Friday, 11 August 2023

Health and Safety at Work

Robert Jenrick was so bent that even Boris Johnson had to sack him, and Suella Braverman was reappointed a week after she had had to resign due to a major breach of security. They ordered the painting over of a mural of Mickey Mouse because he was too close to home.

Of course they knew that there was Legionella on the Bibby Stockholm, but they were too stupid to realise that the staff would also be able to catch it. They ignored the Fire Brigades Union because it was left-wing, but the Prison Officers' Association is no less so, it is unburdened by affiliation to what remains of the Labour Party, and the former Prison Officers who are staffing what is supposedly not a prison ship are presumably still in it, but no longer under a ban on industrial action.

Speaking of industrial action, the existential crisis in the NHS is not being caused by the doctors' strike. The doctors' strike is being caused by the existential crisis in the NHS. The Labour Party that refuses to back the strikes recently objected to the further privatisation of England's NHS only on the grounds that it ought to have been announced sooner and that it ought to have been going further.

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.

8 comments:

  1. Kinnock was on Newsnight letting Alexander Downer set the agenda directly and through Kirsty Wark.

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  2. Boris Johnson was never bent. What have they ever got on him, other than the ludicrous revelation that he once stood close to a birthday cake when the rest of the country was under ludicrous rules?

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    1. His rules. And that was hardly his first incident. He has been doing these things for 50 years.

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  3. In other words, they got nothing on him. Scotland Yard’s “Prosecco Squad” (or Cake Squad) is the stuff of satire, not a serious country. In Italy, where former leaders like Berlusconi are actually in with the mafia and sleeping with prostitutes, they laugh long and hard at the British definition of a “political scandal.”

    Who knows, Johnson may even have stood near a sausage roll…

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  4. In the EU, Commissioners were found with suitcases full of cash bribes from Qatar, the corruption and organised crime ties of the likes of France’s Chirac and Italy’s Berlusconi are the stuff of legend while here in dear old Blighty, a PM standing near a birthday cake (with people he worked with every day anyway) is deemed such a scandal he is removed as a PM and an MP.

    At least it shows the British, uniquely in Europe, still believe in the rule of law that we regard any of this as a scandal at all. In mainland Europe, they laugh at the English and their quaint definition of a “political scandal.”

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    1. Oh, there was a lot more going on than that.

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