David Lindsay: October 2023

Tuesday, 31 October 2023

American XL Bully

The New York-born Boris Johnson.

The dogs have killed 12 people, and that calls for action.

Johnson has killed rather more people than that, and that calls for rather more action.

And now, the Greek Orthodox Cultural Centre in Gaza. No one could have mistaken it for anything else. That particular Patriarch of Jerusalem is always a Greek. The present one is also a Castleman; if you know, you know. But like those of all the other bearers of that and similar titles, his flock of hundreds of thousands is Palestinian. Go on. Ask how long there have been Christians in Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, the BBC may refer to a mere "explosion", as if the Jabalia refugee camp had blown itself up, but the IDF admits on television, in a Glaswegian accent, that it has killed at least 120 people in the hope that one of them might have been a particular Hamas commander. The view of the neoconservative media is that Glaswegians cannot possibly understand such matters. Clearly, it depends which ones.

He encouraged this war crime, so Keir Starmer is also a war criminal. If this utterly inexperienced politician really is just an opportunist, then who is advising him? Three quarters of people want a ceasefire. Israel has never, ever been a popular cause in Britain, from the circumstances of its creation onwards. Menachem Begin, anyone? A Conservative Government refused to arm it during the Yom Kippur War, while Begin's Government armed Argentina during the Falklands War.

Israel's base in Britain is the majority, but by no means the whole, of a tiny ethnic minority, half of one per cent of the population, few of whom had an ancestor in these Islands 150 years ago, and almost none of whom had one 50 years before that. This evening's demonstration at Liverpool Street station was organised by Jews. The ones who now denounce immigration, "multiculturalism", identity politics, and allegiance to foreign states or transnational communities, are unwittingly hilarious in their lack of self-awareness.

By alienating the unions and by greatly reducing the membership, Starmer has brought the Labour Party to the brink of bankruptcy, so its policy is now probably for sale on the open market. Here we are. 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.

To Tackle The Tumour

I tried to tell you about Boris Johnson. Not that you needed me to. You had not been born yesterday, so you already knew about men who cultivated that sort of persona. The hardest core of his supporters did not like him because they found him funny. They liked him because they could tell that he was as callous as they were.

Still, between the Covid-19 Inquiry, and the famous victory of the campaign to save railway ticket offices, today is a bad day for those who define themselves by their spite towards the old, the poor, the disabled, the chronically ill, the very young, and so on; the people who screamed like toddlers because the pubs were shut even though, in the case of newspaper columnists, they had already been working from home for years. There was a form of something similar on the other side, an assumption that people like delivery drivers still had to go to work while those to whom they were delivering did not. But even so.

That latter attitude has survived the lockdowns, and it has become quite entrenched. No one could more perfectly embody both mentalities, or the single mentality of which they were both manifestations, than Keir Starmer and his entourage. Again, at their core, they are callous. The Kid Starver of Gaza is the Kid Starver of Gospel Oak, even if he has not yet advocated the dropping on the poor parts of Britain of 12,000 tonnes of explosives, barely less than the 13,000 to 15,000 tonnes that were dropped on Hiroshima, and already enough to have killed in three weeks more children than had died in every other armed conflict annually since 2019. The number of children killed in Gaza this month is greater than the number of people killed in the 30 years of the Northern Irish Troubles.

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 Scale New Heights

Ralph Schoellhammer writes:

A report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), published last week, claims that the world will reach peak demand for oil, coal and gas by 2030. This has been seized on by the likes of the World Economic Forum as proof that we’re about to enter a brave, green future, free of evil fossil fuels.

But other developments this month suggest otherwise. At the same time as the IEA and the WEF have been heralding an imminent end to fossil fuels, Germany has been firing up an extra coal facility, energy giants Exxon Mobil and Chevron are doubling down on their fossil-fuel businesses and the wind-power industry has been begging governments for more subsidies and bailouts.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that those anticipating an imminent decline in fossil-fuel use are indulging in wishful thinking. This is largely because they are ignoring the huge geopolitical changes the world is now undergoing. The fact is that global energy markets have been fundamentally transformed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It means that governments and nations are now putting energy and national security above concerns over climate.

The war in Ukraine exposed the reality of the energy transition in Europe. It showed that far from having made any real progress towards developing a green energy infrastructure, European nations had become increasingly reliant on imported fossil fuels from Russia and a few other liquified-natural-gas-exporting countries. Losing access to Russian gas after the invasion of Ukraine put the Europeans into competition with the rest of the world for any molecule of fossil fuel available on the market. And so, since 2022, we have seen European nations leverage their economic power to outbid poorer competitors, particularly in Asia, for oil and gas.

Europe’s scramble for fossil-fuels pushed many of these Asian countries into energy crises of their own. And so, as a result, those same countries, contrary to the green hopes of the IEA or the WEF, have been intensifying their own domestic fossil-fuel industries. Indeed, Pakistan has announced plans to quadruple its coal-fired power capacity, and Indonesia and other regional powers have since followed suit.

Across the world, there’s little sense that fossil-fuel use will be in decline any time soon. Germany’s foolish decision to shut down its nuclear-power plants, and the failure of its wind- and solar-power industry to come anywhere close to meeting its energy needs, has left it in dire straits. That is why German coal plants are now on standby ‘for longer than planned’. After all, no politician, not even one as delusional as Robert Habeck, the Green economy minister, can risk the lights going out all over Germany.

Then there’s China, the real fly in the ointment of those expecting fossil-fuel demand to peak in the next few years. Beijing has certainly made plenty of pledges to reduce carbon emissions. But coal continues to dominate domestic energy supplies. Indeed, China’s coal-power capacity is still expanding as it desperately tries to reduce its dependence on imported petroleum products. After all, most of this fuel comes by sea. And the Communist leadership is well aware of the US Navy’s capacity to intercept or stop these vital maritime supplies. Given the current geopolitical tensions between Washington and Beijing, there is no realistic scenario in which China will give up on its plans for coal use anytime soon.

Even the US is gradually realising that the changed geopolitical conditions will affect its energy policy. At the moment, the Biden administration is trying to square the circle of achieving energy security while simultaneously satisfying the demands of the domestic environmentalist crowd. In practice, this has meant easing sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry in order to gain access to more fuel, while simultaneously making a showboating decision to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline to Canada. In other words, the US is attempting to get more fossil fuels to market while hoping the American left doesn’t notice. Hence Washington encourages drilling for oil and gas everywhere except at home.

Even the most ardent environmental zealot will soon have to reckon with the new geopolitical reality. After all, if Greens in Germany’s governing coalition can be convinced to defend coal plants, there’s every chance American politicians will soon be encouraging fracking and drilling from Alaska to Texas.

Those who think the world will soon be doing without fossil fuels need to get real. Far from entering terminal decline, fossil-fuel use is set to scale new heights.

Truth, Justice and Accountability

Kate Flannery writes:

Halloween for the striking miners brutalised by police at Orgreave and throughout the 1984-5 miners’ strike is a grim reminder to them, the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC) and all of us, of justice delayed and justice denied.

On October 31 2016, after previously tricking us into believing that an Orgreave inquiry was likely, Amber Rudd, then-Tory home secretary, ruled out any kind of investigation into the police riot of June 18 1984.

Seven years on from this decision and almost 40 years since the strike, we continue our essential campaign to keep up the political pressure for a full and authoritative inquiry into government involvement and state-sanctioned brutality at Orgreave.

Many still carry the physical and emotional scars meted out by the police on the orders of the state. Miners attending the Orgreave picket were tricked and ambushed, assaulted and arrested, locked up and fitted up.

Neither the government nor the police have ever accepted responsibility or been held to account for any wrongdoing following the acquittal of 95 miners after the collapse of the prosecution case at trial in 1985.

Offences of police perjury and perverting the course of justice have never been investigated and, at the time, were just a whisper in the mainstream media.

Miners assaulted by the police and arrested during the strike, family members, supporters and activists involved in the miners’ strike looked on from the House of Commons public gallery as Rudd’s horrific inquiry rejection announcement was made.

The spurious, contradictory and unacceptable reasons for not holding an inquiry were that nobody died, there were no miscarriages of justice, it was too long ago, policing had improved since 1984, the police had nothing new to learn and it was not in the public interest to hold any kind of inquiry.

The current Tory government has decided to cover up the decisions and terrifying actions of the 1980s Tory government above truth, justice and accountability.

However, the OTJC continues its fight to expose these injustices and the Tories will not escape from the demons and ghosts of their past.

The Tory government used everything at its disposal to demoralise and demonise the miners and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) throughout the 1984-5 miners’ strike. It was one of the most bitter industrial disputes in Britain’s history.

The strike to protect jobs, industry, communities and trade unions also highlighted the Tory lies about their pit closure plans and their efforts to try to dismantle the trade union movement and organised labour through their privatisation programme and neoliberal ideology.

Despite being up against unrelenting Tory and right-wing media propaganda, the strike not only received phenomenal solidarity at home, with financial and practical support from organisations and people throughout Britain, but from all over the world.

The violent destruction of the British coal industry and mining communities has resulted in the violence of austerity and the inevitable hardship and poverty created by a private market putting profits before people.

The families and communities of ex-miners along with many in Tory Britain are either unemployed or now working in zero-hours, low-paid, insecure jobs in call centres, distribution centres, fast-food outlets and retail parks on the sites the pits once occupied.

Since 2016 there have been significant developments further exposing the need for an Orgreave inquiry. Some very revealing Home Office files and government papers relating to the strike have been released to the National Archives.

Disclosure by the National Police Chiefs Council has revealed the existence and location of Association of Chief Police Officers files relating to Orgreave and the miners’ strike which are embargoed until 2066.

We also understand that director of public prosecutions documents relating to arrested miners are now embargoed until 2071.

An independent approach by the Bishop of Sheffield in 2018 to Rudd’s successor, home secretary Sajid Javid, requested there be an Orgreave independent panel set up, similar to the format and terms of reference of the Hillsborough Independent Panel to help to commence scrutiny and consideration. This was rejected by Javid.

New evidence relating to police malpractice, police spies and the strike has also been revealed in the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry, where the NUM is a core participant.

The Scottish Parliament’s review findings into policing during the 1984-5 miners’ strike, accepted by the Scottish Parliament in 2020, and the ongoing process into a collective pardoning of miners convicted during the strike, has been a significant move towards truth and restorative justice.

The Senedd has also continuously called for an Orgreave inquiry. There have also been various parliamentary petitions and debates over recent years requesting an inquiry.

Our OTJC petition calling for an Orgreave inquiry attracted thousands of signatures in addition to many councils and individuals writing to successive home secretaries and MPs.

A Daily Mirror article also exposed that Rudd did not want an inquiry as it could slur the memory of Thatcher and upset party members.

The deputy leader of the Labour Party recently announced at the TUC that a Labour government would “support a full investigation into the violent events at Orgreave.”

There have also been recent revelations by the former political editor of the Times about comments the late queen is said to have made about her opposition to the police violence at Orgreave.

The OTJC have never received a response to our request to meet the Prime Minister and Home Secretary to discuss all these important new issues.

Holding an Orgreave inquiry is in the public interest and very much a live issue relating to a lack of scrutiny and accountability.

While a large number of documents are in the public domain, in addition to the Independent Police Complaints Commission 2015 findings relating to police conduct at Orgreave, the government has denied any formal and official process to reveal the content of all these relevant documents and materials in any thorough and authoritative way.

Recent punitive and draconian legislation to further restrict our human rights and the right to protest and organise reveal a government determined to be unaccountable and to continue to stifle and criminalise dissent.

We are not deterred and are heartened by the determination of many other social justice campaigns. Many trade unions also continue to expose the instability of our economy.

We stand in solidarity with them as they recruit, campaign, organise, protest and strike. We are all galvanised as they win considerable disputes and continue exposing and challenging exploitative employment practices.

Plans are currently being made to commemorate and celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 1984-5 miners’ strike.

Come to Sheffield on Saturday June 15 2024 and support the annual Orgreave rally.

Bring your banners, comrades and friends and march in solidarity with us to support our call for an inquiry for truth and justice for the miners brutalised by the state and police in 1984.

Least of All

As the world looks elsewhere, Simon Shuster brings a jaw-dropping account of the TIME Person of Last Year:

Volodymyr Zelensky was running late. The invitation to his speech at the National Archives in Washington had gone out to several hundred guests, including congressional leaders and top officials from the Biden Administration. Billed as the main event of his visit in late September, it would give him a chance to inspire U.S. support against Russia with the kind of oratory the world has come to expect from Ukraine’s wartime President. It did not go as planned.

That afternoon, Zelensky’s meetings at the White House and the Pentagon delayed him by more than an hour, and when he finally arrived to begin his speech at 6:41 p.m., he looked distant and agitated. He relied on his wife, First Lady Olena Zelenska, to carry his message of resilience on the stage beside him, while his own delivery felt stilted, as though he wanted to get it over with. At one point, while handing out medals after the speech, he urged the organizer to hurry things along.

The reason, he later said, was the exhaustion he felt that night, not only from the demands of leadership during the war but also the persistent need to convince his allies that, with their help, Ukraine can win. “Nobody believes in our victory like I do. Nobody,” Zelensky told TIME in an interview after his trip. Instilling that belief in his allies, he said, “takes all your power, your energy. You understand? It takes so much of everything.”

It is only getting harder. Twenty months into the war, about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory remains under Russian occupation. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed, and Zelensky can feel during his travels that global interest in the war has slackened. So has the level of international support. “The scariest thing is that part of the world got used to the war in Ukraine,” he says. “Exhaustion with the war rolls along like a wave. You see it in the United States, in Europe. And we see that as soon as they start to get a little tired, it becomes like a show to them: ‘I can’t watch this rerun for the 10th time.’”

Public support for aid to Ukraine has been in decline for months in the U.S., and Zelensky’s visit did nothing to revive it. Some 41% of Americans want Congress to provide more weapons to Kyiv, down from 65% in June, when Ukraine began a major counteroffensive, according to a Reuters survey taken shortly after Zelensky’s departure. That offensive has proceeded at an excruciating pace and with enormous losses, making it ever more difficult for Zelensky to convince partners that victory is around the corner. With the outbreak of war in Israel, even keeping the world’s attention on Ukraine has become a major challenge.

After his visit to Washington, TIME followed the President and his team back to Kyiv, hoping to understand how they would react to the signals they had received, especially the insistent calls for Zelensky to fight corruption inside his own government, and the fading enthusiasm for a war with no end in sight. On my first day in Kyiv, I asked one member of his circle how the President was feeling. The response came without a second’s hesitation: “Angry.”

The usual sparkle of his optimism, his sense of humor, his tendency to liven up a meeting in the war room with a bit of banter or a bawdy joke, none of that has survived into the second year of all-out war. “Now he walks in, gets the updates, gives the orders, and walks out,” says one longtime member of his team. Another tells me that, most of all, Zelensky feels betrayed by his Western allies. They have left him without the means to win the war, only the means to survive it.

But his convictions haven’t changed. Despite the recent setbacks on the battlefield, he does not intend to give up fighting or to sue for any kind of peace. On the contrary, his belief in Ukraine’s ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisers. It is immovable, verging on the messianic. “He deludes himself,” one of his closest aides tells me in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”

Zelensky’s stubbornness, some of his aides say, has hurt their team’s efforts to come up with a new strategy, a new message. As they have debated the future of the war, one issue has remained taboo: the possibility of negotiating a peace deal with the Russians. Judging by recent surveys, most Ukrainians would reject such a move, especially if it entailed the loss of any occupied territory.

Zelensky remains dead set against even a temporary truce. “For us it would mean leaving this wound open for future generations,” the President tells me. “Maybe it will calm some people down inside our country, and outside, at least those who want to wrap things up at any price. But for me, that’s a problem, because we are left with this explosive force. We only delay its detonation.”

For now, he is intent on winning the war on Ukrainian terms, and he is shifting tactics to achieve that. Aware that the flow of Western arms could dry up over time, the Ukrainians have ramped up production of drones and missiles, which they have used to attack Russian supply routes, command centers, and ammunition depots far behind enemy lines. The Russians have responded with more bombing raids against civilians, more missile strikes against the infrastructure that Ukraine will need to heat homes and keep the lights on through the winter.

Zelensky describes it as a war of wills, and he fears that if the Russians are not stopped in Ukraine, the fighting will spread beyond its borders. “I’ve long lived with this fear,” he says. “A third world war could start in Ukraine, continue in Israel, and move on from there to Asia, and then explode somewhere else.” That was his message in Washington: Help Ukraine stop the war before it spreads, and before it’s too late. He worries his audience has stopped paying attention.

At the end of last year, during his previous visit to Washington, Zelensky received a hero’s welcome. The White House sent a U.S. Air Force jet to pick him up in eastern Poland a few days before Christmas and, with an escort from a NATO spy plane and an F-15 Eagle fighter, deliver him to Joint Base Andrews outside the U.S. capital. That evening, Zelensky appeared before a joint session of Congress to declare that Ukraine had defeated Russia “in the battle for minds of the world.”

Watching his speech from the balcony, I counted 13 standing ovations before I stopped keeping track. One Senator told me he could not remember a time in his three decades on Capitol Hill when a foreign leader received such an admiring reception. A few right-wing Republicans refused to stand or applaud for Zelensky, but the votes to support him were bipartisan and overwhelming throughout last year.

This time around, the atmosphere had changed. Assistance to Ukraine had become a sticking point in the debate over the federal budget. One of Zelensky’s foreign policy advisers urged him to call off the trip in September, warning that the atmosphere was too fraught. Congressional leaders declined to let Zelensky deliver a public address on Capitol Hill. His aides tried to arrange an in-person appearance for him on Fox News and an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Neither one came through.

Instead, on the morning of Sept. 21, Zelensky met in private with then House Speaker Kevin McCarthy before making his way to the Old Senate Chamber, where lawmakers grilled him behind closed doors. Most of Zelensky’s usual critics stayed silent in the session; Senator Ted Cruz strolled in more than 20 minutes late. The Democrats, for their part, wanted to understand where the war was headed, and how badly Ukraine needed U.S. support. “They asked me straight up: If we don’t give you the aid, what happens?” Zelensky recalls. “What happens is we will lose.”

Zelensky’s performance left a deep impression on some of the lawmakers present. Angus King, an independent Senator from Maine, recalled the Ukrainian leader telling his audience, “You’re giving money. We’re giving our lives.” But it was not enough. Ten days later, Congress passed a bill to temporarily avert a government shutdown. It included no assistance for Ukraine.

By the time Zelensky returned to Kyiv, the cold of early fall had taken hold, and his aides rushed to prepare for the second winter of the invasion. Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure have damaged power stations and parts of the electricity grid, leaving it potentially unable to meet spikes in demand when the temperature drops. Three of the senior officials in charge of dealing with this problem told me blackouts would likely be more severe this winter, and the public reaction in Ukraine would not be as forgiving. “Last year people blamed the Russians,” one of them says. “This time they’ll blame us for not doing enough to prepare.”

The cold will also make military advances more difficult, locking down the front lines at least until the spring. But Zelensky has refused to accept that. “Freezing the war, to me, means losing it,” he says. Before the winter sets in, his aides warned me to expect major changes in their military strategy and a major shake-up in the President’s team. At least one minister would need to be fired, along with a senior general in charge of the counteroffensive, they said, to ensure accountability for Ukraine’s slow progress at the front. “We’re not moving forward,” says one of Zelensky’s close aides. Some front-line commanders, he continues, have begun refusing orders to advance, even when they came directly from the office of the President. “They just want to sit in the trenches and hold the line,” he says. “But we can’t win a war that way.”

When I raised these claims with a senior military officer, he said that some commanders have little choice in second-guessing orders from the top. At one point in early October, he said, the political leadership in Kyiv demanded an operation to “retake” the city of Horlivka, a strategic outpost in eastern Ukraine that the Russians have held and fiercely defended for nearly a decade. The answer came back in the form of a question: With what? “They don’t have the men or the weapons,” says the officer. “Where are the weapons? Where is the artillery? Where are the new recruits?”

In some branches of the military, the shortage of personnel has become even more dire than the deficit in arms and ammunition. One of Zelensky’s close aides tells me that even if the U.S. and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, “we don’t have the men to use them.”

Since the start of the invasion, Ukraine has refused to release official counts of dead and wounded. But according to U.S. and European estimates, the toll has long surpassed 100,000 on each side of the war. It has eroded the ranks of Ukraine’s armed forces so badly that draft offices have been forced to call up ever older personnel, raising the average age of a soldier in Ukraine to around 43 years. “They’re grown men now, and they aren’t that healthy to begin with,” says the close aide to Zelensky. “This is Ukraine. Not Scandinavia.”

The picture looked different at the outset of the invasion. One branch of the military, known as the Territorial Defense Forces, reported accepting 100,000 new recruits in the first 10 days of all-out war. The mass mobilization was fueled in part by the optimistic predictions of some senior officials that the war would be won in months if not weeks. “Many people thought they could sign up for a quick tour and take part in a heroic victory,” says the second member of the President’s team.

Now recruitment is way down. As conscription efforts have intensified around the country, stories are spreading on social media of draft officers pulling men off trains and buses and sending them to the front. Those with means sometimes bribe their way out of service, often by paying for a medical exemption. Such episodes of corruption within the recruitment system became so widespread by the end of the summer that on Aug. 11 Zelensky fired the heads of the draft offices in every region of the country.

The decision was intended to signal his commitment to fighting graft. But the move backfired, according to the senior military officer, as recruitment nearly ground to a halt without leadership. The fired officials also proved difficult to replace, in part because the reputation of the draft offices had been tainted. “Who wants that job?” the officer asks. “It’s like putting a sign on your back that says: corrupt.”

In recent months, the issue of corruption has strained Zelensky’s relationship with many of his allies. Ahead of his visit to Washington, the White House prepared a list of anti-corruption reforms for the Ukrainians to undertake. One of the aides who traveled with Zelensky to the U.S. told me these proposals targeted the very top of the state hierarchy. “These were not suggestions,” says another presidential adviser. “These were conditions.”

To address the American concerns, Zelensky took some dramatic steps. In early September, he fired his Minister of Defense, Oleksiy Reznikov, a member of his inner circle who had come under scrutiny over corruption in his ministry. Two presidential advisers told me he had not been personally involved in graft. “But he failed to keep order within his ministry,” one says, pointing to the inflated prices the ministry paid for supplies, such as winter coats for soldiers and eggs to keep them fed.

As news of these scandals spread, the President gave strict orders for his staff to avoid the slightest perception of self-enrichment. “Don’t buy anything. Don’t take any vacations. Just sit at your desk, be quiet, and work,” one staffer says in characterizing these directives. Some midlevel officials in the administration complained to me of bureaucratic paralysis and low morale as the scrutiny of their work intensified.

The typical salary in the President’s office, they said, comes to about $1,000 per month, or around $1,500 for more senior officials, far less than they could make in the private sector. “We sleep in rooms that are 2 by 3 meters,” about the size of a prison cell, says Andriy Yermak, the presidential chief of staff, referring to the bunker that Zelensky and a few of his confidants have called home since the start of the invasion. “We’re not out here living the high life,” he tells me in his office. “All day, every day, we are busy fighting this war.”

Amid all the pressure to root out corruption, I assumed, perhaps naively, that officials in Ukraine would think twice before taking a bribe or pocketing state funds. But when I made this point to a top presidential adviser in early October, he asked me to turn off my audio recorder so he could speak more freely. “Simon, you’re mistaken,” he says. “People are stealing like there’s no tomorrow.”

Even the firing of the Defense Minister did not make officials “feel any fear,” he adds, because the purge took too long to materialize. The President was warned in February that corruption had grown rife inside the ministry, but he dithered for more than six months, giving his allies multiple chances to deal with the problems quietly or explain them away. By the time he acted ahead of his U.S. visit, “it was too late,” says another senior presidential adviser. Ukraine’s Western allies were already aware of the scandal by then. Soldiers at the front had begun making off-color jokes about “Reznikov’s eggs,” a new metaphor for corruption. “The reputational damage was done,” says the adviser.

When I asked Zelensky about the problem, he acknowledged its gravity and the threat it poses to Ukraine’s morale and its relationships with foreign partners. Fighting corruption, he assured me, is among his top priorities. He also suggested that some foreign allies have an incentive to exaggerate the problem, because it gives them an excuse to cut off financial support. “It’s not right,” he says, “for them to cover up their failure to help Ukraine by tossing out these accusations.”

But some of the accusations have been hard to deny. In August, a Ukrainian news outlet known for investigating graft, Bihus.info, published a damning report about Zelensky’s top adviser on economic and energy policy, Rostyslav Shurma. The report revealed that Shurma, a former executive in the energy industry, has a brother who co-owns two solar-energy companies with power plants in southern Ukraine. Even after the Russians occupied that part of the country, cutting it off from the Ukrainian power grid, the companies continued to receive state payments for producing electricity.

The anticorruption police, an independent agency known in Ukraine as NABU, responded to the publication by opening an embezzlement probe into Shurma and his brother. But Zelensky did not suspend his adviser. Instead, in late September, Shurma joined the President’s delegation to Washington, where I saw him glad-handing senior lawmakers and officials from the Biden Administration.

Soon after he returned to Kyiv, I visited Shurma in his office on the second floor of the presidential headquarters. The atmosphere inside the compound had changed in the 11 months since my last visit. Sandbags had been removed from many windows as new air-defense systems had arrived in Kyiv, including U.S. Patriot missiles, which reduced the risk of a rocket attack on Zelensky’s office. The hallways remained dark, but soldiers no longer patrolled them with assault rifles, and their sleeping mats and other gear had been cleared away. Some of the President’s aides, including Shurma, had gone back to wearing civilian clothes instead of military garb.

When we sat down inside his office, Shurma told me the allegations against him were part of a political attack paid for by one of Zelensky’s domestic enemies. “A piece of sh-t was thrown,” he says, brushing the front of his starched white shirt. “And now we have to explain that we are clean.” It did not seem to trouble him that his brother is a major player in the industry that Shurma oversees. On the contrary, he spent nearly half an hour trying to convince me of the gold rush that renewable energy would see after the war.

Perhaps, I suggested, amid all the concerns about corruption in Ukraine, it would have been wiser for Shurma to step aside while under investigation for embezzlement, or at least sit out Zelensky’s trip to Washington. He responded with a shrug. “If we do that, tomorrow everybody on the team would be targeted,” he says. “Politics is back, and that’s the problem.”

A few minutes later, Shurma’s phone lit up with an urgent message that forced him to cut our interview short. The President had called his senior aides into a meeting in his office. It was normal on Monday mornings for their team to hold a strategy session to plan out the week. But this one would be different. Over the weekend, Palestinian terrorists had massacred many hundreds of civilians in southern Israel, prompting the Israeli government to impose a blockade of the Gaza Strip and declare war against Hamas. Huddled around a conference table, Zelensky and his aides tried to understand what the tragedy would mean for them. “My mind is racing,” one of them told me when he emerged from the meeting that afternoon. “Things are about to start moving very fast.”

From the earliest days of the Russian invasion, Zelensky’s top priority and perhaps his main contribution to the nation’s defense had been to keep attention on Ukraine and to rally the democratic world to its cause. Both tasks would become a lot harder with the outbreak of war in Israel. The focus of Ukraine’s allies in the U.S. and Europe, and of the global media, quickly shifted to the Gaza Strip.

“It’s logical,” Zelensky tells me. “Of course we lose out from the events in the Middle East. People are dying, and the world’s help is needed there to save lives, to save humanity.” Zelensky wanted to help. After the crisis meeting with aides, he asked the Israeli government for permission to visit their country in a show of solidarity. The answer appeared the following week in Israeli media reports: “The time is not right.”

A few days later, President Biden tried to break through the impasse Zelensky had seen on Capitol Hill. Instead of asking Congress to vote on another stand-alone package of Ukraine aid, Biden bundled it with other priorities, including support for Israel and U.S.-Mexico border security. The package would cost $105 billion, with $61 billion of it for Ukraine. “It’s a smart investment,” Biden said, “that’s going to pay dividends for American security for generations.”

But it was also an acknowledgment that, on its own, Ukraine aid no longer stands much of a chance in Washington. When I asked Zelensky about this, he admitted that Biden’s hands appear to be tied by GOP opposition. The White House, he said, remains committed to helping Ukraine. But arguments about shared values no longer have much sway over American politicians or the people who elect them. “Politics is like that,” he tells me with a tired smile. “They weigh their own interests.”

At the start of the Russian invasion, Zelensky’s mission was to maintain the sympathy of humankind. Now his task is more complicated. In his foreign trips and presidential phone calls, he needs to convince world leaders that helping Ukraine is in their own national interests, that it will, as Biden put it, “pay dividends.” Achieving that gets harder as global crises multiply.

But faced with the alternative of freezing the war or losing it, Zelensky sees no option but to press on through the winter and beyond. “I don’t think Ukraine can allow itself to get tired of war,” he says. “Even if someone gets tired on the inside, a lot of us don’t admit it.” The President least of all.

Just The Ticket

The railway ticket offices have been saved, a magnificent victory for the public organised by, in, through and as the trade unions. Even the Daily Mirror broke with the right-wing Labour machine to support this campaign, and that is almost unheard of; indeed, it sided with the RMT instead, and the RMT has won. For be in no doubt, this triumph owes nothing to the Official Opposition, the Leader of which has today returned to the negative approval rating that he richly deserves.

Jamie Driscoll has been endorsed by the RMT, which has become the lodestar that the NUM used to be, but without the inconvenience of affiliation to the Labour Party. Bring on his Total Transport Network. If Kim McGuinness sought the Labour nomination for the Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner Election on the same day, then she would not even be pretending to believe that she could beat him.

Six Days To Go

See you at Durham Crown Court on Monday 6th November. I am to answer a single charge of having published six blogposts, of which two do not exist, two do not say anything like what is alleged, and two have nothing to do with anything remotely pertinent.

It took the Police two months to arrest me, but to this day no Police Officer has ever set eyes on any of those posts, since I was arrested and charged on simple trust in the word of the complainant, a former Police Officer who claimed to have been shown them by person or persons unknown, and on whose credibility alone depend all of my previous convictions, among much else. At the time of writing, that is the Prosecution's own position, also in writing.

This, this, this and this still apply. In 2021, I did enter guilty pleas, on advice that I should have ignored. It is the biggest regret of my life. I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged. Who says otherwise? Tell me a name.

In 2020, there were no fingerprints. They could not produce the envelope. They said that they had lost it. They were allowed to present some sort of reconstruction, featuring reconstructed prints that may or may not have been mine or any of millions of other people's, if they had been originals, which they were not. This site has linked to Matthew Franklin Cooper's longer than any other has, and he would make a very good fit for my thinktank, for my weekly magazine, for my monthly cultural review, and for my quarterly academic journal.

But all of that was barely part of the Crown Prosecution Service's case. It had told my brief that it was going to drop the whole thing on the first day, but instead it introduced the propensity evidence on which alone I was convicted by a jury that had been explicitly directed to "disregard" the concept of conviction beyond reasonable doubt. That direction made it into Peter Hitchens's column, and while I ought not to discuss private correspondence, he told me that he had heard of two such cases that week. I do wonder whose the other one was.

Thus, the State made itself dependent on the credibility of my latest accuser, whom the Police take so seriously that it took them two months to arrest me, and whom the CPS takes so seriously that it requested in open court, to my solicitor's delighted amazement, that I be put on unconditional bail. Pursuant to that, see you at Durham Crown Court on Monday 6th November.

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 113

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

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

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

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

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 113

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

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a thinktank to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 816

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 816

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, 30 October 2023

Data Protection

"Labour wouldn't sell your NHS data to Palantir," says Wes Streeting, secure in the knowledge that it will have happened before he came to office. He will give no commitment to reverse it.

Streeting is openly in politics for the express purpose of privatising the entire NHS in England, and as the last reshuffle showed, he has reached the cap on his ambitions in view of the heavily public school Labour intake that the last three by-election victories have already begun. He would be Keir Starmer's only ever Health Secretary.

In Peaceful Liberty

Rishi Sunak should be invited to condemn the statement, "We won't rest until we have justice, until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty." Keir Starmer has done so by withdrawing the whip from Andy McDonald, who should announce his candidacy for Mayor of the Tees Valley. Woman of the Day, Louise Ellman, should be asked to list her achievements in 22 years as the MP for one of the safest seats in the House.

And recalling the implicit suggestion that there were more Trotskyists in Britain than people in the Army, since that many had voted for Jeremy Corbyn to be Leader of the Labour Party, Suella Braverman should be made to explain what she thought that half a million Hamas supporters in London alone, with a million or more in the country as a whole, had been doing hitherto. As, again, should 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 on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

19 Weeks On

Nominations have been closed for 19 weeks, so when is the election?

If you know, you know.

One Week To Go

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 112

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 112

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

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 815

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 815

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Sunday, 29 October 2023

Flood Them Out

This site's first reference to flooding in Lanchester is from 5th July 2012, when, to her great credit, Pat Glass had raised the matter at Prime Minister's Questions, mentioning Lanchester by name.

Yet here we are again. Damn right, I am standing for Parliament again.

Lease Off, Life

Try and explain leasehold to anyone from almost anywhere else in the world. Then give three cheers for the three-term Labour Government that never abolished it. And note carefully how feudalism has morphed into global capitalism, so that nostalgia for the former does not ultimately provide the basis necessary for resistance to the latter. Leasehold should simply be abolished. People who wonder why I keep up the politics, no one else is saying things like this.

And With All Your Mind

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

I do not resile from this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this,this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this or this. Rather, I reiterate every word of each and all of them. There was no cathedral sex party. The move from the old Bishop's House to the new one made a profit. There was no allegation of sexual assault against Bishop Robert Byrne CO, who should sue every media outlet that had suggested one. Although I am often asked, I know neither where nor how Bishop Byrne is. But I am often asked. I am not doing Marko Rupnik, because that would involve siding with the people who had done nothing for Bishop Byrne. They and Rupnik can all go to Hell in the same handcart.

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

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

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 111

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 111

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

This post will appear daily until further notice.