to our lost sense of community. As pubs and clubs close down across the country, teenagers are more likely to spend their evenings on Instagram, TikTok, playing video games or on some dubious porn forums than getting drink from the offie and messing around in the park or on abandoned railway lines. A social vacuum has been created at the same time as a dumbed-down visceral communication system has emerged.

This creates a place where someone as pathetic as Andrew Tate can gain a limited sphere of influence. The emergence of such characters would have been impossible in the Nineties. They would have been dismissed as ludicrous wankers in a truly contested, democratic street culture, as opposed to the top-down media one we now live in. Now a noncey, supermarket transgression has gained a foothold, appealing to an entire lost generation of anxious, isolated teenage bedroom wankers, brimming with the sleazy narratives of onscreen porn.

While young people are being stripped of their right to be completely irresponsible — i.e. young — those of us who spent a whole chunk of our change in the last century are often unprepared to let go of our unruly youth, still investing in bad behaviour and the institutions believed to encourage it; the pub, the gig, the nightclub, the rave, the football ground and the traditional workplace. I personally thank the higher powers for those declining bastions.

In their growing absence, the neoliberal state has gutted everyone’s lives of meaning — to the extent that we have little to cling to other than a narcissistic, media-constructed sense of who we are and our supposed entitlement to avoid personal discomfort at all costs. Thus, through toxic social media platforms, proponents of various identities get to sling all sorts of mud at each other, devoid of any social setting and real human interaction.

Generally, it’s an inconsequential battle, in which people are afforded the keyboard warrior’s licence — rewarded by the dopamine hits — to abuse each other with relative impunity. The objective of the game is to goad the other party into an overreach and a subsequent pile-on, with an attendant Twitter ban or, the great weapon of our times, “cancellation”. Generally, however, in those futile wars, no party claims a feasible victory. Nonetheless, the participants are rarely shy of pompously deploying tiresome, overdramatic dictums declaring their cause or viewpoint to be “on the right side of history”.

This nonsense benefits only the continuation of the current bankrupt system. The establishment’s economic, financial and social elites once starved people into compliance; now it lures them into pointless shouting matches, allowing them to stupefy themselves in the process.

So, white men aren’t the only ones rendered toxic by our culture. Every group and demographic, as evidenced by its social media extremists, are fundamentally unhappy with their lot and in existential crisis about who they are in this changing world.

Part of this is the old science of consumer capitalism: keep us feeling bad about ourselves and then give us a product or service or procedure that will make us centred, complete or alive. Ignore the fact that we’re strutting around in a zoo we’ve made for ourselves. Whatever we consume or change or alter, we remain polar bears in the same concrete enclosure, pacing up and down.

The toxicity of white rich men is more consequential than that of the rest of us, which is largely an acting out, a cry for attention. After all, they are seen to have the power to change all this. Only they don’t.

The consciousness-crushing machine they’ve helped create and service brings them no substantive life benefit anymore. Can a man with £400 million in the bank really be poorer than one with £500 million? How many lives do you need to live to spend that?

It’s the accumulation of meaninglessness; the buying of some kind of dominance and largely imagined status over peers. Checking figures from the spreadsheets on their screens. Seeing how efficient a capitalism no longer tied to production is in taking the resources of communities, monetising it, and transferring it to their accounts.

Basically, wasting their lives away in that most futile of pursuits: making non-spendable money, while the years tick by, and dreams of love and laughter are replaced by a rancid resentment and urge to satisfy the ego-driven need for “influence”.

The continuing war of capital upon consciousness, on what makes us human, continues apace. In an economy that can produce everything at zero cost, the wealthy are coming to the end of their ability to control us by paying wages. Now, this can only be done through the steady erosion of human consciousness.

AI is a backstop here, just in case our spirits rebel in reaction to this, and we cut up too rough. After all, a robot or a computer doesn’t need food. And crucially, it’s not changed by anyone looking at it. It is not self-conscious. But if the system can’t make robots quickly enough to replace us, it’ll try to make us all into robots.

“We’re not allowed to say that” is the factory bleat that resonates throughout social media from all we older, toxic, white working-class males. How excited we get on our dopamine hits, when some papier-mâché faced ponce seems to stick it to the poker-arsed gatekeepers of neoliberal morality with a racist or sexist quip — while they (quietly) endorse an economic system of gross inequity that now almost literally defecates on us. Our participation in “politics” is reduced to watching a Frank Drebin from Police Squad/The Naked Gun look-and-soundalike clownishly annoy some uptight disapprover.

What we certainly are allowed to do, is to be nostalgic. The system plays on our need to make sense of our existence by processing our past, but only in a way that all conflict is taken out of it. Thus, our need to validate our lives in a fake “golden age” haze becomes a de facto endorsement of a system that has limited the potential of those lives.

It encourages us to sit around crying into our beer about how things ain’t what they used to be, reconstructing a collective rose-tinted past designed to sustain us in our dotage, while ensuring this state creeps ever closer as mindless aphorisms — ubiquitous, circular — rot our brains. Fuck that. Pick up a book instead. Let’s get educated. The smarter we are, the less easy it is for the unenlightened greed junkies to fuck things up for us.

The world is changing, let’s change with it, but in ways which make sense to us, not to the blueprint of white-collar fascist controllers or soulless tech nerds who need to get properly laid. (They are the ones who’ve swamped our brains and culture with the shabby dictates of their crass dating algorithms.)

If I could make one solitary plea to white working-class men: do not be servile to the upper classes. They are not your amigos. They blithely dispatched your forefathers to the killing fields, and they haven’t gained any greater appreciation or respect for you since.

In broader terms, Trump-Biden 2 or 3 or 4 will not do anything for the citizens of this world that the first one didn’t. Probably much less. Toxic masculinity is just that, because it exists within a toxic system.