After his meeting in the White House with a truculent Trump and JD Vance, Zelenskyy headed to London for a summit of 19 leaders, including Justin Trudeau, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Nato chief Mark Rutte. This time there were no verbal fisticuffs, and with hugs all round, Zelenskyy basked in the company of friends.

Donald Trump criticised European leaders including Sir Keir Starmer on Monday, deriding their weekend talks over Ukraine and launching a furious new attack on Volodymyr Zelensky for saying a peace deal is still “very, very far away”.

In what could be a major setback in ending Russia’s war on Ukraine, the US president fired off a tirade just as the prime minister was on his feet in the Commons insisting America was vital, sincere and indispensable in the path to peace.

Sir Keir rejected calls from MPs for Britain to shun Mr Trump and America after last week’s extraordinary ambush on Mr Zelensky in the White House Oval Office.

However, in a hint the US could be prepared to withdraw military aid to Ukraine, the president said in a social media post: “This is the worst statement that could have been made by Zelensky, and America will not put up with it for much longer! This guy doesn’t want there to be peace as long as he has America’s backing.”

And in a sideswipe at Sir Keir and other European leaders, he added: “In the meeting they had with Zelensky, [they] stated flatly that they cannot do the job without the US – probably not a great statement to have been made in terms of a show of strength against Russia. What are they thinking?”

    Trump says ‘no room left’ to avoid massive tax hikes on Canadian and Mexican importsTrump says ‘no room left’ to avoid massive tax hikes on Canadian and Mexican imports

Later on Monday night, Mr Trump warned Mr Zelensky “won’t be around very long” if he did not end the war soon.

At a press conference at the White House, Mr Trump told reporters: “The deal could be made very fast. It should not be that hard a deal to make. Now, maybe somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, and if somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, I think that person won’t be around very long.”

It was a deepening of the diplomatic crisis that began on Friday when Mr Zelensky was asked to leave the White House after being bullied in front of the world’s media by Mr Trump and vice-president JD Vance.

But he appears to be at odds with the French president Emmanuel Macron about the “coalition of the willing” that Britain and France are meant to lead.

When he came to the House of Commons to outline his proposals, the prime minister received praise for his diplomacy but also a number of awkward questions about his support for Mr Trump.

Starmer updated MPs following intensive diplomatic efforts around the Ukraine crisis

Starmer updated MPs following intensive diplomatic efforts around the Ukraine crisis (PA Wire)

The SNP and Tory shadow minister Alicia Kearns called for the invitation from the King for a second state visit – which Sir Keir brandished at the White House last week – to be rescinded.

The prime minister rejected those demands and warned MPs that any solution to Ukraine and European security would need to be achieved by working “more closely” with the US president.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said the UK needs to “reduce our dependency on the United States” as he fears “that President Trump is not a reliable ally with respect to Russia”.

He told the Commons: “We’ve entered a new era, one where the United States prefers to align itself with tyrants like Putin rather than its democratic partners. We need to reduce our dependency on the United States because I say with deep regret that I fear that President Trump is not a reliable ally with respect to Russia.”

Sir Keir said: “I welcome the understanding from our dialogue that our two nations will work together on security arrangements for a lasting peace in Ukraine. I also welcome the president’s continued commitment to that peace, which nobody in this House should doubt for a second is sincere.”

He added: “Our defence, our security, our intelligence are completely intertwined, no two countries are as close as our two countries and it’d be a huge mistake at a time like this to suggest that any weakening of that link is the way forward for security and defence in Europe.”

Emily Thornberry is critical of the decision to cut the overseas aid budget

Emily Thornberry is critical of the decision to cut the overseas aid budget (PA Archive)

He also avoided answering a question about Britain’s ambassador to the US, Lord Mandelson, making statements in support of Mr Trump that defence minister Luke Pollard said did not reflect government policy. The diplomat claimed that Mr Trump’s mineral deal initiative to end the war was “the only show in town”.

Sir Keir said: “The plan is clear, we’re working, particularly with the French, I’ve had extensive conversations with President Macron over the last week, intensively over the weekend, talking to Ukraine as well, those are going on at the moment.”

In a further clash, he accused Nigel Farage of “fawning over Putin” when the Reform UK leader asked him how many British troops would be stationed in Ukraine.

The prime minister also faced a backlash from senior Labour MPs over his decision to cut the overseas aid budget to fund an increase in defence spending.

The post Keir Starmer Tries to Ride Two Horses Simultaneously appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street – OGL 3

“The entire clown show caught up with us.”

– Anonymous senior Tory speaking after the election result

Last week the Conservative Party received an absolute drubbing in the UK general election.

The Tories had their worst performance in their 190-year history, losing almost half their share of the vote and 252 parliamentary seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, surpassing their previously greatest electoral catastrophe, when the Balfour government went under in 1906, losing 246 seats. There are now 121 Conservative MPs, and no Tory MPs in Central London, Wales, Oxfordshire (one of the leafy shires that were previous Tory strongholds), and Cornwall (which has had at least one Tory MP since 1924).

The Tory campaign was woefully inept. Rishi Sunak, hardly the most prepossessing of physical specimens, held its launch outside the prime minister’s residence in Downing Street during a torrential downpour, while spurning an umbrella—he ended-up looking like a tormented drowning rat.

A Sunak campaign visit to Titanic yard in Belfast (near where the Titanic was built, but now populated by luxury condominiums), was an open invitation to journalists to ask if he was the captain of a sinking ship.

Another Sunak campaign stump at Silverstone, the UK’s Formula One racing venue, simply brought to mind the contrast between the sleekly high-performing racing cars and a rickety Tory campaign with wheels that were falling off.

Sunak also made the terrible mistake of bailing on the second-half of the 80^thyear commemorative D-Day ceremony in Normandy. The Tories pay lip service to the notion that they are the patriotic party, and Sunak’s refusal to be at what was probably the last such D-Day commemoration attended by aging veterans, created a barely concealed racist hullabaloo in the rightwing media (with snide insinuations about Sunak’s brown skin and Indian immigrant background, overlooking the fact that 87,000 colonial Indian soldiers died fighting for the Allies in World War II). Sunak was taught the hard way that no one can be a Tory leader with being heedful of perceived patriotic obsequies.

Sunak’s campaign was not helped by the fact that several prominent Tories, seeing the proverbial writing on the wall, decided to retire rather than contest the election, while others who remained election candidates simply went into hiding. As a result the Tory media campaign was fronted by second-raters who were unrecognizable to all but the most dedicated political aficionados, and they were of course no match for the sharpest TV and radio interviewers. (Unlike the US, the top British media interviewers do not pose “soft ball” questions— Sam Donaldson, and Helen Thomas in the White House press room, were probably the last US media figures seriously to challenge politicians on screen and in the air, and their prime years were during the Reagan, Bush I and II, and Clinton presidencies.)

As a last straw, the closing days of the election campaign saw disclosures of Tory officials and politicians using insider knowledge to bet on the setting of the date of the general election. This is now the subject of a police investigation.

Bereft of ideas, and mired in sleaze and corruption, the Tories resorted to a “war on woke”. Alas for them this only served to wake up the British public.

With regard to the election itself, the low turnout of 59.9% was a sharp decrease from the 67.3% that voted in the 2019 election– it was the lowest turnout at a general election since 2001, when just 59.4% voted, this being the lowest percentage since before World War II.

Labour’s vote-share was just under 34% (though it won 64% of the seats), the lowest score for a majority-winning party since 1832, and not much greater than the 30.7% that Tory John Major received in 1997, when he was annihilated by New Labour’s Tony Blair. Blair won 43.2% of the vote and 418 seats (to the Tories 165 seats). In 2024 the Tory vote-share plunged from Boris Johnson’s 2019 44% to Sunak’s 24%.

These figures indicate overall that Starmer’s majority was wide but relatively shallow. For one thing, Labour did not achieve the 253-seat super-majority that Blair did in 1997. So what preempted a more deep-rooted victory?

Obviously the above-mentioned low turnout played a part—historically Tory voters, more prosperous in general and more resolute than Labour supporters in defending their class interests, turn up in proportionally greater numbers at polling stations.

Labour also benefitted from gains made by the hard-right Reform, which ate significantly into the Tory vote. Although it only won 5 seats,

Reform came 2nd in 103 constituencies, primarily those which had voted for Brexit in 2016 (and thus Tory in 2019). Over 4 million people voted for Reform, giving it 14% of the total vote. The vagaries of the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system translated this into a mere 5 Commons seats (including one for its leader Nigel Farage), but Farage now has a base from which he can capitalize even further on Tory disarray, as well as potential dissatisfaction with Labour on immigration (Reform’s pet theme, based largely on approximations of Schroedinger’s Cat fantasies about “furriners” taking jobs from native Brits, but also somehow coming over to milk the UK’s unemployment benefits system). Something like a challenge to Labour on this issue is bound to happen, given that Labour has pledged to reform the UK’s chaotic immigration structure to make it fairer and more coherent, and shows no signs of faltering in this undertaking. There is nothing altruistic about this stance, since everyone knows that voters with proximate immigrant backgrounds tend to vote Labour.

The combined Tory–Reform vote, at 38%, was larger than Labour’s 34% share. So in the end was the result more of an anti-Conservative vote, than a pro-Labour one?

Another contributing factor to Labour’s landslide but shallow electoral outcome was due to areas with a Muslim electorate of 20+% who baulked at Starmer’s Zionism regarding Gaza– Labour lost 5 seats to pro-Palestinian candidates who stood as Independents, including the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had been expelled from the party by Starmer.

Labour gains were also enabled by the Scottish National Party’s implosion in Scotland. The SNP, which won 48 seats in 2019, won 9 this time, while Labour, who won a single Scottish seat in 2019, now has 37. This creates a conundrum for independence-seeking Scots, who number around 45% consistently in opinion polls, but who now have no viable political party to further this aspiration.

Yet another factor contributing to the Tory defeat was the strongest Lib Dem showing since 1923. The Lib Dems got 71 seats, at the expense of the Tories in the main, indicating fairly clearly that many voters who were anti-Tory preferred the Lib Dems to Labour.

The Greens, more progressive than the now centrist or even centre-right Labour, increased their vote share from less than 3% to 7%, but  gained a mere 4 seats. The Greens came second behind Labour in dozens of seats, thus highlighting yet again the fundamental unfairness of the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system.

Green voters are largely  in urban areas with an often varied and younger electorate. Many live in rental properties, often carrying the burden of student debt, and with a large proportion in precarious jobs. Labour, with its greater determination in catering to capitalist interests and the asset-manager class in particular, poses less appeal for this kind of individual.

As a result, more Labour MPs in urban areas will have to compete for votes with the more progressive Greens. This will be reflected in growing incentives to tax the wealthy, enhancing public ownership of now privatized industries, the abolition of tuition fees, greater investment by the government, the amelioration of child poverty, and

stronger measures in addressing the climate crisis. Labour will not have the alibi of treating the Tories and Reform as its sole electoral competitors, thereby competing with them in endless rounds of  spurious measures to thwart asylum seekers and in race-to-the bottom cuts in public expenditures.

14 years of Conservative rule brought Brits cruel austerity, ruinous Brexit, Boris Johnson’s Covid-era Partygate, Covid pandemic PPE corruption, economic decline, the proliferation of food banks, the Grenfell Tower fire disaster, and so forth. The Tories came to power in 2010, and everything in 2024 has become worse for most Brits.

“Change” was Keir Starmer’s constant refrain during the campaign. At the same time, all he offered voters were Tory-lite policies and retro-patriotism. The fare offered was so light that the Murdoch-owned media endorsed him. So what is the context in which “change” can occur?

In addition to problems caused by harmful Tory policies since 2010, the UK faces longer-term and more deeply entrenched structural problems.

Wage growth from 2010 to 2020 was the lowest over any peacetime 10-year period since the Napoleonic Wars. The UK’s annual growth rate in productivity since 2007 has been a paltry  0.4%, its lowest over an equivalent period since 1826.

Per capita GDP has grown by a feeble 4.3% over the past 16 years, compared with 46% in the previous 16 years. Moreover, GDP growth over the past few years has been generated almost exclusively by the size of overall population growth. That is to say, by the immigration that both Labour and the Tories say they want to curtail.

Tory governments go by the mantra of  low taxes, but this government has had to increase taxes to a level not seen in almost 75 years, when the UK was still suffering from economic burdens incurred in World War II. A flatlining economy reduces the government’s revenue streams, and the reduction of these streams has had to be countered by increased taxation.

The average annual real wage has fallen by about $14,000 below the level existing before the financial crash of 2008.

The new Labour government will have to confront these seeming intractables. Keir Starmer has said Labour needs two terms in office to remedy these problems. He is being optimistic.

The UK’s economic problems are long-term and systemic. They can’t be dealt with in the span of a single government’s two (or even more) terms in office.

The social contract which existed from the end of World War II until it was dissolved by Margaret Thatcher ensured that wages kept up with productivity. That generation had decent incomes, and assets (especially housing) were reasonably priced.

What came with Thatcher, however, was a switch of emphasis from the productive economy to financialization– basically speculation and arbitrage on asset prices. Asset prices were jacked up in a series of speculative bubbles to create “wealth,  for those possessing assets.

But inflating asset prices also meant that they were increasingly out of reach for a newer generation trying to acquire them for the first time.

An entire generation– a recent Guardian piece called it ‘Generation Rent’ (though rents are unaffordable for young families in 66% of the UK) — has been wiped-out when it comes to having a long-term stake in the economy.

To remedy this at least 2 things will have to happen: (1) the UK’s productive economy will have to be restored: and (2) the UK’s archaic and dysfunctional political system will have to be realigned drastically if the first objective is to be achieved.

Nothing proposed by Starmer, who uses the word “delivery” as often as “change”, comes remotely near to delivering on these 2 objectives.

The post The UK’s Major Political Shifts appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: Judicial Office, UK – CC BY-SA 4.0

Two years ago CounterPunch published a piece by me on the greatest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

Between 1999 and 2015 several hundred sub-post masters (SPMs) were accused and in many cases convicted of negligence or crimes involving theft, false accounting and fraud, based on flawed information – defective to the point of being haywire– provided by the multinational Fujitsu-installed Horizon computer system. The Fujitsu-Horizon system wrongly indicated that money had somehow “gone missing” from numerous SPM branch accounts. The accused victims were required to pay back the missing money or face prosecution.

Unlike the US, these SPM-run post offices are often attached to general stores of various kinds, and thus are the lifeline of small many towns and villages. British post offices also function as banks (most likely the only bank in a village), so they are where people go to collect their pensions, as well as to withdraw and deposit money, and so forth.

Numerous such small post offices were closed while their SPMs faced spurious “investigations” by post office apparatchiks with powers of criminal investigation and prosecution in England and Wales, thanks to an archaic law going back to 1683. The assumption behind these heavy-handed “investigations” was that accused SPMs were guilty unless proven innocent. So much for British “justice”, where of course someone is, in principle, innocent until proven guilty.

More than 900 SPMs were convicted using evidence from Horizon computers, including 700 convictions obtained by the Post Office (PO) between 1999 and 2015. Some of those convicted committed suicide, got divorced, were bankrupted, or suffered mental breakdowns. So far 103 convictions have been quashed and new parliamentary legislation is being introduced to overturn the convictions of SPMs prosecuted between September 1996 and December 2018.

To update my March 2022 CounterPunch piece, in which I mentioned the start, after much pressure, of an official inquiry, chaired by a retired high court judge. This inquiry is continuing, and what it has shown so far is utterly damning.

The inquiry would not have happened but for the doggedness of the SPM Alan Bates, now the subject of a TV drama.

Bates was an SPM for five and a half years before he was sacked for being “unmanageable” and as “someone who struggled with accounting”. Bates refused a plea bargain, and was met throughout with repeated lies (“no other SPMs have your problem with the Horizon system”, even though 29 bugs were identified as early as 1999 in the Horizon system) and stonewalling. Instead of addressing his concerns, the PO and its legal team only saw Bates as a PR risk, who had to be managed accordingly.

Bates, however, fought back stubbornly, and his unremitting persistence led to the current inquiry. Even this inquiry has been subjected to PO stonewalling.

When the PO waited until the last minute before submitting thousands of documents of potential evidentiary significance in July 2023, a Counsel to the Inquiry, Jason Beer, said: “It is of course grossly unsatisfactory, to be told at 10.32 pm that there are 4,767 documents that are at least potentially relevant to a witness who is being called 11 hours and 28 minutes later.” 

In 2012 the forensic accountants Second Sight were appointed by the PO, together with a small group of MPs and the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA), to investigate Horizon.

In February 2015 the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee was told by Angela van den Bogerd, head of partnerships at the PO, that the PO had provided Second Sight with all the information the PO said would be provided at the outset.

But Ian Henderson, the lead investigator for Second Sight, told the committee that he had not received access to prosecution files, which he needed to verify his suspicions that the PO had brought cases against SPMs with “inadequate investigation and inadequate evidence”. Henderson went on to say these files were still outstanding 18 months after they had been requested.

The inquiry lacks prosecutorial power, but can submit its findings to the police for possible legal action.

Stephen Bradshaw was a PO investigator who provided evidence to the Inquiry. The Guardian sketch writer John Crace covered Bradshaw’s time in the witness stand, and Crace is worth quoting at length (given that the PO was withholding files from Second Sight 18 months after they had been requested):

“Bradshaw was defensive…. Blake [a counsel for the Inquiry] began by taking him through his written statement to the inquiry. Did he not now regret that he had not reflected a little more on the cases he had investigated? Had paused to think and join the dots? Bradshaw shook his head. It was well above his pay grade to be asked to think. He just kept his head down and did as he was told.

OK, said Blake. Well, allow me to help you break the habit of a lifetime. Maybe we could just run through the evidence and you tell me what comes into your mind….. So you’ve said that you never had any idea that the Horizon system was defective. Now let me take you through a document trail that shows you were well aware of the Computer Weekly story back in 2009 and that many operators were reporting problems.

Oh, that. Bradshaw sat back. No. None of that counted. Because the only knowledge that really counted was what Post Office bosses were telling him. Anything he might have picked up himself was just gossip. Trivia. Unreliable evidence. Knowledge was not really knowledge until he had been told it was genuine knowledge by Paula [Paula Vennells, the PO CEO at that time] and the teams…. And at no time did the Post Office bosses tell him there was a problem, so in his mind there wasn’t a problem”.

Bradshaw, like his colleagues and bosses, showed himself to be a gutless “get the job done and pick up your annual bonus” company man.

Alan Bates, now 69, who has had his claim for full compensation rejected by the PO, gave his evidence to the inquiry last week.

He was poised and collected in his testimony, while describing PO officials as “thugs in suits”, and Ed Davey (the former PO minister who now leads the Liberal Democrats) as “disappointing and offensive” after his meeting with Davey. Davey reportedly only met with Bates when informed that the sacked SPM’s campaign was about to be the subject of a forthcoming TV drama.

The inquiry has shown that what went on was a classic case of passing the buck.

The PO’s line was that it had been misled by Fujitsu and took Fujitsu’s assurances at face value. Vennells (then-PO CEO) wrote in a letter to the parliamentary Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee: “The message that the [PO] Board and I were consistently given by Fujitsu, from the highest levels of the company, was that while, like any IT system, Horizon was not perfect and had a limited life-span, it was fundamentally sound.” Vennells went on: “Fujitsu’s then CEO when I raised {the issue of the system’s security] with him said that the system was ‘like Fort Knox‘.”

One of the goals of the Inquiry will be to ascertain exactly what transpired between the so far not-exactly-forthcoming Fujitsu and the evidently duplicitous PO. Each wants to throw the other under the proverbial bus.

The government told Bates it had an “arm’s length” relationship with the PO, and maintained throughout that it had been misled by the PO’s leadership. In fact there was back-door communication between the PO and the government (the sole shareholder in the PO), something they withheld from Bates.

Two key protagonists—Davey and Paula Vennells (who stood down as CEO in 2020)—have yet to give their evidence to the Inquiry.

We can expect Davey and his lawyers to stick to his “the government is arm’s length with regard to the PO” line and to maintain that he had trusted Vennells & co, who then misled him about what was going on. This time it will the government’s turn to throw the PO under the bus.

Vennells, still the PO CEO, after the PO started conceding court cases, apologized in December 2019 to SPMs caught-up in the scandal, saying: “I am truly sorry we were unable to find both a solution and a resolution outside of litigation and for the distress this caused.”

The PO incurred massive liabilities during Vennells’ CEO tenure directly as a result of the Horizon scandal—these were estimated in early 2024 to be £160m/US$202m in compensation and £298m/US$376m in current legal fees already paid (with more fees expected to come), and £1bn/US$1.26bn of public funds set aside for future compensation.

Vennells’ forthcoming evidence at the Inquiry is bound to be a box-office draw.

Fujitsu will also await the fate of its other contracts with the UK government. It has done well so far and is confirmed to have held contracts worth more than £3.4bn/US$4.3bn linked to the UK Treasury since 2019.

Some of these contracts were awarded after the December 2019 legal judgment over the company’s software, which found that “bugs, errors and defects” in Fujitsu’s Horizon system could cause shortfalls in Post Office branch accounts.

Clearly Fujitsu continues to find favour with the Tory government, even though it informed the Cabinet Office in January 2024 that it would not bid for UK government contracts until the conclusion of the public inquiry into this scandal.

It will also be interesting to see who ends up in jail when this tragedy for the SPMs and their families is finally over (if indeed it ever will be).

The post “British Justice”? Hundreds of Subpostmasters Ask, What’s That? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: Judicial Office, UK – CC BY-SA 4.0

Two years ago CounterPunch published a piece by me on the greatest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

Between 1999 and 2015 several hundred sub-post masters (SPMs) were accused and in many cases convicted of negligence or crimes involving theft, false accounting and fraud, based on flawed information – defective to the point of being haywire– provided by the multinational Fujitsu-installed Horizon computer system. The Fujitsu-Horizon system wrongly indicated that money had somehow “gone missing” from numerous SPM branch accounts. The accused victims were required to pay back the missing money or face prosecution.

Unlike the US, these SPM-run post offices are often attached to general stores of various kinds, and thus are the lifeline of small many towns and villages. British post offices also function as banks (most likely the only bank in a village), so they are where people go to collect their pensions, as well as to withdraw and deposit money, and so forth.

Numerous such small post offices were closed while their SPMs faced spurious “investigations” by post office apparatchiks with powers of criminal investigation and prosecution in England and Wales, thanks to an archaic law going back to 1683. The assumption behind these heavy-handed “investigations” was that accused SPMs were guilty unless proven innocent. So much for British “justice”, where of course someone is, in principle, innocent until proven guilty.

More than 900 SPMs were convicted using evidence from Horizon computers, including 700 convictions obtained by the Post Office (PO) between 1999 and 2015. Some of those convicted committed suicide, got divorced, were bankrupted, or suffered mental breakdowns. So far 103 convictions have been quashed and new parliamentary legislation is being introduced to overturn the convictions of SPMs prosecuted between September 1996 and December 2018.

To update my March 2022 CounterPunch piece, in which I mentioned the start, after much pressure, of an official inquiry, chaired by a retired high court judge. This inquiry is continuing, and what it has shown so far is utterly damning.

The inquiry would not have happened but for the doggedness of the SPM Alan Bates, now the subject of a TV drama.

Bates was an SPM for five and a half years before he was sacked for being “unmanageable” and as “someone who struggled with accounting”. Bates refused a plea bargain, and was met throughout with repeated lies (“no other SPMs have your problem with the Horizon system”, even though 29 bugs were identified as early as 1999 in the Horizon system) and stonewalling. Instead of addressing his concerns, the PO and its legal team only saw Bates as a PR risk, who had to be managed accordingly.

Bates, however, fought back stubbornly, and his unremitting persistence led to the current inquiry. Even this inquiry has been subjected to PO stonewalling.

When the PO waited until the last minute before submitting thousands of documents of potential evidentiary significance in July 2023, a Counsel to the Inquiry, Jason Beer, said: “It is of course grossly unsatisfactory, to be told at 10.32 pm that there are 4,767 documents that are at least potentially relevant to a witness who is being called 11 hours and 28 minutes later.” 

In 2012 the forensic accountants Second Sight were appointed by the PO, together with a small group of MPs and the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA), to investigate Horizon.

In February 2015 the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee was told by Angela van den Bogerd, head of partnerships at the PO, that the PO had provided Second Sight with all the information the PO said would be provided at the outset.

But Ian Henderson, the lead investigator for Second Sight, told the committee that he had not received access to prosecution files, which he needed to verify his suspicions that the PO had brought cases against SPMs with “inadequate investigation and inadequate evidence”. Henderson went on to say these files were still outstanding 18 months after they had been requested.

The inquiry lacks prosecutorial power, but can submit its findings to the police for possible legal action.

Stephen Bradshaw was a PO investigator who provided evidence to the Inquiry. The Guardian sketch writer John Crace covered Bradshaw’s time in the witness stand, and Crace is worth quoting at length (given that the PO was withholding files from Second Sight 18 months after they had been requested):

“Bradshaw was defensive…. Blake [a counsel for the Inquiry] began by taking him through his written statement to the inquiry. Did he not now regret that he had not reflected a little more on the cases he had investigated? Had paused to think and join the dots? Bradshaw shook his head. It was well above his pay grade to be asked to think. He just kept his head down and did as he was told.

OK, said Blake. Well, allow me to help you break the habit of a lifetime. Maybe we could just run through the evidence and you tell me what comes into your mind….. So you’ve said that you never had any idea that the Horizon system was defective. Now let me take you through a document trail that shows you were well aware of the Computer Weekly story back in 2009 and that many operators were reporting problems.

Oh, that. Bradshaw sat back. No. None of that counted. Because the only knowledge that really counted was what Post Office bosses were telling him. Anything he might have picked up himself was just gossip. Trivia. Unreliable evidence. Knowledge was not really knowledge until he had been told it was genuine knowledge by Paula [Paula Vennells, the PO CEO at that time] and the teams…. And at no time did the Post Office bosses tell him there was a problem, so in his mind there wasn’t a problem”.

Bradshaw, like his colleagues and bosses, showed himself to be a gutless “get the job done and pick up your annual bonus” company man.

Alan Bates, now 69, who has had his claim for full compensation rejected by the PO, gave his evidence to the inquiry last week.

He was poised and collected in his testimony, while describing PO officials as “thugs in suits”, and Ed Davey (the former PO minister who now leads the Liberal Democrats) as “disappointing and offensive” after his meeting with Davey. Davey reportedly only met with Bates when informed that the sacked SPM’s campaign was about to be the subject of a forthcoming TV drama.

The inquiry has shown that what went on was a classic case of passing the buck.

The PO’s line was that it had been misled by Fujitsu and took Fujitsu’s assurances at face value. Vennells (then-PO CEO) wrote in a letter to the parliamentary Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee: “The message that the [PO] Board and I were consistently given by Fujitsu, from the highest levels of the company, was that while, like any IT system, Horizon was not perfect and had a limited life-span, it was fundamentally sound.” Vennells went on: “Fujitsu’s then CEO when I raised {the issue of the system’s security] with him said that the system was ‘like Fort Knox‘.”

One of the goals of the Inquiry will be to ascertain exactly what transpired between the so far not-exactly-forthcoming Fujitsu and the evidently duplicitous PO. Each wants to throw the other under the proverbial bus.

The government told Bates it had an “arm’s length” relationship with the PO, and maintained throughout that it had been misled by the PO’s leadership. In fact there was back-door communication between the PO and the government (the sole shareholder in the PO), something they withheld from Bates.

Two key protagonists—Davey and Paula Vennells (who stood down as CEO in 2020)—have yet to give their evidence to the Inquiry.

We can expect Davey and his lawyers to stick to his “the government is arm’s length with regard to the PO” line and to maintain that he had trusted Vennells & co, who then misled him about what was going on. This time it will the government’s turn to throw the PO under the bus.

Vennells, still the PO CEO, after the PO started conceding court cases, apologized in December 2019 to SPMs caught-up in the scandal, saying: “I am truly sorry we were unable to find both a solution and a resolution outside of litigation and for the distress this caused.”

The PO incurred massive liabilities during Vennells’ CEO tenure directly as a result of the Horizon scandal—these were estimated in early 2024 to be £160m/US$202m in compensation and £298m/US$376m in current legal fees already paid (with more fees expected to come), and £1bn/US$1.26bn of public funds set aside for future compensation.

Vennells’ forthcoming evidence at the Inquiry is bound to be a box-office draw.

Fujitsu will also await the fate of its other contracts with the UK government. It has done well so far and is confirmed to have held contracts worth more than £3.4bn/US$4.3bn linked to the UK Treasury since 2019.

Some of these contracts were awarded after the December 2019 legal judgment over the company’s software, which found that “bugs, errors and defects” in Fujitsu’s Horizon system could cause shortfalls in Post Office branch accounts.

Clearly Fujitsu continues to find favour with the Tory government, even though it informed the Cabinet Office in January 2024 that it would not bid for UK government contracts until the conclusion of the public inquiry into this scandal.

It will also be interesting to see who ends up in jail when this tragedy for the SPMs and their families is finally over (if indeed it ever will be).

The post “British Justice”? Hundreds of Subpostmasters Ask, What’s That? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: Mайкл Гиммельфарб (Mike Gimelfarb) – Public Domain

The so-called “mother of parliaments” in London is currently in over-drive generating a plethora of responses to widespread dysfunction, ranging from side-splitting guffaws to a weary cynicism to tears and a deep sadness (depending on who you are).

The context for these responses is the total collapse of the Conservative Party as potential winner of the forthcoming general election. Beset by factional infighting, the Tories have for months been around a consistent 20 points behind the opposition Labour Party in the opinion polls.

Every move by the Tory government seems to emerge from a crisis while precipitating another crisis in turn. It is no exaggeration to say that the Tories are a government in name only.

One parliamentary farce centered on the vote for a motion calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza conflict. The motion was proposed by the Scottish National Party (SNP), with the clear aim of making even more prominent the split between Labour’s pro-Zionist leader Keir Starmer (who had refused steadfastly to call for a ceasefire) and Labour MPs and town and city councilors in areas with significant Muslim electorates overwhelmingly in favor of a ceasefire.

In Walsall, 8 councilors who resigned from Labour over the issue in November are threatening to up their own candidate against Labour at the general election.

Eleven Labour councillors in Burnley resigned from the party in November, 10 resigned in Oxford, and 8 quit in Blackburn. This month two Labour councilors resigned in Kirklees, Yorkshire, and there has been a steady stream of others.

Starmer, a technocratic opportunist with no visible political convictions while entirely reliant on focus groups for his declared (pro tem) positions–  “misspoke” initially when he said Israel had the right to turn off water and electricity for Gazans after the October 7 Hamas attack, and took his time before shifting his position to a call for meaningless “humanitarian pauses” in Israel’s relentless slaughter.

The SNP ceasefire motion created an obvious problem for Starmer, now faced with splits at every level of his party.

Parliamentary procedure decreed that the original motion would be debated, as well as a Tory government motion designed to water down the SNP motion by calling for a “humanitarian pause”.

Starmer, to save his skin, then tabled a Labour motion identical to the SNP motion, which the Speaker Lindsay Hoyle (who is a Labour MP), chose for debate in addition to the other motions, in a clear breach of parliamentary procedure, which required only the SNP motion and the government amendment to be put up for debate. When Hoyle announced his decision chaos ensued as SNP and Tory MPs walked out of the chamber. Hoyle said he allowed Labour’s motion in order to protect MPs (presumably Labour?) from threats to their safety over the vote. Despite his two apologies Hoyle’s breach of parliamentary convention prompted 63 SNP and Tory MPs to sign a motion of no confidence in the Speaker.

The Speaker survived because a sufficient number of MPs gave Hoyle the benefit of the doubt over the question of the threat to MPs— the Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a rightwinger in 2016 and the Tory MP David Amess in 2021 by an Islamist.

The SNP announced that it would try to reintroduce the ceasefire motion this week, this time including a call for arms sales to Israel to be frozen. It will be interesting to see how the Speaker and Starmer respond.

Starmer’s troubles extend beyond the chamber of the House of Commons. Also this week is a by-election in Rochdale—with a population that is 30% Muslim– in the north-west of England following the death of its Labour MP Tony Lloyd.

Labour chose a Lancashire county councilor, Azhar Ali, as its candidate. The rightwing tabloid Daily Mail then released a recording in which Ali suggested at a meeting that Israel allowed the October 7 attacks to go ahead, so that it could retaliate by attacking Gaza “in self-defense”. Ali apologized for his comments, but following the disclosure of other similar comments made by Ali, Labour withdrew its support for him, and ceased to campaign on his behalf. Ali can still stand in the election, but will sit as an independent if elected.

Two former Labour MPS are also standing in this election. George Galloway, a strong supporter of the Palestinian people and critic of Starmer, is standing for the Workers Party of Britain. Simon Danczuk was selected as the candidate for the rightwing Reform UK. Danczuk was the Labour MP for Rochdale in 2010-2015, but was suspended from the party after it emerged he had been sexting with a 17-year-old girl. Danczuk said he is standing as an “old Labour” candidate, and would focus on local issues, rather than on what he describes as Starmer’s “woke” politics, or the conflict in Gaza. Starmer would be the loser no matter who got elected.

Meanwhile, the Tories faced a mess of their own.

The Conservative MP and former deputy chair of the party, Lee Anderson, said Islamists had “got control of London” and that its Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan had “given our capital city away to his [Islamist] mates”. Anderson refused to apologize for his comments, and was suspended from the party.

The former Tory home secretary/interior minister, Suella Braverman, then said that “Islamist cranks and leftwing extremists” had taken control of the UK’s streets as part of a leftwing agenda. Starmer sought a respite from his travails by calling on the Tory party to purge its ranks of Islamophobes. Braverman and Anderson belong to their party’s rightwing, which has been putting prime minister Rishi Sunak under pressure after a series of catastrophic by-election defeats. The Tory right is fearful of losing votes to the far-right Reform UK, regardless of the fact that it would be electoral suicide for the Tories to move even further to the right. Sunak though is too weak to bring his rabble-resembling rightwing into line.

The “mother of parliaments”? Do Brits laugh or cry?

The post Chaos in the Mother of Parliaments appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: Raph_PH – CC BY 2.0

Jonathan Freedland is a senior columnist for the Guardian, and its point-person in providing commentary and reporting on the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Freedland gives every impression of being fair-minded and “objective” in this commentary, unlike the less-knowledgeable and far-from-impartial US commentator Thomas Friedman, who is little more than a fan-boy of Likud and its political allies (aside from the occasional muted demurral when Israel turns its overwhelming military might on hapless Palestinians, though in the end Friedman always finds ways to exculpate Israel).

Freedland went to Israel to cover its current conflict with Gaza. In a Guardian piece from there he enjoined his readers to “listen to the phone call made by one of the Hamas murderers of 7 October to his parents back in Gaza. Hear his pride, his ecstatic joy as he tells them he has “killed Jews” with his own hands, including a husband and wife and eight others. “Dad, 10 with my own hands!”.

The Guardian invited readers of this article to submit a response to what Freedland’s wrote. Here is what I sent in (it did not get published):

“This unspeakable bloodlust [referred to by Freedland] called to mind a parallel episode during Israel’s assault on the Jenin refugee camp two decades ago:

Moshe Nissim, IDF Bulldozer Operator in Jenin: “Before we went in [to Jenin] I asked some guys to teach me [how to operate a Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer]. They taught me how to drive forward and make a flat surface… For three days I just erased and erased… I kept drinking whisky to fight off fatigue. I made them a stadium in the middle of the camp! I didn’t see dead bodies under the blade of the D-9… But if there were any I don’t care”. Originally published in a report by Tsadok Yeheskeli, Yediot Aharonot, May 31 2002.

Unlike Mr Freedland I’m not sure what lessons are precisely to be drawn from such cases of untramelled bloodlust”.

International law requires these war-criminal berserkers (on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides) to be brought to account, and it is not unreasonable to expect fair-minded journalists to acknowledge both such situations accordingly.

In a later article from Israel Freedland says:

“There is, in fact, a terrible price to pay as long as Israel keeps fighting in Gaza, in the form of the deaths of thousands of innocents. And there is a terrible price to pay if Israel stops fighting in Gaza, leaving intact a murderous, eliminationist threat. Neither option is bearable. It is a tragic choice. We cannot do much for the two peoples trapped by that choice, but we can at least admit that we see it”.

But: is Israel not also “a murderous, eliminationist threat” for Gazans since it imposed its draconian siege on that territory in 2007? So why not point this out, instead of pointing this accusatory finger solely at one of the parties involved? And why can’t we “do much for the two peoples trapped by that choice”? There is a clear way out of this supposed tragedy. But first another contention in this article requires attention.

Freedland says “responsibility for a death toll estimated to be in excess of 15,000 – in less than two months – rests squarely with a Hamas enemy that deliberately embeds itself in population centres, including in schools and hospitals”.

Freedland is right to say that Hamas blurs the line between its combatants and non-combatant Gazan civilians—this of course is a prima facie violation of international law, though the application of this law in asymmetrical warfare lacks the clear-cut applicability present in wars of a more regular and standard character.

Freedland’s claim however occludes the fact that Israel also blurs the line between its active-duty combatants and those of its civilians who are designated as “reservists”.

In Israel, military service is compulsory for most citizens, with men serving for two and a half years and women for two years, starting at the age of 18. After completing their required service, these men and women typically become part of the Israeli Defence Force’s (sic) Reserves. That is to say, these individuals, usually up to the age of 40 (50 in certain specialist fields), can be summoned back to active duty at the behest of their government.

So is an Israeli aged 18-40 in civvies really and routinely to be regarded as a non-combatant civilian? After all, reservists are allowed to take their weapons home with them when they finish their service in the regular military, and the media is replete with images of Israelis in civvies shouldering guns in the middle of towns and cities.

Soon after the October 7 attack by Hamas, Israel expanded its mobilization of reservists to 360,000.

Any Jewish person anywhere in the world is a citizen of Israel by virtue of this fact, regardless of their place of birth. As a result, many “Israelis” possess dual-nationality, and can be called-up to serve in Israel’s military while living abroad. According to the Washington Post,  about 10,000 people living in the United States alone have reported for Israeli military duty after receiving draft notices that were part of the mass mobilization after Hamas’s attack in October (incidentally, this includes someone who lives and works as a financier in Los Angeles— hence a likely case of making money in one country and killing Palestinians in another).

Israeli airlines El Al, Israir and Arkia added more flights to bring “home” these reservists, according to their websites and Israel’s airports authority.

The demarcation between combatants and noncombatant civilians is thus blurred indisputably by both sides in this conflict.

As mentioned above, Freedland contends we can’t “do much for the two peoples trapped” in what he regards as an inexorable tragedy. But of course we can! Freedland scarcely mentions Israel’s countless illegalities in its dealings with the Palestinian people. A start can be made by addressing some of these.

Every international legal body regards the siege/blockade of Gaza as contravening the law prohibiting the use of collective punishments against civilians. International law permits an occupied people to engage in armed resistance against the occupier. As long as Israel maintains its illegal siege, there will be justified resistance against the blockader/illegal occupier (with the caveat that noncombatant civilians are not to be targetted). Israel– so far shielded and abetted by its US paymaster– has to be brought to an acknowledgement of this situation.

At the same time, Freedland and others maintain that this step will not be a practical proposition for Israel as long as Hamas maintains its “eliminationist” stance towards Israel.

While Hamas pledged to “eliminate the Zionist entity” in its 1988 founding charter, which called for the creation of an Islamic state over the entirety of the land of historic Palestine, its May 2017 “Document of general principles and policies” abandoned eliminationism in favour of a long-term truce in which Israel exists within its 1967 borders as a condition of further negotiations leading to the creation of a Palestinian state.

Neither the exact nature of this putative Palestinian state nor that of a future Israel was specified in the May 2017 document, leading Hamas doubters to maintain that this was merely a playing-for-time diplomatic smokescreen employed by Hamas while it pursued its longer-term eliminationist goals. But in any event, contra Freedland and others, Hamas has not been committed publicly to the elimination of Israel since 2017.

Zionists such as Freedland have of course a visceral distrust of Hamas.

Hamas is however in no position to destroy Israel militarily, so why not create an internationally supervised framework, in the context of a long-term ceasefire or truce, in which Hamas is held accountable for each and every one of its policy declarations and subsequent actions? The same of course would apply to Israel.

Will anyone take bets that a principled procedure of this kind is unacceptable to Israel and its supporters in the western media?

Meanwhile, in Gaza Hamas will doubtless be crippled by Israel’s brutal techno-militarism, but in the longer-term Hamas or one of its approximations or proxies will almost certainly find ways to continue the resistance.

An American state, New Hampshire, uses “Live free or die” as its official motto.

What if the long-suffering Palestinian people insist on joining New Hampshire in adhering to this simple motto? Saying this in the knowledge that 75% of Gazans are now internally displaced,  and 400,000 have lost their jobs since Israel began its retaliation after October 7.

The post Zionist Jonathan Freedland, the UK’s Nuanced Version of Thomas Friedman appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: ukhouseoflords – CC BY 2.0

I have just returned after spending a week in London, attending the always engaging Historical Materialism conference, the pro-Palestine march which drew hundreds of thousands of protesters, and the major David Hockney exhibition, marking his 80^th birthday, at the National Portrait Gallery.

Both the Tory prime minister and the Labour leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, have espoused Joe Biden’s line and called for “humanitarian pauses” instead of a ceasefire in Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The march was directed at both Labour and the Tories, but the open Tory civil war which broke out at the same time enabled Starmer to duck somewhat into the background (at least for a short time).

The focus of the Tory civil war was Sue Ellen Cassiana Fernandes (Braverman since 2018), a brown-skinned child of immigrants who cosplays a white racist. Suella, as she prefers to be called, published an article in The Times just before the march in which she labeled the demonstration calling for a Gaza ceasefire a “hate march” (this was not the first time she had used such language about pro-Palestine protests).

In the article Braverman attacked the police as being politically biased for refusing to ban the lawfully-organized march.

Since she was made Home Secretary by Rishi Sunak Braverman’s been involved in a series of rows, often irritating No 10 Downing Street with her comments.

Braverman floated the idea of banning charities from giving tents to homeless people, saying they were “occupied by people, many of them from abroad, living on the streets as a lifestyle choice”.

She had angered others by referring to the arrival of asylum seekers in small boats from across the Channel as “the invasion on our southern coast”.

At October’s Conservative party conference, Braverman made an over-blown populist speech attacking the “luxury beliefs” of liberal-leaning people, and prompted a Tory London assembly member who is gay to heckle her for making their party look “transphobic”. He was removed quickly from the conference hall by a couple of heavies.

Braverman was so bent on undermining Sunak’s authority that he had little choice but to show her the door. After all, he had only made her Home Secretary in order to secure his right flank from attacks by the Tory knuckle-dragger base during his campaign for the party leadership. Braverman alluded to this in a furious 3-page letter responding to her sacking, where she accused him of reneging on apparent undertakings he had given as a condition of her accepting the Home Secretaryship.

Sunak conducted an immediate cabinet reshuffle in which he appointed the then Foreign Secretary to be Braverman’s replacement as Home Secretary, and, to much surprise, brought back the tainted David Cameron, who had been prime minister from 2010 to 2016, to be Foreign Secretary. Cameron, who left parliament after he lost the Brexit referendum in 2016, now had to be appointed to the House of Lords as Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton before he could assume his position as Foreign Secretary.

Sunak had taken recently to referring himself as the “change” prime minister (though no one seemed to know what that meant, least of all Sunak himself), and the media was soon replete with delicious satire on how appointing a has-been politician to his cabinet could conceivably represent any kind of plausible “change”.

Compared to the Tories, Labour’s rank and file tend to be more pro-Palestinian, and this is now the underlying factor in challenges confronting its (self-declared Zionist) leader Keir Starmer,  who faces calls for a ceasefire, as opposed to short-term pauses, in Gaza’s catastrophe.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) called for a parliamentary vote on a resolution for a ceasefire, partly with the undeclared but obvious intention of embarrassing the pusillanimous Starmer.

Dozens of backbenchers, as well as 8 shadow ministers, defied Starmer to back the SNP resolution, which however was defeated when put to a vote. This was the biggest challenge to his authority since he became Labour leader in 2020, but Starmer was fortunate in two respects.

Firstly, the rebels seemed mindful that Labour is a government in waiting, and couched their opposition with a decorum far removed from the unbridled ferocity marking current conflicts in the Tory party.

Secondly, the rebels were not joined by major figures in Starmer’s shadow cabinet, the resignation of one or two of whom would have been a far bigger problem for him than what was now amounting to a rebellion very much from his party’s second tier.

Starmer stressed his anti-ceasefire position in his response to the Labour rebels, but his tone was somewhat low-key. Eschewing his usual tactic of threatening critics with expulsion from the party, he did leave himself open to the possibility of backing a ceasefire at some point in the future, saying, “My focus has always been on what will make a material difference on the ground”.

Given his repeated lying on this and other occasions, anyone who believes Starmer on Gaza’s catastrophe is likely to believe in the efficacy of magic potions.                                        

The post Eventful London: Suella’s Fall; Starmer’s Evasions appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: Chatham House – CC BY 2.0

“I support Zionism without qualification”.

– Keir Starmer, statement to Jewish News, February 2020

“Israel must always have the right to defend her people”.

– Keir Starmer, October 2023

To use a Britishism, the Labour party leader Keir Starmer has got his knickers in a twist over the Israel-Hamas conflict.

At the end of the recent Labour Party annual conference, Starmer gave a round of media interviews. On LBC radio the politician who had been a human rights lawyer said something that would have landed him in the proverbial soup with his teachers in an Intro to Law class: “Hamas’ actions are terrorism and Israel has the right to defend herself”. He added: “Israel has the right” to withhold power and water from Palestinian civilians. “Obviously, everything should be done within international law”.

Withholding power and water from noncombatant civilians amounts to a collective punishment forbidden by international law, so Starmer’s rider that “everything should be done within international law” was moot and downright contradictory.

As his own party began to protest at the Zionist Starmer’s dishonesty, it took him several days to come up with a lame clarification: ‘It is not and never has been my view that Israel had the right to cut off water, food, fuel or medicines”.

Meanwhile, Israel was bombing Gaza to smithereens, and posters went up in Labour areas with significant Muslim electorates, naming Labour councillors who were toeing Starmer’s line on Gaza and calling on local voters not to vote for these Starmerites in forthcoming elections.

Starmer has not called for a ceasefire or truce (as the UN has done), instead backing humanitarian “pauses” to help aid reach Gaza. He said through a spokesperson that such “pauses” would make humanitarian support possible “without stopping Israel taking action to disable the terrorists who attacked them in the first place”.

This ”softly softly” approach towards Israel has split Labour down the middle. Around 20 town and city councilors have left the party in protest at Starmer’s failure to call for a formal ceasefire. In Oxford, Labour lost control of the city council when 9 of its councilors resigned from the party. Three senior Labour figures—Sadiq Khan (London mayor), Andy Burnham (Manchester mayor), and Anas Sarwar (Scottish Labour leader)– called for a ceasefire.

In Westminster, 39 Labour MPs, including shadow minister Imran Hussain, signed a parliamentary petition calling for an “immediate de-escalation and cessation of hostilities”, while dozens of Labour MPs have said publicly they want a ceasefire. Starmer toeing the line taken by the US, EU, and the Tory government may be too much to stomach.

Starmer, renowned for his tin-ear when it comes to politics, attempted to defuse the situation by holding a virtual meeting between his leadership team and Labour council leaders.  He also went to a mosque in South Wales, where he tweeted a demand for the return of hostages. Stung by this evidence of Starmer’s real priorities, the mosque issued a statement repudiating his views on Gaza. Starmer then made his third U-turn after an ITV interview, in which he denied supporting Israel’s right to cut off water and food (a lie), and by issuing an open letter to councilors in which he said with palpable insincerity how much he felt the plight of the Palestinian people, before repeating his call for a “humanitarian pause” in the bombing, something which the prime minister Rishi Sunak had already done a few hours before.

Starmer is in something of a dilemma.

Nearly all the above-mentioned Labour politicians represent areas of the “red wall” with large Muslim electorates that Labour needs to win back in the next election if it is to beat the Tories. Starmer has shed a boatload of members (over 200,000 of them and their fees) since becoming leader, and has attempted to overcome the ensuing financial shortfall by pandering instead to wealthy donors, many of them Zionists. Several of his colleagues have followed suit. Pleasing Zionist donors does not go down well with Muslim voters, while condemning Israel in order to retain the Muslim vote alienates Starmer’s Zionist donors.

Starmer, like Biden, insists that “Israel has the right to defend itself”. On the specific matter of international law, this is not a legal right. Israel, an aggressor because of its two-decade-long siege/blockade of Gaza, cannot claim “self-defense” to justify its violence against armed resistance to this illegal siege/blockade. When a Nazi claimed that Germany attacked Russia in “self-defense” during WW2, a judge at the Nuremberg Tribunal said:

“One of the most amazing phenomena of this case which does not lack in startling features is the manner in which the aggressive war conducted by Germany against Russia has been treated by the defense as if it were the other way around. …If it is assumed that some of the resistance units in Russia or members of the population did commit acts that were in themselves unlawful under the rules of war, it would still have to be shown that these acts were not in legitimate defense against wrongs perpetrated upon them by the invader. Under International Law, as in Domestic Law, there can be no reprisal against reprisal. The assassin who is being repulsed by his intended victim may not slay him and then, in turn, plead self-defense”. (Trial of Otto Ohlendorf and others, Military Tribunal II-A, April 8, 1948)

This principle– an aggressor can’t legally claim “self-defense” as a justification when it exacts reprisals on those who resist the aggressor– is central to international law.

Starmer’s problem over Gaza blends into a wider predicament—opinion polls indicate consistently that voters loathe the Tories, but don’t at the same time love Starmer and his party. Equivocating over Palestine-Gaza is not likely to help his cause.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Image Source: Philip Halling – CC BY-SA 3.0

“I can’t believe that a young Margaret Thatcher leaving Oxford today would join the Conservative Party led by David Cameron. I think she would get involved in UKIP, and no doubt topple me within 12 months or so”.

– Nigel Farage, then leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), in 2013

The Conservative Party’s annual conference was held last week in Manchester, England. It confirmed that there is a royal road leading from Mrs Thatcher to the far-right United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), as Nigel Farage implies in the above quotation, and then a similar road leading from UKIP to today’s Tory party. Truth be told, the Tory party on display at the conference has morphed into UKIP 2.0.

Nigel Farage claimed as much during the conference when he attended a talk given by Liz Truss, who was prime minister for a mere 49 days after Boris Johnson resigned— the agenda she announced on taking office was unfettered free-market idolatry (tax cuts for the rich and corporations, drastic cuts to a social-welfare system already on its knees, all her proposals uncosted) that tanked the UK economy overnight and led to her resignation.

Truss is attempting to make a comeback of sorts by leading one of the warring factions at the conference. Her Growth Group advocates the same policies that threw the UK economy into a downward spiral when she was prime minister— cutting taxes and public spending, a so-called smaller state, more fracking, half-a-million new houses (somehow built by her scaled-down state with its greatly reduced tax take). Unbelievably, 60 Tory MPs (out of a total of 322) found this junk economics sufficiently persuasive to join Truss’s group, thereby opting for a likely reprise of the economic debacle that was the centerpiece of her failed premiership.

Nigel Farage, unsurprisingly, is a fan of “Mad Lizzie”, and said to reporters trailing him that while he had stayed the same, the Tory party moved towards him. This was evident as he strutted around the conference venue like a conquering potentate.

Sensing he was the conference’s man/emperor of the hour, Farage, who left the Conservatives in 1992 after a dispute over the EU’s Maastricht Treaty, scorned the Tory party leader and current prime minister Rishi Sunak’s hint on TV that Farage would be welcomed back in the party, boasting: “I achieved a lot more outside of the Tory party than I ever could have done from within it”.

Another Tory faction is the inappropriately named New Conservatives, seeing as their main figures are old parliamentary lags–  Bill Cash (2024 will be his 40^th year as an MP), John Redwood (36 years in parliament), and Iain Duncan Smith (also an MP for 36 years). The Who have a celebrated song about meeting the new boss….  Given that Sunak as party leader will have his own election manifesto, the New Cons (same as the Old Cons, with that hat-tip to The Who) launched their alternative manifesto, containing some of the same snake oil vended by Truss—such as unfunded tax cuts for the rich and corporations; but since these old codgers aren’t full-on libertarians like Mad Lizzie, their prospectus contained large gestures to the Tory’s xenophobic base, which served as a reminder of their party’s traditional nickname, to wit, the Nasty Party.

That is, leaving the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) which would allow the UK to have its Guantanamo equivalent for asylum-seekers; “raising” education standards by stopping A-level failures from going to university (A-levels being the standard matriculation requirement for English universities, currently waived in exceptional circumstances); and maintaining a “hostile environment” for immigrants who look a darker shade of pale.

Another grouping is formed by those who adhere to old-fashioned “One Nation” Tory paternalism (Mrs Thatcher called them “wets”). They now form a largely pro-EU rump in the party— Boris Johnson drove them out of his cabinet because they would be a thorn in his side when he tried to implement Brexit.

Faced with his party’s civil war, Sunak lost control of the chaotic conference and wasn’t seen much until his conference closing speech.

Sunak’s speech simply served as a fire accelerant for the Tory civil war.

The keystone in his speech was the cancellation of Stage 2 of the high-speed rail project (HS2) intended to run from London to Birmingham (Stage 1), and then from Birmingham to Manchester (Stage 2).

HS2 was a white elephant from the start. It would reduce travel time between London and Birmingham by a mere 30 minutes, though of course with probable rip-off ticket prices in tow.

With huge delays and cost overruns, opinion was divided on what to do with HS2. Continue doggedly with the project to its culmination point in Manchester, or scrap it now and lick the financial wounds thus involved?

Sunak chose the latter.

His problem is that the strategy behind Boris Johnson’s 2019 election victory relied on a largely fictitious notion of “leveling-up” for the North of England (which had voted overwhelmingly for Brexit in 2016), by purporting to reduce inequalities between it and the far more prosperous South. Johnson made HS2 the core of this flight of fancy.

Cynics on social media now say a “serious” Johnson (albeit a description seen these days as a contradiction in terms) would have given the HS2 contract to Japan, South Korea, or China, widely regarded as the best railway builders in the world, though China would be fraught for geopolitical reasons. In any case, HS2 would probably not have been bungled by a company from Japan or Korea.

Politicians, many of them Tories, in the North of England accused Sunak of betrayal, which is certainly true, but then this has been the North’s fate for centuries in the UK’s London-dominated politics. Sunak senses the northerners will moan and groan, but resign themselves to their “destiny” eventually. Given historical precedent, the wealthiest prime minister in British history may not be wrong. But when that proving time comes, he will be long be ensconced in his luxury compound in Santa Monica.

Given the opinion poll results for a long time, the Tories will be wiped out at the next election, which will probably be held by this time next year. Notwithstanding Keir Starmer’s lackluster and certainly non-transformative leadership of Labour.

What a choice for Brits—an assortment of nasty far-right Tory nutcases who will replace Sunak, or the timid but sly Starmer who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, and certainly not to Rupert Murdoch.

Back to the Tory party conference.

It was left to the outsider Frank Luntz, a focus-grouper for the US right, to deliver a somber truth to his conference audience: “I want to scare the shit out of you. You know the average age of the Labour voter? 38-40. The average age of the Tory voter? Deceased”.

Nervous audience titters greeted Luntz’s statement— a truth was somehow in the process of being recognized even by those who found it unpalatable.

At every “future of the party” event at the conference, speakers quoted the recent YouGov poll showing only 1% of 18-24s intend to vote Tory. For those who believe age predisposes voters increasingly towards conservatism, this figure barely rises for the under-50s. The anti-Tory young are thus adhering to anti-Toryism even as they grow older.

So: a sliver of good news perhaps.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: Governor Glenn Youngkin – CC BY 2.0

Virginia’s plutocrat Republican governor Glenn Youngkin has not so far declared himself a candidate in the 2024 presidential election even as he goes out of state for appearances where, to all intents and purposes, he conducts himself as a presidential campaigner.

Youngkin campaigned in 15 states last year for Republican gubernatorial candidates– only 5 of his candidates won, and 4 of those were in solid red states. At least 2 of these candidates promulgated Trump’s fabrications about the 2020 “stolen election”. Youngkin’s PAC dispenses largesse to “stolen election” liars and supporters of the 1/6 insurrection.

At the same time Youngkin plays a delicate balancing act with Trump and his supporters. He accepted Trump’s endorsement for the governorship but did not invite Trump to his campaigns. Youngkin sucked-up to Trump by criticizing the FBI raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in search of illegally removed classified documents, calling it “a stunning move by the DOJ and FBI”. Youngkin also refuses to say whether Trump should cease pushing the 2020 election lie, though he also accepts with some wavering here and there that Joe Biden won the presidency legitimately.

Fox News now touts Youngkin as a presidential candidate and has had him in at least 6 live interviews on FN in the period from this mid-June to mid-July — twice on Hannity, and once each on Fox & Friends, Fox & Friends Weekend, America’s Newsroom, and Fox News Tonight.

In these FN appearances Youngkin caters to right-wing Republicans by boasting about how he’s taking on “progressive liberals”, while in his in-state public appearances he confines himself to his more moderate-sounding pitch about raising standards in schools (while proposing budget cuts for public schools in order to fund vouchers for home-schooling and private education—thankfully the Democrats nixed this in the state legislature); giving parents more rights; and reducing people’s taxes (he’s proposed a package of $4bn tax cuts, which is easy to do because Virginia is currently running a large surplus).

Youngkin has a proclivity for gesture politics. He banned the teaching of Critical Race Theory in Virginia schools even though it is not taught there, and he set up a tip-line for people to rat on teachers who taught “divisive concepts”. The tip-line had to be discontinued after a few weeks when it was swamped by a large number of hoax calls.

Next month Youngkin will attend a fund-raising party on Long Island hosted by Wilbur Ross, Trump’s controversial commerce secretary, who appears to have switched his political allegiances away from his former boss.

Doubtless fat-cat Youngkin fans will be prodded by Wilbur to open their wallets for the Virginia governor who resembles  a Trumpster in more ways than one (albeit as someone who is always careful to lead Trump supporters from the back).

Youngkin, with his trademark tech bro fleece vests, but unlike the boorish Trump, gives the appearance of an affable and couth country-club Republican. However, this belies his 25-year-long career with the Carlyle Group—Youngkin ended up as co-CEO of this hardened and at times criminal corporate-raiding outfit from 2018 to 2020.

Forbes estimated his wealth to be about $440million in 2021, $165 million of which Youngkin loaned to his own gubernatorial campaign. Youngkin makes no reference to his enormous wealth and only says he was a “financier” before entering politics.

Youngkin, however, has continuing legal problems relating to his previous career as a “financier”. According to NBC News:

In January 2020, Glenn Youngkin… got some welcome news. A complex corporate transaction had gone through at the Carlyle Group, the powerful private equity company that Youngkin led as co-chief executive. Under the deal, approved by the Carlyle board and code-named “Project Phoenix,” he began receiving $8.5 million in cash and exchanged his almost $200 million stake in the company for an equal amount of tax-free shares, according to court documents.

The Project Phoenix payout came on top of $54 million in compensation Youngkin had received from Carlyle during the previous two years, regulatory records show….

NBC News says the lawsuit filed against Carlyle by the city of Pittsburgh Comprehensive Municipal Pension Trust Fund, a Carlyle stockholder, charges that

         the $344 million deal harmed Carlyle’s stockholders, who received nothing in return when they funded the payday….  the Carlyle insiders who received the payouts escaped a tax bill that would have exceeded $1 billion, according to the complaint, which accuses Rubenstein , Youngkin and other Carlyle officials of lining their own pockets at the expense of people like police officers and firefighters.

Youngkin clings to the typical Republican pose as a friend of law enforcement, and it will be interesting to see if this and other legal issues related to the “financier’s” complex employment past come to light should he be a candidate for the presidency. The Democrats would be fools if they did not focus on his chequered past if they have to campaign against the “financier”.

(I have detailed some of Carlyle’s legal problems when Youngkin was employed there in a previous CounterPunch piece.)

Youngkin, if he decides he wants to be president will probably campaign, in the Republican primaries at any rate, by rehashing his relentless preoccupation with wedge “culture wars” issues– albeit undertaken by him without Trump’s feverishly unhinged bombast and Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s snarling soullessness.

Youngkin uses the benign sounding notion of “parent’s rights” to enact an array of right-wing education policies.

Youngkin’s predecessor as governor, the Democrat Ralph Northam, implemented policies that permitted some Northern Virginia school districts to let students decide on the names and pronouns they wanted to use in class. Youngkin’s new policy hands back control of the way students express their gender identity to their parents. In addition, school activities are to be based on biological sex at birth, rather than gender or gender identity.

Youngkin’s attempted whitewashing of Virginia’s history curriculums turned out to be a fiasco. The templates for the new curriculums, created by shadowy right-wing think tanks, excluded lessons about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Juneteenth Holiday, as well as referring to indigenous people as America’s “first immigrants”. Ronald Reagan was referred to in numerous places, but there was no mention of Barack Obama; and the history of Algonquian chief Powhatan long featured in Virginia civics education was excised.

After a huge public outcry, the state Board of Education sent the templates back for revision before voting on February 23 this year to advance the revised syllabuses, though final adoption isn’t expected until later this year.

Youngkin nominated a former coal lobbyist and Trump administration Environmental Protection Agency chief, Andrew Wheeler, for a cabinet position overseeing Virginia environmental policy. When Wheeler did not receive confirmation from the Virginia legislature, Youngkin made him a senior adviser.

As Trump’s star starts to fade overall while his legal woes mount, and his appeal is confined increasingly to his cult-like base, and DeSantis plods on with his flatlining campaign, the Republican establishment may decide that Youngkin is the horse they want to ride to the White House (oh well– he owns a 30-acre luxury horse farm in Fairfax county, Virginia).

Youngkin will probably get a fairly easy ride in the early stages of the Republican primaries. Trump is a well-recognized crook who can’t challenge Youngkin on the latter’s legally volatile business career (though he could say Mr Fleece Vest is not up to the rough and tumble of a presidential campaign, a la his jibe against a “low energy” former governor of Florida in a previous presidential run), and the milque-toast DeSantis has confined himself so far to saying Trump’s legal issues do no more than distract Republicans in the run-up to the 2024 election.

DeSantis is miles behind Trump in the opinion polls, and his only hope, without saying so in public, is that the legal system will take care of his orange-hued opponent before the presidential race intensifies.

Meanwhile, Trump hopes a successful presidential bid will enable him to side-step his legal woes by getting his lawyers to invoke some kind of presidential immunity.

Youngkin could perhaps be sharing DeSantis’s hopes on this issue since—phew!– he will no longer have to tip-toe round Trump and his more feral supporters.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

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Photograph Source: Simon – CC BY 2.0

It is an understatement to say that 2022 has been a dismal year in British politics, except of course for the plutocrats who have their nasty paws on the levers of power with the active connivance of the Tory government.

Alas, 2023 is not likely to be any different and will probably be even more chaotic than last year.

UK excess deaths are currently running at 1000 a week/over 50,000 a year, the worst figures since 1951.

The plutocracy is immensely relaxed about the prospect of a Labour government led by Keir Starmer. For one thing, Starmer will not threaten them with wealth taxes. Starmer is more interested in what the hedge fund managers think, as opposed to the growing number of wretched and impoverished.

At the same time UK opinion poll puts the Tories on 19%, with Labour 45%, LDs 8%, SNP 6%, Gr 9%, Reform 8%, “Others” 4%. This is a pattern seen in many polls in recent months.

Electoral Calculus calculates these figures into House of Commons seats:

Tories 38 seats. Labour 507. Lib Dems 27. Reform 0. Greens 1. Scottish National Party (SNP) 54. Plaid Cymru (Welsh independence party)  4. “Other” 1. North of Ireland parties 18.

Labour therefore governing with a majority of 364 seats, the SNP are the 2nd biggest party group so would be the Official Opposition.

This however is merely a dreamscape in all probability.

Opinion polls are fickle and there has long been a propensity for voters to return to their “natural” party of affiliation as the general election approaches. Given the unpopularity of the Conservative government, there are a lot of “shy Tories” out there hiding themselves for now but who will become less inhibited when election day beckons.

Labour is committed to putting itself on the chopping-block of the “soft” Tory vote. Being “incredibly relaxed”– a phrase used by Tony Blair’s senior advisor Peter Mandelson, now advising the wretched Keir Starmer— about the filthy rich has undergone a little touching-up and is now a key Starmer principle. Labour has deserted the striking nurses, postal workers, and other key workers.

Neither main party is using the word “Brexit” in interviews or speeches. The Tories have abandoned the word because the government department tasked with looking for Brexit “opportunities” has been shut-down after not being able to find any Brexit “benefits”. These have been as impossible to find as the proverbial unicorn.

Labour won’t mention Brexit because they are terrified it could trigger “Red Wall” voters who abandoned Labour for the Tories over Brexit in the 2019 general election. Labour hopes these “Red Wall” voters will have time to forget about Brexit when the next election is held in 2024 or early 2025, so best pretend Brexit is buried for now.

Brexit was calculated to appeal to 2 groupings:

+ Joe and Gladys Bonkers next door or down the road with their barely concealed imperialist, xenophobic and racist convictions. Those inclined to condemn Joe and Gladys wholeheartedly should however remember they and many in this grouping are also the “left behinds”, victims of Thatcherite and Blairite neoliberalism.

+ the already wealthy who want to avoid the chafing EU restrictions on their ability to become even richer (the former minister of Brexit Opportunities Jacob Rees-Mogg; Nigel Farage and his super-rich backer Arron Banks, among others; the “patriotic” billionaires owning the right-wing media who live in overseas tax havens).

Brexit, perhaps even more than the costs incurred by the mishandling of the Covid pandemic, is responsible for the UK’s economy going down the drain, and neither party wants to address this vital fact so important for the future of the British economy.

Both main parties believe they can’t afford to alienate these 2 groupings, and they therefore have to avoid the obvious truth that those in the second grouping helped bankroll the Tory propaganda efforts which won over those in the first grouping.

A poorly-framed referendum in 2016, with a crude yes/no answer on leaving the EU required of voters, paved the way for a Brexit fraught with missteps.

It is hard to recall any other period in UK history where those who purport to be on the left have been so timorous, unimaginative and docile, so lacking in principle and self-belief as today.

There are exceptions of course— Jeremy Corbyn, never New Labour, is frequently to be seen on the picket lines of striking workers. But then politics for someone like him does not exist to further naked self-interest or the acquisition of pound notes and gold bars.

For New Labour 2.0, having taken the parliamentary whip away from Corbyn, it is another story– a return to the past masquerading as the future.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

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Photograph Source: Simon – CC BY 2.0

It is an understatement to say that 2022 has been a dismal year in British politics, except of course for the plutocrats who have their nasty paws on the levers of power with the active connivance of the Tory government.

Alas, 2023 is not likely to be any different and will probably be even more chaotic than last year.

UK excess deaths are currently running at 1000 a week/over 50,000 a year, the worst figures since 1951.

The plutocracy is immensely relaxed about the prospect of a Labour government led by Keir Starmer. For one thing, Starmer will not threaten them with wealth taxes. Starmer is more interested in what the hedge fund managers think, as opposed to the growing number of wretched and impoverished.

At the same time UK opinion poll puts the Tories on 19%, with Labour 45%, LDs 8%, SNP 6%, Gr 9%, Reform 8%, “Others” 4%. This is a pattern seen in many polls in recent months.

Electoral Calculus calculates these figures into House of Commons seats:

Tories 38 seats. Labour 507. Lib Dems 27. Reform 0. Greens 1. Scottish National Party (SNP) 54. Plaid Cymru (Welsh independence party)  4. “Other” 1. North of Ireland parties 18.

Labour therefore governing with a majority of 364 seats, the SNP are the 2nd biggest party group so would be the Official Opposition.

This however is merely a dreamscape in all probability.

Opinion polls are fickle and there has long been a propensity for voters to return to their “natural” party of affiliation as the general election approaches. Given the unpopularity of the Conservative government, there are a lot of “shy Tories” out there hiding themselves for now but who will become less inhibited when election day beckons.

Labour is committed to putting itself on the chopping-block of the “soft” Tory vote. Being “incredibly relaxed”– a phrase used by Tony Blair’s senior advisor Peter Mandelson, now advising the wretched Keir Starmer— about the filthy rich has undergone a little touching-up and is now a key Starmer principle. Labour has deserted the striking nurses, postal workers, and other key workers.

Neither main party is using the word “Brexit” in interviews or speeches. The Tories have abandoned the word because the government department tasked with looking for Brexit “opportunities” has been shut-down after not being able to find any Brexit “benefits”. These have been as impossible to find as the proverbial unicorn.

Labour won’t mention Brexit because they are terrified it could trigger “Red Wall” voters who abandoned Labour for the Tories over Brexit in the 2019 general election. Labour hopes these “Red Wall” voters will have time to forget about Brexit when the next election is held in 2024 or early 2025, so best pretend Brexit is buried for now.

Brexit was calculated to appeal to 2 groupings:

+ Joe and Gladys Bonkers next door or down the road with their barely concealed imperialist, xenophobic and racist convictions. Those inclined to condemn Joe and Gladys wholeheartedly should however remember they and many in this grouping are also the “left behinds”, victims of Thatcherite and Blairite neoliberalism.

+ the already wealthy who want to avoid the chafing EU restrictions on their ability to become even richer (the former minister of Brexit Opportunities Jacob Rees-Mogg; Nigel Farage and his super-rich backer Arron Banks, among others; the “patriotic” billionaires owning the right-wing media who live in overseas tax havens).

Brexit, perhaps even more than the costs incurred by the mishandling of the Covid pandemic, is responsible for the UK’s economy going down the drain, and neither party wants to address this vital fact so important for the future of the British economy.

Both main parties believe they can’t afford to alienate these 2 groupings, and they therefore have to avoid the obvious truth that those in the second grouping helped bankroll the Tory propaganda efforts which won over those in the first grouping.

A poorly-framed referendum in 2016, with a crude yes/no answer on leaving the EU required of voters, paved the way for a Brexit fraught with missteps.

It is hard to recall any other period in UK history where those who purport to be on the left have been so timorous, unimaginative and docile, so lacking in principle and self-belief as today.

There are exceptions of course— Jeremy Corbyn, never New Labour, is frequently to be seen on the picket lines of striking workers. But then politics for someone like him does not exist to further naked self-interest or the acquisition of pound notes and gold bars.

For New Labour 2.0, having taken the parliamentary whip away from Corbyn, it is another story– a return to the past masquerading as the future.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

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Photograph Source: UK Prime Minister – OGL 3

The Twilight Zone is an American television series, inaugurated in the 60s but with several subsequent iterations, involving various genres listed as fantasy, science fiction, absurdism, dystopian fiction, suspense, horror, supernatural drama, black comedy, and the psychological thriller.

Most of these genres happen to apply to the current state of UK politics– fantasy, absurdism, dystopian fiction (though dystopian nonfiction is perhaps less of a misnomer where the UK is concerned), horror, and black comedy are likely to feature prominently in any plausible characterization of contemporary Ukanian politics.

The country’s political comedians are experiencing a boom-time not seen since the days of Margaret Thatcher (some may recall she was widely reported to be entirely lacking in a sense of humour, and comedians cashed in on this).

The current prime minister, the ex-Goldman Sachs banker and hedge fund manager, Rishi Sunak, is a shameless plutocrat who is said to be worth £800m/$980.5m. His wife, who is richer than the king, is worth even more.

Britain’s flatlining economy has just entered what the Bank of England says could be the longest recession and steepest fall in living standards on record.

Britain is the only G-7 nation whose GDP is still lower than before the pandemic— no more does it seem like the 6^th richest country in the world,   as its economic performance comes to resemble that of an Eastern European country with an emerging economy. Government figures show the following:

+ the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose by 11.1% in October, a 41-year high,

+ the UK’s top energy companies are set to make almost $200bn/$245bn in excess profits over the next 2 years. In the same time energy bills are set to rise to their highest levels in 40 years causing a cost of living crisis. Average bills for electricity and home-heating natural gas have doubled in the last year and are expected to rise further in April. The government does nothing about this bare-faced price gouging,

+ the purchasing power of the pound decreased by 13.20% in 2022 compared to 2021, fuelling a resulting rise in import prices,

+ 1 in 6 British households rely on some form of social welfare,

+ almost a third of British children live in poverty,

+ the number of children eligible for government-funded free school meals is just under 25%,

+ 1in 4 households are in financial difficulty or on the verge of it,

+ almost 1 in 10 households have failed to pay bills,

+ in the 12 months to March 2022, 2.1m emergency food parcels were distributed by a continuously expanding web of more than 2,000 food banks — an increase of approximately 1 million from 2014-15, according to the food-bank organizing charity, the Trussell Trust. This need is driven by spiraling food and energy prices (the price of cooking oil and pasta, for example, has risen 60% in the last year), and plunging wages.

+the sharp decline in public services and public sector wages has ensued in months of industrial strikes by train workers, postal workers, London bus drivers, university teachers and staff, paramedics and ambulance drivers, road workers, workers at Heathrow airport, passport and visa staff, courthouse staff, with nurses due to have their first ever strike beginning on 15 December. This has all the makings of a general strike as the winter starts to intensify.

The meretricious Tory government blames the war in Ukraine and the pandemic for causing these problems, without however fooling too many Brits as people realize several other countries have also had to deal with the consequences of the war and the pandemic.

Certainly never mentioned by the Tories in the way of self-exculpation are 12 years of economically-illiterate austerity compounded by the increasingly disastrous Brexit (which takes 4% – £100bn/$122.6bn a year – from GDP and approximately £40bn/S49bn from the UK’s annual tax revenues), both of which have sapped the UK economically and politically and made it incapable of dealing with jolts to the support systems relied on by tens of millions of Britons.

As the Tories sink in the polls, their MPs are starting to jump like rats off the proverbial sinking ship.

Fifteen MPs, including 3 former ministers, have said so far they won’t be contesting the next general election due in 2024.

This number is bound to increase—  Tories since Thatcher have begun to view politics not so much as a form of public service, but rather as a way to embark on lucrative careers in and after their times in office. More Tory MPs will be seeking “opportunities” outside parliament as the voting-booth guillotines start to loom for them.

In the meantime the remaining Tory MPs engage in internecine warfare, as they put their personal fortunes ahead of the supposedly “patriotic” Tory party and their rotting country.

Sunak, the third premier since 2019, chosen solely by Tory MPs for the job, is thus hostage primarily to his far-right “colleagues”, and makes U-turn after U-turn to placate this or that party faction. Asked to describe Sunak’s task as prime minister, an unnamed Tory MP said Sunak was there “to manage decline”.

It is no surprise therefore that the opposition Labour party has been trouncing the Tories in opinion polls for the last few months. The general election, as of now, is being handed on a plate to Labour and the other opposition parties.

All that Labour and its leader Keir Starmer have done so far is to sit on numerous political fences and watch passively as the ramshackle and decayed Tory party immolates.

Nothing Starmer does conduces to even a veneer of social democracy, and the opposition Scottish National Party MP Stephen Flynn’s got it absolutely right when he asked in a parliamentary debate:

“What is the greatest achievement of the Tories: leaving the single market, ending free movement, denying democracy to Scotland, or getting Labour to agree with all of these?”

Hardly an endorsement of the state of Ukanian politics.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: Glenn Youngkin – CC BY 2.0

The Republican Glenn Youngkin, a political novice, became the 74th governor of the bellwether (“purple”) state of Virginia on 15 January 2022.

It soon became clear that Youngkin regarded the governorship as a stepping-stone to something greater, coy though Youngkin has been about his presidential ambitions. To some extent this tentativeness is understandable.

If Joe Biden wins a second term in 2024, it will be 2028 before Youngkin can make a run at the presidency. If a Republican wins in 2024, they will almost certainly run for reelection in 2028, which will delay a Youngkin presidential bid by another 4 years, that is, until 2032. So 2024 is probably the optimal date for a Youngkin pitch at the presidency.

The need to start campaigning for 2024 may explain why, his reticence about his intentions notwithstanding, Youngkin is spending a lot of time outside his state stumping for Republican candidates.

In the recent midterms, Youngkin campaigned for Republican gubernatorial candidates in 10 states–  Maine, Connecticut, New York, Michigan, Colorado, Oregon, New Mexico, Kansas, Wisconsin, and Arizona (the candidate here was Kari Lake). Every one of the 10– all but one on the party’s out of touch far-right– lost, but they received the consolation gift of a trademark Youngkin red fleece vest.

There is a joke on social media: “What is the difference between G_d and Glenn Youngkin? Answer: G_d is everywhere and Glenn Youngkin is everywhere but Virginia”.

Back in Virginia, the peripatetic Youngkin donated to 3 congressional candidates. Two lost, but received the solace of a Youngkin fleece vest like their losing out-of-state counterparts.

Youngkin has the comportment of a sociable and civil-minded country club Republican, but this belies his corporate background as the co-CEO of a ruthless and at times criminal asset-stripping outfit (the Carlyle Group), and the contentious policies espoused by the governor’s office.

Governor Youngkin’s unrelenting preoccupation has been with “wedge” cultural issues.

As becomes a Republican, Youngkin favours restricting abortion, but will only say his preference (for now) is for a 15-week ban, though his other statements on this issue indicate he wants a narrower time limit, probably as low as 6 weeks. The speculation is that Youngkin will wait until the 2023 Virginia elections to see if Republicans hold onto the House of Delegates and flip the state Senate before making his next move on abortion. There is little point in taking up a more radical position on abortion if any move by Youngkin is likely to stall in the general assembly and attract adverse publicity as a result.

Youngkin has also sought to downplay the considerable weight of Virginia’s difficult history where race is concerned. Two episodes come to mind here.

The first is the risible “snitch line” Youngkin set up for people to call in and rat on teachers whose teaching brought-up “divisive issues”. Youngkin, whose own children attend private schools, said this was to preempt the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Virginia’s schools. CRT is not taught in schools, so this was a blatant attempt to whip Youngkin’s ill-informed base into a benighted frenzy. The predicable then happened: hoaxers jammed the line with fictitious reports, so much so that it was taken down quietly in September.

The second was a crude attempt to whitewash the history and social studies curriculum in Virginia’s public-school system. Youngkin and his handlers refused to deny that this draft revision, which was promptly withdrawn after it had been rejected by the Department of Education, was outsourced to “educational services” provided by rightwing think-tanks and foundations.

The introduction to the botched draft said that the aim of the curriculum revamp is “to restore excellence, curiosity and excitement around teaching and learning history…. The standards will recognize the world impact of America’s quest for a ‘more perfect Union’ and the optimism, ideals and imagery captured by Ronald Reagan’s ‘shining city upon a hill’ speech…. Students will know our nation’s exceptional strengths, including individual innovation, moral character, ingenuity and adventure, while learning from terrible periods and actions in direct conflict with these ideals”.

These vacuous rhetorical flourishes with their overt political bias (“Reagan” being easily recognizable Republican code), downplayed slavery and the genocide of the first peoples—there is only one mention of the civil rights movement and a couple of sentences on slavery and racism (the draft maintained there were several causes for the Civil War apart from slavery). The draft also referred to Native Americans as “America’s first immigrants”.

Youngkin has also set out to make life difficult for the minuscule minority of Virginia’s trans school students. He has introduced a new school policy requiring students to use lavatories or play for sports teams in line with their biological sex and not their gender identity.

All these attempts to excite Republicans with Trumpian “hot button” issues are not likely to yield much for the crude opportunist Youngkin.

Trump’s star is being dimmed, and Ron DeSantis is making the running when it comes to claiming the Orange Man’s mantle. DeSantis is governor of a red state, and is not going to penalized for stealing Trump’s clothes in the way that Youngkin, governing a purple state, is likely to be.

This accounts for Youngkin’s propensity to speak out of both sides of his mouth when in Virginia, and to leave the rough stuff for his out-of-state campaigning.

So far Youngkin’s strategy (if it is that) has produced very little for him.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

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Photograph Source: Simon Dawson / No10 Downing Street Posted by: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and The Rt Hon – OGL 3

“The Tories believe in the markets but the markets no longer believe in the Tories!”

– Ed Miliband, former Labour leader, now Shadow Secretary of State for Climate Change

“It’s hard to construct an argument now that the Conservatives can win that general election, I suspect the conversation is, you know, how much do we lose it by?”

– Veteran Tory MP Charles Walker on Times Radio

The Conservative party held its annual conference in Birmingham last week.

Prior to the Tory conference the MSM had decided party leader Keir Starmer had a “good” Labour conference, which was not difficult, given that the Tory meltdown after Liz Truss’s debacle of a “mini budget” gave Labour a double-digit lead in the opinion polls during the Labour conference. That lead has now extended to 33-points in the latest poll.

All Starmer had to do was demarcate himself from Truss, who has done a fantastic impersonation of a kamikaze politician in the short time she has been in office.

The cynical dishonesty of describing her “Dom Pérignon budget” as a “fiscal event” in order to avoid scrutiny by the government’s Office of Budgetary Responsibility was remarkable though hardly surprising. Her predecessor Boris Johnson had a breathtaking record when it came to weaving and sidestepping round the official bodies entrusted with scrutinizing his decisions and government policy. He also bypassed the “mother of parliaments” as often as he could. No surprise then that Truss should take a leaf out of BoJo’s book.

The seriously unstable Tory party appears to have nuked itself. Four prime ministers in 6 years, 5 chancellors of the exchequer/finance ministers in 6 years, and 4 health secretaries (in charge of the critically underfunded NHS) in 6 years, are markers of this instability. For the first time in NHS history the nurses union is polling members on possible strike action.

To this shuffling of the proverbial deck chairs we have to add the fact that the Tory party is now riven by cliques publicly at war with each other.

This warfare was in open view when the chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announced in a U-turn that he was scrapping plans to abolish the 45p tax rate paid by those on incomes of more than £150,000/$166,000.

In addition, there was confusion over whether Kwarteng will bring forward a key Commons statement regarding his plans for funding his tax cuts (the cut to the top rate was accompanied by several other cuts). He told GB News he was sticking to his original plan of delivering a medium-term fiscal plan on November 23. However his own officials confirmed it could be brought forward to the end of October.

BoJo’s chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who lost to Truss in the Tory leadership contest and now has no ministerial position, had promised to tackle inflation before looking to cut taxes.

The leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, challenged Truss to espouse BoJo’s promise to increase welfare benefits by the rate of inflation. BoJo’s former cabinet minister Nadine Dorries echoed this position, and accused Truss of “lurching to the right”.

The former cabinet minister Grant Shapps, sacked by Truss when she became PM on September 6, told media she had only 10 days to save her job.

With Kwarteng facing withering criticism, Truss failed to say she trusted him– she had previously appeared to blame Kwarteng for the 45% tax rate debacle.

At a conference fringe event, the home secretary/home affairs minister, Suella Braverman, announced her opposition to the 45% U-turn. Braverman went further and claimed that Truss’s opponents had “staged a coup and undermined the PM in an unprofessional way”. One of Braverman’s first pledges when she became home secretary was to resume the deportation of refugees, some clearly victims of torture, to Rwanda by December this year. Braverman is the daughter of Kenyan and Mauritian immigrants.

The levelling-up secretary, Simon Clarke, then displayed his fealty towards Truss by tweeting his support for Braverman.

Clarke is a close ally of Truss, and had said in a speech at the start of the conference that Britain had long lived in a “fool’s paradise” and needed to curb public spending to subsidize the £45 billion worth of tax cuts. Clarke blamed the “very large welfare state” for the country’s economic stagnation, and said government departments, already slashed to the bone, would have to “trim the fat”.

Clarke obviously needs to be told that several European countries with larger welfare states (measured by using welfare expenditure as a percentage of country GDP) have long been performing better economically than the UK.

The former home secretary, the loathsome Priti Patel who wanted refugees flown to Rwanda for offshore “processing”, urged her party to back Truss while speaking at a fringe event. Patel is also the child of immigrants.

Clearly Truss still has a few lackeys marching in lockstep with her.

The Tories rebelling against Truss and Kwarteng probably also recalled that the two fired the most senior civil servant in the Treasury (in case he stood in the way of their farcical budget’s implementation).

Truss and Kwarteng cut every possible corner in this reckless “push for growth”, in essence using vast government borrowing to transfer wealth upwards from those who have little to those to those who have lots.

A probable sign that a major western government has gone completely off the rails comes when the IMF rebukes it for irresponsible economic decision-making. The IMF typically only uses such rhetoric when bullying less wealthy countries into submitting to its draconian policy prescriptions (think of hapless Greece during its economic collapse a decade or so ago). This time it was the Truss government’s turn to receive an IMF tongue lashing.

Truss’s short closing keynote resembled her gung-ho stump speeches during the campaign for the Tory leadership. Lots of huffing and puffing about “aspiration” and “growing the economic pie”– the word “growth” was used 29 times during her 34-minute speech. But no detailed economic plans were mentioned.

There was also no mention of the cost of living crisis, the climate crisis, the NHS, the minimum wage, the creaking education system, the judiciary under pressure, or the parlous benefits system. Truss was unable to rule out cuts to public spending and curbs on welfare payments to pay for her policies.

Instead, in yet another attempt to stoke the “war on woke”, Truss made a fierce attack on what she called the “anti-growth coalition” alleged to be standing in the way of her “pro-growth” plans. This “coalition” includes “Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, the militant unions, the vested interests dressed up as think tanks, the talking heads, the Brexit deniers, Extinction Rebellion and some of the people we had in the hall earlier” (the Greenpeace protesters who were removed for disrupting her speech).

When her speech was over he pound went down by nearly 1% against the dollar but gained ground afterwards.

After Kwarteng’s budget Moody’s warned that the UK’s sovereign credit rating could be downgraded, and adjusted its 2023 growth forecast for UK GDP downward from 0.9% to 0.3%.

The Bank of England intervention to halt the economy’s nosedive ends on October 14, and UK financial assets, the pound, and gilts could behave even more unpredictably when this happens.

Truss and Kwarteng are still in deep water with no lifeboat in sight.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

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2022 Sri Lankan economic crisis, people wait for long time to refill liquefied petroleum gas cylinders. Photograph Source: AntanO – CC BY-SA 4.0

Sri Lanka, an island of 22 million people, continues to be in the grip of its worst economic and political crisis since independence on 10 February 1948.

Since April there have been protests against extensive shortages of food and fuel, as well as a profound crisis of trust in Sri Lanka’s political institutions, primarily parliament and the presidency (both have faced repeated charges of corruption and nepotism for decades, a situation unable to be surmounted by a cowed judicial system).

The heart of the anti-government movement, at this point, was a demand for the resignation of the strongman president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a member of a successional political family.

This demand was a success. In the middle of July Rajapaksa fled Sri Lanka for the Maldives during the night on an air force plane, and announced a couple of days later that he was stepping down from the presidency. Gotabaya is now said to be in Singapore.

What precipitated Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s flight was the massive scale of his family’s corruption and venality.

The rule of the Rajapaksas began in 2005 when the older brother Mahinda was elected president. A sectarian, he became a hero with his Sinhalese Buddhist majority community for ending the brutal three-decade civil war with Hindu Tamil separatists.

At the same time, the Tamil minority regarded him as a mortal enemy for the viciousness of the war, where Tamils were killed in their tens of thousands, and even more “disappeared” when the war was supposedly over.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa was Mahinda’s defence secretary and head of the armed forces, and has repeatedly been accused of war crimes and of being personally incriminated in the killings of journalists and the enforced disappearances and the unidentifiable “white van abductions” of Tamils, human rights campaigners, and political opponents.

Mahinda lost the presidential election in 2014, brought down by widespread corruption allegations, but the stranglehold of his family on Sri Lanka’s politics meant that neither these allegations nor those of war crimes were investigated.

The president from 2015 to 2018 was the placeholder Maithripala Sirisena.

Supposedly “non-affiliated”, Sirisena turned out to be a stooge of the Rajapaksa family. Promising to serve only one term, he made Ranil Wickremesinghe (the current president) his first prime minister.

Ranil Wickremesinghe lasted until 2018, when Sirisena sacked him and appointed the former President Mahinda Rajapaksa (his erstwhile supposed rival) as prime minister.

Sirisena then prorogued Parliament, violating the Sri Lankan constitution in the process, and precipitating a constitutional crisis.

In November 2019, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the former defense secretary who presided over the last phase of the civil war, was elected president, and appointed his brother (the former president) Mahinda as prime minister.

Parliamentary elections were held in August 2020. The brothers’ party, Sri Lanka People’s Front– campaigning on a platform of Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism and governmental militarism– achieved a supermajority in these elections. This put them in a position to amend the constitution and remove curbs on presidential powers.

Assurances given to the international community by Maithripala Sirisena and the Rajapaksa brothers that there would be investigations into war crimes perpetrated during the civil war have always come to naught— at the same time as they mouthed these bromides to the international community, the Rajapaksas were telling their domestic audience that such measures would never be taken against the country’s “war heroes”.

Despite this, the US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power in 2016 called Sri Lanka a “global champion of human rights and democratic accountability” (sic).

Ms Power was voicing what had become conventional wisdom in the international community, namely, that Sri Lanka merely “needs time” to heal the wounds of the civil war, and was somehow already embarked on that curative trajectory. Sri Lanka therefore needed encouragement rather the horsewhip. This was a grievous miscalculation.

As a result of this blunder, pervasive in international political circles, the Rajapaksas always knew they were in for an easy ride from the international community, and could use this impunity to ride rough-shod over ordinary Sri Lankans.

Mahinda and Gotabaya weren’t the only Rajapaksa players in Sri Lankan politics. Another brother, Basil, who was finance minister, as well as several other Rajapaksas who held cabinet posts, are said collectively to have bankrupted the country by engaging in widespread corruption, economic mismanagement, reckless borrowing, drastic and unnecessary tax cuts (which increased the national debt), profligate spending on vanity projects, and the already-mentioned militarization of government (the US now supplies military equipment to Sri Lanka), and a conflict-riven Buddhist-Sinhalese racist politics.

Basil Rajapaksa, a US citizen, is nicknamed “Mr Ten Percent” as a result of his habit of demanding a 10% personal commission from local and foreign companies on their receipt of government contracts.

Basil, and the eldest Rajapaksa, Mahinda, remain in Sri Lanka on the orders of the supreme court. Also subject to this order is Mahinda’s nephew Namal Rajapaksa, said to be the family’s political heir apparent.

Sri Lanka ran out of foreign currency to pay for imports. The ensuing fuel and food shortages, months of lengthy power blackouts, and record inflation (39.1% in May), prompted Sri Lankans to take to the streets in April.

These protests were met with teargas attacks, draconian surveillance, travel bans, death threats, and imprisonment of protesters without charge.

The protesters stormed the presidential palace, took dips in the absconded Gotabaya’s swimming pool, and worked out in his gym.

There is no confidence that current president Ranil Wickremesinghe can, or will, do anything significant about this critical situation. Ranil is expected to seek a bail-out deal with the IMF, which of course will demand its usual hardline “conditionality” that will hit the poorest hardest.

Like the 2015-2018 placeholder president Maithripala Sirisena, the wily and opportunistic deal-making Ranil Wickremesinghe (nickname “Deal Ranil”) seems to have been earmarked for a similar role by the Rajapaksas.

The Rajapaksas may be a family, but their record shows they are also Sri Lanka’s foremost cartel.

Soon after being made president, Wickremesinghe declared a state of emergency, and called the protesters “fascists” while cracking down on the demonstrations.

The state of emergency continues, allowing security forces to arrest leaders of the protest movement, conduct searches without warrants, limit public gatherings, and to demolish the main anti-government protest camp in a violent pre-dawn raid that caused consternation in foreign embassies and among human rights advocates.

A government spokesman said last week that Gotabaya will return to Sri Lanka— he only has a short-term visa for his stay in Singapore, and has not so far applied for asylum there.

However, last week Sri Lanka’s supreme court posted a call for Gotabaya Rajapaksa to make submissions by 1 August in response to various petitions seeking accountability for those deemed responsible for the country’s economic collapse.

This step by the supreme court may encourage Gotabaya to prolong his foreign travels, taking care of course to avoid those countries which have extradition agreements with Sri Lanka.

Instead of walking away with their tails between their legs for turning a long and steady blind eye to the Rajapaksas’ excesses and crimes, western governments and media saw Sri Lanka’s economic collapse as yet another opportunity to target bogeyman China.

Western political leaders and media have consistently depicted China’s Belt and Road initiative as a “debt trap” for the countries benefitting from it.

Sri Lanka is now alleged to be the latest “victim” of this “debt trap”.

Alas for purveyors of this “debt trap” narrative, the vast majority of Sri Lankan foreign debt is owed to the West.

It turns out that (as of 2021) a massive 81% of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was owned by US and European financial institutions, as well as western allies Japan and India.

According to statistics released by Sri Lanka’s Department of External Resources, as of April 2021, the bulk of its foreign debt is owned by Western venture capitalists and banks, who own 47% of the debt.

The top holders of Sri Lankan foreign debt, in the form of international sovereign bonds (ISBs), are the following:

BlackRock (US)
Ashmore Group (Britain)
Allianz (Germany)
UBS (Switzerland)
HSBC (Britain)
JPMorgan Chase (US)
Prudential (US)

The Asian Development Bank and World Bank, which are arms of the US’s Washington Consensus, own 13% and 9% of Sri Lankan foreign debt (respectively).

Japan owns 10% of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt, while India own’s another 2% as of April 2021.

China, by contrast, owns !0% of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt.

Most of my information regarding Sri Lanka’s debt is taken from Ben Norton’s excellent piece (posted on 13 July) on MRonline.

To quote Norton: “Western media reporting on the economic crisis in Sri Lanka, however, ignores these facts, giving the strong, and deeply misleading, impression that the chaos is in large part because of Beijing”.

Meanwhile the people of Sri Lanka continue to suffer, with the prospect of a Rajapaksa return to power somehow looming over them.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

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Photograph Source: Glenn Youngkin – PDM-owner

Glenn Youngkin prevailed narrowly against Democrat former governor Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial election in November 2021.

Youngkin was a political novice, while McAuliffe campaigned on his record as a former neoliberal governor. He seemed unaware of the political inroads made by rightwing populism in his state since his previous term as governor. McAuliffe’s campaign simply promised a reprise of his previous term as governor, which made him look “same old, same old” in contrast to the newcomer Youngkin.

Youngkin’s campaign strategy was relatively simple: pander sufficiently to Virginia’s Trump base to keep it onside, while appealing to just enough independent voters to win the election.

Youngkin’s strategy succeeded.

Absolutely no mention was made by McAuliffe of Youngkin’s 25-year-long career with the corporate raider Carlyle Group (rising to be its co-CEO), and the trail of criminal infractions the Group has always left in its wake. McAuliffe has some murkiness in his own corporate background—this almost certainly inhibited him in exposing malfeasances in his rival’s business past.

Youngkin, whose “worth” is estimated by Forbes to be $440 million in 2021, also refrained from mentioning this corporate background, limiting himself to saying he had been a “financier”.

Youngkin harped instead on another theme: modern politics was “too toxic” and “too divisive”.

The deeply ideological import of these seemingly anodyne statements soon became clear when Youngkin took office.

During his campaign Youngkin said repeatedly that he opposed the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Virginia’s schools, while obviously knowing that CRT is not taught in schools. Once in office Youngkin set up an email tip line for people to report, anonymously, teachers who were teaching about racism “in a divisive way”.

The tip line was deluged with tips—albeit from pranksters who brought the line down with obviously fictional accounts of CRT being taught in schools. Many also emailed to say that Younkin’s schools’ agenda was itself divisive, since it made it difficult, if not impossible, to teach US history accurately without an honest rendering of slavery and its repercussions.

Virginian higher education was also targetted by Youngkin. To quote The Washington Post:

“In his first major step to shape the future of the nation’s oldest state-supported military college, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) on Thursday named four White, mostly conservative members to the Board of Visitors at the Virginia Military Institute, including a former member who resigned in 2020 right before the vote to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson from the campus.

The 182-year-old school, whose cadets fought and died for the South during the Civil War, has been mired in allegations of racism and sexism that continue to divide alumni into rival camps of those who support change and those resisting it.

Two of the four new board members appointed by Youngkin are well-known in Republican political circles or within the conservative alumni wing”.

Youngkin’s heavy hand was also felt in Virginia’s community college system. He sent a letter calling on members of the State Board for Community Colleges to involve his administration in the search for a new chancellor or resign. The Board relented and allowed Youngkin to be take part in the search. No governor had interfered in a search for the head of this system before.

Youngkin has made other polarizing executive decisions.

He picked Dr Colin Greene to be his health commissioner.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Greene said racism was not a factor contributing to a long-recorded disparity in health care for Black Virginians.

Greene also dismissed gun violence– pronounced a public health crisis by the American Medical Association– as a mere talking-point for Democrats.

The Virginia Board of Health condemned unanimously Greene’s comments as an embarrassment. The 15-member board directed Greene and Virginia Department of Health spokespersons to refrain from making public declarations undermining the board’s “intentions regarding disparities in case and outcomes, nor make statements that carry a message of denial of basic scientific facts regarding disparities”.

Youngkin has refused to fire Greene. Youngkin does his best to cater to Trump’s base, many of whom would applaud Greene’s statements, and while Youngkin usually resorts cautiously to code in conveying sentiments similar to Greene’s, he won’t fire his health commissioner lest he alienate parts of this benighted base.

The chameleon Youngkin took advantage of Juneteenth to sign a proclamation lauding Abraham Lincoln for declaring an end to slavery.

This would not be well-received by Trumpians, but Youngkin, whose asset-stripping background enables him to do a cost-benefit analysis in his sleep, probably recognized that 42% of Virginia’s population is non-white, and that independent voters would not object in large numbers to such a proclamation. Decision made accordingly.

Youngkin appointed Corey Flores, a Republican gay activist with a history of profanity-laden posts on social media, to the state LGBTQ+ advisory board. Flores suggested that vice president Kamala Harris had advanced her political career by performing a sex act on former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown. Youngkin went ahead with the appointment of Flores after his office had asked the appointee to “tone it down”.

Youngkin, who said he objected to same-sex marriage during his campaign, tried to offset this by beginning the observance of Pride Month by hosting a small reception, attended by about 50 people, celebrating the Month at the Virginia Capitol. The media was barred from this event. A Youngkin supporter said this was proof of the governor’s sincerity in his campaign pledge to be a “unifier” (Youngkin’s podium slogan was “Getting it done together”).

Youngkin had earlier turned down a request for a Pride month proclamation — a symbolic recognition that’s typical for other heritage months.

The recent supreme court decision to overturn Roe v Wade poses a challenge for Youngkin.

The majority of Virginians support access to abortion, while Youngkin’s been open in his opposition to it. At the same time, he’s ducked the question of the restrictions he’ll place on abortion as a result of the supreme court’s decision. Some political commentators have speculated that Youngkin will allow hardline Virginia Republicans to take the lead on this issue while he rides on their coattails, making the usual qualifications and caveats along the way.

Youngkin is said by those around him to harbour presidential ambitions.

The approach Youngkin has used in Virginia will probably not work at the national level. While Ron DeSantis, said to be making inroads into support for Trump, is prepared to feed red-meat to the latter’s base, speaking in code to it will be declared “cowardice” by supporters of the Florida governor.

At the same time, Youngkin’s milquetoast support of LGBQT rights, and the feeble gesture in support of racial equality by signing the Abraham Lincoln proclamation, will be trumpeted by his ultra-rightwing opponents as signs of a lurking apostasy.

Another round of chameleon-inflected cost-benefit analyses beckons.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: Phil Scott (Our Phellap) – CC BY-SA 3.0

The next Conservative government must not pander or protect certain sectors. Let’s not go out of our way to help small businesses, agriculture trade unions, coloured people, women.

(Friedrich von Hayek, speech to 1978 Conservative party conference, in front of Margaret Thatcher)

I’ve just read a detailed report, titled “The Great Train Robbery”, on UK rail privatization from its beginnings in 1994 to 2012.  Essentially– and this is the model followed by all the UK’s privatized enterprises– the newly privatised railway companies positioned themselves, with John Major’s Tory government’s explicit connivance, to limit risk to profits and maximize their ability to extract “value” (a polite word for ripping-off customers to expedite to the utmost dividends paid to shareholders, who are in the case of the UK railways are mostly multinational conglomerates, when they are not foreign governments). Foreign companies also dominate British water.

In other words: these profits are politically constructed, especially since from the inception of its privatization the railway system receives a bigger state subsidy compared to the days when it was state-owned.

The Report states that “overall, some 92.4% of the net profit has been distributed as dividends between 2007 and 2011”. To unpack this a little:

For every £100/$125.51“earned” by the privatised railways, shareholders got £92.4/$116 in the form of dividends. This left a paltry £7.6/$9.55 to be ploughed back into reinvestment for the railway system, after executives had eaten into this meagre amount for their stupendous compensations and bonuses. It should be recalled that in the days when the system existed as the state-owned British Rail, those who ran the system were regarded as civil servants and paid accordingly. Railway executives were paid the same as their equivalents in, say, the department in charge of the government’s fleet of ministerial cars.

The result has been deteriorating service for customers, exorbitant ticket prices, persistent delays and overcrowding, with the system focused on the most profitable lines (mainly in the commuter areas outside London) while the rest of the country faces a decline in provision.

Even if these ratios were £70 of the £100 of the net profit going to the shareholders, with £30 being ploughed back into reinvestment for the railway system (as pointed out, after its executives had rewarded themselves on a fulsome scale unrelated to performance), this slightly less unacceptable ratio would still represent a significant loss for the national, regional, and especially local economies.

There is a recent illustration of the stunning levels of executive remuneration in the denationalized industries.

According to The Guardian, the chief executive of National Grid was paid £6.5m/$8m for the year to the end of March 2022, and his salary is due to increase by 3.75% from July. National Grid posted an 11% increase in operating profits last month to almost £4bn/$4.92bn in the 12 months to the end of March.

The UK is going through an energy crisis, with rising prices forcing people to use candles for lighting and unable to turn on their electric cookers when preparing meals.

There are calls for a windfall tax on soaring energy company profits, which the Tory government has refused to implement. Predictably, the CEO of National Grid warned that such a tax would “harm reinvestment”.

A Harvard Business Review article from 1989 titled “Does Privatization Serve the Public Interest?”, by John B. Goodman and Gary W. Loveman, states that “by 1987, the Thatcher government had shed more than $20 billion in state assets, including British Airways, British Telecom, and British Gas”.

Also “denationalized” before 1987 were British Aerospace, Cable and Wireless, British Steel, British Petroleum (BP), Britoil, Rolls Royce, Jaguar, and water.

Thatcher also sold-off council housing to the private sector.

By the time Thatcher was ousted from office in 1990, more than 40 UK state-owned businesses employing 600,000 workers had been privatized. Over £60bn/$75.1bn of state assets had been sold, and the share of employment accounted for by state-owned industries fell from 9% to under 2%. But this was not the end of the story.

“Denationalizations” after Thatcher included the final sell-off of British Coal, as well as electricity generating companies Powergen and National Power, and of course British Rail.

When Blair’s New Labour came to power in 1997, privatization continued, albeit by the backdoor. Citing the need to produce an “entrepreneurial culture” (i.e. Thatcherism MK 2), Labour, while abandoning the full-scale privatizations of the Thatcher-Major era, replaced them with the equally-flawed Private Finance Initiative (PFI).

PFIs were introduced by New Labour into the London Underground, the NHS and schools. PFIs were sold to the public on the alleged grounds that they raised money (Blair and his acolytes forgot conveniently to mention that this was only going to be in the short-term), and all without needing to introduce higher taxes (this was their touted clincher-argument for PFIs).

When the Tories returned to power in 2010, they privatized Tote betting, sold off Northern Rock and other nationalized banks, the Royal Mail, the probation services, roads, large sectors of education and the NHS (NHS dentistry is now fully private). Even sections of the police, traditionally an ally of the Tories, were privatized.

The Tory-Lib Dem coalition of 2010-2015 privatized court language services, giving Capita and Applied Language Solutions a failed £168m/$210.3m contract to provide interpreting services to courts, police, and prisons.

The Tory minister in charge of this failed privatization, Chris Grayling, earned the soubriquet “Failing Grayling” for this and other grievous shortcomings during his no-longer-existing ministerial career.

“Failing G”, who’s always pinned his political fortunes to BoJo, even awarded a multi-million-GB pound post-Brexit contract for cross-Channel ferry services to a company which did not own any ferries.

BoJo, even while hung-over after his several booze-fuelled revelries (admittedly not all part of Partygate, he had party-loving form long before that), could not put up with these abysmal failures in the face of public ridicule, and the nincompoop Grayling was despatched to the backbenches.

The UK’s privatization binge is glorified asset stripping, pure and simple.

Spread that over the decades since Thatcher, it is easy to understand why taxes are high (the highest since the 1950s) and the norm has become substandard and overpriced services in the denationalized industries.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: sasastro from Suffolk – Newmarket Jubilee Parade & Party-005 – CC BY 2.0

A hereditary monarch is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary doctor or mathematician.

 – Thomas Paine

When she became Queen, Britain still had loads of colonies and she seemed fine with that. Then that largely stopped and she also seemed fine with that. Analysis of all the mutually contradictory things she has seemed fine with over her exceptionally long reign isn’t going to help the country and is very unfair on an elderly woman who has handled the frankly surreal circumstances of her existence with stoicism and dignity.

– David Mitchell

Mercifully, I was not in Ukania for the queen’s 70^th anniversary as the reigning monarch. If I was, I’d spend the extra holidays in a pub with my republican pals, rather than focus on the endless media obsequies.

In any event this jubilee represents a sombre occasion for my family.

On 3 July 1953, when Princess Elizabeth was crowned as queen, we lived in a then British colony. (Elizabeth became queen the moment her father, King George VI, died on 6 Feb, 1952, though her Coronation took place in 1953.)

On Coronation Day in 1953 my 4-year-old younger brother Patrick was seriously ill in hospital with diphtheria. His lungs were clogged with fluid, which could only be unblocked with a manually operated device (these days such devices are of course electronic and monitored by computer).

As Patrick’s lips turned blue my mother, who was with him, hunted desperately for a nurse to clear his lungs. The nurses’ station had no nurses on duty.

Apparently, most of the hospital staff had been given the day off to celebrate the Coronation. My frantic mother (forever an ardent fan of the royal family) found a nurse eventually, in another ward, but by then it was too late for Patrick.

Which only poses the question: what is at stake, and for whom, when such officially-orchestrated events, with their attendant and incessant media hype, take place? We can be sure there were thousands of others in the British Empire who were grief-stricken like my mother on Coronation Day in 1953.

But media-focused flummery is the order of the day in 2022.

The pivot of attention was the celebratory service in St Paul’s Cathedral, at which the queen was not present— the festivities of the previous day attended by her had tired her out. It was more comfortable for her to watch her show on TV, and who can blame any 96-year-old for doing this?

Also not in attendance was the queen’s favourite child, the disgraced Andrew, said to be recovering from Covid.

Meghan Markle, dutifully accompanied by her husband Harry, made what was deemed a low-key reentry into the royal family after a 2-year absence, and quickly became the centre of tabloid-driven attention, albeit short-lived because of the incessant 24/7 news cycle, when she arrived in London. Each succeeding Jubilee event monopolized the news cycle for its proverbial 15 minutes or so.

The queen also passed on the Jubilee concert the next day. It featured Rod Stewart, Brian May of Queen, Elton John via video, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Alicia Keys, Duran Duran (as a concession to “younger” tastes), with Diana Ross as the closing act. Most music commentators complimented Her Majesty on declining to appear at an event that barely deserved to be called a “concert”.

Of more potential political import were the loud boos and jeers which greeted Boris “BoJo” Johnson when he entered the cathedral for the Jubilee Thanksgiving. This was a staunchly royalist crowd, many camping overnight for a good vantage point, who would normally have a reflexively tribal affiliation with the Tory party.

BoJo read one of the lessons at the service (from Philippians 4:8): “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right … think about such things”.

Many on all forms of media noted that whoever chose the readings for the service, BoJo’s especially, had a profound sense of humour.

BoJo being booed by his own side was seen by some commentators as a particularly damning verdict on his prime ministership.

BoJo was caught lying to the queen (over Brexit) — small potatoes for those of us who have long been accustomed to his inveterate lying, but something amounting to treason for royalists. Lying to plebs can be forgiven, but lying to Her Maj is the horror of horrors for diehard royalists.

The jubilee celebration could only be personal—as a country Ukania had nothing to celebrate.

The NHS is on its knees, thanks to Tory cuts, and Brexit causing many staff from EU countries to leave the service and return home. It has “lost” 25,000 beds, and an astounding 14 million patients face delayed surgery, including 300,000 for heart ailments.

A third of its general practitioners say they plan to leave the NHS in the next 4 years, citing intrusive bureaucracy and disheartenment at the terms and conditions of their work.

Where crime is concerned, police failure to investigate burglaries has increased twofold, and prosecutions for rape have plunged by 70%. In the final quarter of 2021, 96 criminal trials were aborted for lack of a judge, against just 4 the year before. The judicial system is a shambles.

Brits have had to cancel their already paid-for summer vacations because the privatized passport office took months to deliver their new passports. Processing visas for Ukrainian refugees has been scandalously slow for the same reason.

Crossing the Channel at Dover requires a minimum wait of 4 hours.

The Tory privatizations since Mrs Thatcher have been a bust.

Half the children’s homes in England are now in the clutches of offshore private equity operators, raking in profits from their ability to fleece local councils by charging exorbitant fees with no fear of regulation while the Tories are in power.

The civil service has been pared to the bone, with more staff cuts in the offing. BoJo wants to cut the civil service workforce by a fifth, amounting to 91,000 jobs, in a misguided attempt to “save taxpayer money” in the midst of the cost-of-living crisis. Services managed by the civil service are becoming increasingly substandard, and will decline further when the latest cuts take effect.

In the midst of these cuts BoJo just increased the staff of Chequers, the prime ministerial country retreat, where he is reported to spend more than his predecessors in living memory.

For the sybaritic BoJo, the pleasures of life have always been an absolute priority.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: sasastro from Suffolk – Newmarket Jubilee Parade & Party-005 – CC BY 2.0

A hereditary monarch is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary doctor or mathematician.

 – Thomas Paine

When she became Queen, Britain still had loads of colonies and she seemed fine with that. Then that largely stopped and she also seemed fine with that. Analysis of all the mutually contradictory things she has seemed fine with over her exceptionally long reign isn’t going to help the country and is very unfair on an elderly woman who has handled the frankly surreal circumstances of her existence with stoicism and dignity.

– David Mitchell

Mercifully, I was not in Ukania for the queen’s 70^th anniversary as the reigning monarch. If I was, I’d spend the extra holidays in a pub with my republican pals, rather than focus on the endless media obsequies.

In any event this jubilee represents a sombre occasion for my family.

On 3 July 1953, when Princess Elizabeth was crowned as queen, we lived in a then British colony. (Elizabeth became queen the moment her father, King George VI, died on 6 Feb, 1952, though her Coronation took place in 1953.)

On Coronation Day in 1953 my 4-year-old younger brother Patrick was seriously ill in hospital with diphtheria. His lungs were clogged with fluid, which could only be unblocked with a manually operated device (these days such devices are of course electronic and monitored by computer).

As Patrick’s lips turned blue my mother, who was with him, hunted desperately for a nurse to clear his lungs. The nurses’ station had no nurses on duty.

Apparently, most of the hospital staff had been given the day off to celebrate the Coronation. My frantic mother (forever an ardent fan of the royal family) found a nurse eventually, in another ward, but by then it was too late for Patrick.

Which only poses the question: what is at stake, and for whom, when such officially-orchestrated events, with their attendant and incessant media hype, take place? We can be sure there were thousands of others in the British Empire who were grief-stricken like my mother on Coronation Day in 1953.

But media-focused flummery is the order of the day in 2022.

The pivot of attention was the celebratory service in St Paul’s Cathedral, at which the queen was not present— the festivities of the previous day attended by her had tired her out. It was more comfortable for her to watch her show on TV, and who can blame any 96-year-old for doing this?

Also not in attendance was the queen’s favourite child, the disgraced Andrew, said to be recovering from Covid.

Meghan Markle, dutifully accompanied by her husband Harry, made what was deemed a low-key reentry into the royal family after a 2-year absence, and quickly became the centre of tabloid-driven attention, albeit short-lived because of the incessant 24/7 news cycle, when she arrived in London. Each succeeding Jubilee event monopolized the news cycle for its proverbial 15 minutes or so.

The queen also passed on the Jubilee concert the next day. It featured Rod Stewart, Brian May of Queen, Elton John via video, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Alicia Keys, Duran Duran (as a concession to “younger” tastes), with Diana Ross as the closing act. Most music commentators complimented Her Majesty on declining to appear at an event that barely deserved to be called a “concert”.

Of more potential political import were the loud boos and jeers which greeted Boris “BoJo” Johnson when he entered the cathedral for the Jubilee Thanksgiving. This was a staunchly royalist crowd, many camping overnight for a good vantage point, who would normally have a reflexively tribal affiliation with the Tory party.

BoJo read one of the lessons at the service (from Philippians 4:8): “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right … think about such things”.

Many on all forms of media noted that whoever chose the readings for the service, BoJo’s especially, had a profound sense of humour.

BoJo being booed by his own side was seen by some commentators as a particularly damning verdict on his prime ministership.

BoJo was caught lying to the queen (over Brexit) — small potatoes for those of us who have long been accustomed to his inveterate lying, but something amounting to treason for royalists. Lying to plebs can be forgiven, but lying to Her Maj is the horror of horrors for diehard royalists.

The jubilee celebration could only be personal—as a country Ukania had nothing to celebrate.

The NHS is on its knees, thanks to Tory cuts, and Brexit causing many staff from EU countries to leave the service and return home. It has “lost” 25,000 beds, and an astounding 14 million patients face delayed surgery, including 300,000 for heart ailments.

A third of its general practitioners say they plan to leave the NHS in the next 4 years, citing intrusive bureaucracy and disheartenment at the terms and conditions of their work.

Where crime is concerned, police failure to investigate burglaries has increased twofold, and prosecutions for rape have plunged by 70%. In the final quarter of 2021, 96 criminal trials were aborted for lack of a judge, against just 4 the year before. The judicial system is a shambles.

Brits have had to cancel their already paid-for summer vacations because the privatized passport office took months to deliver their new passports. Processing visas for Ukrainian refugees has been scandalously slow for the same reason.

Crossing the Channel at Dover requires a minimum wait of 4 hours.

The Tory privatizations since Mrs Thatcher have been a bust.

Half the children’s homes in England are now in the clutches of offshore private equity operators, raking in profits from their ability to fleece local councils by charging exorbitant fees with no fear of regulation while the Tories are in power.

The civil service has been pared to the bone, with more staff cuts in the offing. BoJo wants to cut the civil service workforce by a fifth, amounting to 91,000 jobs, in a misguided attempt to “save taxpayer money” in the midst of the cost-of-living crisis. Services managed by the civil service are becoming increasingly substandard, and will decline further when the latest cuts take effect.

In the midst of these cuts BoJo just increased the staff of Chequers, the prime ministerial country retreat, where he is reported to spend more than his predecessors in living memory.

For the sybaritic BoJo, the pleasures of life have always been an absolute priority.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: Matt Brown – CC BY 2.0

Boris “BoJo” Johnson’s statements to the British public on the UK’s Covid lockdown (courtesy of Private Eye, 29 April 2022):

+ “The more we all follow the rules, the fewer lives will be lost” (28 March 2020)

+ “Don’t meet up with friends, hanging out in parks could kill” (3 April 2020)

+ “Anyone can get coronavirus. If you go out, you could spread it. People could die” (8 April 2020)

+ “Rules aren’t just for others. Play your part to beat the virus” (14 April 2020)

+ “If one person breaks the rules, we all suffer” (15 April 2020)

The UK’s rightwing media can’t resist depicting BoJo Johnson as the country’s great political escapologist, someone who has taken the definition of a Teflon politician to new heights (though “depths” is the more accurate characterization). The individual with the supposed gift of being able to rewrite an adverse political script with an instantaneous finger click.

Last week the Metropolitan police announced that BoJo would face only one fine for his Partygate transgressions at the prime ministerial No. 10 Downing Street residence during the Covid lockdown.

The Met concluded its “investigation” into Partygate by announcing that No 10 was the venue for 126 breaches of the law committed by 83 people—the largest single location for lockdown crimes during the pandemic.

While the UK was in a lockdown where people were unable to attend the funerals of loved ones, or be at their deathbeds, BoJo was treating his official residence/workplace as the equivalent of a frat house. Despite this, BoJo only received a single fine from the Met even though he attended at least 6 illegal social gatherings at No 10.

This evident discrepancy between BoJo’s repeated transgressions and the subsequent slight slap on the wrist prompted much media head scratching.

Staff known to have attended the same 6 illegal social gatherings as BoJo were fined while he wasn’t. One staff member received 5 fines in total. These largely more junior staff members, unlike BoJo, were said to be unable to afford expensive lawyers during the Met’s investigation. The age-old adage thus remains vindicated: if you have the money, the law will be on your side.

Adam Wagner, the UK’s leading authority on Covid law, said the Met’s leniency towards him amounts to a verdict that BoJo “attended six illegal gatherings but attended five of them legally”.

The Met, which assigned a team of 12 detectives to the Partygate probe at a cost of £460,000/$574,000, flubbed its investigation of Partygate from the start.

While a parent was fined for kicking a ball in the park with their autistic child during the lockdown, the hopeless Met, which provides 24/7 security for No  10, refused to investigate Partygate, saying it was “unnecessary”, until a legal challenge occurred. At least one party was an outdoor event, with accompanying music, so the Met’s duty officers stationed at the front door of No 10 must have been stone deaf if they did not know what was going on.

BoJo was kindly informed by the Met that he would receive no more fines even before it concluded its investigation.

The Met’s timorousness in the face of political authority was evident throughout the inquiry, and BoJo’s presiding over a culture of enduring lawbreaking in the very building where the laws that bound Brits were devised seemed of slight import to the Met.

BoJo’s Partygate travails are not over yet.

Partygate was investigated by a senior civil servant, Sue Gray, when the Met made its belated decision to investigate BoJo and his staff for possible breaches of the law.

Not wanting to compromise the Met’s criminal investigation, Gray handed over her findings to the Met, and delayed the publication of her complete report. Instead, she issued a provisional and truncated report, not making any charges, but with enough detail of No 10’s office environment to show— admittedly in hindsight– that the Met failed to do its job.

It is reported that Gray’s final report will be issued in the next few days. In the meantime, it’s been disclosed that BoJo and Gray met in secret, allegedly at the prime minister’s request (though his office said at first that Gray had sought the meeting).

Given that BoJo has succeeded in nobbling the Met, this secret meeting attracted immediate media attention.

The Independent reports that Gray’s staff have rejected No 10’s claim that the meeting, said by Downing Street to be at her request, was for her “to clarify her intentions” prior to its publication, once the Met investigation was over.

BoJo had said Gray’s inquiry was “completely independent”, but faced with media scrutiny over the secret meeting, his office back-tracked on its original claim, now saying the meeting was instigated by an aide to BoJo, and not by Gray herself.

Given that a mere flunkey was unlikely to summon the head of an official inquiry on their sole initiative, the suspicion formed that BoJo had a plump finger in this particular pie.

The concern now is whether Gray, in her final report, will allow herself to be nobbled by BoJo, and let him off the hook the way the Met did.

The hope is that Gray will lay out the evidence, and follow it to the appropriate conclusions, without fear or favour.

BoJo, who has made manipulating and browbeating those around him a lifelong practice, will of course be mightily displeased should this happen.

Who knows, an uninfluenced or not watered-down Gray report will have an impact that could even induce his so far cowardly MPs to dump BoJo as their party leader, and in so doing end the tenure of one of the worst prime ministers in British history.

After all, the one constant in all of this has been the conduct of BoJo’s pusillanimous MPs, who have constantly put their own electoral interests ahead of any desire to see that the right thing is being done in this baleful saga.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: Sinn Féin – Protest at Boris Johnson visit – CC BY 2.0

The recent UK midterm elections delivered a historic verdict in the north of Ireland when Sinn Féin, standing for a reunited Ireland, emerged as the largest party.

Sinn Féin topped the first-preference vote with 29%, and won 27 seats, enabling its deputy leader, Michelle O’Neill, to become the north of Ireland’s first minister-designate.

O’Neill is the first nationalist to hold this position in a momentous blow to Protestant-oriented Unionism.

The Democratic Unionist party (DUP), the largest of the Unionist parties won 25 seats.

The cross-community Alliance Party won 13 seats, becoming the third-largest party in an election for the first time.

The DUP, much chagrined at its loss of hegemony in Northern Ireland politics, retreated in a huff by saying it will not re-enter the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive while issues with the Northern Ireland protocol remain.

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which resulted in the prevailing Northern Irish political settlement, called for a “frictionless” border between the 2 parts of Ireland.

Brexit put the “frictionless” border in jeopardy, since a border now existed between the EU-member Republic of Ireland and the UK-belonging (and thus non-EU) Northern Ireland.

The anomalous status of Northern Ireland with regard to EU trade was resolved by the Northern Ireland protocol, which retained the “frictionless” border, but upheld the need for checks on goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the latter basically being a part of the EU’s single market).

In the 2019 general election, Boris “BoJo” Johnson had a single mantra—he had an “oven-ready deal” that would “Get Brexit Done!”. It won him an 80-seat parliamentary majority.

The routinely dishonest BoJo claimed categorically that his Brexit deal would not put a border in the Irish Sea. He insisted that businesses in Northern Ireland would have unencumbered access to markets in England, Scotland and Wales, saying with typical bombast that the Irish Sea trade border would exist “over my dead body”.

However, BoJo, in his haste to show he could “get Brexit done”, signed an agreement with the EU, binding in international law, which required the Irish Sea border to be there.

In so doing BoJo conned the DUP, which is renowned historically for its inflexibility when it came to safeguarding what it perceives to be Unionist interests.

BoJo also duped the EU into thinking he could be trusted when he signed a treaty enshrining Northern Ireland’s special status with regard to the EU— a status he clearly had no intention of adhering to.

The DUP, having lost its majority in the assembly, decided to take a gamble by calling BoJo’s bluff— telling BoJo that unless he scrapped unilaterally the part of the Northern Ireland protocol which requires trade barriers to exist between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, the DUP would not enter into any power-sharing arrangement with Sinn Féin, thereby scuppering the Good Friday Agreement.

The foreign secretary Liz Truss, who has ambitions to succeed BoJo and is branding herself as a “Margaret Thatcher MK 2”, has taken the position that the UK has no choice but to act unilaterally if the EU did not accede to the UK’s demands to abolish the checks on goods crossing from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.

BoJo supported Truss at first, but shifted his position later in typical fashion. Renowned for having no settled principles on anything (except his own self-interest)— BoJo was after all anti-Brexit when he was mayor of London, BoJo flew to Belfast on Monday to meet with the north of Ireland’s political leaders.

BoJo took a less strident tone than his foreign secretary, but ended-up pleasing no one.

Sinn Féin’s president Mary Lou McDonald accused BoJo of intolerable and timewasting tactics where the protocol is concerned.

McDonald said BoJo was placating the DUP and that he gave “no straight answers” during their meeting, saying: “The British government is in a game of brinkmanship with the European institutions, indulging a section of political unionism which believes it can frustrate and hold society to ransom”.

The DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson said after meeting BoJo: “We cannot have power-sharing unless there is a consensus. That consensus doesn’t exist”.

“Consensus” for the DUP involves ditching the part of the protocol which requires a trade border to exist between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, and since Sinn Féin is opposed to this, no return to power-sharing is on the horizon, and BoJo left the meetings empty-handed, with the ball back in his court. The only thing that would be acceptable to the DUP is precisely what Sinn Féin opposes.

BoJo said more details regarding the protocol would be released “in the coming days”, and is widely expected to scrap unilaterally key parts of the protocol, daring the EU to give him what he wants or else.

After his meetings with the Northern Irish leaders, BoJo typically wanted to have his cake and eat it. He dismissed the idea that his proposed legislation, giving his government the right to ignore key parts of the protocol, could start a trade war with the EU, saying: “What we’re doing is sticking up for the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, and what we are doing it trying to protect and preserve the government of Northern Ireland”.

It is hard to see the EU sitting back and allowing the UK to get away with breaking an international treaty it had signed in order to maintain a “frictionless” border between the 2 parts of Ireland, and by so doing, ensuring that a single market exists between the north and the south of Ireland.

The EU fears a “slippery slope”. Its members have trading relations with non-EU countries, of course, and allowing the UK to break agreed-upon rules for the institution of a single market could set a precedent for other countries demanding a similar leeway in their trading relations with EU members.

Meanwhile, a delegation of powerful US Congressional representatives, including the head of the ways and means committee, Richard Neal, is expected to arrive in London in the coming days, reflecting the White House’s concern about escalating tensions over the protocol.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: Matt Brown – CC BY 2.0

Last week elections were held 4,300 councillors in 146 English local authorities. In Scotland all 32 councils and in Wales all 22 councils also held elections. In the north of Ireland there were elections for all 90 seats in the devolved Northern Irish Assembly. in addition, 7 mayoralties were at stake. The elections came at the perceived mid-way point of the UK government’s term, and had crucial implications for all the political parties involved. 

In a nutshell, the election results showed the following:

+ The crisis-ridden Tories, beset by scandal, imploded, losing 490 seats in the process;

+ Labour under Keir Starmer, bereft of vision or ideas, made gains (more than 250 seats) but failed in the end to capitalize on the Tory debacle. It did extremely well in London, but much less so elsewhere. Starmer only seems able to define himself in opposition to Labour’s leftwingers, and not much else.

+ The Lib Dems (gaining 188 seats) and Greens (gaining 82 seats) made significant headway, especially given that Labour is now a centre-right party, leaving the centre and centre-left as fertile ground for them. However, both these minority parties face major limitations— most significantly, the UK’s antiquated first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system, which is geared to assign electoral spoils to the 2 major parties (as in the US).

+ History was made in the north of Ireland when Sinn Féin, campaigning for a united Ireland, emerged against the grain of Northern Irish history as the largest party (more about this later).

+ In Scotland, the Scottish National Party (SNP) made further gains, the Tories got trounced, and Labour emerged as the main opposition to the nationalists. After 15 years in power, the SNP increased its seat tally by 22, while Labour gaining 20, the Lib Dems 20 and the Greens 16. The Conservatives dropped 63.

+ In Wales, Labour (the ruling party) and the nationalist party Plaid Cymru both made gains at the expense of the Tories. Welsh Labour is social democrat, and has not joined Starmer in his anti-Corbynism.

The results from Scotland and Northern Ireland are likely to raise weighty constitutional questions about the future of the UK. The SNP may be emboldened to push for another referendum on Scottish independence in a few years (especially after the 2024 general election result), and Sinn Féin has given itself a 5-year timeframe to introduce a referendum on Irish reunification.

Sinn Féin topped the first-preference vote with 29%, enabling its deputy leader, Michelle O’Neill, to become the north of Ireland’s first minister, the first nationalist to hold this position in a historic and severe blow to Protestant-oriented Unionism.

The Democratic Unionist party, the largest of the Unionist parties (it won 25 seats to Sinn Féin’s 27), wants an urgent meeting with BoJo Johnson to warn him it will delay power-sharing at Stormont until Christmas if the Northern Ireland protocol is not modified.

Some Tory candidates took to calling themselves “Local Conservatives”, urging voters not to punish them for “mistakes made in Westminster”, in order to distance themselves from the prime minister Boris “BoJo” Johnson. The ruse did not work– the Tories got hammered.

Prof John Curtice, the psephologist who led the analysis of the election results for the BBC said of the outcome:

The trouble is, outside of London, Labour share of the vote was actually down slightly.

In terms of seats won and lost, while it’s made net gains in London, it’s actually made a slight net loss outside of London. So outside of London it’s a rather different story. And of course Labour can’t win Westminster parliament by simply winning Westminster council.

When the presenter, Nick Robinson, put it to him that an accurate summary of the outcome would be “Bad for the Tories, not good enough for Labour”, Curtice replied: “I think that’s absolutely right.”

The central challenge for BoJo was holding together his 2019 coalition of red wall voters (typically Brexit-voting, white, working-class, fed-up Labour supporters aged over 45), and their blue wall counterparts (traditional lifelong Tories in the leafy shires around London and in the south of England). This coalition broke-down in these elections.

The red wall held reasonably well for the Tories, but blue wall voters defected in large numbers to the Lib Dems. The challenge for the Tories in the 2024 general election will be winning back the blue wall while not reneging on the expansive promises BoJo made to win over the red wall in 2019.

Given that the UK is likely to be in the economic doldrums for the next 2-3 years, with a recession looming in 2023, holding together this coalition between the 2 walls will put a strain on the public purse.

As it is, the current high rate of inflation (expected to reach 10% in the final quarter of this year, stoking a cost-of-living crisis associated primarily with spiralling energy bills (while energy companies are making bumper profits), and with the economic costs of Brexit starting to kick in, these issues will have to be addressed even before BoJo can persuade his MPs to fund his red wall “levelling-up” pledges.

In order to ward-off threats to his leadership during his Partygate travails, BoJo has already made significant concessions to the “small state” and “liberty loving”, low-tax wing of his party (primarily by lifting all Covid restrictions, prematurely and against the advice of medical experts), and this querulous faction will put lower taxes much higher on their electoral agenda than increased spending on socially-deprived parts of the UK.

BoJo is thus having to ride the proverbial two horses in mid-stream.

It now seems likely that some Tories will use their poor election result to launch a fresh leadership challenge against BoJo.

BoJo’s fate will probably be sealed by 2 upcoming parliamentary by-elections in seats held by Tory MPs who resigned–one after being found guilty of sexually abusing minors, the other after being caught watching porn on his phone in the chamber of the House of Commons.

Meanwhile the Labour leader Keir Starmer is not without his own Covid lockdown problems.

As the election campaign was ending, Durham Police announced they were launching an investigation into whether Starmer broke lockdown rules in the so-called Beergate brouhaha following “significant new information”.

Starmer has been feeling the heat since footage emerged recently in the mass media of him drinking a beer indoors with colleagues in April 2021 in Durham, while campaigning in a nearby by-election.

At the time of the gathering, non-essential retail and outdoor venues including pub gardens were open, but some social distancing rules, including a ban on indoor mixing between households, were still in effect.

Durham police had said in their initial assessment that no offence was committed by Starmer.

The original footage was filmed on 30 April 2021 by a student at a Durham university, who passed it on to the student newspaper.

The story lay dormant until BoJo and the chancellor/finance minister, Rishi Sunak, were fined last month for breaching lockdown rules in the prime minister’s official residence.

BoJo’s supporters in parliament and the pro-Tory tabloid rags then went to town with the Beergate story, in a desperate attempt to establish an “equivalence” between Starmer’s one-off indoor drinking episode and BoJo’s repeated partying at his official residence.

This however put pressure on the Durham police to reopen their investigation into Starmer.

When BoJo had been charged, and before he was fined, Starmer called on him to resign. Starmer, in order to protect his “integrity”, would probably have to resign if charged with a similar offence by the Durham police. If he did, it is hard to see how BoJo could not follow suit.

Starmer has said he is the victim of a “smear” campaign. What has certainly come to light is the lack of consistency in the application of the lockdown regulations by different police forces.

However, the concurrent departure of Starmer and BoJo would in fact be the perfect scenario for those wanting UK politics to raise its collective head somewhat above current bog levels.

At one stroke, the worst UK prime minister in modern times would leave office, as would the flat-out anti-socialist careerist purporting to lead a socialist party, and who inveigled his way into its leadership under a false prospectus.

A possible perfect storm for a couple of rank pro-Establishment opportunists?

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Growing up in the then British colony of Malaya, my closest friend in elementary/primary school was Jeswant Singh, from a Sikh family living in our neighbourhood in Kuala Lumpur (KL).

The Singh family was large. Jeswant had several siblings—as I recall, 7 brothers and 2 sisters. Each went by their nicknames—Jeswant was Googi, older than him was Bangsa, and older than both was Umber. I can’t remember the names of the older siblings. Only Jeswant’s real name was known to me.

The oldest sibling, a male, who did well in school, was sent to study law in London. When he returned, he worked his way up in neighbouring Singapore to become a judge. The family, understandably, was immensely proud of him. They always regarded him as a totemic figure.

One of the two sisters, clearly a family matriarch-in-waiting, was nicknamed “Queenie” by her younger siblings.

I never knew what her actual name was— she was Queenie, and that was that.

Jeswant and I did our homework together, after which I usually sat down with the family for a delicious Punjabi meal.

Jeswant and his brothers were immensely athletic, with Jeswant probably the best of them all (especially in soccer and field hockey, the latter being a sport for men in many countries).

After we were together in elementary school, Jeswant’s father retired, and the family moved to a then far-away town (the smaller and quieter Ipoh).

There Jeswant sustained a serious back injury, and botched epidurals prior to equally substandard back surgeries left him permanently incapacitated.

I last saw Jeswant just before I left for the UK in the mid-60s. When he visited me in KL, Jeswant, an all-round hard nut, was in tears as he described the pain of his botched back surgeries.

In those days, in a very recently independent British colony, with a not fully-established legal framework for suing those incompetent and negligent, litigating against Jeswant’s surgeons for their substandard work was not really an option.

I suspected later that Jeswant was being used as a guinea pig for surgical techniques imported from the (modern and state of the art) west, but utilized by surgeons not competent enough, or without the full repertoire of medical tools from the west, to execute them properly.

Jeswant and I had no contact after I went to the UK, in the mid-60s, as I said.

I do have indelible recollections of Jeswant and his family.

There was a time when a burglar entered their house in the middle of the night. The burglar probably soon regretted his decision, because the 6 male children in residence (all of whom played field hockey), picked up their sticks and clubbed him until he was bleeding all-over before tying him up and summoning the police.

Apparently, the police said the Singhs had done a good job in roughing-up the intruder.

If the Singhs had not done this, the burglar would have had the shit beaten out of him by the cops when he was taken to the police station, before being hauled in front of a judge.

My guess is that the unfortunate burglar, if given the hypothetical choice, would have declined the options posed both by the Singh brothers and the cops.

The bully where we lived was Raymond, the offspring of an Indian and Chinese marriage (they are called Chindians in Malaya/Malaysia).

Raymond was called “Raymond Kutti” by the Singh brothers– I later discovered “kutti” means itch or bitch in Punjabi– but have no real clue why Jeswant and his brothers gave Raymond this nickname.

Raymond Kutti was a menace for those younger than him in the neighbourhood.

The Kutti once barged through our bamboo hedge during office hours, when he knew my parents were not at home, and plucked what he wanted from our fruit trees. I happened to be there, and remonstrated with him. The Kutti raised a fist at me and told me to “fuck off”.

I mentioned this incident to Jeswant and his older brothers, who said they would “take care” of the Kutti.

I’ve only a rough idea of what might have transpired, but I was never troubled by Raymond again, and neither were our fruit trees and hedge.

The Singh brothers were also (unintended) environmental conservationists before their time.

Their father owned, proudly, a car which he drove only on special occasions— he went to work daily on the local bus. His children called him “the old man”, though most certainly not to his face.

When the time came to wash the old man’s car, the youngest Singh brothers, about 3 of them I recall (Jeswant, Bangsa, and Umber would hop on the roof of the vehicle with their shorts on, and hose-down and soap themselves. The tropical heat made this a pleasant experience for them.

Neighbours would look out of their windows to behold this proto-conservationist spectacle.

Baths over, and the accompanying water saved by doing double-duty with the car wash, my Singh friends jumped off and gave dad’s car the finishing touches it merited.

A family deeply influential for, and indelibly remembered by, this young Surin.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

Photograph Source: U.K. Prime Minister – OGL

“I don’t think any government could conceivably be doing more to root out corrupt Russian money – and that is what we’re going to do, and I think we can be proud of what we’ve already done and the measures we have set out”.

– Boris Johnson, speaking in the House of Commons, 23 February 2022

For Boris “BoJo” Johnson, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is both an opportunity and a potential trap.

A possible trap, because £1.9m/$2.5m has been given to the Tory party by Kremlin oligarchs since BoJo came to power.

London/”Londongrad” property markets and banks are flush with Russian money, while BoJo has turned a blind eye during this time.

Many, including some in his own party, say BoJo has in fact turned 2 blind eyes, while he cavorted at oligarch parties, pocketed their donations, and did nothing to regulate the inflow of dirty money into the UK.

The Ukraine war is opportunity for BoJo because he was on the verge of losing his job as PM as a consequence of the Partygate scandal, until the Ukraine war created a potential diversion that has come to his rescue (so far) where Partygate is concerned.

Social media postings contain trolling images of BoJo phoning Putin apologetically, saying he appreciates the fact that the Tories are in the pockets of Kremlin oligarchs. At the same time, BoJo says to Putin, since the UK is a NATO member, it has no alternative but to toe the NATO line on Ukraine.

BoJo has therefore to play a game of “On the one hand, but on the other….”

On the one hand, signal to the Londongrad Kremlin oligarchs that the steps taken against them will be cosmetically rendered as far as possible, the “fierce” appearance of these steps notwithstanding.

On the other hand, at least give the appearance that Ukania is now doing NATO’s bidding in the Ukraine war.

BoJo gives the impression that now is the time to ditch his Kremlin oligarch benefactors; albeit as slowly as possible, while allowing them the time and loopholes to move their loot and superyachts to less vulnerable locations.

Friendly Dubai, where transactions in cryptocurrencies are welcomed, is becoming a favourite destination for oligarchs looking to relocate their dough.

This “slowly does it” approach is for now BoJo’s preferred option. Some oligarchs, those less directly connected to the Tories, will be sanctioned, and their yachts and private jets sequestered if they are docked or housed in territories under British jurisdiction (e.g. Gibraltar).

The Labour MP Chris Bryant, a member of the Commons foreign affairs select committee, has said the following about this “slowly does it” tack espoused by BoJo:

“The Russian banks that Boris Johnson put on the sanctions list… aren’t the major players: they’re the spare change in the Russian economy. The three individuals he named have already been sanctioned in the US since 2018. So, we’re picking off the minnows but allowing the basking sharks to swim freely. Johnson didn’t even know whom we had already sanctioned, claiming that Roman Abramovich was on the list and refusing to correct the recordwhen I asked him about it. Later in the day, his office had to own up that he was wrong. Is it too much to expect that a prime minister at a moment of international crisis would actually know some of the details?”.

So far, no British-based Kremlin oligarchs have had their massively-expensive Ukanian luxury properties impounding by BoJo’s government.

Italy, by contrast, has imposed a freeze on Alisher Usmanov’s $18 million resort compound in Sardinia. The step taken by the Italian government does not involve a confiscation of Usmanov’s resort (that would create a minefield of legalities), but only a ban on its use or sale and transfer—the property is still owned by Usmanov.

In addition to these legal intricacies, there is another Ukanian complexity when it comes to tracking the assets of oligarchs, not just the ones who are Russian, but also those from Nigeria, the Central Asian ex-Soviet republics, and even Ukraine.

The dirty money flooding into London is deeply embedded, some would say buried, in its vast financial sector, where a horde of lawyers, tax experts, accountants, financial advisers, investment brokers, real estate agents, and luxury car dealers provide the requisite “laundering” for the tainted money streaming into Londongrad.

The legacy of Empire then provides access to another level of opacity for the possessors of dirty money.

Eight of the top 10 tax havens in the world are to be found in British territories– the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Anguilla, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey provide a surfeit of shell companies which make the true ownership of assets all but impossible to establish.

The UK has 87,000 properties whose ownership is wedged into these overseas shell companies.

Even the later Mrs Thatcher, who prided herself on her stern adherence to “Victorian values” (whatever they are), lived for 20 years in a London house “owned” by a company called Bakeland Property Company Ltd registered in the British Virgin Islands.

This arrangement was to the ultimate benefit of Thatcher’s 2 children—it was estimated at that time the house was worth £6m/$8m, so both inheritance tax at 40% (£2.4m/$3.17m) as well as Stamp Duty Land Tax at 7% on any subsequent sale (£420,000/$553,000) were avoided.

There is a notion going round today that Thatcher would have been horrified at the prodigious largesse extended by her presentday Tory counterparts to those depositing their corrupt monies in these off-shore shell companies.

Her own example shows that optimism on the part of those who peddle this view is probably misplaced.

Oliver Bullough, an investigative financial journalist once based in Moscow, has a very recent book– Butler to the World: The Book the Oligarchs Don’t Want You to Read – How Britain Helps the World’s Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything—which provides the indispensable context for the inroads made by dirty money in the UK’s economy.

Bullough has indicated why we should not be confident about the UK’s ability to stem the influx of such money. He says that where the UK is concerned, extremely recent reverences to financial rectitude notwithstanding, eradicating laundered money is akin to trying to remove the eggs from a cake after it has been baked.

BoJo’s posturing during the Ukrainian crisis was not well-received by other leaders in last week’s NATO summit in Brussels. A dishevelled and bleary-eyed BoJo showed-up looking as if he had slept in his car the night before.

While the other leaders shook hands with each other no one bothered to greet the arch-proponent of Global Britannia. Even the normally sycophantic BBC News reported that the visibly uncomfortable BoJo seemed “lonely” at the meeting.

The participants in the summit are well-aware that BoJo’s stunt at repristinating his supposed hero Winston Churchill in the Ukraine war is a wretchedly contrived and probably doomed attempt to mask his several problems at home.

One such problem includes of course his longtime ties with Kremlin oligarchs now being sanctioned by the European and North American countries represented at the NATO summit.

BoJo’s connections with Russian oligarchs are not recent. They go back to the time (2008-2016) when he was mayor of London.

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Alas for the charlatan BoJo, Vladimir Putin must be taking this in with a cynical smile. More

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It has also been linked to recent increases in cases among unvaccinated people in the UK, which now has the highest number of cases of the Indian variant outside India itself. According to The British Medical Journal, cases of the Indian variant in the UK have risen by more than 160% in the week to 20 May. The variant is still predominantly affecting the north west of England and London, but there are clusters across the country. More

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Photograph Source: Matt Brown – CC BY 2.0

“Boris deserves nice curtains given what he’s been through with Covid”.

– Voter in the north of England

“You can’t expect people to vote for you in an election but not tell them why”

– John McDonnell (shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Jeremy Corbyn)

Last Thursday voters in every part of the UK, with the exception of Northern Ireland, went to the polls in the largest assessment, however imprecise that may be, of political opinion since the 2019 general election.

The polls combined 2020 and 2021 elections, the former postponed due to the pandemic, and at stake were 4,600 seats across 143 councils, taking in metropolitan, unitary, county and district councils.

The results were largely in line with predictions made by the opinion polls.

Labour’s most prominent defeat was in the election for a new MP for Hartlepool. This election was triggered after the Labour MP Mike Hill resigned during a parliamentary investigation into alleged sexual harassment.

Labour held this seat since it was created in 1974 (including 2017 and 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn was party leader), but the Tories won Hartlepool after a 16-point swing— notwithstanding 11 years of Tory austerity, and a Tory leader who is a proven liar with a long-standing reputation for sleaze and corruption.

Labour was on the wrong foot from the beginning in Hartlepool— its candidate, Paul Williams, is a staunch anti-Brexiter, and to put him up in a constituency where 70% voted for Brexit was simply not the best tactical move. Williams was parachuted into the constituency by Labour HQ, and the local party had no say in the matter. Williams, a doctor, campaigned on bringing back services to a local hospital he had recommended for reduction when he was a local commissioner. Apparently, this irony was not lost on Hartlepool’s voters.

In addition to losing Hartlepool, Labour had a net loss of 6 councils and more than 200 seats in the elections.

The elections for the Scottish parliament produced no surprises. The ruling party, the Scottish National Party (SNP), won 64 seats, falling just short of an absolute majority by 1 seat. However, with the pro-independence Greens securing 8 seats, there is a mandate for a new independence referendum – this will put the SNP at loggerheads with the UK government, the latter having said it will refuse this referendum.

The prime minister Boris “BoJo” Johnson has called for an immediate summit with the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon.

Wales, like Scotland, has a parliament, the Senedd. Labour won half of the 60 seats, with the Conservative’s winning 16, and the pro-independence party Plaid Cymru 13. Labour will continue to lead the devolved administration, as it has done since the first election in 1999. Labour was helped by the standing of its leader in Wales, Mark Drakeford, the incumbent first minister, whose handling of the Covid pandemic has been seen to be far superior to the lacklustre leadership on this issue provided by BoJo (now going by the soubriquet “Cash for Curtains” after his most recent corruption scandal).

London’s mayor Sadiq Khan, the Labour incumbent, won his election by securing 55.2% of the vote, while his Conservative opponent came second at 44.8%. London is now a firmly Labour city, Khan is believed to have done a reasonably good job in his first term, and the only doubt was always going to be the size of his majority.

The mayor of Greater Manchester, Labour’s Andy Burnham, was re-elected with 67.3% of the vote, with his Conservative opponent coming second at 19.6%. Burnham, the former Labour health secretary, is renowned for his defiant stance against the government during Greater Manchester’s second Covid wave at the end of last year, and this made his re-election a shoo-in.

Despite the drubbing Labour received overall, it won 11 of the 13 mayoral races. In addition to London, Greater Manchester, and Wales, it also won the Liverpool city region, Liverpool itself (the new mayor is Liverpool’s first woman and first black person to become mayor in its history), the northern town of Salford, and the northern rust-belt town of Preston, the latter getting attention in the past few years for the “Preston Model”, a distinctive form of municipal localism, learning some lessons from the US city of Cleveland, involving the integration of community, cooperative, and public assets into a mutually sustaining system.

Also taking place in England and Wales were elections for 39 police and crime commissioners (PCCs)—these are officials with oversight of their local police forces.

Labour’s trouncing had an immediate fall-out. Its leader Keir Starmer had said he would take “full responsibility” for his party’s poor performance, but his first response was to try to sack Angela Rayner, the party chair who was coordinating Labour’s election campaign. Rayner’s supporters say the campaign was run out of Starmer’s office, and that she was a mere PR figurehead for the election.

Rayner, with a working-class background and an MP since 2015, was previously a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, but as a member of her party’s “pragmatic left” decided to become a backer of Starmer, who obviously now views this ex-Corbynite as an expedient scapegoat for Labour’s failings.

The backlash at the news of Rayner’s possible sacking was immediate and furious, and Starmer had to backtrack by making Rayner shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster as well as appointing her to the newly created post of shadow secretary for the future of work.

Rayner will retain her post as Labour’s deputy leader (this position is decided by a vote of party members), which gives her an independent mandate. Having seen Starmer’s attempt to throw Rayner under the bus, hopefully other Labour “pragmatic leftists” will be more circumspect about giving him their support.

Like his mentor Tony Blair, Starmer has shown he may not be entirely trustworthy.

Moreover, Starmer’s campaigning strategy was unbelievably threadbare— it consisted in saying to voters “I’m not Tory” and “Labour is under new leadership”, without announcing any policy proposals showing what this would entail (hence the above-mentioned observation by John McDonnell). Starmer insisted Labour candidates display their “patriotism” by highlighting the Union Jack in their campaigns, but clearly this pantomime British Empire Tribute Act did not impress many voters.

Starmer, a distinguished lawyer (for which he was awarded his knighthood) before he entered politics, wipes the floor in parliamentary debate with “Cash for Curtains” BoJo. Apart from that, his opposition to the Tories has been milquetoast. His main parliamentary strategy has been to require Labour MPs to abstain (rather than oppose) when Tory legislative proposals are voted on, leading him to be nicknamed “Sir Tory Abstainer” in social media.

The skill in mastering a legal brief in courtrooms is not translating so far into the ability to communicate clearly and persuasively with a larger public, and Starmer’s campaign appearances, by general consensus, were wooden, robotic, and formulaic.

Having tried to give Rayner the boot, Starmer’s next step was to have a meaningless shadow cabinet reshuffle.

Already there is media speculation about Starmer’s replacement before the 2024 general election.

This speculation is gratuitous for now. Only a run of Labour losses in future by-elections will pose this issue seriously, unless an unforeseen disaster happens before then.

Starmer’s first test will be an upcoming parliamentary election triggered by the Labour MP Tracy Brabin winning the contest for West Yorkshire mayor and having to vacate her parliamentary seat as a result. If this seat is lost to the Tories, Starmer’s position as leader would become even more precarious.

Some grassroots Labour party members want Jeremy Corbyn back as leader.

Corbyn, while not renowned for oratory, is at the same time a campaigner who can woo large crowds. He is also a thoroughly decent person, a quality in very short supply on nearly all fronts of UK parliamentary politics.

Nonetheless, the various accounts of Corbyn’s leadership indicate that the bureaucratic daily grind of managing a contemporary political party on a 24/7 media cycle was not really his forte. Moreover, he’s not likely to want the job back, given the constant internal sabotage he experienced from supporters of Blair’s regime, who are still installed at Labour’s party HQ, and who for now are Starmerites.

Those on the party’s left who could do the job of being the next Labour leader include Jon Trickett, a former shadow minister, widely regarded as the sharpest mind in parliament, though some ask if he’d want the job at 70.

Other front runners are the Corbyn supporters Richard Burgon (a 40-year -old lawyer and relentlessly energetic campaigner with grassroots support, he’s my future pick), and the more experienced former miners’ union leader Ian Lavery.

The candidate favoured by the party’s right is likely to be the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham.

All this is in the realm of speculation, and as a famous French Marxist philosopher once reminded us: “the future lasts a long time”.

The Tory triumph in these elections was achieved in the context of a badly managed pandemic (albeit with a vaccine “bounce” for BoJo); an economic slump caused by Brexit; a long-term gig economy promoted by both the Tories and New Labour since Thatcher; a critical housing crisis; and Potemkin-like attempts to address climate change.

As Americans would say about this somewhat inexplicable situation: “Go figure!”

Labour’s decline cannot however be attributed entirely to its recent internecine brawling and skirmishing. The current crisis facing it has been decades in the making, and mirrors the travails of social-democratic parties across Europe. Telling this story can be reserved for another time.

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“I’d say I’m Northern Irish and British. I’m not Irish. I don’t live in Ireland”.

– Zara Ferguson, a navy reservist living in Northern Ireland

“I’m very pleased and proud to be in the UK and feel it’s the best way forward. It would have been better if all of Ireland had stayed in the UK”.

– Tom Elliott, a former Ulster Unionist leader and MP

Northern Ireland (NI) celebrated the centenary of its foundation on Monday. The political situation in NI remains febrile, despite a pause in the rioting.

Arlene Foster, the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) leader and Northern Ireland’s first minister, resigned after 6 turbulent years in that position. Foster would probably have been forced out if she had not resigned. She also resigned from her membership of the Stormont Assembly, and said she was leaving the DUP.

The main reason given for Foster’s departure is the Brexit deal’s Northern Ireland Protocol negotiated by Boris “BoJo” Johnson with the EU. Party activists blame Foster and her supporters for the hopelessly impractical trade barrier down the Irish Sea confected as part of the Protocol.

Unionists fear the Protocol undermines NI’s position as part of the UK and prods it towards reunification with its neighbour to the south.

The DUP applauded Brexit, and obstructed Theresa May’s attempts to mitigate its impact on NI on the grounds that her attempts were inadequate.

BoJo’s path to the prime ministership required May’s toppling from that position, so for a short time he and the DUP were obstructionist allies of convenience.

DUP Assembly members are concerned that vacillating voters on the party’s right will desert them for even more doctrinaire rival Unionist parties in May 2022’s Assembly elections. Removing Foster gives them a convenient foil and a chance to rebrand themselves in time for the elections. At the same time, a DUP move to the right as part of this rebranding may hasten the defection of moderates to the centrist Alliance party.

There is a real possibility that such shifts will undermine NI’s fragile and already acrimonious power-sharing executive. If the shifts are sufficiently destabilizing, a return to direct rule from Westminster could occur.

An important consideration here is the importance of a European identity for NI’s minority Catholic community. Blending their Irishness with this European identity functioned as a bulwark against notions of sovereignty subordinated to English domination— by saying “I’m a Northern Irish European”, a Northern Irish Catholic could achieve a distancing, cognitive or otherwise, not achievable by alternatives such as “I’m a Northern Irish member of the UK”.

The above-mentioned shifts are accompanied demographic changes and pressure from Sinn Féin’s on holding a referendum on Irish unity.

However, Foster’s failure to overthrow the NI Protocol was not the only reason for her downfall.

She was judged to have failed to stop or overturn an arrangement that led to an “economic United Ireland” in the view of her critics; they found her positions to be too lax on subjects such as gay rights and marriage and other social issues; she was said be too yielding in responding to Sinn Fein demands over use of the Irish language; as well as being too “inclusive” for the tastes of hardliners.

Free Presbyterians – Christian fundamentalists who despite declining numbers are still an important part of the DUP’s base – were angered when Foster and 2 DUP ministers abstained on an Assembly vote to ban gay conversion “therapy”.

The party’s founder, the late Revd Ian Paisley, always regarded it as part of his vocation to rescue Ulster from “sodomy”, and DUP die-hards with misty-eyed recollections of Paisley’s homophobia viewed Foster’s abstention as a betrayal. Paisley, speaking in an unending thunderous bray with an accompanying bulldog-like demeanour, was said to terrify household pets during his stints of house-to-house campaigning at election time. Reputedly, Rover or Fifi would scurry under the sofa as he boomed-out his campaign pitch. However, Paisley remains something of a beacon for the DUP, setting a mirage-like bar his successors will always find difficult to reach.

Several DUP politicians are vying to succeed Foster.

An early favourite is Edwin Poots, a Stormont Assembly member and agriculture minister who has expressed strong opposition to the Protocol. He is thought to have spearheaded the overthrow of Foster, and was the first to announce his candidacy.

Poots, aged 55, is a Free Presbyterian and young Earth creationist who believes the planet is only 6,000 years old. He also supported banning gay men from donating blood and opposed the adoption of children by gay couples. A man after Ian Paisley’s heart!

Meanwhile, it is becoming clear that cracks are starting to appear in Northern Irish Unionism.

Business and civic leaders are aware that change is going to be impossible to resist, especially if Scotland becomes independent, and the UK breaks up as a result.

If the UK crumbles, the prospect of a united Ireland or some other constitutional arrangement that will allow NI to have closer ties with the Republic while remaining notionally within the UK, may be difficult to counter.

Growing numbers of younger voters do not identify as either Nationalist or Unionist, and are less likely to be averse to such changes. Secularism is eating away at the Protestant soul of Unionism, just as it is gnawing at the Catholicism of its neighbour to the south.

Brexit has been a boon for the EU-member Irish Republic. Frustrated by the extra red tape involved as a result of Brexit, UK producers are no longer shipping their goods to NI (from where they are sent on to the Republic). Instead these manufacturers are sending their products straight to the Republic for subsequent re-export to the European mainland.

Rosslare Europort, the shortest shipping route from Ireland to both England and the European mainland, handles ferries and freight. Freight is up almost 500% as a result of Brexit. From Rosslare there are 18 direct sailings to Dunkirk, Cherbourg and to Bilbao in Spain. There are also new routes from Dublin to Rotterdam and Oostende with some of the biggest ferries in the world.

If the Republic’s gain in prosperity as a result of Brexit becomes even more tangible, and as London’s sheer indifference towards NI becomes more difficult to overlook, fewer Northern Irish are likely to share the above-quoted opinions of Zara Ferguson and Tom Elliott.

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In March last year I was in New Delhi for a conference at one of the several universities there– it was my last trip anywhere since the pandemic took hold in increasing parts of the world that spring.

Delhi’s notorious pollution relented, and there were blue skies during my week there.

But the pandemic was looming. A conference participant from Tokyo took ill with what turned out to be Delhi Belly (aka traveller’s diarrhoea). However, since Covid-19 has already taken hold in Japan, and some of its symptoms overlap with Delhi Belly, the organizers took him to a nearby clinic. They were not equipped to administer a Covid test, so he was sent on to a hospital with this capacity. To the relief of all at the conference, his test result was negative.

India did relatively well at the start of the pandemic, prompting the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi to claim at the beginning of March that the country was in Covid-19’s “endgame”.

Today, however, the Covid situation in India, and Delhi in particular, is absolutely dire. State governments in Delhi and Mumbai are now scrambling to reconstruct the temporary Covid facilities they had decommissioned earlier, in the belief that the pandemic had been brought under control.

However, in the space of just 12 days, India’s Covid infection rate doubled to 17%, reaching 30% in Delhi. Hospitals have filled to capacity, with most beds occupied by the young; in Delhi, 65% of cases are under 40 years old.

Six hospitals in Delhi have run out of oxygen completely and medical authorities say other hospitals have just a few hours of supplementary oxygen supply left.

A crematorium east of Delhi had to build funeral pyres in its parking lot to deal with demand. Mortuaries are at full capacity and bodies are left to decompose at home.

A number of people have died while waiting for oxygen, and more than 99% of all intensive care beds are full. The New Delhi High Court has ordered the government to divert oxygen from industrial use to hospitals treating Covid patients.

Indian railways said it now has special trains specifically designed to carry liquid oxygen and oxygen cylinders, named the “Oxygen Express”. Thousands of Covid beds are also being created in train carriages.

India reported a global record of 349,691 new cases on Sunday April 22^nd, a record increase for the fourth consecutive day, and 2,767 people dead, as the surge hit the world’s second-most populous country (India has nearly 1.4 billion people). The country’s brittle health care system is now in a state of collapse, lacking the ICU beds and supplementary oxygen needed for seriously ill patients.

The following chart depicts the gravity of India’s Covid situation, where new cases now exceed those of the US during the latter’s peak:

Source: Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.

Modi’s government had ordered a wide-ranging lockdown last year, in the early stages of the pandemic, but has since become cagey over the economic consequences of the continued imposition of strict restrictions.

Modi’s version of Indian/Hindu exceptionalism stoked his complacency.

The totally unwarranted belief in national greatness led to the country being unprepared for the severity of the crisis, especially in vaccine production.

Western countries had encouraged India to become the engine of global pharmaceutical manufacturing, but last week German Chancellor Angela Merkel said this approach was possibly mistaken. China and the US are now manufacturing more Covid-19 vaccines than India, which is now having to import Russia’s Sputnik-5 vaccine.

India has launched a vaccination drive but only a tiny fraction of the population has been administered a vaccine, as indicated by the following chart:

Our World in Data at https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=USA~IND~GBR.

The US has vaccinated 26.7% of its population against the virus, the UK 16.5%, while India (admittedly with its massive, mostly rural, population) is at 1.4%.

The government announced that vaccines will be available for those over the age of 18 from May 1 but experts say India won’t have enough doses for the 600 million people who will qualify for a jab.

Like his American friend “Dolan Trum”, the smug Modi would not pause campaigning while the pandemic was in full flow. India proceeded to hold 5 state elections in April, and an unmasked Modi presided over huge political rallies, with crowds not social distancing and without masks like their leader.

Modi was also criticized for allowing millions of Hindus to take a dip in the Ganges during the Kumbh Mela festival, again without social distancing and without masks.

In addition to shortages of hospital beds, oxygen, and vaccines; plasma and Remdesivir (the promising experimental drug used to treat Donald Trump when he contracted Covid), also remain in short supply in hospitals across the country.

The prospect of stemming India’s second wave of Covid remains dim for now. Apart from the incompetence of political leaders prone to magical thinking (the chief minister of Uttarakhand, TS Rawat, claimed that oxygen is not necessary since the ancient Brahmin sages survived without breathing), 3 exacerbating factors have to be taken into account.

India’s medical experts say new and more virulent Covid variants, in particular a “double mutant” strain that originated there, have contributed to the surge in infections, affecting people in their 20s and 30s in particular.

In addition, an over-relaxed government did not use the lull after the first surge to build-up stockpiles of drugs and vaccines, as well as enhancing Covid- care provision. Modi’s government fell asleep at the proverbial steering wheel.

Another still imponderable factor is the transmission of the virus to rural areas, as workers who migrated to the now highly infected cities in search of work, flee these cities (having lost their jobs due to lockdowns) and return to their villages, bringing the virus with them.

To quote The Guardian:

“Scenes of migrant workers massing at bus and train stations, fleeing lockdowns in Indian cities for their villages, are ominous to doctors in the country’s hinterlands.

They know that many of those in the crowds will be returning with Covid-19 strains that are ravaging urban India, leading to record numbers of daily infections this week and the country’s highest daily death tolls since the virus emerged. In parts of rural West Bengal state, where politicians were holding mass election rallies until late this week, the surge has already started”.

India’s rural areas are of course even more disadvantaged with regard to health and medical resources than its cities.

Moreover, deaths in rural areas, from whatever cause, are less likely to be registered than in bigger towns and cities, as more rural dwellers die at home without reaching a hospital, where the requisite bureaucracy can record their deaths.

The result is an almost certain discrepancy between confirmed (i.e., officially registered) deaths and actual deaths.

Modi’s response to a wave of criticism? Censor such criticism– Twitter confirmed it had blocked dozens of critical tweets following a legal demand from the government.

Photograph Source: Jamie McCaffrey – CC BY 2.0

CounterPuncher Binoy Kampmark has given us an unsparingly accurate snapshot of the late Prince Philip in action at a Cambridge University event in 2006, while placing that event in the supervening context of the old brute’s habitual racism, misogyny, and regal condescension.

The BBC gave saturation coverage of Philip’s death, as did the main commercial channel ITV.

Following Philip’s death at Windsor Castle aged 99, the BBC scrapped its schedules across both BBC One and BBC Two to run an endless succession of mirrored programmes about him.

Viewers of BBC Four were met with a message advising them to switch over for a “major news report”, while BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 5 Live also broadcast programmes about Philip.

CounterPuncher Jonathan Cook points out that ITV, which generate revenues from advertising, saw a 60 per cent drop in viewing figures after “it decided to broadcast endless forelock-tugging”.

The BBC received more than 110,000 complaints relating to its coverage of Philip’s death, with the fact that it had two channels showing exactly the same programmes for hours on end probably constituting a big chunk of the complaints.

A BBC spokesperson, resorting to boilerplate, said lamely: “We are proud of our coverage and the role we play during moments of national significance”.

The spokesperson declined to confirm the number of complaints the BBC received.

Ukania’s over-saturated media coverage of the prince’s death saw fawning on a scale that became ridiculous.

Brits were told Philip was “the grandfather of the nation”, how much “we’ll miss him when he’s gone”, how Bonnie Prince Charlie Mk 2 will now be the “patriarch” of the royal family— if the TV-viewing figures are a guide, more than a few Brits were not happy at this extravagant toadying to the Establishment.

Even the disgraced Prince Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein’s pal in cavorting with the latter’s sex slaves, emerged from the seclusion of a tower in some royal castle to say that Philip’s death “left a huge void for the queen”.

To provide wall-to-wall coverage of the Philip spectacle, just about every palace functionary involved in Philip’s funeral received their 90 seconds of fame on nationwide TV– the Lord Chamberlain, the Queen’s Comptroller, ladies in waiting, lords of this and that.

Every member of the royal family “resuming their duties” received TV coverage.

The press coverage was just as over-imaginative and obsequious.

“One last look of love”, said the Daily Mirror of arrangements where the Queen is expected to pause briefly at Philip’s coffin before taking her place in the quire.

The Daily Mail had a picture of Prince Charles with the caption “Agony of Charles, a picture of grief”. Overlooked here is the long history of Charles’s uneasy relationship with his father.

Philip received his education at Gordonstoun, a school in Scotland created on rugged Outward Bound principles. He flourished there, and insisted, the queen’s tergiversations notwithstanding, that his “sensitive” son go to Gordonstoun. Charles, who much preferred music rooms to rugby fields, loathed Gordonstoun, and when it came to his own sons’ educations, Gordonstoun wasn’t in the picture.

It was Philip who virtually ordered Charles to marry Diana Spencer, in a handwritten letter no less, despite having more than an inkling about his son’s trysts with the still-married Camilla Parker-Bowles.

When over-blown paens presented as baying headlines and ridiculous captions are the mechanism for dragooning Brits into swooning adherence to a twisted Establishment narrative, any such complexities and inconvenient facts are bound to be occluded.

The funeral, in the chapel at Windsor castle, was a relatively modest affair.

The pandemic’s restrictions reduced invitees to 30 family members instead of the traditional 800 or so in a cathedral. These included members from Philip’s German family, whose recent ancestors had Nazi connections so strong that they were not invited to the wedding of Philip and Elizabeth in 1947.

The other departure from a traditional royal funeral was the absence of military uniforms in the mourning party. Male mourners wore morning coats instead.

Two reasons were advanced for this: (1) Harry’s exit from the royal family to reside with Meghan Markle in California meant he had been stripped of all his high-falutin honorary military appointments (so he would appear at the funeral in the uniform of a humble army captain, the rank he achieved in his actual military service); and (2) the shameless Andrew apparently insisted on wearing the uniform of an admiral, even though he retired from the navy with the rank of commander. The husband of his older sister Anne is a bona fide admiral (retired), so the sight of a fake admiral (moreover someone wanted for questioning in the US for his dealings with Jeffrey Epstein) alongside a real admiral in the funeral procession probably rang alarm bells for the functionaries in charge of royal protocol.

Such are the bizarre exigencies of Ruritanian flummery.

The queen sat alone in the quire at the funeral service. The media coverage highlighted how “alone” she would now be with Philip’s demise.

Not mentioned is the retinue of valets, footmen, and maids who have surrounded her since she was born. The queen may be bereft after the loss of her husband of 73 years, but physically alone she will not be.

This flummery did little to dispel the impression that this is a monarchy approaching its terminus.

A generally admired queen (for whatever reason) aged 94 and hanging on till the end, followed by an elderly son who has shown none of the qualities needed for his role as future king, to be succeeded in turn by the callow Prince William, who will doubtless be overshadowed by his subtly glamourous wife Kate Middleton, in something of a reprise of the situation between Charles and Diana.

That seems to be Ukania’s future, as mirrored by its monarchy— a country of vanished economic means clinging forlornly to the symbolic accoutrements of its largely fantasized past.

Photograph Source: John Morton – CC BY 2.0

Northern Ireland has now become the focal point of the UK’s post-Brexit crisis.

While the connection between the more than a week of rioting by Protestant “Loyalists” and Brexit may not seem obvious, some, such as the Northern Ireland justice minister, Naomi Long, say the UK prime minister Boris “BoJo” Johnson’s “dishonesty” over the still-to-be-decided Brexit border has exacerbated the situation.

The protocol agreed between the EU and the UK fudged the issue of the land border between the UK-member Northern Ireland (NI) and the EU-member Republic of Ireland to NI’s south.

The Brexit deal put NI in a distinctive and somewhat anomalous position — legally part of the UK, but at the same time within the EU’s customs regime and part of the single market, with some exceptions, where trade is concerned.

This uncertainty over a nonstandard border between the Protestant-dominated NI and its neighbouring Catholic-majority Irish Republic has made more appealing the prospect of a united Ireland, primarily for economic reasons— such a reunion would confer the huge benefit of direct access to EU markets for NI, without the encumbrances involved in being tied to the UK.

NI is currently in the economic doldrums because of uncertainty over the UK-EU border issue.

At the same time, the merest prospect of a reunion with its Catholic neighbour alarms a significant part of the Protestant-majority NI.

NI’s Protestants would of course become a minority in a reunified Ireland, and many “Prots”, albeit of an increasingly older generation, would welcome the imposition of a hard border with its neighbour to the south, if only as an ever more redundant and forlorn symbol of NI’s ties to the UK.

BoJo was warned repeatedly (by the Biden administration no less) that any Brexit deal which compromised the Good Friday peace agreement between the two parts of Ireland would run the likelihood of jeopardizing that peace. These apprehensions are starting to be realized on the volatile streets of Belfast.

BoJo’s grovelling before Donald Trump showed how desperate he is for a UK-US trade deal to help replace trade lost when the UK left the EU. The pro-Irish Biden won’t offer BoJo the sniff of such a deal while the streets of Belfast are burning.

Meanwhile, the EU is taking legal action against the UK after the latter announced it will waive paperwork on food entering NI, an open breach of the Brexit agreement.

BoJo’s overwhelming electoral priority was securing a Brexit deal via any pretense under the Ukanian sun (those susceptible to omens may know that this sun is notorious for shielding itself behind rainy grey clouds, just read a novel by Dickens or Henry James?) — BoJo doesn’t give a rat’s posterior for maintaining peace in Ireland, nor for the greatly increased possibility of a push for independence on the part of the EU-supporting Scotland.

A few days ago, Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said a fresh referendum on independence would impossible to resist should her party, the Scottish National Party (SNP), secure a majority in next month’s elections for the Scottish parliament.

Every opinion poll so far indicates the SNP will win this election.

The vagaries of its first-past-the-post electoral system ensure that UK general elections are largely determined by votes cast in England, and playing to the Brexit-inclined English electorate was BoJo’s overwhelming objective in the 2019 election.

The English chauvinist BoJo probably won’t lose any sleep over rioting in Belfast, there being for now no real likelihood that his whopping 80-seat parliamentary majority in Westminster (London) will be threatened by unrest in NI.

The ex-London mayor BoJo’s view of the political universe has always been somewhat London-centric, except perhaps when it comes to obtaining munificence, legally mind you, from shady Kremlin oligarchs and Gulf Sheikhs.

Responding to the unrest in Belfast, BoJo joined every other mainstream politician, British and Irish alike, in issuing his pro forma statement denouncing the criminality of thugs and hooligans, etc.

The violence in Belfast obscures for now the other drawbacks to the UK’s ramshackle Brexit deal.

Also contributing to the muddying of the economic impact of Brexit is the economic boost provided by the pent-up demand generated by the Covid lockdowns—with pubs, restaurants, and shops shuttered, and holiday travel vastly curtailed, Brits spent much less than usual, precipitating a retail crash and recession.

With the latest lockdown about to be lifted after a successful vaccination rollout, the expectation, especially in Downing Street, is that Brits will embark on a spending spree.

There are 2 counter-indications to this rosy scenario.

The first is that many Brits lost their jobs during the lockdowns, and these unfortunate individuals, if they obtain post-lockdown employment, will probably be paying-off debt rather than hitting the shopping malls.

The second is that none of the Brexit deal’s structural weaknesses will be removed by a burst of short-term household spending—there are only so many new cars, fridges, and flat-screen TVs a household needs or can afford.

The other distraction from any Brexit woes is the death of the queen’s husband, Prince Philip. All the UK mainstream media are giving this event saturation coverage, so much so that a growing number of Brits are turning off their TVs in sheer frustration. The Prince’s death has even eclipsed the Meghan Markle-Harry media drama as the cynosure of attention.

BoJo is benefitting (for now) from a vaccination “bounce”.

The latest Opinium poll for The Observer found that 44% now approve of the government’s Covid handling, with 36% disapproving. Overall, the poll recorded a 9-point lead for the Conservatives over Labour, the largest Tory lead since last May. This despite the fact that the UK’s death toll, just over 127,000, remains one of the highest in the world per 1000 of population.

Major events surrounding the royal family—births, marriages, funerals— usually provide a boost for the “king/queen and country” Conservatives.

If the Tories receive a helping hand from Philip’s death, Labour will be in deep trouble when local council elections take place in 3 weeks’ time.

The Tories have always had an electoral advantage from Ukania’s structurally unbalanced political system.

Now with the vaccination “bounce” and the royalist psychodrama (a hint here is provided by the BBC’S description of Philip as “the grandfather of the nation”) providing the Tories with yet another step-up the electoral ladder as “the nation’s grandfather’s” funeral takes place on live TV– there is talk in the media of the lacklustre Labour leader Keir Starmer being deposed from the party leadership should Labour receive its expected trouncing in the polls.

To think that in the 21^st century, an advanced industrial country could have a fictive “grandfather of the nation” helping undermine the electoral prospects of its main opposition party!

In that country, to resort to a cliché, the surreal has now become its real.

The Northern Irish have of course experienced English surrealities for centuries, but then they have never really mattered for an England-dominated UK.

The riot has always been their voice, as it is now.

Photograph Source: Katie Crampton (WMUK) – CC BY-SA 4.0

Protests over the killing of George Floyd occurred outside the US. In the UK these protests prompted the government to order an official report on racial inequality.

The setting-up of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED, a sardonic appellation worthy of George Orwell’s 1984) by Boris “BoJo” Johnson was a version of an age-old strategy, namely, appoint a commission of trusties who can then be guaranteed to deliver a whitewash (even though the 10-person commission had only 1 white member).

The 258-page report, commissioned last year and published last Wednesday, came to conclusions that beggared belief and prompted widespread public derision. A sample of CRED’s conclusions:

+ CRED found that although more needs to be done, Britain should be seen as a “model for other white-majority countries”.

+ CRED’s report claimed institutional racism does not exist in the UK, that the term “structural racism” was “too liberally used”, and that influences such as socioeconomic background, culture and religion had a “more significant impact on life chances”. After CRED’s report was released, the government admitted that a “considerable number” of people giving evidence, many from ethnic minorities, had in fact testified to CRED that structural racism was a serious problem.

+ While CRED’s report accepted that more needed to be done on the British Empire and colonization in schools, it suggested that the history curriculum in British schools should teach “a new story” about slavery, and emphasize that slavery is not only “about profit and suffering”, but how “culturally African people transformed themselves into a re-modelled African/Britain”. CRED’s critics pointed out that this looks like fantasy-attempt to imbue slavery with at least one redeeming feature, when slavery had none. American readers may recall how the egregious Trump-supporter Ben Carson (an Afro-American) described slaves as “economic immigrants”. Ukanian officialdom now appears to have a similar version of this mendacious narrative.

+ CRED’s chapter on health acknowledges differences across ethnic backgrounds but describes the situation as “much more variable”, citing the part played by individual choices, and advising people, in the familiar right-wing libertarian way, to “take control of their own health”. CRED had no medical experts.

+ The major immigrant Windrush scandal, is mentioned just twice in CRED’s report. The report concludes that Britain is no longer a place where “the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities”, despite this scandal constituting an undeniable example in recent times where Tory government decisions had appalling racially discriminatory, consequences. Saying the Windrush disgrace is an instance “where ethnic minority communities have rightly felt let down”, CRED’s report continues: “Outcomes such as these do not come about by design, and are certainly not deliberately targeted”.

The shameful truth here is quite different. Many of those affected by the Windrush scandal had been born British subjects, they and their parents having arrived legally in the UK before 1973, from Caribbean countries as members of the “Windrush generation” (named after the Empire Windrush), the ship bringing one of the first groups of West Indian migrants to the UK in 1948. Ukania at that time was in desperate need of migrant labour for its postwar reconstruction.

Numerous members of the Windrush generation, as a result of the current Tory “hostile environment” policy towards these legal immigrants, were deported because they were given entry documents subsequently destroyed by the Home Office (Ukania’s interior ministry), an unknown number were placed in detention, lost their jobs or homes, and had legally-issued passports confiscated or were denied welfare benefits or medical care for which they qualified by law.

An independent investigation into the underlying context of the Windrush scandal published last year, said the Home Office displayed “institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness” on race issues, “consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism”.

To say of the Windrush fiasco, as CRED did, that “outcomes such as these do not come about by design, and are certainly not deliberately targeted” reflects completely the depths of the government’s cynicism.

+ CRED also mischaracterized significantly the part played by experts in its compilation, and some have reacted with an understandable fury. The report’s Appendix D, headed “Stakeholders list of organisations and individuals”, said CRED had “heard evidence from many during the course of its work” and “would like to thank the following for their participation”. This characterization turned out to be false. To quote The Huffington Post:

“Author SI Martin, who is black, said he only discovered his name was in the appendix, under a sub-heading entitled “Academics and individuals”, on the day after the report was published and claimed CRED had not contacted him.

Asked for his reaction, he told the PA news agency: “Initially, hilarity. Because of all of the names that could have appeared on that document attesting to its credibility, mine would have been the least”.

“If they’d known the first thing about me I’d have been the last person chosen.”

He said that “publicly and in writing, in every public arena, all of my ideas and sentiment are diametrically opposed to practically everything in that document”.

“Those who know me, those who know anything about me, would understand the ridiculousness of my name being associated with that”, he added.

It is understood that Martin was named in error and will be removed from the acknowledgements”.

In a similar position to Martin was Sir John Bell, Regius professor of medicine at Oxford University. After seeing his name on CRED’s list, Bell told the Daily Telegraph: “Totally news to me. I never spoke to them… I did support this office and had a call with them, but that is not the report – it is different”.

Stephen Bourne, a historian, told PA Media he was contacted last June by No 10’s adviser on racial and ethnic issues, Samuel Kasumu (who resigned the day after CRED’s report was published), and invited to a Zoom meeting during Black History month alongside other historians of black Britain.

He later accepted the invitation in October, but was not told “anything about a commission”.

Bourne added: “I knew nothing about this commission, knew nothing about a report, they didn’t even mention historians, but I just assumed that is what it would be”.

Bourne delivered his lecture to a group of people on Zoom, without any introductions beforehand. He was flabbergasted to find out later what their CRED roles were after looking-up their names online.

Bourne said he then contacted Samuel Kasumu and “read him the riot act”, saying it was “unprofessional and discourteous” to mislead him into thinking he was participating in a roundtable discussion with other academics when it was in fact a session intended for CRED and its report.

Bourne said he had been “misled” and was “very disappointed and very upset” that his name was “attached to a report as a stakeholder when I didn’t have anything to do with it and I don’t actually agree with the report” — “The report is flawed and I’m not happy with the report”.

A spokesperson for CRED said: “Stephen Bourne participated in a 10 Downing Street event for Black History Month, in which he made a valuable contribution about the curriculum which influenced the thinking of the commissioners on the subject”, before going on to say that “We thanked him as a courtesy.”

As already mentioned, Downing Street’s most senior Black adviser, Samuel Kasumu, quit his post the day after the report’s publication, although No.10 sources maintained his leaving had “absolutely nothing to do with the report”.

The Runnymede Trust, a race equality think-tank, said the report was “littered with racist tropes”, such as pointing to the “optimism” of some immigrants as opposed to others (thereby invoking the “model minority” myth, mainly to do with Asian immigrants), references to absent Black fathers, and claims of “rising sensitivity” among ethnic minorities to racism (as if racism is not a problem, albeit of a different kind, for the white majority as well).

The government stuffed CRED with institutional-racism deniers to distort the evidence and arrive at pre-determined conclusions in line with its agenda for a culture war on the issues of race and education– the Tories having signalled their intention to make education more “patriotic” some time ago.

CRED’s aim, in accord with the Tory government’s agenda, was thus not to focus on the realities of racial disparities in the UK, but to contain and steer a volatile debate in a direction where this racism can be rebranded as an issue over-stated by anti-racist “activists” pursuing their own “radical political agenda”, and so forth.

The task confronting Brits now is to compel CRED to disclose any terms of reference given it by BoJo, as well as the criteria he used for the composition of CRED, and the criteria for evidence used by the commission BoJo appointed. The shady role of the suddenly vanished Samuel Kasumu must also be investigated.

Compelling evidence that the CRED report is little more than an exercise in gaslighting is provided by its failure to interview during its consultative process the person who appointed it, BoJo himself. The members of CRED would have found that this is what the palpable racist BoJo has written or said in the past:

+ Calling women wearing the burqa “letter boxes” and “bank robbers”.

+ Writing a ditty about the Turkish President having sex with a goat.

+ Writing about the Congo: “No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird”.

+ Dismissing “part-Kenyan” Barack Obama’s views on Britain.

+ Describing Commonwealth citizens as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”.

+ Describing Ugandan children who sang for him as “Aids-ridden choristers”.

+ Calling Papua New Guinea a country with “orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing”.

+ Calling Africa “that country”.

+ Saying Malaysian women go to university to “find men to marry”.

+ Saying Africa “may be a blot, but not on our conscience. … The problem is, we are not in charge anymore”.

+ Refusing to condemn an aide who said that “black people have lower IQs on average”.

+ On FGM in Africa: “some readers may feel vaguely that the African male should not be stampeded into abandoning his ancient prerogatives”.

A country with a proven racist serving as its leader, had that leader appoint a commission, CRED the incredible, which concluded that Ukania is as “a model of racial equality”.

Only so much cynicism can be absorbed, even by the most languidly blasé.

But absorbed it will be by BoJo’s Little Englander base, especially in the absence of a firm Labour opposition.

Photograph Source: Marco Verch – CC BY 2.0

The EU’s vaccine rollout has been on the equivalent of life-support since its inception.

Likewise, the UK’s Brexit rollout has also been on life-support, if not in a hospital bed immediately adjacent to the EU’s— sisterly/brotherly love between the two not quite being what the doctor has been able to prescribe.

When it comes camouflaging their respective debacles with spin and PR, the UK has an easier time of it, since all it needs to do is cast Brussels as the villain responsible for its Brexit plight.

The UK’s PR strategy has another tack in addition to blaming Brussels, that is, using a megaphone at every opportunity to insist that leaving the EU enabled it to have the successful vaccine rollout that has evaded the bureaucratically-mired EU.

The EU has no equivalent presumed villain easily within its purview. An organization with 27 nation-state members, with disparate and oftentimes incompatible interests, and lacking the fiscal clout and freedom of action of a nation state, may have several targets to aim at in the search for someone to blame for the EU’s current situation.

The countries on the EU’s periphery, mainly from the former Soviet bloc, blame Brussels. Brussels in turn fights within itself to apportion blame. The president of the European Commission (EC) Ursula von der Leyen has been much criticized— a German, and Germany is the biggest country in the EU, she has been accused by some EU members of being too preoccupied with “keeping Germany happy”.

The only recourse left to Brussels in this phony war is to hold the UK’s feet to the proverbial fire when it comes to enforcing the terms of the Brexit agreement it had with the UK.

But for now, Brexit’s problems are not at the forefront of public attention in the EU and UK. The EU has the bigger problem of dealing with the pandemic on its plate, and the UK would rather divert attention to its successful vaccine rollout than dwell on the internal impact of its Brexit fiasco.

Meanwhile the EU proposed, misguidedly, a more stringent regime to curb vaccine supplies going to countries less badly affected by the pandemic.

Admitting it is a Covid-19 “hotspot”, the EC said on Wednesday last week it may not approve exports to countries that have made more progress with vaccine rollouts or where the “epidemiological situation” is more satisfactory than the EU’s.

The EC announced this step during a disagreement with AstraZeneca over vaccine provision, with the EC complaining that the UK is importing doses from Europe while not exporting any back.

The EC executive vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis said 10m doses had moved from the EU to the UK while “zero doses” had returned from British plants.

The disparity in the rate of vaccine inoculations between the UK and the UK is glaring: across the EU, just over 11% of adults have received a first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine while in the UK the figure is more than 54%.

The European continent is also experiencing a third wave of Covid infections as the UK claws its way back from a winter lockdown.

Spain’s coronavirus infection rate rose last Friday to 138.6 per 100,000 people from 134 the day before, the Spanish health ministry reported.

Last week Poland reported a new daily record of 35,143 coronavirus cases, in the middle of a record number of infections for the third consecutive day.

Last week French health ministry data showed the number of people in intensive care units with Covid-19 rose by 57 to a 2021 high of 4,766.

Reuters reports that Germany has issued Covid travel warnings for several European countries, including neighbouring France, Austria, Denmark and the Czech Republic.

Travellers to Germany from countries on the list are required to provide a negative coronavirus test no more than 48 hours old upon arrival in Germany. They will also have quarantine for 10 days, though this period can be shortened if they get a second negative test after 5 days.

However, the EU’s proposed curb on its vaccine exports, ill-thought-out all along, was abandoned quickly in the face of immediate push-back from within the EU itself.

Bernd Lange, chairman of the European Parliament’s international trade committee, criticized the projected restrictions, warning it could have consequences for the EU’s vaccination efforts– “Everyone should realise what kind of danger we are engaging in: we might end up with less vaccines for the EU”.

Even Jean-Claude Juncker, until 2019 the head of the EC (and before that prime minister of Luxembourg), criticized the EU for being too cautious in its vaccine procurement, and for engaging in a needless tiff with the UK.

Juncker, legendary for his boisterous wine consumption at summit meetings and his ensuing Yeltsin-like antics (e.g., bitch-slapping other summit attendees in a supposed display of camaraderie, and needing to be taken away in a wheel-chair after reeling in a drunken stupor), said soberly:

“I would like the member states and the commission to speed up the efforts to provide vaccines for each and every one in the European Union…. Britain is in advance for different reasons, because Britain took the decision to have an emergency decision-based approach whereas the European Union, the commission and the member of states, were more budget conscious … We were too cautious”.

Juncker’s boozed-up capers are much missed by some of us. Eurocrats tend to be a bunch of grey suits, and Juncker’s carnivalesque conduct at summits was a welcome laugh for anyone of a moderately cynical disposition.

Even so, Juncker’s current intervention on the pandemic is spot on.

The EU’s procurement of vaccines was stalled for more than 2 months in 2020 by a number of member states refusing to accept their full share of vaccine provision because they feared having to spend money on a product that might turn out to be ineffective.

The EU’s vaccine approval process was further slowed-down by concerns during negotiations with providers about costs, as well as the desire to avoid legal liability if the vaccines turned out to be unsafe for those inoculated.

Meanwhile the UK (and US), with a much less cumbersome approval process, sped ahead with their vaccine procurement.

The EU’s quick reversal on its ill-advised curb of vaccine exports to the UK has not however ended this by-now highly politicized vaccine spat.

France’s foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the UK will find it difficult to source second Covid inoculations since its success was due to pressing on with first doses, without having obtained the second doses required for a full vaccination of its population.

The British government responded by saying it had sufficient supplies, despite “challenges”, to give people their second doses within its 12-week time frame— the UK chose the extended time frame for the second dose in order to administer a first dose to a larger segment of the population.

However, vaccine production is now global in scale, and last week the Indian government introduced a 2-3 month ban on vaccine exports in order to ensure supplies adequate to cope with its own growing Covid pandemic.

India’s decision to curtail vaccine exports will delay 5m doses due to be sent to the UK. This forthcoming shortage will add a month to the UK’s vaccination programme, and inoculations will not be made available to under-50s until 1 May.

This of course has nothing to do with any shenanigans between the EU and the UK, as well as the devastating non-availability of vaccines in the world’s poorest countries, now having the barest of health and medical resources to deal with their Covid crises.

“Vaccine nationalism” is thus very much a game for richer countries, and the world’s abjectly poor are consigned to be its spectators.

Photograph Source: Eybl, Plakatmuseum Wien/Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain

Readers of any reliable news outlet will probably be aware that the UK’s Brexit rollout has been little short of a disaster.

Adding to the catalogue of Brexit failures, the UK is now being sued by the EU for extending unilaterally a grace period on food imports to the island of Ireland, where the EU and the UK share a land border, and where a special trade system was set up as part of the Brexit deal. The wheels of the international justice system grind slowly, so it may be a while before this case is resolved.

These readers may also be aware that, a successful Covid vaccination programme notwithstanding, the UK’s death toll from the pandemic is among the highest in the western world.

They may also be aware that the combination of Brexit and the pandemic has plunged the UK’s economy into depths not encountered for 300 years.

What better time, therefore, to conduct a review of existing defence arrangements, and to promise an upgrade of current weapons systems, as a hoped-for boost to the morale of Brits uneasy or depressed about the situation described above.

A war, started by the Americans on some pretext with the UK joining as the ever-loyal ally, might have served this morale-boosting purpose better, but a populace distracted by the pandemic and its ramifications may be less easily cajoled by previously effective recourses to bellicosity such as the invasion of Iraq.

So, time for Prime Minister Boris “BoJo” Johnson and Ukania to head to the weaponry gym where armaments, and other military paraphernalia, can be bulked-up for show without any imminent prospect of battle-field combat.

The UK Defence Review 2021called for an increase in expenditure of £40bn plus /$56bn plus on WMDs. China was very much its focus.

“China’s growing international stature is by far the most significant geopolitical factor in the world today…. The fact that China is an authoritarian state, with different values to ours, presents challenges for the UK and our allies. China will contribute more to global growth than any other country in the next decade with benefits to the global economy”.

BoJo, the ersatz Churchill, announced that the UK intends to deploy the HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier and supporting carrier strike group in Indo-Pacific waters later this year, perhaps in the hope that it will make China (2 aircraft carriers) tremble at the knees.

CounterPuncher Dave Lindorff has given a recent overview of Russia’s and China’s nuclear warfare capabilities.

Lindorff points out that China has 380 nuclear warheads, and is estimated to have 100 nuclear-capable missiles with a variety of ranges. It has 6 nuclear-missile carrying submarines, and 2 aircraft carriers, which are deployed close to home.

The UK has 4 Trident nuclear-missile carrying submarines.

The UK Defence Review calls for an increase in the UK’s stockpile of the Trident nuclear warheads from 180 to 260, the biggest increase since the end of the cold war.

However, to call Trident a “British” missile is something of a misnomer.

Trident missiles are designed and manufactured in the United States by Lockheed Martin. Maintenance and in-service support of the missiles is undertaken at King’s Bay, Georgia, USA. While Trident’s nuclear warheads are manufactured in the UK, they are patterned after their US equivalent, the American W76 warhead. The missiles are in effect leased from the US.

While the UK has operational control over its Trident missiles, it is impossible to believe that the UK’s missiles will be launched without prior American approval. A country receiving a submarine-launched Trident missile strike will probably have no way of distinguishing between US and UK missiles, since both use Trident, and thus could just as feasibly retaliate against the US as the UK.

Nuclear missiles are of course professed to be a deterrent, in response to an enemy’s first strike, but this renders their deployment moot, for the UK at any rate.

The (relatively tiny) UK fits into Oregon state, so an enemy strike, involving multiple nuclear warheads much more powerful than the single bomb dropped on Nagasaki (22 kilotons on Nagasaki vs a single Trident warhead-equivalent of 100 kilotons), directed solely at London would nonetheless wipe-out any semblance of everyday life in most of the UK, with the possible exception of a few islands to the far north of Scotland.

What then would be the point of a Ukanian retaliatory strike?

The UK Defence Review 2021also makes much of the threat posed by cyber-warfare, but there seems to be little connection between this trepidation and the decision to increase unilaterally the UK’s nuclear warhead stockpile by 40% and to lower significantly the bar for first use of WMDs.

This altered position, the review argues, is a response to the challenge posed by “emerging technologies that could have a comparable impact” to a strike by nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

It is not clear what the Tory government means by “emerging technologies”, just as it is unclear how adding to a stockpile of WMDs will counter the threat posed by a cyber-attack.

Unless the muddle-headed BoJo thinks that one way to respond to a cyber-attack would be to launch a Trident missile strike against the presumed cyber-belligerents. But this would be an act of sheer lunacy, involving the almost certain annihilation of his country in the ensuing counter-strike.

The underlying motivation for this baffling flummery lies elsewhere.

Ukania’s political elite, with even the Labour leader Keir Starmer joining in, is in the midst of a frenzy of flag-waving.

BoJo’s new “media room” in 10 Downing Street has no less than 4 union jacks in the back— Americans may think a room with a phalanx of flags is normal, but it isn’t for many Brits.

BoJo’s transport secretary, Robert “three homes” Jenrick, explained BoJo’s enthusiasm for the union jack thus: BoJo was using “a symbol of liberty and freedom that binds the whole country together”.

This is arrant nonsense. The northern Irish (especially its Catholic community) have little enthusiasm for Ukania, especially after the chaos brought to that part of Ireland by Brexit; Wales is devolved, has its own parliament, and polls show increased support for independence; and Scotland, the current leadership crisis in the Scottish National Party notwithstanding, seems to be bailing on the sinking HMS Ukania.

BoJo even tried to get packages of the Oxford University/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine labelled with an image of the union jack, despite the fact that AZ is actually an Anglo-Swedish company with a French chief executive.

The Ukanian project is in its death throes, and no number of union jacks and Trident missiles is going to come to its rescue.

Photograph Source: SC National Guard – Public Domain

The advanced industrial countries are now inoculating their populations with the Covid-19 vaccines. A Vaccine Tracker provided by Bloomberg indicates that of the following three countries, the UK’s rollout has been the most effective (36.03 doses per 100 people), followed by the US at 28.83 doses per 100 people (as one would expect, the US’s individual state variation is considerable—extending from North Dakota (36.84) to Georgia at 13.4), while the EU is far behind at 10.64 doses per 100 people.

The EU’s figure seems surprising. For example, Chile (32.92), Morocco (15.6), and Turkey (13.07) have done better.

The EU’s poor performance has been most visible on 2 fronts: (production and acquisition); and (2) distribution and roll-out.

Achieving co-ordination between the 27 EU member countries was going to be somewhat cumbersome from the start, despite a huge €1.8tn/$2.15tn pandemic recovery budget. The European Commission had to devise a bureaucratic framework for 27 countries, which resulted in a more unwieldy authorization-process before the vaccines could be administered. In addition, some countries had their own demanding regulations and paperwork to negotiate, while poor planning in others added to the delay.

While the UK signed its purchasing contracts with vaccine manufacturers quickly, for example, the EU’s slower-paced movement towards the authorizations required at member-nation and European Commission levels meant it was always going to acquire vaccines at a slower rate— it stood to reason that profit-minded manufacturers would begin working on the orders of those non-EU countries (not just the UK but also the US and others) which signed their purchasing contracts ahead of the EU.

Hence AstraZeneca told the EU that of its initial contracted batch of 80 million vaccines, only 31 million would materialize immediately. This was in addition to a glitch in the deliveries of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine– after Pfizer announced a temporary supply reduction, Italy reduced its daily administering of about 80,000 doses to fewer than 30,000.

Both AstraZeneca and Pfizer said at that time that operational issues at their plants were delaying production.

While Pfizer-BioNTech had initial operating problems, its vaccine had the most successful roll-out. The European Commission, under pressure from France which was desperate to succeed with its own vaccine prototype (it turned out to be a dud), “played safe” bureaucratically and divided its bets between several companies: Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Johnson and Johnson (as of last week). Johnson and Johnson’s first shipments will start in the second half of April, and the company has committed to delivering at least 200 million doses to the EU in 2021.

Dividing bets in this way then had to confront the problem that there are differing storage requirements for different vaccines– the AstraZeneca vaccine is less complicated in this regard, while the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine requires more complex ultracold storage.

In the end, however, those countries which went with Pfizer-BioNTech from the beginning were better served in launching their respective vaccination programmes.

The EU roll-out was also hampered because the European Medicines Agency (EMA) was slower than the US or UK regulators to authorize use of its first vaccine.

The primary consideration here for the EMA was the need for the 27 EU member-nations to avoid liability in case problems arose, and in order to give people in very disparate national cultures greater confidence that the deployed vaccines were safe.

Faced with these difficulties and impediments, several EU countries used a clause in the EMA rule book that permitted EU countries to purchase vaccines from manufacturers outside the EMA’s remit, such as Russia and China.

Countries on the EU’s periphery, from the former Soviet bloc, believe they have been left behind by Brussels.

Serbia has received 1 million doses of Chinese vaccines. Hungary is already doing so by ordering the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, and Italy has just signed a deal with Russia to produce 10 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccine in Italy this year.

Perceptions of vaccine production and distribution in the EU are blurred by its contribution to the United Nations-sponsored COVAX roll-out. Intended, laudably, to provide vaccines for poorer countries, the EU exported 34 million doses last month under the auspices of the UN’s COVAX programme.

However, while subscribing to the COVAX programme can be seen as a gesture of international solidarity, the EU has also exported vaccines to rich countries, such as the UK and US, that have been much more successful than the EU in providing vaccines for their citizens.

The following countries have so far received vaccine shipments from the EU:

Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Hong Kong, Japan, Kuwait, Macao, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Oman, Panama, Peru, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, and Uruguay.

As “vaccine nationalism” takes root, critics argue that while exporting vaccines to relatively impoverished Ecuador and Colombia (say) can be justified, exporting them to Australia and the UK while the EU has lagged in providing vaccines for its own citizens is harder to explain.

The vaccine manufacturers with production facilities in the EU argue that they were under contract to produce vaccines for countries outside the EU (e.g., AstraZeneca for the UK), and that any attempt by Brussels to curb such exports would place them in breach of contract.

The EU has no alternative but to find other ways to get more vaccines for its members— this coming at a time when a third wave of the pandemic, associated with the spread of new variants of the Covid virus, is proceeding across much of Europe.

The infection rate in the EU is now at its highest level since the beginning of last month, with Italy, France, Germany and Poland seeing a surge in infection rates, and with Hungary and the Czech Republic also reporting high infection rates and fatalities from the virus (health authorities in these two countries are warning the current figures are likely to get worse in the next few weeks).

The story of the pandemic is clearly not over for the EU.

Image Source: Noé Alfaro – CC BY 2.0

Indexes, such as the Democracy Index published by The Economist’s Intelligence Unit, have to be taken with a grain of salt— one suspects that neoliberal western countries get a somewhat easier ride from The Economist.

In any event, the Democracy Index is fraught with anomalies. In the 2020 Index, the US is ranked 25^thout of 167 countries, and placed in the “flawed democracy” category, while the UK is ranked 17^th and placed in the “full democracy” category— notwithstanding the fact that evidence emerges daily relating to the Tory government’s massive corruption in awarding no-bid Covid procurement contracts worth tens of billions to its cronies.

In the UK, the budget revealed last week showed, in its fine print, that funding in 2021/22 for the disastrously inefficient test and trace system alone (this excludes contracts for PPE, etc.) commits “a further £15 billion next year”, on top of £22bn this financial year to March 31, taking total expenses for the broken-backed service to a massive £37bn/$52bn over two years.

So how does a Mobutu- or Marcos-like kleptocracy on this scale in Ukania somehow qualify it as a “full democracy”?

At the same time, it should not be assumed that what’s happening in the US in general, and Virginia in particular, is small potatoes compared to the UK.

Pillaging of public funds, however massive, is merely one component in determining the constitution of a democracy.

Other considerations include the political influence exerted by monied interests and patronage networks such as lobbies, pressures to limit the franchise for marginalized groups (typically involving racially-based criteria), the independence of the judiciary, the freedom of the media, the integrity of electoral systems (barely intact after Trump’s shenanigans this past year), the rigged Electoral College system, and of course the use of gerrymandering.

According to the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia, Virginia has a long history of bipartisan and equal-opportunity gerrymandering, dating back to 1779 when Patrick Henry attempted to redraw Virginia’s 5th Congressional District to the advantage of his own party.

Both main political parties gerrymander in Virginia. For example, in 1991, Democrats redrew the district of former Republican congressman (later governor and US Senator) George Allen to force him out of office.

In 2000, Republican majorities gerrymandered House Democratic Minority Leader Richard Cranwell out of the district he had represented for 29 years by relocating his home on the electoral map and placing it in the district of a popular 22-year Democratic Delegate.

Since the redrawing of electoral districts takes place every 10 years after the US Census is published, the temptation to cement one’s electoral advantage for at least a decade is hard to resist, and there is of course the desire to exact revenge against political opponents who weren’t exactly fair in previous redrawings of the electoral map and the elections that followed.

In a surprising development, a group of Virginia Democrats gave up this opportunity to gerrymander, when they voted in favour of an amendment to the State Constitution depriving themselves of the power to redraw legislative district maps in 2021, after the decennial US Census.

In 2020, Democrats won majorities in both houses of the Virginia Legislature; and with a Democratic governor already in office, they took full control of the state government for the first time in a generation.

The ultimate aim of gerrymandering is of course to ensure that your party wins seats even when it loses the popular vote.

While both Democrats and Republicans were divided on measures to end gerrymandering, a sufficient number from both sides agreed to a cross-party measure that would require Virginia’s district maps to be drawn by a bipartisan commission made up of lawmakers and regular citizens.

Voters ratified the amendment in November 2020, so it will now go into effect.

Virginia’s changing demographics have a lot to do with this shift of opinion in the Virginia Legislature.

With population growth in the Northern Virginian crescent around Washington DC, where high-income tech and government jobs are proliferating, the Republican base in the state is shrinking, and is increasingly confined to its rural areas. The Republican party’s opportunities for a gerrymander are reduced accordingly.

Time therefore for the GOP to find some rules that will create conditions not disadvantaging them electorally in the future.

While winners can afford to make fairness a cynical and less-preferred option, losers are more inclined to make fairness their first choice.

For the Democrats, Virginia’s historical red-state political leanings have meant that gerrymandering, although working to their benefit occasionally, has served the Republican party better in the longer term.

Virginia’s new constitutional amendment establishes a 16-member commission, made up of 8 lawmakers and 8 citizens, divided evenly between the two major parties. An overall majority of both lawmaker and citizen commissioners would have to agree on a proposed map to send it to the Legislature for approval. If agreement is not forthcoming in the commission, the task moves on to the State Supreme Court.

Some black Democratic lawmakers opposed the amendment on the grounds that it didn’t provide enough safeguards for black voters, who have long been deprived of adequate political representation by gerrymandered electoral maps. In the past 5 years alone, federal courts in Virginia have rejected Republican-drawn state and congressional districts for deliberate discrimination against black voters.

The new commission, born of compromise, is of course flawed. It includes lawmakers, for long the major architects of Virginia’s gerrymandering, and the new structure allows 8 of these proverbial foxes to guard the henhouse.

The henhouse may be ringed with the equivalent of CCTV, but Republicans nationwide continue to find ways to undermine efforts to make voting fairer. In Missouri, Utah and Michigan, Republican lawmakers are seeking to torpedo voter-led ballot initiatives that were passed by citizens fed-up with the chicanery of their so-called representatives.

The newly-created Virginia Redistricting Commission has held its first meeting, and picked two citizen chairwomen, Democrat Greta Harris and Republican Mackenzie Babichenko, with each taking turns to chair commission meetings.

The Commission’s work is going to be slow for now—Virginia’s electoral maps can’t be redrawn until new US Census data is available, but the COVID pandemic has slowed-down the current Census, and the Census findings may not be obtainable in time to create new maps for this year’s Virginia House primaries in late August or early September.

If new maps can’t be drafted in time, this year’s House elections will probably be held using the currently-drawn districts.

At the first meeting commissioners introduced themselves and began discussing guidelines for their procedures.

Predictably, some of the foxy lawmakers on the commission, experienced and at ease with procedural matters, tried to get a head start on their colleagues– three of them began by proposing a list of specific lawyers the commission might hire as its legal advisers.

The proverbial chickens on the commission may need more help if this corralling in advance by the commission’s lawmakers becomes a pattern.

If not, the tenure of the commission’s chickens could be remembered for a scenario of scattered feathers and bones.

A most welcome start has been made in dealing with Virginia’s gerrymandering, but as they say, only time will tell. 

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The respective motivations, and their specific underlying conditions, are of course different in the UK and France, but both culminate in plans for universities to curb the expression of leftist points of view.

In the UK this gives a potential pulpit to “maverick” speakers on the right, such as Steve Bannon, who (facetiously?) approved the delivery of pipe bombs to critics of Trump, and who lost his book deal for having a favourable view of underage sex.

In France, the incoherent neologism “Islamo-leftism/ islamo-gauchisme” is applied to a fantasized political alliance between leftists and Islamists. The aim here of France’s centre-right (led by president Macron) is to steal the wind from its far-right (led by Marine Le Pen), by showing that Macron’s credentials on Islamophobia are just as impeccable as Le Pen’s.

The neoliberal governments in both countries are facing failures of their respective political agendas, and seek to deflect or distract from the ensuing short-term messes.

At the same time, these distractions and deflections have longer-term accompaniments, however vague and fantasy-imbued the latter may be.

The UK Education secretary Gavin Williamson announced he will introduce legislation that will enable academics, students or visiting speakers to sue universities for compensation if they believe they have suffered free speech infringements. Williamson also said he would appoint a “free speech czar” and place new conditions regarding speech on universities that depend on public funding.

The vast majority of UK universities are publicly funded— only 6 of its 130 universities are private, so Williamson’s threat to these universities is very real.

The Tory proposals add fuel to hot-air concerns in the pro-Conservative media that right-wing speakers are being denied the right to express their opinions on campuses.

“Right-wing” in this case is an umbrella term, encompassing homophobes, Christian zealots, Islamophobes, Zionists, peddlers of racism, climate-change deniers, and so forth.

Williamson, in his rush to get his proposals through, couldn’t even get his facts right.

He, and several other Tories, relied heavily on a 2019 “research” report by the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange for information regarding a free speech “crisis” on UK campuses.

An example cited in the report, and mentioned in the House of Commons, alleged that the highly-ranked Cardiff university allowed the feminist Germaine Greer to be denied a platform in 2015 on the grounds that she has a record of making “transphobic” comments. However, the Greer event went ahead.

The head of Cardiff university is now demanding that this falsehood be fully corrected for the parliamentary record.

Williamson is having to resort to confected culture wars to draw attention away from the battle he’s had with teachers ever since the serial Covid lockdowns were put in place. Rightwingers in his party want students and teachers to return to school without having adequate test, trace, and isolation procedures, and a fast-track programme for vaccinating teachers, in situ.

Teachers aside, the Tories view the vaccines as a silver bullet, but medical experts caution that this can’t be the case until satisfactory test, trace, and isolation procedures exist.

All schools in England will return on March 8, a “big bang” in contrast with the phased reopening of schools in devolved Scotland and Wales— teachers in England have insisted on having the more cautious phased reopenings enjoyed by their colleagues in Scotland and Wales.

Serious issues face UK higher education as a result of the pandemic. Hundreds of employees at universities are facing redundancy, after large numbers of “gig” academics had their jobs axed last year. Neoliberal restructuring, under the guise of “recovery packages”, is creating lay-offs and increasing the workloads of those with jobs.

Misled by ministers and vice chancellors (the UK equivalent of a university president) into assuming they were going to have a relatively normal university experience, students are now under the cosh as well: a recent survey found that 9% have used foodbanks during the pandemic. Students have also paid £1bn/$1.42bn rent for empty rooms over the past year.

There are allegations that students were lured back to campuses in order sign contracts for accommodation containing a non-refundable clause before being told that classes were going to be online—the hapless students might as well have stayed at home, accessed online classes there, and avoided signing their rip-off accommodation contracts.

Unlike the 1960s and 70s, when I studied at English universities, campus lodging is now almost completely outsourced to private companies. These companies donate handsomely to the Tory party, which therefore has no interest in overturning campus housing arrangements clearly detrimental to the majority of students.

But instead of dealing with these failings, the Tories have decided to place a smoke-screen around them by generating a new round of headlines for its opportunistic culture war.

On what grounds does a body politic tolerate its intolerables where speech is concerned?

When does a right to free speech start to curtail the rights of those who might be the targets of that speech?

Where do the margins between free speech and hate speech lie, and who should regulate them?

These are complex and recurrent questions that have persisted over the ages precisely because they are so difficult to resolve.

Where John Milton, Voltaire, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and others have struggled with these hugely complicated issues, a nincompoop like the UK secretary of education presumes that cut-and-dried solutions provided by right-wing think tanks are begging to be implemented.

The situation in France is somewhat different. The proposed Tory “free speech” laws are widely regarded as being impossible to enforce— if you are forced to give Steve Bannon a platform, then how can you justify banning a eugenicist flying under the flag of pseudo-science?

France proposes to target reputable left-wing scholars (among others), with their trails of publications and public speeches, and these will be much easier to corner than this or that crazily malevolent speaker sounding-off on a UK campus.

“Islamo-leftism” is intended to refer to a purported convergence between leftist academics who work on race, intersectionality or de-colonial/post-colonial studies, and fantasized “Islamic extremists” somehow bent on overthrowing an “Americo-Zionist” hegemony.

This kind of nonsense would normally be given short shrift, but for the fact that it is resonating in the upper echelons of French government.

To quote CounterPuncher Philippe Marlière:

“So why such a fuss about “Islamo-leftism”? Academics who work on intersectionality, race or decolonial issues take gender-related and race-related discriminations and inequalities seriously. Their research findings are therefore unpalatable to the government which upholds the view that there is no structural sexism and racism in France, or nothing to discuss about France’s colonial past. Hence the concerted attacks on “critical academics” to discredit their work and silence them”.

Both Macron in France and the Tories in the UK are riding the tigers of their respective right-wing populisms.

Their game is to do as much as possible to avoid having far-right opponents out-flank them, and splitting their right-wing voting blocs in the process. For now, centre-right politicians in France and the UK are more concerned about Marine Le Pen and Trump-fan Nigel Farage than they are about left-wing rivals.

This approach, combined with the absence of credible opposition to the left in both cases, has succeeded up to now.

Both Macron and the Tories have been disasters for their respective electorates. Which only renders imperative the emergence of a strong left in both countries.

Photograph Source: Free Images – CC BY 2.0

“This [Brexit] is an amazing moment for this country.”

–Boris Johnson (New Year’s Day, 2021)

“Only a quarter of Brits believe Brexit has ‘gone well’ so far”

– YouGov poll

The UK’s official departure from the EU took place on January 1, 2021. The Brexit roll-out, not unexpectedly, has been awash with problems.

The government describes these as “teething problems”, but it is clear that some of them are inbuilt into the Brexit deal, and will be there for the duration.

As expected, the Northern Irish border is one of them. Northern Ireland is part of the UK, but remains in the EU’s economic orbit because it shares a border with the EU-member Republic of Ireland.

The Prime Minister, Boris “BoJo” Johnson, insisted, implausibly, that there would be “frictionless” trade despite this border arrangement, but this has not turned out to be the case.

UK companies shipping goods to Northern Ireland face new customs rules and health checks that have the same impact as shipping goods to the EU per se, rendering Northern Ireland a “foreign” country, economically, even though it is a part of the UK.

The post-Brexit UK-EU trade deal allows goods to move without tariffs or quotas, but businesses still face extra costs, paperwork, inspections, and other barriers.

Businesses anticipated these hurdles when trading with the EU, but were relatively unprepared to face the same obstacles when shipping goods to Northern Ireland.

These measures regarding shipments to Northern Ireland were put in place to retain an open border between Northern Ireland and the EU-member Irish Republic to its south.

The potential pitfalls regarding this border arrangement became apparent a couple of weeks ago, when the EU proposed a ban on shipments of the Covid vaccine to Northern Ireland in order to bolster the bloc’s vaccine stocks.

This step would have created a hard border, for however short a term, between the two parts of Ireland, and in so doing breach the terms of the Brexit deal.

Irish leaders were quick to object to the EU’s plan, and Brussels dropped it in a couple of hours—the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen (a medical doctor by training) apologizing for her “mistake”.

The transport of medicines is clearly an issue for Brexit cross-border provisions. An official of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) told a parliamentary committee that an unnamed drugs manufacturer had been forced to move its production from Wales to Ireland in order to overcome delays at the UK-EU border.

Friction at the border held-up the manufacturer’s exports of time-sensitive cancer drugs to the EU, which had to be destroyed as a result, the committee’s MPs were informed.

The BBC surveyed 3 exporters in the North East, and reported as follows:

A brewery in Newcastle has been hamstrung by the new shipping rules, which have caused its beers to be held-up in ports or returned to it, severing it from its EU markets– which account for a quarter of its business– in the process. Wylam Brewery has already lost half its business because of the pandemic lockdowns.

Another firm operates clothing banks for charities. It sorts, repairs, and packs donated items into containers that are sent for sale to the EU and elsewhere.

The new “rules of origin” require all products not originally made in the UK to be subjected to a 5.3% import duty before they can enter the EU. Many clothing items have “Made in China” labels attached to them, and these are now subjected to the EU’s China import tax. As a result, ECS Textiles has 20 tonne/20,000kg containers languishing at a port in Latvia (to which it sends 5 containers per week), and is incurring extra storage costs while they are there. The charities involved are receiving less money as a result.

Another firm manufactures metal fasteners for chemical drums, which it ships to Germany and other countries, and is facing increased haulage costs since Brexit. The price of a single container has increased by £650/$891, and Berger Group Europe has had to suspend several of its exports to the EU.

More complex paperwork can be streamlined in time, but the extra haulage costs and import duties are here to stay.

The Tory government is putting a positive spin on events.

UK supermarkets are not facing food shortages, but this is due in large part to businesses stockpiling ahead of Brexit and in anticipation of any chaos caused by the Covid pandemic.

Large-scale traffic jams have not occurred at English Channel ports, and the expected monster 7,000-vehicle tailbacks have not materialized.

Traffic is flowing efficiently across the Channel, with fewer than 5% of trucks being denied entry because drivers lack the requisite documentation.

Business organizations say this is not necessarily to the government’s credit–companies have opted to scale-down their cross-Channel transactions as they wait for things to improve, and The Observer reports that the volume of exports going through British ports to the EU fell by 68% last month compared with January 2020, primarily as a result of problems caused by Brexit.

These organizations say businesses need more support to overcome post-Brexit obstacles, and are pleading with the British government and the EU to streamline customs paperwork and to reduce “rules of origin” bureaucracy that has requires businesses to prove their goods are British (as opposed to being manufactured in some other country and having a “Made in Britain” label slapped on them) and thus entitled to tariff-free trade.

The British government says it is spending millions to help companies with these problems.

Having done their best to deceive the electorate in the run-up to Brexit over the problems potentially afflicting cross-border trade, the Tory Brexiters are now admitting that frictionless trade was a mirage.

The International Trade Secretary Liz Truss said recently:

“We’ve always been clear that trading as a third-party country would involve processes, the similar processes that you have for trading with the United States or Japan or any other countries”.

Contrast this with the breezy statement made in 2016 made by Michael Gove, the current minister in charge of Brexit: “The day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want”.

Hand in and with the deception that Brexit would be almost completely free of obstacles to trade, Brexit supporters maintained that leaving the EU would enable the UK to develop its own economic programmes and set-up trade deals with this or that country of choice.

Last week the UK applied to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade bloc of 11 countries (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam). Unlike the UK, all these countries have proximity to the Pacific, which does not bode well for the success of the UK’s application.

In any event, sceptics point out that the UK’s £111bn/$152bn in annual trade with the Pacific bloc is a fraction of the £670bn/$920bn a year in trade between the UK and the EU.

It is becoming increasingly clear that no such trade deals can match the trade advantages the UK had as a member of the EU, and that the Tory government was being less than candid about this with the UK electorate.

Things are due to get more complicated. The Guardian reports:

In the coming months further checks are due to be phased in at the UK border, controlling everything from the import of sausages and live mussels to horses and trees, as well as the locations these checks can take place.

One logistics firm warned the situation had “disaster written all over it”, saying businesses need more time to prepare, while accountancy firm KPMG said some of the “biggest headaches” facing traders are yet to come. Importers fear UK customs are not ready for the new controls, and that logjams at points of entry could cause fruit and vegetable shortages in the spring.

The “teething problems” excuse used by BoJo Johnson and his pals looks increasingly to be no such thing.

Brits are starting to face the beginnings of a permanent economic shift, involving long-term economic adjustments for which they are ill-prepared.

Photograph Source: Bundesministerium für euro – CC BY 2.0

If you are from Scotland and want independence for your country, then Boris “BoJo” Johnson, the UK prime minister, is just the proverbial gift that keeps on giving.

BoJo made a recent “essential” visit to Scotland– ignoring pandemic travel restrictions in so doing– for one of his now de rigueur but palpably contrived photo ops (featuring hi-vis jackets, hard hats, lab coats, butchers’ aprons, the works).

While there he, in essence, blamed the Scottish for their ingratitude in not appreciating how much Scotland’s union with the rest of the UK (and especially England) had done for them.

“Think of your economy”, was the gist of his message.

Thing is, thanks to Tory mismanagement of Covid and Brexit, resulting in the UK’s worst recession in 300 years, the “think of your economy” sound-bite was always likely to have a quite different resonance in Scotland.

The last 20 opinion polls have shown a majority of Scots in favour of independence, and every time Boris visits Scotland, the poll ratings of the Scottish National Party (SNP) go up a few points.

Boris Johnson is becoming to Scottish (and Irish) people what the blowhard sectarian Ulster Protestant Ian Paisley was for the cause of Irish reunification.

Cynics have said the reason the IRA didn’t assassinate the bull-frog-voiced Paisley during the Irish Troubles was because he was their biggest recruiting tool every time he opened his mouth.

The tin-eared BoJo– albeit a “shape-shifting creep” (described thus by a member of Obama’s administration) that the tribally-entombed Paisley never could be– is becoming a similarly effective recruiter for the cause of Scottish independence.

The Tories and Labour are well behind the SNP in opinion polls– SNP are at present 56% in the polls, the Scottish Tories are 22%, Scottish Labour are 14%, Scottish Lib Dems 6% and others 2%.

Support for the Scottish Tories is falling: under Theresa May it was 27%, the low point of support for the Scottish Tories under Boris Johnson has been 19%.

Scottish Labour is not doing much better.

At the 2015 general election Labour lost 40 MPs in Scotland in an SNP landslide. Scottish Labour is facing a fight for “survival”, but Scottish voters, understandably, see the SNP as providing the real opposition to the Conservatives, and therefore view Scottish Labour as a “wasted vote”—the invariable fate faced by 3^rd or 4^th position parties in a 2-party system without proportional representation.

Political commentators say Scottish Labour’s chances of recovering from that position, and supplanting the Tories as the main opposition to the SNP, is all but impossible.

Since both the Scottish Tories and Lib Dems are opposed to independence, the only way for Scottish Labour to demarcate itself from this anti-independence alignment is to: (a) back independence (b) campaign to rejoin the EU (c) support the introduction of a proper federalism, and (d) abolish the anachronistic House of Lords, and commit itself to dealing with all the other long-ingrained interests associated with such political relics.

Only in this way will Scottish Labour take the wind out of the SNP’s sails, by robbing it of its key campaigning points against the now pro-Independence and anti-neoliberal Labour.

But this will put Scottish Labour radically at odds with the Labour Party in England and Wales.

The Labour leader Keir Starmer’s strategy (so far) has been to hang on to BoJo Johnson’s coat-tails, and hope he can convince voters in the lead-up to the next election that he’ll give them everything they have with BoJo (with a bit of trimming here and there of course), all delivered more competently and without the Tories unending corruption and cronyism.

Starmer is thus bent on delivering neoliberalism “with a human face” (laughter may be permitted here), mimicking the strategy espoused by his mentor Tony Blair when he took on the Tories successfully in 1997.

Starmer, apart from his lawyerly ability to trounce BoJo in parliamentary debate, is the quintessential ““empty suit”. People who know him say he is fundamentally “apolitical”, and that politics is simply an arena where he can take his personal ambitions to the next level.

Starmer agrees with BoJo that a second referendum on Scottish independence should be prevented.

Starmer’s ingratiation towards the Tories seems to have no limits—he even agreed that BoJo’s trip to Scotland was “essential”, even though it clearly breached the lockdown restrictions.

At the same time, Scottish Labour is in disarray. It is currently undergoing a leadership contest, and the winner will be the 5^th person, each one just as ineffectual as the other, to lead the Scottish Labour Party in just 5 years.

The two candidates– one a Blairite multimillionaire, the other a wooly centrist—are both opposed to Scottish independence and to a referendum on that independence. The winner will face a key electoral examination just 9 weeks later at elections for the Scottish parliament.

The consensus among the commentariat is that Scottish Labour and the Scottish Tories will be demolished in these elections because of their opposition to a second referendum for Scottish independence.

The Scottish parliamentary elections will therefore serve as a prolepsis to an actual referendum that neither the Tories nor Labour, at both the Scottish and Ukanian levels, will be able to prevent.

The cause of Scottish independence is now a juggernaut.

Scottish Labour’s only avenue to survival is not to contest the SNP on the issue of independence (it’s bound to lose on this one), but to say that since Scotland is the most socialist of the national components of the UK, only Labour can deliver on a full blown social-democratic agenda for Scotland.

This will test the SNP’s commitment to socialism, on which it has been fuzzy at times, on account of its nationalist-libertarian wing.

But, but— Scottish Labour committing itself to independence and full-blown socialism to remain viable in Scotland?

That’s probably not going to go down well with Keir Starmer and his neoliberal Blairite cabal in London.

Photograph Source: James Boyes – CC BY 2.0

The number of people in the UK who have died after testing positive for Covid-19 has risen to 97,936 (as of January 24), and will pass 100,000 in a few days. There has been an increase of 610 in the death toll over 24 hours. The real figures for the daily death toll are certainly higher, as indicated by Office for National Statistics records.

Adjusted for population size, the US equivalent of the UK’s death toll would be 588,000– on January 21 the US death toll stood at 417,211.

The total number of positive tests in the UK since the pandemic began is 3,617,459.

The Government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said the new Covid variants now emerging may be associated with a higher mortality rate. There are 77 known cases of the South African variant in the UK, and at least 9 cases of the Brazilian variant.

Vallance said that for a man in their 60s, the average risk from the old strain of the virus was that for 1000 people who got infected, roughly 10 can be expected to die – however, with the new variants it is estimated it might be 13 or 14.

The new variants are also estimated to be 70% more transmissible.

Vallance went on to say that the new variants may be less susceptible to the vaccines now being used, though he cautioned that the evidence for this is still being awaited.

The chief medical officer for England, Professor Chris Whitty, said there were signs Covid-19 cases were falling, and that hospitalizations in parts of England were beginning to “flatline”. However, he said it will take weeks for the death rate to start falling.

The latest reports (January 21) are of 37,899 people in hospital with Covid-19. There was a time when 20,000 – perhaps 25,000 at the outer limit – was mentioned as the maximum-capacity figure for the NHS. The UK has been above that figure for weeks. The numbers being hospitalized now are 78% higher than at the peak of the first wave.

An important consideration here is that the UK entered the pandemic with fewer staffed, funded ICU beds compared with other developed countries. Germany has 29 ICU beds per 100,000 population, the US around 25, the UK 6.6.

Hospital capacity has been increased by a combination of cancelling non-Covid operations and treatments, and making already exhausted staff work overtime.

According to The Guardian, adapted single-decker London buses, with seats removed and oxygen onboard, have been turned into ambulances to ease the strain caused by the pandemic.

The prime minister, Boris “BoJo” Johnson, let 17 days elapse between being alerted of the new variant and imposing a tough national lockdown.

The dithering BoJo now says there can be no easing of lockdown measures in England until at least February 15, in the expectation that up to 15 million of the most vulnerable and other priority groups should have been vaccinated in that time.

BoJo’s government has been indecisive over bringing in stronger restrictions. It has instead focused on public health messaging, often confusing and contradictory, exhorting people to follow the rules. The inconsistent rules in turn almost guarantee reduced compliance on the part of the public.

BoJo and his cabinet of nodding dogs sit on their backsides, and don’t have a plan.

As in the US, where the wacko libertarian wing of the Republican party has opposed even the most reasonable restrictions (on the grounds that they curtail” liberty”), BoJo is likewise constrained by his headbanging libertarian backbenchers. Rather than reading them the riot act, he delays action until the headbangers realize the public is getting upset over the scale of the pandemic, and sense they have no choice but to back their boss’s next move, however grudgingly.

The result is too little, too late.

A case in point is the newly imposed requirement that a negative Covid test result be administered compulsorily to some travellers to the UK — 9 months after the aviation industry started calling for such testing. Travellers to the UK are already required to self-isolate for 10 days, or 5 with a negative test, but everyone agrees that enforcement has been patchy.

The same situation existed during Brexit negotiations with the EU. BoJo struck a deal at the 11^th hour to run out the clock on his party’s Brexit hardliners, who would have hacked away at any deal reached sooner. There is considerable overlap in the memberships of the Tory Covid libertarian faction and its hardline Europhobic counterpart, and BoJo fears them both.

The government is still vacillating over the creation of quarantine hotels for travellers coming into the UK. Countries such as Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa took this step at the start of the pandemic, and have the pandemic largely under control. Aotearoa has just recorded its first case of community transmission since November, although there is no immediate evidence the virus is spreading.

In the meantime, UK media show photos of crowded terminals at Heathrow.

However, the biggest cause of the continuing transmission is almost certainly the fact that so many workplaces remain open. The government is unwilling to close non-essential workplaces.

Student numbers in schools are said to be around 5 times higher than during the first lockdown. Around 14% of pupils, who are either vulnerable or the children of key workers, are currently in school.

Nurseries haven’t been shut-down at all: they were exempted from the proclamation about schools having to close to most attendees. This reluctance to close schools and nurseries has contributed to higher numbers of parents going back to work than during the March-May 2020 lockdown.

The most recent workplace Covid sandal has occurred at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency’s offices in Swansea, Wales. Unlike the US, vehicle licensing in the UK is undertaken by the central government.

More than 500 Covid cases have been recorded at the DVLA, where staff claim workers with symptoms were encouraged to return to work, while exposed employees have had their requests to work from home rejected.

The largest workplace eruption of the virus has thus taken place at a top government organization.

The transport secretary, Grant Shapps (who has also gone by the aliases Matthew Green and Sebastian Fox in the past), is being asked to explain how such a flare-up could have happened in a large government unit where the most stringent workplace rules are supposed to be in force.

This reluctance to impose a proper lockdown is prompted by anxieties over its impact on business (typically big donors to the Tories), even though informed opinion is that long-term economic wellbeing is best safeguarded by making every lockdown as secure as possible.

At the same time, a proper lockdown requires adequate financial support for those affected adversely. Unless non-essential workers who can’t work from home are furloughed on full pay, they’ll be compelled to return to work in unsafe places just to buy food and pay the rent.

BoJo obviously hopes the vaccination programme can come to his rescue.

Unlike the chaotic, patchy and outsourced test-and-trace arrangements, rife with nepotism and cronyism, the centralized coordination of the programme, through the NHS, is showing itself to be far more effective– numbers getting their first vaccine shot have increased significantly.

But problems remain with the timeframe for dispensing the second dose. World Health Organization advice is to have a gap of 3-4 weeks between the two doses, but this advice– now backed by the British Medical Association– is being ignored by the government, which is proposing a 12-week gap for the Pfizer vaccine.

The government wants more people to receive the initial dose, in the hope that this will create a broader and swifter spread of immunity across communities. However, there are serious concerns about how much protection a single dose provides.

The risk is that too wide a gap in administering the doses could fatally compromise the immunity conferred by the first dose, and in so doing nullify the buttressing provided a follow-up shot.

While vaccination offers the best way out of the pandemic, its short-term impact will be partial and slow, as immunity takes time to become widespread in communities– the estimate in the medical profession is that 75%-80% vaccination coverage of the public needs to occur before sufficient immunity becomes achievable.

During that time the death toll will continue to increase.

Photograph Source: United States House of Represetntatives – Public Domain

While Republican senators Hawley and Cruz grab the headlines in their attempts to curry favour with the previous inhabitant of the White House (and his base) by trying to upend the election result, a host of smaller Republican players around the country have made similar efforts at ingratiation.

The case of Western Virginia’s Congressional representatives is instructive in this regard.

I happen to live in the district of Morgan “the Morgue” Griffith (R-VA09) who, with the advantages of incumbency and hefty corporate subventions, has made it into something of a fiefdom.

Griffith was elected to the 9th in the Tea Party wave of 2010.

The Morgue, who is a lawyer, signed on to the Texas lawsuit trying to overturn the results of the presidential election, saying it was “well-written and persuasive”, even though the overwhelming consensus among legal scholars is that the lawsuit was completely without merit, and bordered on the frivolous.

The gravamen of the lawsuit initiated by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was that 4 states won by Biden– Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin— had “unlawful election results” because of the way they counted votes.

Biden’s victory ensured that Kamala Harris would have the deciding vote in any Senate decision that was tied, and Paxton argued that laws passed by the Senate had outcomes that affected Texas.

The Supreme Court threw out the case, saying “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections”.

Ken Paxton is facing legal difficulties of his own, and some in the commentariat argue that his lawsuit was a brazen attempt to curry favour with Trump in the hope of receiving a presidential pardon.

Whatever Paxton’s motives were, the Morgue had to take a different legal tack— the impact of Senate decisions on Texas have no material bearing on the state of Virginia.

Hence the Morgue explained that he sided with Ken Paxton because the governors, not the legislatures, had implemented changes in voting procedures during the pandemic, while only legislatures had the authority to do so.

The Morgue was heedless of the fact that in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott had extended the early voting period by executive order—so why wasn’t Griffith challenging the election result in Texas? Readers will know the answer.

Griffith was the only member from Virginia to vote against part of COVID-19 relief bill, joining 129 other Republicans who voted against a measure to increase the next round of stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000.

The Morgue said he voted against the CASH Act because it didn’t include spending cuts, which Trump demanded as condition for increasing the amount of the stimulus payments.

In any event, the Morgue is a corporate shill, mainly for the fossil fuel industry. According to Blue Virginia, his backers include Norfolk Southern, Alpha Natural Resources, the National Auto Dealers Association, Dominion Energy, Altria, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, Comcast, Eastman Chemical, FirstEnergy Corp, and Koch Industries.

Griffith puts more energy into representing his donors than his voters, by espousing the now standard Republican strategy of catering to corporate interests while fobbing-off his voters with culture wars.

Politicsthatwork.com says his voting record indicates that the Morgue opposes gun control, foreign and humanitarian aid, a humane immigration policy, labour rights, LGBT rights, racial equality, and women’s rights.

When the House of Representatives reconvened after the riot at the Capitol to certify the election results, Griffith was among 139 Republican representatives who voted against certification.

In this vote he was joined by Ben Cline (R-VA06), who represents the adjacent district. Cline has in fact been in lockstep with Griffith in doing Trump’s bidding on the election results.

Cline took over from the long-time incumbent Bob Goodlatte, winning his seat in 2018. He had previously served as Goodlatte’s chief of staff. Goodlatte was House Judiciary Committee Chairman when he retired, and used his position, assiduously, to protect corporations from civil litigation. So much so that CounterPuncher Ralph Nader gave him the nickname “Bad Bob” in a typically excoriating piece.

Cline appears to have acquired Bad Bob’s bag of tricks, and is backed by AT&T, the American Bankers Association, the National Auto Dealers Association, Dominion Energy, Holtzman Oil, Deloitte (after the Capitol riot Deloitte announced it would not be donating to Republican politicians who tried to overturn the election result), among others.

Politicsthatwork.com says that Cline opposes environmental protection, a humane immigration policy, LGBT rights, racial equality, and women’s rights.

Bad Bob may have departed the hallways of Congress, but Virginia’s Sixth District now has Bad Ben.

The news from the Virginia General Assembly offered a small contrast to the goings-on in the Virginia Congressional delegation. To quote the Roanoke Times:

“House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn removed three Republicans from committees Wednesday in response to a letter they sent to Vice President Mike Pence last week asking him to overturn Virginia’s electoral votes.

Dels. Ronnie Campbell of Rockbridge, Mark Cole of Spotsylvania and David LaRock of Loudoun asked Pence to reject the “certificate of ascertainment” that was submitted to formally cast Virginia’s electoral votes.

On the opening day of the regular session of the General Assembly, Filler-Corn, D-Fairfax, removed Campbell, a former state trooper, from Courts of Justice; LaRock from Transportation; and Cole from Privileges and Elections. When Republicans controlled the House, Cole served as chairman of the elections committee”.

Previously, Campbell posted on his Facebook page a link to a petition asking the US Supreme Court to order a new election (it doesn’t have the authority to do so). In addition to asking people to sign the petition, Campbell also called for a fresh election without the use of absentee ballots.

LaRock attended the Trump rally in Washington DC which preceded the riot at the Capitol. He later issued a statement claiming the riot had been caused by “paid provocateurs”.

These Republicans would of course have got-off scot free had the Republicans controlled the Virginia House.

Photograph Source: Dunk ?- CC BY 2.0

The UK has been in a protracted capitalist crisis since the collapse of the postwar welfare-state “compromise” between capital and labour (1945-1970s), a compromise which Margaret Thatcher ended definitively with much glee.

Overall, being in the EU neither reduced nor worsened the nature of this crisis. With regard to this systemic crisis, the EU, in this framework, has been neither problem nor solution.

Being in the EU merely kept Ukania in what airline pilots call a “holding pattern”, by doing nothing to create conditions for ameliorating this crisis, and thus not providing the tools needed for its resolution.

All the UK needed to do, in order to abide by this status quo, was comply with the EU’s regulatory framework, which was designed, in essence, to be concordant with Germany’s interests, AND France’s to a lesser extent (not that these interests had no overlap with those of the UK).

At the same time, leaving the EU was always going to incur short, and medium-term, costs, even without the Covid pandemic. The Tories lied about these costs (“sunny uplands”, “new Golden Age”, “Singapore on the Thames”, and all that jazz). The pandemic has merely revealed the devastating extent of these Tory lies.

The much-trumpeted insistence by the Brexiters on the UK’s need to restore “sovereignty” is a red herring. Sovereignty is useless without the power to exercise it— and the systemic crisis just mentioned has weakened the UK’s capacity to exercise this power.

The UK economy is now basically financial services with a little tourism tacked on (and financial services, 80% of UK GDP, and 30% of the UK’s exports to the EU, were left out of the Brexit deal).

When it comes to the rules of the capitalist economy, Ukania is basically a taker, rather than issuer, of rules.

The EU’s canny negotiators were always aware of the UK’s position of weakness, as well as the incompetence of its negotiators chosen on the basis of “true belief” in the cause of Brexit rather than ability, and got nearly everything they wanted, while BoJo Johnson, despite his bumptious bragging, only got 43% of what he sought (according to informed commentators on the negotiations).

Brexit is fundamentally about a Tory culture war—masking a rightwing, deregulating, all norms to be set by (rigged) markets, project– designed to con and sidetrack the long-downtrodden and understandably angry elements in the UK’s subaltern classes.

Many subaltern Brits alas have a forelock-tugging, stubborn nostalgia for ostensibly better imperial days (“Wogs begin at Calais“, “Johnny Foreigner”, etc.), underwriting BoJo’s fatuous claim that EU nationals who made the UK their home have treated the UK like “their own” country for too long.

This said by an Islamophobic foreign-born (New York) Eton and Oxford educated posho, with a Turkish Muslim great-grandfather named Ali Kemal, whose son changed his name to “Wilfred Johnson” because he was bullied for being a Muslim at his English boarding school!

But then this foreign-born UK politician with a Muslim grandfather has long inhabited a “post-truth” reality, where historical memory can be erased at a stroke.

After all, he had been against Brexit while being London’s Mayor, and only changed his position with a view to becoming leader of the (overwhelmingly) pro-Brexit Tory party. The Tories were in power, so this was BoJo’s royal road to becoming Prime Minister.

The growing consensus, on the right as well, is that BoJo had craved a job beyond his capabilities. Constitutively averse to hard work of any kind, he had to lead the response to the UK’s greatest public health challenge in a century. At the same time, Brexit represented the UK’s greatest political challenge since the 1956 Suez crisis.

BoJo would have been unable to deal with either challenge on their own. Together they have exposed him for the fraud he basically is, though his narcissistic self-regard has blinded him to any of his limitations.

According to the latest Opinium poll for the Observer, more people think Boris Johnson should resign as prime minister than think he should continue in office.

The Observer continues:

“There were also signs of a slight drop in support for the government’s handling of coronavirus. Some 72% (+4 on the last poll) think the government has not acted fast enough, with 42% (+4) thinking they are definitely not acting fast enough”.

The fact that UK now has more new Covid cases per capita than any other country in the world, with a death toll of over 80,000, underlies this loss of support for the Tories.

As this culture war takes place, the Tories, their pals (mainly from social networks formed at expensive private schools and Oxbridge), and their pimps in the rightwing press, rake-in huge piles of dosh from Ukania’s now unrestrained chumocracy.

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

Many families will have members who are Trump supporters (myself included). Now that Trump has less than a month left in office, some family members are resorting to social media to tout “the good things he’s done”.

In the interest of balance, here are some other things Trump did:

+ Children are taken from their parents and incarcerated.

+ Saw photographic evidence his policies separated families at border; denied policies separated families at border; then contradicted himself by stating, “You have to take the children away”.

+ Signed order to build wall between Mexico and United States that he claimed Mexico would pay for—Mexico has not paid.

+ Squeezed the budget for cybersecurity in order to pay for the wall (according to Frank Figliuzzi, former FBI deputy director for counterintelligence)

+ Told FBI director “I hope you can let this go” about investigation into national security adviser lying about communication with Russian ambassador.

+ Said he would speak under oath about conversations with fired FBI director. Did not speak under oath about conversations with FBI director.

+ Heard Puerto Rico mayor beg for hurricane assistance; attacked mayor, saying hurricane not “real catastrophe”.

+ Called Puerto Rico hurricane death-toll a Democratic hoax.

+ Said the same about the Democrats and the Covid pandemic.

+ Cut pandemic early warning program.

+ Tweeted deadly global pandemic was “very much under control,” like flu.

+ Said country would be “raring to go by Easter [2020],” learned of half-million cases by Easter.

+ Said he would not assist states with pandemic efforts if governors did not appreciate him.

+ Described deadly global pandemic as very mild, and 99% of cases “totally harmless”.

+ Mused whether injecting or ingesting cleaning products could cure virus; then denied responsibility for subsequent lethal abuses of cleaning products by his followers.

+ His repeated coronavirus misinformation.

+ Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement.

+ Trashed environmental standards and regulations.

+ Approved large-scale mining projects on federal and tribal lands.

+ Chose former industry executives and lobbyists to run major federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department.

+ Told widow that dead soldier husband “knew what he signed up for”.

+ Called veterans “losers”.

+ Mocked the tremors of a journalist with a cerebral condition who asked him a question.

+ Said Saudi Arabia is fighting “barbaric criminals”.

+ Helps the Saudis cover-up the murder of a Saudi-American citizen.

+ Saudi Arabia has spent $270,000 on rooms, meals and parking at Trump’s hotel in Washington.

+ Forbes estimates China paid Trump at least $5.4 Million since he took office, via mysterious Trump Tower lease.

+ In spite of his “America First” policy, Trump’s MAGA caps and clothing lines are made in Asia.

+ Offered his golf resort as next G7 summit venue, for a price.

+ Used State Department website to advertise Mar-a-Lago resort.

+ Says: “I have the absolute right to pardon myself”.

+ Dispatched lawyer to claim presidents “cannot obstruct justice”.

+ Gave thanks for himself on Thanksgiving.

+ Congratulated Chinese president for eliminating term limits, announced “maybe we’ll give that a shot someday”.

+ Noted when North Korean dictator speaks, “his people sit up at attention.” Said, “I want my people to do the same”.

+ Referred to Senator Warren as “Pocahontas,” NFL as “weak and out of control”, retweeted anti-Muslim videos.

+ Suggested a critical journalist be investigated for murder.

+ Requested attorney general investigates author of op-ed criticizing him.

+ Declared free press “the enemy of the American people”.

+ Cheated on all his 3 wives.

+ Was accused of sexual assault yet again, said this one “not my type”.

+ Said “is it wrong to be more sexually attracted to your own daughter than your wife?”.

+ Appointed this daughter and her husband Jared as “senior advisers” even though they did not receive security clearances.

+ Allowed “perhaps I’d be dating her” daughter to sit in on meeting with German Chancellor.

+ Did not release tax returns (despite saying he would).

+ Swindled hundreds of small contractors who worked for him.

+ Has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy for his companies 6 times.

+ His businesses settled at least 13 employment-related lawsuits between 1990 and 2014 (apropos the myth that Trump “never settles”).

+ Settled 3 fraud lawsuits linked to now-defunct Trump University for $25 million (apropos the myth that Trump “never settles”).

+ For decades Trump has been off limits to major US banks because he defaults on loans.

+ Called critical Black congresswoman “extraordinarily low IQ person,” critical former Black staff woman “dog,” critical Black interviewer “stupid”.

+ At a rally, said “Look at my African-American over there”.

+ Pardoned racist Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.

+ In breach of international law, pardoned Blackwater mercenaries who massacred unarmed civilians in Iraq.

+ In Trump’s last month in office, pardoned a string of Republican convicts who had provided him with “services”.

+ Under Trump’s administration, America’s National Debt has increased by nearly $7 trillion.

+ Tried to steal the 2020 presidential election by appointing a crony to head the USPS, tasking him with dismantling sorting machines so mail-in ballots wouldn’t be delivered on time.

+ So far raised $207m to support his bogus “electoral fraud” claims.

Photograph Source: Mike Finn – CC BY 2.0

“Everything that the British public was promised during the 2016 referendum and in the general election last year is delivered by this deal”.

– Boris “BoJo” Johnson

Faced with the grim reality of leaving the EU without a deal, Boris Johnson was always going to hail any “least-worst” deal as a “victory”. And so he did. A jubilant BoJo, ever the lying blusterer, claims his deal is everything the electorate voted for in the 2016 referendum and in last year’s general election. It certainly isn’t, if one scrutinizes the details.

BoJo’s “oven ready” Brexit deal was always premised on a con— the UK would be able to cast aside the EU politically but continue to enjoy all the economic benefits.

The newly completed deal leaves many loose-ends that will only be resolved through micro-negotiations. Meanwhile, jobs will be lost as the UK economy loses capacity due to the deal’s terms.

The government’s own independent forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility, expects Brexit to reduce GDP by 4% in the medium term.

From 1 January, most UK nationals will lose the right of free movement within the EU. UK nationals will no longer be free to work, study, start a business or reside in the EU. Visas will be required for any stay over 90 days. British business travellers and workers posted to an EU country (i.e., someone staying in the EU to work for a limited duration) will face fines unless they get advance authorization once the UK leaves the EU.

UK businesses will face substantial extra costs in doing business with its biggest export market. Although these businesses will have tariff-free and quota-free access to EU markets, the UK will officially be a “third country” to the EU, and so traders will face increased costs incurred by this new status and its accompanying customs checks and paperwork for hauliers at the border.

This “thin” tariff-free and quota-free arrangement is also contingent on UK businesses complying with EU standards (as well as those existing in the UK). There will be checks and inspections, with the requisite costs to business, on such compliance.

The deal is also intended to ensure people and goods can pass relatively unimpeded between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. In fact, it is going to be more difficult for goods to pass between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK since a virtual single market will exist between the EU-member Republic of Ireland and its UK-member to the north.

The groundwork is being laid, however unevenly, for a time when then reunification of Ireland will make increased economic sense (if it does not do so already). Further rounds of micro-negotiations are expected before the issue of the Irish border nears resolution.

The quantity of fish that EU fisherman can catch in UK waters is reduced by 25% over the next 5.5 years (the UK had demanded 80%). From 2026 the quotas will be negotiated annually. If the UK imposes requirements the EU finds too stringent– e.g., a too large reduction of quotas– the EU can impose import taxes on UK fish products intended for the EU market, and can also impose sanctions in other sectors.

Representatives of the UK fishing industry were not impressed by this part of the deal, saying they were “bitterly disappointed” in the quantity of fish the UK could catch.

Barrie Deas, head of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations, said the UK accepting a 25% repatriation of quotas, amounted to “justice deferred, justice denied”. Obviously, fishing rights will continue to be a contentious issue.

Financial and other services (80% of UK GDP) are not covered by the deal. Hence the EU can decide unilaterally which services it grants equivalence, and Brussels will also be able to revoke this status unilaterally. The UK would not of course be in this weakened position if it remained in the EU.

France managed to exclude the audio-visual sector from the deal. The UK has around 1,400 broadcasters, about 30% of all channels in the EU. Britain’s TV and video-on-demand service providers will no longer be able to offer services to EU-domiciled viewers unless they transfer part of their enterprise to an EU member state. This represents a major blow to this flourishing sector.

Automatic recognition of the qualifications for doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, veterinarians, engineers, accountants, and architects will cease. These individuals will now have to apply for recognition in the EU-member-state they want to practice in.

The UK’s subsidy-regime for its industries was a potential sticking-point for the EU, which feared the UK could use subsidies to gain a completive advantage over EU manufacturers. While the UK will establish its own subsidy-regime, it is required to ensure that this regime accords with key principles specified in the deal. The treaty also allows both parties to resort to remedial measures if there is evidence that domestic invigilation has failed to uphold the shared principles. These remedial measures have not yet been agreed-upon. Micro-negotiations will be needed to determine them.

Both sides agreed to a base level of environmental, social and labour standards, the so-called “level-playing” field, below which neither must fall. There will be a review after 4 years to ensure this protocol was working.

The EU’s insisted initially on an “evolution clause” that would allow the EU to apply unilateral tariffs on UK goods should such standards deviate over time. If one side upgraded their regulatory framework, the other would have to conform, or face penalties.

The EU compromised on this issue by dropping its immediate penalty-clause requirement. Instead, there will now be scope for a “rebalancing” review, which allows either side to ask for a review of the economic sections of the deal, including the minimum standards.

Penalties will only be imposed if one side obstructs or delays agreement on a new set of standards. If this occurs, the other may apply tariffs, provided these are approved by an independent arbitration body. This will involve yet another tier of bureaucracy, which the UK’s Brexiters, knowing they were lying, said leaving the EU would reduce.

The EU also feared the UK would import cheap goods manufactured in other countries, slap a “made in Britain” label on them, before sending them on to the EU market.

The EU therefore insisted on an agreed-upon determination of what is required for a particular product to count as “made in Britain”.

The EU agreed that EU materials and processing should to be registered as British input when the completed products are exported into the EU market.

A product would therefore only be subject to tariffs if more than 40% of its pre-finished value did not originate in the UK or from a non-EU country such as the US or Brazil.

Even if British products included items from a country having a trade agreement with both the EU and the UK, these products would not have a “made in Britain” designation.

The UK will be excluded from the Erasmus student exchange programme, relied on heavily by UK universities to give their students access to European-language teaching and to courses of study not available in the UK. A replacement scheme named after Alan Turing, and earmarked for 35,000 students, will cost £100mn/$136mn in 2021/22, with funding for subsequent academic years to be determined in future spending assessments.

Sceptics have said 35,000 students participating in a scheme costing only £100mn will work out at only £2,850/$3865 each—probably enough to pay for accommodation and living costs in another country but little else.

Unlike the Erasmus scheme, the Turing version has no provision for funding students to come to the UK, this being a significant source of income from British universities. A group of education and business leaders said earlier this year that this would cost the UK’s economy £243mn/$330mn a year.

Cooperation on security and law enforcement will be weakened, as the UK will be kept out of key exchange programmes. Cross-border police investigations and law enforcement can continue, but the UK will forfeit membership of the European Arrest Warrant system, and it will not be a full member of Europol or Eurojust. However, arrangements are being made to allow UK “cooperation” with these entities.

The UK will have a “mechanism for access” to the Schengen Information System (SIS II), an automated database disseminating police alerts on stolen goods and missing persons.

The UK will also have access to the Passenger Name Records, which provides live data on the movement of air and ferry passengers, and the Prüm database of fingerprints, DNA and car number plates of suspects. These are key tools in responding to terrorism.

Setting up a protocol for dispute resolution was difficult to achieve, since it will have to resolve trade disputes in the coming decades.

If either the UK or EU believes trade is being distorted, it can seek remediation after consultation. An arbitrage panel will meet within 30 days in order to adjudicate. If the measures taken were later deemed flawed or disproportionate, the affected party can take compensatory measures.

Steps are being taken to create an overarching UK-EU governance committee, assisted by subcommittees, to implement and enforce the treaty.

The Brexiters promised Brits “sunny uplands” when the UK left the EU. There will be no such thing.

Few in the UK will be pleased by this botch of a deal.

Twenty MPs belonging to the hardline Brexiter Europe Reform Group of the Tory party have already threatened to vote against the deal (though this could just be hot air). For them a No Deal would have been preferable, since, in their view, BoJo’s deal still keeps the UK tethered to Brussels, and therefore vitiates the mythical “sovereignty” they’ve yelped about in the last 5 years.

The deal won’t go down well in anti-Brexit Scotland. The Scottish National Party has made it clear that BoJo’s deal relinquishes the benefits of EU membership without gaining anything in return for Scotland. The Scottish argument for independence will now come to the fore, with the economic argument as its pivot.

The UK has always been tied-up in a Gordian Knot over the EU.

The EU is an unreformable institution—pretty much everyone, both Left and Right, acknowledges this, albeit for hugely different and incompatible reasons.

The Ukanian Right is prey to rebarbative post-imperial fantasies (a “new global Britain”, a “Singapore on the Thames”, ruling over the metaphorical waves of a conjured-up digitized business empire, a pale facsimile of the actual heaving waves traversed in bygone imperial days), and blames the EU for standing in the way of a sought-after realization of these atavistic delusions.

The Left, correctly, regards the EU as the primary European vehicle for neoliberalism and globalization. The EU stands unyieldingly in the way of any genuinely socialist project undertaken by its member nations.

For this reason alone, the EU was much more at ease dealing with the neoliberal BoJo– despite all the bogus huffing and puffing at the 11^th hour as a deal was being hammered-out– than it would have been with a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn committed to a socialist agenda never previously seen in the EU’s history.

Corbyn’s successor, the Blairite opportunist Keir Starmer, mindful that his strong Remainer record will probably endure as a bad memory for voters in the Leave-voting seats that Labour lost to the Tories in the 2019 election, changed his stripes and ordered his MPs to support the deal when it is put to a vote in parliament on December 30^th. A few Labour MPs, representing constituencies with a large number of Remain voters, have said they will abstain rather than back a bad deal.

So far, Ukania’s botched response to the pandemic has resulted in over 70,000 deaths by Christmas Day.

Adjusting for population numbers, the UK death toll would be the equivalent of 350,000 Covid deaths in the US.

So far 60 countries have closed their borders to the UK because of its mishandling of the pandemic.

This will not be a propitious situation in which to begin post-Brexit trading in a few days’ time.

Photograph Source: EU2017EE Estonian Presidency – CC BY 2.0

In 2016, BoJo Johnson travelled into the future and arrived at a post-Brexit Britain. The vista he faced pleased BoJo immensely. Writing in The Telegraph, the charlatan fantasist and future prime minister said of the panorama in front of him:

“The markets were calm. The pound did not collapse. The British government immediately launched a highly effective and popular campaign across the Continent to explain that this was not a rejection of ‘Europe’, only of the supranational EU institutions; and a new relationship was rapidly forged based on free trade and with traditional British leadership on foreign policy, crime-fighting, intelligence-sharing and other intergovernmental cooperation”.

Nearly everyone knows that BoJo’s avidity for his own fictions and any attendant chicanery almost rivals that of Donald Trump.

In the run-up to the 2019 general election, the Conservative party’s official Twitter account was rebranded as a fact-checking service. Beat that Donnie!

Last week, Tory activists in the constituency of the hardline pro-Brexit MP Peter Bone were urged in a party newsletter to emulate Trump by “weaponising fake news” and talking “nonsense” if this works. The bulletin sent out to members in the constituency went on to say: “A lie can go round the world before the truth can get its boots on”.

The UK helped defeat the Nazi Germany of Joseph Goebbels in World War Two, but it would appear that Dr Goebbels will have won the peace if the Tories get their way on “fake news”.

The Tory Brexiters had 4 years to deal with the obvious reality posed by the EU’s unwavering position on a trade deal (i.e., the core of its regulatory framework needs to be retained in any such deal), but the Tories preferred to con the electorate with an imaginary “oven-ready” deal with the EU.

The Tory Brexiter scenario was decidedly rosy.

The UK, supposedly freed from EU shackles, will become “Singapore on the Thames”; that “we would immediately be able to start negotiating new trade deals with emerging economies and the world’s biggest economies which could enter into force immediately after the UK leaves the EU” (the words of Dominic Cummings, BoJo’s recently dismissed Svengali-like chief adviser); and that “getting out of the EU can be quick and easy – the UK holds most of the cards” (Sir John Redwood, a senior Tory MP).

The pro-Brexit former chair of the Confederation of British Industry, Lord Digby Jones, preached that the German car-manufacturers (fearing loss of access to the UK market) will somehow bring Angela Merkel to her senses.

The noble Lord, a plutocrat, failed to understand that new Mercedes Benzs and BMWs can only be afforded (in the main) by the UK’s stock-portfolio class, that Audis are for the top bracket of the salariat, while anyone else who wanted a German car, and who could afford it, had to make do with a Volkswagen. In any event, someone able to afford a Benz or a Beamer today will probably have no problem forking-out that little extra incurred by the imposition of tariffs on EU goods imported into the UK.

These Brexiter Alice-in-Wonderlanders were eager, or maybe even desperate, to follow the White Rabbit down the Brexit rabbit hole.

The truth of the matter is that the UK is not prepared for a post-Brexit world even it secured a trade deal with the EU.

An article in Prospect said last month that “Overall, just 12.5 per cent of businesses feel ready for what is to come; in the food and drink sector, only 3.5 per cent say they are fully prepared. The problem is severe for larger businesses, but even worse for small- and medium-sized enterprises which have far fewer resources to devote to planning”.

Covid is responsible for this situation in part, but the blame lies largely with the government’s incompetence when it came to making adequate preparations for Brexit.

BoJo and his fellow Brexit devotees maintained the fiction of “frictionless” trade between the UK and EU (after the transition period ends on December 31^st) until very recently, and failed to create the requisite regulatory framework for a post-Brexit UK. To quote the above-mentioned Prospect article:

“Additionally, the government has been laggardly in creating the multiple new regulatory agencies entailed by leaving the single market, many of which even now are not fully established. It is obviously impossible for businesses to prepare for new regulatory regimes when they have not actually been developed. And even though in many cases it seems likely that the UK regulations will remain the same as those of the EU, new accreditations and registrations are still needed”.

Another complication is posed by the near certainty that the IT software intended to help transport companies submit their customs and border control paperwork digitally will not be ready on 1 January. BBC News reported at the end of October:

“The Association of Freight Software Suppliers (AFSS) said its members could not guarantee delivery because officials had failed to give it details and direction for the project.

…. The AFSS explained the problem was that some functions could not be designed until it was known exactly what they needed to do, and that could not happen until trade negotiations ended.

… the association’s chairman Stephen Bartlett said… “When we ask how some of the systems are going to work, we’re told, ‘We can’t talk about it”, he explained”.

For its part, the government insists that any such disruption is going to be “short term”.

The EU, by contrast, has its Brexit logistical and infrastructural systems already in place.

In addition to the above, the UK Department for Transport confirmed that the customs control area near Ashford in Kent for lorries arriving in the UK on ferries will not be completed in time for the end of the transition period.

The DfT says an unanticipated level of rainfall in England during the autumn is responsible for the slower pace of construction.

Traffic jams of up to 7,000 lorries are expected in Kent, home of the UK’s channel ports, caused by new and untried (and so potentially confusing) customs and border-control procedures at the end of the year.

The National Audit Office has warned that there will be disruption regardless of the outcome of Brexit negotiations. Indeed, there have been 5-mile traffic jams in Kent the past few days as firms rush to boost their stockpiles before 1 January.

If all this transpires, and most of it will, Brits will be in for a miserable new year, with the Covid pandemic adding to their wretchedness.

Refusing to learn from the US experience when lockdown measures were eased during the Thanksgiving period, BoJo declined to follow the advice of his medical and public health advisers, and decreed that a similar lifting of lockdown restrictions should take place during a 5-day Christmas period. Then reality struck: a new and more contagious strain of the virus emerged, and Johnson was forced into another U-turn. The lockdown will only be lifted for Christmas Day itself.

The baneful and tragic repercussions of such recklessness are almost inevitable.

Brexit was from the beginning an ideological project designed to paper-over conflicts in the ruling Tory party (David Cameron’s aim in calling the Brexit referendum); and then morphing into a mobilization, forefronted by this ideological project, to ensure electoral success (Theresa May and Johnson).

Electoral success was duly delivered to the Tories, but Ukanian voters have yet to be confronted with the full price they’ll have to pay as a consequence.

All these voters can count on are more meaningless 3-word slogans on podiums, created by PR consultants paid a small fortune to do so, and accompanied by yet more rounds of resounding mismanagement.

As I write supposed deadlines come and go.

However, as the talks go deeper into December, the time-frame needed for EU-member governments to translate and scrutinize any agreed-upon document narrows inexorably, leaving the UK to end the transition period without a new trading arrangement with Brussels.

The European parliament’s leaders have said publicly they will need time to scrutinize the agreed text before the end of the transition period.

The probable outcome is that there will be a no-deal period after I January, as negotiations between London and Brussels continue.

This will force the UK to take emergency measures for which it is unprepared. So much for BoJo’s attractive post-Brexit vista in 2016.

Photograph Source: Ungry Young Man – CC BY 2.0

Both the UK and the EU are engaged in a game of brinkmanship, amounting to a kind of shadow theatre— neither wants to shoulder the blame for the UK’s exit from the EU without a trade deal between the two.

The stakes are higher for the UK.

The prime minister Boris “BoJo” Johnson said to voters in 2019 he had an “oven-ready” Brexit deal to submit to the EU. This turned out be one of his customary lies.

Last Wednesday the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and BoJo agreed during a 3-hour dinner in Brussels that a “firm decision” would need to be made by the end of the weekend on whether there was any hope of a deal.

However, in a phone call a few days later they agreed to extend this deadline beyond the weekend, and issued a joint statement afterwards:

“We had a useful phone call this morning. We discussed the major unresolved topics.

Our negotiating teams have been working day and night over recent days.

And despite the exhaustion after almost a year of negotiations, despite the fact that deadlines have been missed over and over we think it is responsible at this point to go the extra mile.

We have accordingly mandated our negotiators to continue the talks and to see whether an agreement can even at this late stage be reached”.

Both sides are conveying to the media they want to “go the extra mile”, and the challenge for each one is to show that the other side failed to go that “extra mile”.

The finality faced by both sides, however, is that any future extensions of deadlines will cease at the end of this month. On January 1^st 2021 the UK leaves the EU, deal or no deal.

The key issue involves the terms on which the UK will acquire a “single market” deal with the EU.

BoJo’s acolytes accuse the EU of “cherry-picking” their way through the conditions for cementing such a deal, ignoring the fact that the EU’s position on the UK’s access to the single market has been clear from 2016. To quote The Guardian:

“The single market is the most level of level playing fields. So for the EU27 to accede to a demand from a large, neighbouring and economically significant third country – the UK – for preferential access to it without a binding commitment to abide by its rules is simply unthinkable. It would undermine the essence of the bloc.

That is why the EU27 are not budging.

All [the EU27] agree that no deal, regrettable as it would be, is better than a deal that risks giving UK companies an unfair competitive advantage in Europe’s single market – now or in the future.

That was the position in 2016 and it is the position now”.

In a nutshell: the UK will have to accept the spine of the EU’s regulatory framework in order to strike this deal.

So far, the UK has failed to understand that the EU is negotiating trade deals with other countries all the time, and what this process entails for the EU.

To cut the UK slack in a prospective trade deal will open the EU to charges from other countries seeking an EU trade deal along the lines of “why aren’t you giving us the easy terms you offered the UK?”.

The UK’s Brexiters interpret every step taken by the EU in its dealings with Albion as a vengeful attempt to punish the UK for daring to leave.

This is a Brexiter misreading, intentional or not, and the truth is simpler and more obvious.

The terms offered the UK for its departure could be used by other countries seeking trade deals with the EU as a “base-line” negotiating position for themselves, which will certainly not be conducive to the EU’s interests.

No slack to the UK, therefore no slack to these countries.

This is the likely unstated premise for the EU’s position with regard to the UK in these negotiations.

Despite all the last-minute shadow theatre (e.g., the UK threatening to scare-off French fishermen with Navy gunboats) surrounding these negotiations, BoJo Johnson is being confronted with an inexorable truth: either a No Deal Brexit or else a Brexit trading deal pretty much on the EU’s terms (with the EU making a few cosmetic concessions in a face-saving placation of the UK).

Whatever transpires, we should bet that BoJo, ever the hoaxer, will claim the result as a “victory”.

The EU will probably say, albeit not publicly, that the outcome gave those Englander bastards something which can’t do damage to the EU’s own interests.

Meanwhile Ukanians also have the Covid crisis to deal with, and BoJo and his team have been catastrophically inept (and hugely corrupt with respect to Covid-related procurement) in dealing with this so far.

Alas, on this front, the shameless BoJo and his circle have been claiming “world-beating victories” as the Covid death toll mounts.

In Ukania, as in the US, rightwing politicians feel impelled to contort reality so that everything can be presented as some kind of “victory”.

For these rightwing fraudsters, “losing” is impossible to accept (at least not publicly), and so the populace pays the deadly price for this mass, self-inflicted, idiocy.

Photograph Source: Jeremy Segrott – CC BY 2.0

As the UK stumbles towards a no deal Brexit, the Tory government becomes increasingly desperate in its attempts to show that the UK is much better than the EU, whether as a collective or with respect to its individual members.

Claims made by Tories on this issue border on the delusional.

The education secretary, Gavin Williamson—whose career peaked when he was Fireplace Salesman of the Year in 2006 and 2007 (before he entered politics) — has claimed the UK is the first country in the world to approve a coronavirus vaccine for clinical use because the country has “much better” scientists than France, Belgium or the US.

The buffoonish Williamson said he was not surprised the UK was the first to give the vaccine clinical approval because “we’re a much better country than every single one of them”.

When asked on LBC radio whether Brexit was the reason for this world-first, Williamson snapped-up the opportunity to put his foot in his mouth last Thursday: “Well I just reckon we’ve got the very best people in this country and we’ve obviously got the best medical regulators”.

“Much better than the French have, much better than the Belgians have, much better than the Americans have. That doesn’t surprise me at all because we’re a much better country than every single one of them, aren’t we?”

Williamson did not seem to make his remarks in jest, but even if he did, they came barely 24 hours after Matt Hancock, the health secretary, said the UK was the first to approve the vaccine “because of Brexit”.

Hancock, nick-named “Door Matt” in the media because of his servility towards BoJo Johnson, contrasted the UK approach with the “pace of the Europeans, who are moving a little bit more slowly”.

Hancock’s claim was contradicted both by the prime minister’s office and the UK’s medicines regulator.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA), which is in charge of approving the vaccine for the European Union, also issued a statement saying bluntly that the UK had prioritized a speedy roll-out over winning the public’s trust so that it could be the first to give the vaccine official approval.

Williamson, warming to his task, then elaborated on his claim about the UK having “much better” clinicians than other countries by saying it was “able to get on with things”, a remark conforming to the Tory talking-point that Brexit was needed because the EU’s regulatory mechanisms are wrapped-up in red tape.

Asked a second time on LBC whether he meant that Brexit was responsible for the UK’s achievement, Williamson said: “I think just being able to get on with things, deliver it, and the brilliant people in our medical regulator making it happen means that people in this country are going to be the first country in the western world – in the world – to get that Pfizer vaccine”.

“A real competitive advantage. But do you know who it’s down to? It’s down to the brilliant clinicians in the regulator who’ve made it happen so fast, so our thanks go out to them. By doing what they’ve done, they’re going to have saved lives.”

The government’s boast about vaccine’s roll-out said it had taken place under a provision of the 2012 Human Medicines Regulations, which permits the speeded-up licensing of pharmaceuticals in the event of an emergency such as a pandemic.

The UK is still under the authority of the EMA until the end of the Brexit transition period on 1 January, and EU laws permit member states to approve medicines for emergency use without EMA authorization.

At a government briefing last Wednesday, the head of the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority, which made the decision, dismissed the claims made by Williamson and Hancock, saying that the MHRA was simply following EU rules. “We have been able to authorize the supply of this vaccine using provisions under European law, which exist until 1 January,” said June Raine, the MHRA’s chief executive.

BoJo’s Johnson’s spokesman also declined to back his health minister when asked to do so. BoJo’s seeming reluctance to engage in gratuitous points-scoring over the EU may have to do with the fact that negotiations on a post-Brexit trade deal between the UK and the EU are deadlocked, to the point where BoJo himself will now conduct talks with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. Ms von der Leyen is not likely to be impressed by witless claims about Ukanian superiority.

As is well-known, the Pfizer vaccine was developed by 2 children of Turkish immigrants in Germany, and manufactured in Belgium by an American enterprise (Pfizer).

The only major part the UK will play in its production and distribution (apart from vaccinating members of the public) will be using Royal Air Force planes to bring it to the UK– as a result of the new Brexit border controls, which require extra levels of customs and immigration red tape, Ukanian ports are about to be jammed by vehicles coming over on ferries.

The bragging by ministers about the vaccine may be intended to draw attention away from 2 discomforting realities.

The first is the continuing high Covid death rate—the UK now has a total of 61,245 deaths from the virus (the highest in Europe).

The second is the continuing bonanza of cronyism and nepotism in the handing-out of public funds for Covid-related procurement.

The non-profit Good Law Project has brought several lawsuits against the government for misuse of public funds, and last week announced the date of the first court hearing:

“Following permission being granted in our PPE cases earlier this week, we’ve now heard that we’ve also been granted permission to bring our challenge against the lucrative public affairs contract given to long-time associates of Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings at Public First…. The [court] hearing will be [on 15] February 2021”.

This misuse of public funds is starting to receive more coverage in the media, and it’s not doing the government any favours.

A poll conducted by King’s College London and Ipsos Mori found that 51% of the respondents believe the government’s handling of the Covid crisis has been a “national humiliation” — twice the number of those who disagree (26%). The poll also found that 57% of people do not trust the government to control the spread of the Covid virus.

No wonder “anonymous sources” in the Tory party are saying that BoJo is likely to be gone sometime in the new year.

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

The fallout regarding the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report on antisemitism in the Labour party continues, as do its repercussions for the former leader Jeremy Corbyn.

I discussed the report in a previous CounterPunch post, pointing out that while it didn’t uphold the claim by the Jewish Labour Movement, which issued the first complaint to the EHRC, that Labour is “institutionally antisemitic”, it nonetheless concluded that Corbyn could have tackled antisemitism more effectively if he had chosen to do so.

At the same time, the report acknowledged that official party procedures for dealing with complaints of antisemitism within Labour had speeded-up under Corbyn.

Corbyn’s responded almost immediately to the report on Facebook, saying—correctly– that the scale of antisemitism in the party had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media”.

Corbyn’s factually-based statement resulted in his immediate suspension as a member of the Labour party. The suspension, greeted with considerable opposition from rank-and-file members and the unions which bankroll the party, as well as the threat of forthcoming legal action, was later lifted by a disciplinary panel.

Corbyn was also told by the Labour Chief Whip, Nick Brown, to “unequivocally, unambiguously and without reservation” apologize for his claims made in the aftermath of the EHRC report. The whip will be withdrawn from Corbyn for 3 months while an investigation is carried out, meaning that while he remains an MP, Corbyn will not be representing Labour in parliament.

Corbyn, as is his wont, backtracked by issuing a contrite statement on social media the morning the disciplinary panel met.

He retracted his earlier statement that antisemitism had been “dramatically overstated” for political reasons by saying “To be clear, concerns about anti-Semitism are neither ‘exaggerated’ nor ‘overstated’”. At the same time Corbyn did not apologize for his statement.

As has typically been the case, Corbyn’s backtrack achieved nothing for him.

Corbyn can’t seem to grasp, at least not publicly, that aside from what his opponents outside the party, such as the fetid Murdoch media, get up to, there are those within— its Blairite remnant and its pro-Zionist bloc —who will do everything they can to destroy him and his supporters politically.

No amount of soft-pedalling on Corbyn’s part will change their minds.

Corbyn’s project, and that of his myriad supporters, is modest, namely, to reintroduce Labour to its founding principles as a social-democratic party and to uphold the rights of the Palestinian people, established for decades by the Geneva Convention and other provisions of international law.

Keir Starmer, despite his dissembling when he ran for the leadership, is a Blairite in all but name, and he is on the payroll of one of the UK’s biggest supporters of Israel, the multimillionaire Trevor Chinn.

Starmer is on record as saying he supports “Zionism without qualification”.

Corbyn needs to ask Starmer and his fellow Labour Zionists to provide a context for the proceedings against him (so he can defend himself properly), by asking the simple question: “is there any part of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people you disagree with?”.

If the reply is “none” (Starmer’s likely answer given his support of Zionism “without qualification’), then at least Corbyn has flushed Labour’s Zionists out into the open for their unconditional support of Israel in its brutal treatment of the Palestinians.

If the reply is “some”, then the follow-up question has to be: “Thank you, but please be specific and tell us exactly what you find disagreeable in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians?”.

The politician who answers the follow-up question truthfully, and disagrees in however a small way with the right of Palestinians to live without an illegal Israeli military occupation, the systemic demolition of entire Palestinian villages, or being shot by Israeli snipers when protesting peacefully, runs the risk of being denounced as an “antisemite”, “supporter of terrorism”, or face the phony plea “we are the victims, so why are you against us, etc.”– the whole familiar panoply of condemnations and exculpations directed at those who dare criticize Israel for its ruthlessness towards the Palestinian people.

As a result, one can surmise that not many in Labour’s Zionist bloc will answer the latter question directly or truthfully.

This less quiescent approach may not succeed– Corbyn is after all dealing with absolute bastards who won’t allow him a milimetre of room to defend himself– but at least he and his surrogates should give it a try.

When dealing with Labour’s ruthless Blairites and Zionists, Corbyn always seems to bring his garden-allotment pruning clippers to a gunfight.

Sure enough, after Corbyn’s suspension was lifted, the Jewish Labour Movement, a pro-Israel lobbying outfit, said Corbyn had “offered no apology for his total failure of leadership to tackle anti-Semitism”.

The Labour Friends of Israel supporter Margaret Hodge, the multimillionaire right-wing Labour MP and tax-avoider, said she was deciding whether she should leave the party given Corbyn’s reinstatement as a party member. Many Labour party members, myself included, would give Hodge a sardonic round of applause if she chose to leave.

But Starmer and his Blairite/Zionist supporters are facing something of backlash.

Corbyn’s supporters on Labour’s National Executive Committee (members of the NEC are elected by party members) walked out of its last meeting because the agreement regarding who became chair of the NEC was altered to prevent the next chair being someone who criticized Starmer’s leadership. The convention was upheld during Corbyn’s time as leader, even though it allowed a Blairite to become chair in their turn.

In a letter to all local party chairs, MPs and Members of the Scottish Parliament, Labour’s general secretary David Evans indicated that any motions about the decision to withdraw the parliamentary whip from Corbyn would be “ruled out of order”. Evans wrote (pointing out he was doing so with the full authority of the NEC):

“I am aware that… motions (including expressions of solidarity, and matters relating to the internal processes of the PLP) are providing a flashpoint for the expression of views that undermine the Labour Party’s ability to provide a safe and welcoming space for all members, in particular our Jewish members. Therefore, all motions which touch on these issues will also be ruled out of order”.

Some leftwing MPs fear this clampdown could expand into the wider suspension of entire local constituency Labour parties (CLPs), whose members have been most vocal in their denunciation of Corbyn’s suspension.

It is estimated that around 60 CLPs have already approved motions of support for Corbyn, with about more 100 due to take place last week.

Evans has already suspended the chair and other members in the Bristol West CLP after they convened a Zoom meeting which discussed a motion critical of the Chief Whip’s decision.

The CLP in Hall Green (Birmingham), met and disregarded Evans’s “guidance” by passing the following resolution: “This CLP demands the immediate and unconditional restoration of the Labour parliamentary whip to Jeremy Corbyn MP”.

The resolution was passed with no votes against and only 2 abstentions. Hall Green has since been joined by the Nottingham East CLP in passing a resolution in support of Corbyn.

So how many CLPs will David Evans (who presumably makes such decisions with Starmer’s backing) suspend when they pass resolutions defiantly in support of Corbyn?

Photograph Source: Keith Hall – CC BY 2.0

Boris “BoJo” Johnson survived his bout with Covid-19 after spending time in intensive-care a few months ago.

BoJo’s survival notwithstanding, he’s now having to self-isolate—again– as a result of meeting with a group of Tory MPs, many casual about social distancing and mask-wearing, who subsequently tested positive for the virus.

BoJo’s self-isolation came at a convenient time for him.

He had just sacked his chief adviser and handler, Dominic Cummings, who was thought by many to be the de facto prime minister. Also sacked was Cummings’ side kick, Lee Cain, who was Downing Street’s director of communications.

This Ruritanian ruckus was the outcome of a classic piece of bureaucratic infighting.

BoJo’s constant mixed messaging and U-turns over the pandemic led to the appointment of a White House-style press secretary, Allegra Stratton (a friend of BoJo’s concubine Carrie Symonds), in the hope that Stratton could somehow improve Downing Street’s slapdash PR.

However, what ensued was a turf war between Lee Cain and Stratton, with Cummings siding with his director of communications against the upstart Stratton. Cain was said to reduce Stratton to tears.

Carrie Symonds, given the nickname “Lady Nut Nuts” by Cummings & Co, is reported to have intervened on behalf of her friend with her prime ministerial paramour, and BoJo responded by giving Cain the boot. While this was going on, Cummings briefed against Lady Nut Nuts, prompting BoJo to give Cummings his termination slip.

All this is mildly entertaining, but a more serious question remains.

BoJo is said to be congenitally undisciplined, erratic, and slothful by those who know him, and needs to have a manager of sorts to keep him somewhat on track. Cummings had this function, but he is gone.

So how, and by whom, will BoJo be managed when he comes out of quarantine?

The departure of the not-much-missed Cummings was said by Tory politicians and the Tory-supporting press to give BoJo a chance to do a “reset” after months of incoherent policy-making and drift.

But any chance of a “reset” was soon scuppered.

The Home Secretary/interior minister, Priti Patel, was found by an official inquiry to have breached the ministerial code by bullying civil servants in the 3 ministries she has served in (the other 2 being International Development and Work and Pensions).

The civil servants involved were subjected to profanity-laden bouts of screaming by Patel, who is known in some social media circles as “Priti Shitty”.

Patel is no stranger to malfeasance.

In August 2017, while at International Development, Patel held meetings in Israel without informing the Foreign Office. The meetings, up to a dozen in number, were said by Patel to have occurred when she was on a “private holiday”. The BBC reported that “According to one source, at least one of the meetings was held at the suggestion of the Israeli ambassador to London. In contrast, British diplomats in Israel were not informed about Ms Patel’s plans”.

Following her “holiday” meetings in Israel, Patel recommended that her department give international aid money to field hospitals run by the Israeli army in the illegally-occupied Golan Heights.

Patel had 2 more undisclosed meetings with Israeli officials in London and New York in September 2017. Her activities on behalf of the Israeli government were deemed in legal circles to be a conflict of interest, and thus a breach of the ministerial code.

Shortly after her appointment as Home Secretary in May 2019, Patel became an adviser to the US military tech supplier ViaSat on a salary of £5,000/$6,637 a month for 5 hours’ work a month, without seeking approval from the government’s Advisory Committee on Business Appointments. This led critics to say she had broken the ministerial code for a second time.

So, with the recent bullying charges Patel was now on the verge of 3 breaches of the ministerial code, but BoJo, having sat since April on the report detailing and weighing-up these charges against Patel, declared last week that she had not breached the ministerial code!

Day is night, and night is day, for this “shape-shifting creep” (the words used by a former official in the Obama administration to describe the prime minister).

BoJo’s adviser on ministerial standards, Sir Alex Allan, whose responsibility was to inform him that Patel’s recent behaviour breached the ministerial code, promptly resigned.

Patel is also notorious for issuing fatuous non-apologies in the past, taking the form of “I’m sorry if you were offended by what I did, and that I hurt your feelings, because that was not my intention”.

Sure enough, the screamed-at civil servants in the Home Office received one of her phony expressions of regret.

Patel, found guilty of yelling obscenities at civil servants in 3 different ministries, got away with it because she convinced BoJo (or maybe he convinced himself) that her behaviour was somehow “not intentional”.

Someone should try that excuse the next time they are accused of bullying at their workplace, and see what response comes their way. They had better beseech their gods for a boss like the “shape-shifting creep”.

Patel should of course have been sacked a long time ago, but now gets off with a feeble “written warning”.

Perhaps it can’t be ruled out—absolutely– that being a close ally of BoJo’s may one day allow a minister to remain in his cabinet despite being found guilty of attempting to run over a civil servant with their car?

Meanwhile, a damning report by the UK’s National Audit Office (NAO) concluded that “standards of transparency and documentation were not consistently met”, as the government handed out £18bn/$24bn in Covid-related contracts to suppliers by the end of July.

The NAO shows that a “VIP lane” to dole out contracts was created for potential suppliers who had been recommended by cabinet ministers and Tory MPs.

Mountains of cash were handed to companies with no demonstrable competence in the manufacture and supply of what they were contracted to provide.

One such company, the pest exterminator Pestfix, was erroneously added to the “VIP lane”, but not before it received £350mn/$467mn worth of contracts. Part of the Pestfix deal included a consignment of 600,000 masks that did not meet the government’s own PPE stipulations.

A £253mn/$336mn deal with Ayanda Capital was brokered by an adviser to the government’s Board of Trade, with £155mn/$206mn spent on 50 million masks which had to be discarded because they did not meet the required standards.

The NAO stated that there had been “inadequate documentation” involving potential conflicts of interest and a lack of record-keeping within the “VIP lane”.

Firms in the VIP lane were 10 times more likely to awarded contracts than suppliers who submitted bids through the normal process.

Of 493 referrals submitted for inclusion in the high priority lane, only 250 sources were recorded, most of them coming from the private offices of ministers and a large number directly from Tory MPs.

The NAO also found that a company owned by individuals who “previously advised or worked with” the cabinet minister Michael Gove were given a contract, as well as an outfit in which a minister had previously owned £90,000/$119,500 worth of shares.

Almost £50mn/$66mn was given to one individual who acted as a middleman for a jeweller in Florida called Michael Saiger whom the government selected to deliver £250mn/$332mn worth of PPE.

The Good Law Project, headed by the senior lawyer Jolyon Maugham, has initiated legal proceedings against the government for these egregious acts of cronyism and nepotism which have turned Ukania into a “chumocracy”.

The post How the UK Became a Chumocracy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Matt Brown – CC BY 2.0

It is probably no exaggeration to say that Donald Trump in all likelihood views BoJo Johnson as his sidekick. They have their birthplace in common, and when they meet it won’t be a surprise if they always began by congratulating each other on this.

BoJo seems much more at ease in Trump’s company than, say, that of the stolid Angela Merkel.

Frau Dr Merkel is probably several notches above the 2 men when it comes to IQ levels, and given their shared predilection for pouting blondes with chest measurements that in some instances almost match the IQs of those thus measured, Chancellor Merkel is highly unlikely to qualify as favoured company for these 2 “manly” men.

But now we have Joe Biden about to move into the White House.

Biden has signalled openly that his dealings with Europe will be conducted via Berlin and not London.

So what does BoJo now do without his pal Trump in the White House?

Like Trump, BoJo is a child of privilege, a narcissist, bully, racist, lifelong philanderer, fantasist, chronic liar, a frequenter of sunny islands owned by the super-rich (some of them rather dodgy), an aficionado of certain stimulative powders, someone congenitally averse to putting in a full shift at work (this burden falls on their minions), friend of dictators, a hazard to his body mass index, and possessing a certain carelessness of other lives (evident in their responses to the Covid pandemic). They only thing they don’t have in common is a golfing addiction.

Like Trump, Johnson is hugely inconsistent. He hops to one notion (we’re locking-down, so stay home). Then he hops to something else (Joe and Jane Normal, it’s time you got back to work, and your kids back to school). Then he hops back to his original notion (Joe and Jane, it’s back to lockdown, now that you’ve used our government-issued coupons at bars and pizza joints).

The bars and pizza joints turned out to be clusters spreading the virus, something medical experts had said was bound to happen if people congregated indoors.

Biden’s antipathy towards BoJo goes back to comments the latter made when he was mayor of London— BoJo writing then that Obama’s decision to remove a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office was a “symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire”.

BoJo, who has a long history of racist comments, sent the obligatory congratulatory message to Biden on his election success, and, not unexpectedly, Obama’s former press official Tommy Vietor responded by calling him a “shape-shifting creep”, saying: “We will never forget your racist comments about Obama and slavish devotion to Trump”.

Senator Chris Coons of Connecticut – who is on a list of those tipped to become secretary of state when Biden is inaugurated – also said that BoJo’s comments about Obama were “not well received”.

The congratulatory message sent by BoJo despite being addressed to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, nonetheless had the word “Trump” showing faintly in the background of the message.

It seemed that BoJo’s office had had originally prepared a message to celebrate a Trump win, only to replace it with one acknowledging Biden’s victory after media outlets called the race for him.

BoJo’s office blamed the glitch on a “technical error”— the computer-age equivalent of “the dog ate my homework” excuse of bygone times. The Guido Fawkes website which also noted barely visible words stating “the future” and “second term” in the background, again a reference to Trump.

The Huffington Post commented:

Chris Bryant, a Labour member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said it was an “own goal” and “everybody’s now commenting all around the world that the British Government couldn’t even work out who it was congratulating because they hadn’t deleted the original properly”.

The “shape-shifting creep” is of course not the only Ukanian politician with a history of racist comments.

There were immediate calls for the former Ulster Unionist Party deputy leader Lord John Kilclooney to be censured after he referred to vice-president elect Kamala Harris as “the Indian” on Twitter. It was not the first time Kilclooney has been accused of racism– he had previously described then-Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar as “a typical Indian”.

Kilclooney claims there was “nothing racist” in his tweet, which read: “What happens if Biden moves on and the Indian becomes President. Who then becomes Vice President?”

Fellow politicians have called on him to delete the tweet and apologize, and Kilclooney has been reported to the Commissioner for Standards and to the Speaker of the House of Lords.

The other potential point of conflict between Biden (who takes immense pride in his Irish ancestry) and BoJo is his concern that BoJo’s decision to press on with legislation intended to override the Brexit deal on Northern Ireland will undermine the Good Friday Agreement that has served as the basis for peace between the north and the south of Ireland for decades.

BoJo signed a deal with the EU that would retain a soft border between the north and the south of Ireland, which is the cornerstone of the Good Friday Agreement. He then realized that a soft border between the Republic of Ireland and Ukanian Northern Ireland would effectively allow EU goods to move into the UK via the north of Ireland without any tariff barriers.

The shifty-eyed BoJo now wants to back out, unilaterally, on what is basically a treaty under international law, and received a harsh response from Biden via Twitter:

“We can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit. Any trade deal between the U.S. and U.K. must be contingent upon respect for the Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period”.

As if to reinforce Biden’s tweet, Ireland’s foreign minister Simon Coveney said: “It’s my view that even if we do get an agreement in terms of a future relationship that if there is still a threat by the [UK] to legislate to undermine Withdrawal Agreement and break international law I don’t believe that any future relationship agreement will be ratified”.

The UK is searching desperately for trade deals with other countries to replace the “frictionless” trade it shared with the 27 countries who belong to the EU, and BoJo grovelled before Trump in nausea-inducing ways in order to get one.

Biden now promises to administer a stiff arm to BoJo’s face on a possible US-UK trade deal if the UK breaks this treaty and imposes a hard border between the two parts of Ireland.

BoJo’s proposed hard-border legislation is currently making its way through both houses of parliament.

With their 80-seat majority in the House of Commons, the Tories got the bill passed there.

However, when the bill was sent to the House of Lords, a big defeat was inflicted on the government— the Lords voted 433 to 165 to remove parts of BoJo’s Northern Ireland Brexit protocol designed to create the hard border between the north and south of Ireland.

The Lords tabled amendments to the bill, which will now be returned to the Commons for further debate and another vote.

The Lords can only delay the progress of the bill as it becomes law, but every opposing step will allow the Biden administration more opportunities to make a US-UK trade deal conditional on the obviation of the hard Irish border desired by BoJo and his fellow Brexiters.

After Trump was inaugurated as president in 2017, BoJo’s predecessor as prime minister, Theresa May, scurried to the White House to make her obeisances before the orange monster, who of course lapped-up everything May put on for his benefit.

Trump even held her seemingly unwarm hand as they walked up to the White House podium. But then everything about May conveys the impression of a limp formality.

With the new US president, Angela Merkel and other EU leaders will probably get to the White House before the “shape-shifting creep” receives an invitation to do so.

In the words of a Biden surrogate: the US has a “special relationship” with the UK, and not Boris Johnson.

BoJo, though, may have started mending fences with the Biden team when he referred, prematurely, to Trump as the “previous president” in parliament last week while reporting to Members on a “refreshing” and “excellent” phone conversation he just had with Biden.

BoJo’s loyalties are to himself only (another trait he shares with Trump)– he’s realized quickly that Trump is acting like a squatter in the White House, and so is making a speedy “shape-shift” towards the next president.

The old-hand Biden may be somewhat senile, but in all likelihood he won’t be fooled.

In an unrelated development, BoJo’s Rasputin-like chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, who was thought to run the country (with BoJo only attending to the PR side of his job), has been sacked with immediate effect.

As infighting grew in Downing Street, the “career psychopath” (as even some Tories describe him) was alleged to have briefed the press against BoJo, causing their relationship to “fall off a cliff”. More details are bound to follow.

Photograph Source: Mtaylor848 – CC BY-SA 4.0

The UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report on antisemitism in the Labour party has just been published. It found Labour to have breached the Equality Act of 2010, by virtue of harassment committed by its “agents” and “indirect discrimination”, occurring in the form of political interference in investigative procedures, muddled official responses to charges, and inadequate training of staff dealing with complaints.

The EHRC concluded that the Labour party, then led by Jeremy Corbyn, could have tackled antisemitism more effectively if the leadership had chosen to do so.

Despite the media frenzy in the Tory press (and the pro-Zionist Guardian), the report didn’t uphold the claim by the Jewish Labour Movement, which issued the first complaint, that Labour is “institutionally antisemitic”.

Corbyn’s almost immediate Facebook response to the EHRC report resulted in his suspension by the party’s general secretary, David Evans (actually it is hard to believe that Evans did not consult Starmer before announcing his decision).

Starmer went along with the decision made by Evans. Starmer issued a brief statement, saying this was a day of shame for Labour. He accepted unconditionally all the EHRC findings and said he would implement them fully.

Corbyn, while accepting parts of the EHRC report, countered Starmer by refusing to accept it in full — yes, there is antisemitism in the Labour party, as is the case in society generally, but a party such as Labour would view one antisemite in the party as one too many. At the same time, a party with half-a-million members will invariably contain a few benighted individuals possessing beliefs incompatible with Labour’s founding philosophy of liberty, equality, and solidarity.

Corbyn said he had been trying to deal with the problem, but was hindered by party bureaucracy, then very much in the hands of a Blairite ancien regime scheming to have him lose the 2017 general election to the Tories!

It should be noted that the EHRC, despite saying there were failings in Labour’s procedures for dealing with complaints, nonetheless presented evidence that these procedures were improved during the Corbyn years. Corbyn pointed out correctly in his rejoinder to the EHRC report: “[My] team acted to speed up, not hinder the process”.

Credible evidence for Corbyn’s claims comes from the Labour Party’s 851-page report titled “The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014-2019”, completed in March this year and leaked in early April.

The leaked report, based on a large trove of internal party documents and statistics, shows that Labour’s failure to get to grips with the “crisis” may have been in large part due to the actions of the very people who were attacking Corbyn in public over Labour “antisemitism”.

One of the key protagonists in this attempt to undermine Corbyn, Labour’s then general secretary Iain McNicol, now a member of the House of Lords, in April 2017 referred to Corbyn’s office as “fucking twats” (said the internal report).

The EHRC said it was aware of the internal report, and considered parts of it, but couldn’t take it fully into account because the leaked report was not officially available.

The leaked internal report shows that ill-intentioned individuals compounded Labour’s problems in investigating complaints about antisemitism– one person made 200 complaints of supposed antisemitism that were dealt with by Labour’s Governance and Legal Unit (GLU), which however found that most of these complaints were directed at people who were not party members.

The available evidence supports Corbyn’s view that the “antisemitism” problem has been clearly overstated by the media and his opponents, both in and outside Labour, for their perceived political gain.

Starmer has now said he does not consider Corbyn to be an antisemite.

So he should, because Starmer is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

Parliamentary funding records show he is on the payroll of the UK’s Zionist lobby. At the same time Starmer served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and backed him in last December’s general election.

Supporting Corbyn in this way was highly consequential and problematic for Starmer, because he couldn’t now turn round and say he’s always thought Corbyn to be an antisemite, and that the only reason he feigned support for Corbyn in the 2019 election was because he realized Corbyn was heading for a big defeat.

Starmer’s only option therefore is to say that Corbyn is not an antisemite, but that only raises the question of why Corbyn is now the subject of disciplinary measures endorsed by Starmer.

Starmer, clearly, needs desperately to sidestep any seeming complicity on his part for going along with Corbyn until Labour lost the December 2019 general election.

Starmer has an interesting history dealing with Corbyn.

He resigned from Corbyn’s shadow cabinet in 2016, claiming he could no longer support Corbyn because of his colleagues opinions on the party leader.

He wrote to Corbyn: “I have maintained my support for you notwithstanding my reservations. However, the resignations across the Shadow Cabinet and Shadow Front Bench yesterday materially change this. It is simply untenable now to suggest that we can offer an effective opposition without a change of leader”.

A leadership race between Corbyn and the nonentity Owen Smith took place shortly afterwards, with Starmer saying, “I am 100% behind Owen [Smith]” in summer 2016. Corbyn trounced Smith in the subsequent leadership election, but held no resentment towards Starmer, and even made him shadow secretary of state for exiting the European Union.

Every successful politician in our faux democracies has to self-negotiate moral compromises that dare not speak their name. Especially given that Starmer lays stake to the moral high ground in his opposition to the Tories.

Starmer did not get to the top of the legal profession without craftiness and evasive skills, and has since proved himself to be a slippery customer.

He’s now insisting that due process requires an appropriate period of reflection and independent investigation before making a final decision regarding Corbyn’s expulsion from the Labour party— which many Labour party members such as I know is the equivalent of punting the ball into the long grass.

The crucial issue here is that no matter what steps Labour takes to deal with the party’s alleged antisemitism, those eager to eradicate Corbynite social democracy for reasons internal to the party’s politics won’t hold back no matter what Labour does to address “antisemitism” within its membership.

Labour, since the Blairite ascendency, has been split irrevocably over the choice of being a social democratic party (Corbyn’s modest agenda) or a neoliberal party with a repertoire of phony “compassionate” gestures subtended by slick PR based on “optics” and “narrative” (the Blairite approach).

In the midst of this media-stoked brouhaha over Labour “antisemitism”, the role and nature of the EHRC has escaped scrutiny.

The EHRC is, supposedly, an independent body overseeing the promotion and enforcement of equality and non-discrimination laws in England. Its record shows it is anything but, and its impartiality has been questioned in the past.

The EHRC commissioners have interesting bios:

+ Caroline Waters (Interim Chair): Private sector directorships

+ Susan Johnson (Interim Deputy Chair): Director at Greggs (a nationwide bakery chain)

+ Suzanne Baxter: earlier career was spent at Serco and Deloitte (both major beneficiaries of disastrous no-bid Covid contracts from the Tories)

+ Pavita Cooper: donor to the Conservative party, with working for Shell, Barclays Bank and Lloyds Banking in her employment history.

+ Alasdair Henderson lawyer, member of the Whig Party

+ Rebecca Hilsenrath (Chief Executive), on record as being “an active member of the Anglo-Jewish community”. She asked if she should be recused from the Labour antisemitism inquiry, but was told to stay on.

+ Helen Mahy: Director of Primary Health Properties PLC, describes itself as “the leading investor in modern [private sector] healthcare properties in the UK”.

+ Mark McLane: until the end of 2018 worked for Barclays Bank.

+ Lesley Sawers: marketing consultant

At present, there is only one Asian on the EHRC Board (the above mentioned Tory-donor Pavita Cooper), and no blacks.

In July 2020, Newsweek reported that two former commissioners at the EHRC, the peers Meral Hussein-Ece (a Muslim) and Simon Woolley (an Anglo-Caribbean), said they were not reappointed to their positions in November 2012 because they were “too loud and vocal” on the issue of race.

It is clear that, under the Tories, a white banker, or company director, or “management consultant”, has a better chance of being appointed to the EHRC board than distinguished individuals who are Anglo-Caribbean or Muslim.

Incidentally, over 300 complaints have been made to the EHRC over Islamophobia in the Tory party, but no action has been taken. A poll shows that 25% of Tory members believe Muslims are a threat to British society. The prime minister BoJo Johnson has referred to burka-wearing Muslim women as “letterboxes”.

Two innocent Anglo-Caribbean brothers mistakenly suspected by police of drug dealing after they bumped fists in the street, say they were subjected to discrimination by London cops, and are suing the police.

The brothers told The Guardian they have been stopped and searched by police more than 25 times, starting when they were children. They registered a complaint with the EHRC to no avail:

“The brothers say they are left with no option but to sue, with institutions supposed to uphold justice failing. Liam said: “We approached the Equality & Human Rights Commission for help in bringing a case. They refused. We asked the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis to admit discrimination under the Equality Act and they too refused. Having exhausted all other options we have today [Thursday] started civil proceedings at court against the Metropolitan police for discrimination, assault and false imprisonment. It remains our hope that the police and all the systems surrounding them will learn from our experience; change is past due”.

Alas, someone should have notified the victimized brothers that the EHRC was too busy investigating Corbyn and his associates in what was near-enough to being a stitch-up job.

Instead of beating Corbyn over the head with the EHRC report, Starmer should have pointed out the glaring weaknesses and lacunae in it, and accompanied this by combing through the bios of its board members, showing in the process how Labour under Corbyn was never going to get a fair shake from this bunch of Establishment apparatchiks.

But with Starmer– the Zionist and Establishment hack par excellence– hell is going to freeze over before this happens.

Speaking more generally, Starmer’s sole political gambit for the moment is to demonstrate to the electorate that he is not Corbyn.

This ploy has not worked in Labour’s past. Blair’s mentor, Neil Kinnock, sought to differentiate himself from his socialist predecessor Michael Foot, but never won an election.

Blair of course prevailed later, but by then the electorate was exhausted after 18 years of Tory misrule under Thatcher and her grey-suited successor John Major.

Like the “Tory lite” Tony Blair, Starmer seemingly is embarked on a similar “Tory lite” gamble.

The post The UK’s Report on Labour Party Antisemitism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Bradley Howard – CC BY 2.0

Each week, it looks as if a new rock bottom has been reached in the UK where the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and negotiations with the EU on a Brexit deal are concerned. The following week then reveals that further depths have now been plumbed, and the story is then repeated in each of the following weeks.

The negotiations with the EU point increasingly towards a No Deal Brexit, which will be catastrophic economically, piling yet more misery on top of the economic chaos caused by the Conservatives’ arbitrary and not-thought-through Covid-19 lockdowns and their accompanying band-aid job support schemes.

As he sinks in the opinion polls, it becomes clearer by the day that Boris “BoJo” Johnson has no idea of what constitutes an adequate response to the pandemic. His proposed solutions are always ad hoc, the latest “solution” usually countermanding the one proferred a couple of days before.

BoJo’s government got the UK into this mess by overlooking warnings early in the year as the pandemic moved steadily across Europe; not really bothering to develop an adequate testing system; closing the UK’s borders much too late; not having a functioning quarantine system; insisting on the shambolic centralization of responses to the pandemic when local conditions required otherwise; failing to provide adequate PPE for staff in hospitals and care homes; not having enough staff to run the emergency Nightingale hospitals; returning elderly Covid-19 patients from hospitals to care homes without adequate testing; and awarding billions to Tory pals and donors in no-bid contracts.

BoJo has finally apologized for failings in England’s £12bn/$15.5bn test-and-trace system as contact-tracing numbers fell to a new low and waiting times for test results climbed to almost double the targetted deadlines.

The ever facile and disingenuous BoJo, having done everything to help his cronies cripple this system, said: “I share people’s frustrations and I understand totally why we do need to see faster turnaround times and we need to improve it”.

James Naismith, professor of structural biology at Oxford University, said of the figures:

“[They] show a system struggling to make any difference to the epidemic … The current system indicates that around two-thirds of infected people do not have contacts traced at all. Of the contacts provided, around 60% of the contacts are reached.

Of those that are reached, over 70% of them are in the same house as the positive case, so were unlikely to have needed the tracing system. Only half of all contacts that are actually traced are reached within 24 hours”.

None of his ministers seem to operate from the same script, so BoJo, a congenital bluffer with a fondness for phrases of cod Latin rather than being an adroit thinker, is tormented during press briefings by requests from journalists to reconcile his seat of the pants decision-making with the equally spur of the moment stances of his ministerial colleagues—the latter being just as incompetent as he is, if not more so.

Even the Tories are at odds with each other over BoJo’s highly confusing 3-tier lockdown system, designed to establish how “at risk” an area happens to be. The measures have been introduced to prevent the UK from undergoing another across-the-nation lockdown which would cause a complete closure of businesses and schools.

Tier 3 (Very high alert level): Household mixing will be banned; all pubs and bars will be closed

Tier 2 (High alert level): Covers most areas under current restrictions; people will not be able to mix with other households indoors

Tier 1 (Medium alert level): Covers most of England; it will feature current rules such as the rule of 6 (individuals) for meetings and 10pm closing time for pubs

There are suspicions that the system is being gamed to suit Tory strongholds— these areas seem to predominate among tiers 1 and 2, while many Labour areas have seen BoJo impose a tier 3 status on them without bothering to consult local leaders.

BoJo has said the criterion for assigning a tier to a particular area is provided by its R or Basic Reproduction Number. This is the expected number of cases directly generated by 1 case in a population where all individuals are susceptible to infection. For example, if a disease has an R number of 18, a person who has the disease will transmit it to an average of 18 other people.

Epidemiologists have long pointed out that using the R number can’t work without an adequate testing system. Even if it works, using the R number on its own won’t do the job of assigning a tier accurately.

Other factors are just as important, such as the capacity of local hospitals to deal with Covid cases regardless of the R number.

As is the case in the US, cities and large towns in the UK with their university, and other, hospitals, tend to be better resourced when it comes to medical care. Small towns in rural areas, with a single general hospital (say), are likely to struggle with even a small rise in the number of Covid cases requiring hospitalization.

BoJo also has no criteria for determining when an area is in a position to be moved down a tier, which is hardly surprising, given that his own medical and scientific advisers expressed no enthusiasm for BoJo’s “tracks of my tiers” system (tributes to Smokey Robinson and the brilliant cartoonist Martin Rowson for this).

The government’s chaotic lockdown regulations, riddled with loopholes, has led to a sharp drop in the number of those adhering to the rules.

The latest Opinium poll showed the proportion of 18-34-year-olds who admitted breaking the rules has increased from 10% to 17% in the last two weeks. The proportion of 35-44-year-olds increased even more sharply – from 10% to 18% over the same period.

BoJo got into an almighty tussle with Andy Burnham, the elected Labour mayor of Manchester.

Burnham is an ambitious and pugilistic Blairite who was an MP before becoming Manchester’s mayor in 2017. Prior to that he had been a member of the cabinet of Gordon Brown (Blair’s successor) until 2010. He ran unsuccessfully against Jeremy Corbyn for the party leadership in 2015. His tin-eared motto in his campaign against Corbyn: ““the entrepreneur will be as much our hero as the nurse”. Adopting a motto like this in a supposedly socialist party would sink any person’s chances of becoming its leader.

Burnham, now probably sensing an opportunity created by the milque-toast disposition of the (equally) Blairite Labour leader Keir Starmer in his dealings with the Tories, did the right thing by insisting on financial relief for the job losses ensuing from the pandemic’s second wave.

After well-publicized toing’s-and-froing’s with BoJo, Burnham ended-up receiving a paltry £65mn/$84mn so that less well-off Mancunians could continue to buy food and pay rent.

By comparison, last month BoJo was telling Brits he was going to spend £100bn/$130bn on the “Operation Moonshot” mass testing project, a sum conjured-up in a go-for-broke con to find a supposedly adequate test-and-trace system after failed attempts galore. Sentient Brits know that most of this money will find its way into the pockets of Tory cronies.

In comparison, the £65mn sought by Burnham for the inhabitants of Manchester amounts to a measly £0.065bn. But then simple arithmetic has never been BoJo’s strong point, and moreover, neoliberal governments such as the Tories operate these days in the realm of Enron-style postmodern accounting.

Cynics in the media suggest that Burnham should turn Manchester into a three-week old corporate outfit, with £300/$391 max in capital, and, pretending to be a Tory, make a pitch for a £100mn/$130.6mn no-bid contract to manufacture PPE (despite having no experience whatsoever in this business).

If others, i.e. totally unqualified Tory supporters, have succeeded fabulously with similar pitches, then why not the hypothetical “entrepreneur” Andy Burnham?

In a more serious vein, Burnham has at last found a cause that puts him on the side of the proverbial angels, and he’s become a key spokesperson not just for his metropolis, but the entire North of England.

This supposedly regional politician, at least for now, has achieved some kind of national prominence. Watch out Keir Starmer, and perhaps Boris Johnson. Someone could be finding a way to be the new sheriff in Westminster.

322 Tory MPs voted against a measure to extend free meals for the UK’s poorest children over the half-term and winter school holidays. Their votes killed the bill.

Millions face incapacitating financial hardship as a result of the pandemic, but the Tories decided to end a lifeline for the most vulnerable families.

It is estimated that 1.4 million children will go hungry this Christmas.

The Manchester United and England soccer star Marcus Rashford, a food poverty activist, has raised £20mn/$26.2mn to fund free school meals, and, backed by more than 2,000 pediatricians, pleaded with Tory MPs to extend the free meals programme to cover the winter period.

The Scrooge-like Tory parliamentary vote (one Tory MP, Ben Bradley, tweeted that free meals in his constituency ended-up in crack houses and brothels), left a poor taste in the mouths of party members, and some Tory local councils, including the one in BoJo’s own constituency, saved face by saying they would take over the funding of school meals for the Christmas period.

Hundreds of cafes, shops, and pubs heeded Rashford’s call to feed poor children.

Labour has just announced it will force another vote on free school meals if the government does not change course before the Christmas break.

Meanwhile the Tories continue to squander vast sums elsewhere.

BoJo still plans to spend £120mn/$155mn on the so-called “Festival of Brexit” in the new year. Historically, this could be the first time a UK government spends millions celebrating a palpable economic disaster for the country.

Earlier this month Downing Street confirmed that plans for a Scotland-Northern Ireland bridge across the Irish Sea are underway, BoJo saying the bridge would “only cost about £15bn/$20bn”. The sea beneath the potential route was used as a huge munitions dump during WW2, and experts have warned against constructing a bridge there.

In July, the government bought a stake worth £400mn/$522mn in the failed satellite firm OneWeb as part of a post-Brexit space strategy. Questions have been raised in parliament about awarding this deal to a bankrupt US company.

In something like a closing finger-flip at Marcus Rashford and his supporters, it was revealed that booze in the parliamentary bars is subsidized to the tune of £4.4mn/$6mn a year.

So cheers everyone, and even if you are destitute, have a jolly good time during the festive (sic) season!

A correction regarding my last week’s CounterPunch article: In my CP article on Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour party, I mistakenly attributed the commissioning of an internal party report on racism and antisemitism within Labour to Starmer. The report was of course commissioned by Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. My apologies to readers.

Photograph Source: Starmer pictured with his shadow cabinet colleagues at the launch of labour’s 2019 general election campaign. Jeremy Corbyn – CC0

Keir Starmer, an MP since 2015, won the April 2020 Labour leadership contest after Jeremy Corbyn lost the 2019 general election. Starmer beat rivals Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy with 56.2% of the vote in the first round, and therefore also became Leader of the Opposition.  In his acceptance speech Starmer said he planned to “engage constructively with the government” during the COVID-19 pandemic, and pledged to adhere to Labour’s 2019 election manifesto.

As is to be expected from someone who was a top lawyer before entering politics, Starmer is a skilled parliamentary debater, and week-in week-out trounces Boris “BoJo” Johnson during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons.

Apart from skinning BoJo in parliament, and calling out the failings of the government, Starmer has been somewhat lacklustre.

He fulfills the basic obligations of a competent party leader in calling out the shambolic performance of the Conservative government.

But a Tory or Lib Dem leader would be expected to call-out the shortcomings of a sitting Labour government if it were as inept as this one. Therein lies the rub— Starmer is averse to declaring his political positions, and functionally, could be the leader of any political party.

Party members such as I suspect he is ashamed of the founding principles of the party he leads.

When he became the Labour leader Starmer promptly discarded the party’s motto “For the many not the few” with his own “A new Leadership” (he might as well have said “a New Labour Mark Two” with its Blairite resonance), in an obvious gesture of separation from Corbyn’s leadership.

Starmer’s reticence in stating his political convictions does not augur well for a future Labour government, and gives the distinct impression of Labour now resembling a “One Nation” Tory party of the kind that existed before the onset of Thatcherism. This rebranding in the direction of a more “moderate” Labour of course suits the Blairite wing of the parliamentary Labour Party just fine.

The UK mediacrats who flinch at the viciousness of the Conservatives will find nothing to jeopardize their wealth and power in a potential Starmer government. The media moguls have warmed to him, and he’s faced none of the venom they directed at Corbyn. A Labour return to Blairism is exactly what someone like Rupert Murdoch wants.

Starmer ordered his MPs to abstain from voting against the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill introduced by the Tories. Also known as the “Spycops” Bill, the Bill, if passed– which was always a given since the Tories have an 80-seat majority in the Commons– would (in its own words) “make provision for, and in connection with, the authorization of criminal conduct in the course of, or otherwise in connection with, the conduct of covert human intelligence sources”. In brief: the spy agencies and police are now free to commit crimes such as torture and murder in the course of their undercover operations.

The spy agencies and police have a long history of targetting of trade unionists, environmentalists, anti-war groups, and framing activists advocating for the reunification of Ireland during the Troubles.

So far 14 Trade Union General Secretaries have opposed the Bill.

The Bill passed a vote in the House of Commons on 5 October 2020 by 162 votes– 34 votes against the Bill were from Labour, 2 were from the Welsh Plaid Cymru, and 1 was from the Lib Dems.

The Labour rebels included shadow ministers Margaret Greenwood and Dan Carden, who subsequently resigned their front bench roles, as did 5 other Labour shadow parliamentary private secretaries (the equivalent of shadow junior ministers)– Sarah Owen, Kim Johnson, Mary Kelly Foy and Navendu Mishra. Jeremy Corbyn and his long-time ally John McDonnell also voted against the Bill.

Since Starmer is an ardent Zionist, it is almost certain he will not demur if pro-Palestinian groups are subjected to criminal conduct during covert operations by the spy agencies and police.

Trevor Chinn, a multi-millionaire pro-Israel lobbyist (he’s the UK’s equivalent of Sheldon Adelson) donated £50,000/$62,000 to help Starmer win the leadership election.

The official register of lawmakers’ financial interests confirms that Chinn donated the sum towards Starmer’s leadership campaign. During the campaign Starmer said “I support Zionism without qualification”, and since becoming leader he has tilted Labour markedly towards Israel.

Starmer was criticized for not revealing all his donors during the campaign—Chinn’s donation was not registered until 5 days after Starmer won the election, although it was received 2 months before. Doing this was not illegal, but many Labour party members, especially those critical of Israel’s egregious breaches of international law, consider this to be an unfortunate beginning to his leadership, bearing in mind his background as a prestigious lawyer.

My American friends will doubtless remind me that the arch-Zionist Alan Dershowitz is also a lawyer with significant credentials.

There are two other pieces of evidence somewhat indicative of the strength of Starmer’s commitment to the Zionist cause.

The first is his preemptive settlement of the lawsuit for defamation brought by Labour insiders who appeared on a BBC Panorama report on alleged antisemitism in the party. The 7 former employees, who worked in Labour’s governance and legal unit, were responsible for the investigation of allegations of misconduct by party members, and sued Labour (then led by Corbyn) after it issued a press release describing them as having “personal and political axes to grind” on the BBC show. In their lawsuit for libel the 7 said the Labour press release contained “defamatory and false allegations”.

Starmer decided to settle out of court, costing the party an estimated £500,000 in fees and damages. The party paid about £200,000 in damages to the former employees.

Corbyn opposed the settlement, having taken legal advice which determined that Labour had grounds to defend the libel action, especially after a recently leaked internal report on antisemitism cast a different light on this episode.

The 851-page report, commissioned by Starmer, uncovered evidence “of racism, sexism, factionalism and obstruction of Labour’s 2017 General Election campaign”. The report confirmed that there was indisputable anti-semitism on the part of some party members. It also confirmed that the system for dealing with these individuals was inefficient, as a result of which some cases dragged on for months or even years.

At the same time the report refuted the charge that these delays were instigated by Corbyn or his office. Also refuted was the accusation that his office allowed antisemitism to flourish—to the contrary, Corbyn’s office had no truck with any kind of antisemitism. In fact the opposite was the case, and blameless individuals faced disciplinary measures on very shaky allegations of antisemitism. Many such cases gained purchase because of an inability to distinguish between genuine antisemitism and opposition to the policies of Israel.

Corbyn’s supporters maintain that this detailed report could have been the basis for opposing the settlement reached by Starmer. He disagreed, obviously, and has so far not commented on the report itself. Which is strange (or perhaps not), given that the report exonerates Corbyn and his associates on the charges of “antisemitism”.

Secondly, when he became party leader Starmer appointed Rebecca Long-Bailey, his main rival for the party leadership and the bearer of Corbyn’s mantle, as shadow education secretary.

RL-B then made a mistake in retweeting the actor Maxine Peake’s accusation that US police forces are taught the neck restraint technique by Israeli police trainers that was used in the killing of George Floyd.

Granted that the officer who murdered Floyd was trained by these Israeli “security experts”, who commonly use the technique on Palestinians. But there is no evidence that the officer in question was specifically taught the technique in his training by the Israelis, and so Peake had to withdraw her tweet.

That said, the assertion that RL-B and Peake made, even though it had to be retracted, hardly amounts to underwriting an “antisemitic conspiracy theory”, the charge Starmer used in justifying his dismissal of RL-B.

RL-B’s accusation was directed at a state regarded by many as a rogue state, which violates unwaveringly the human rights of Palestinians. Moreover, there is ample photographic and video evidence of Israeli military personnel kneeling on the necks of Palestinians, children among them.

A “conspiracy theory” therefore? Gimme a break, Sir Keir Starmer!

Completely silent on the Black Lives Matter protests. Black members leaving Labour in droves.

Nita Clark

If Starmer wasn’t able to run rings around BoJo in parliamentary exchanges, admittedly a pretty low bar given the latter’s status as a political dilettante (now confirmed on a daily basis by disgruntled members of BoJo’s own party), Starmer will soon be seen to be a complete disaster as party leader.

As a consequence of BoJo now increasingly being regarded as the incompetent fraud he’s been all his life, Labour are currently level-pegging with the Tories in the opinion polls.

As mentioned, the right-wing media are giving him an easy time.

Starmer has to do nothing but sit pretty as an onlooker, while BoJo and his pals keep shooting themselves in the proverbial foot over the Covid pandemic and the impending Brexit economic disaster.

A bit like what “Sleepy Joe” Biden is having to do in his election campaign against Trump?

Photograph Source: Bradley Howard – CC BY 2.0

The week’s political headlines around the world were dominated by a member of the species Muscina stabulans descending on the immaculately tended white top– smooth enough to merit comparison to an Astroturf pitch– of the Trump henchman debating Kamala Harris. Nothing as visually spectacular as this occurred in the UK, where the news has been unvaryingly depressing.

+ UK Covid-19 positive tests surged 56% in a week.

+ At the same time, contact-tracing descended to a new low– 5,722 fewer people were tested. Only two-thirds of those who tested positive had their details entered into the tracing system, and a mere 68.6% of the immediate contacts of positive cases were reached. In addition, waiting times have risen again for those awaiting test results.

+ Hospital admissions for Covid-19 have doubled in the past two weeks. Latest figures show there are now 3,090 Covid-19 patients being treated in English hospitals– just 7 fewer than on March 23, when the national lockdown was imposed. On Saturday October 10^th Britain recorded 13,864 cases and 87 deaths, compared with just 74 deaths on March 19^th. At that time, the coronavirus pandemic was doubling every three or four days.

+ The impact on many hospital services in England by the pandemic is revealed in new NHS figures. More than 4 million patients are now waiting for routine surgery and treatments, nearly 50% of whom have been waiting for longer than 18 weeks, the supposed official maximum deadline. There are more than 110,000 people in England who have been waiting for treatment for more than a year. Doctors and patients’ advocates have warned that a second wave of the pandemic is likely to worsen this situation.

+ The “world beating” test and trace system, promised to be operational by May, should have been fixed when infections were lower over the summer. As winter approaches, the government is unprepared for the second wave of the virus that is already starting. All bets are off on whether the broken system will even be fixed by the New Year.

+ Even though £12bn/$15.6bn was spent on an Excel spreadsheet track and trace system using a Microsoft pc, the system cratered because an outdated version of Excel was used! Computer literate school kids could have performed this task for the equivalent of pocket money.

+ The government has failed to account for £3bn/$3.9bn spent on private contracts since the start of lockdown, according to the latest figures available. It comes as 3 MPs (a Green, Lib Dem, and Labour) and the Good Law Project, a non-profit, have launched legal action against the government over its failure to provide details of its contract-spending on the Covid-19 pandemic.

When dealing with the pandemic, BoJo, like his mentor Trump, has bobbed around like a capricious rubber ball. Here are a couple of examples:

+ In March BoJo said the corner on the virus would be “turned in 12 weeks”.

+ In April BoJo said “It’s as though we’ve been going through some huge alpine tunnel… and we can now see the sunlight and pasture ahead of us…”.

+ In July, he announced Brits could be moving away from social-distancing measures by November, with “a more significant return to normality” possible in time for Christmas.

Another BoJo rubber-ball example:

+ (Tuesday 6 October 2020) BoJo, at the Conservative party annual conference, held virtually because of the pandemic: “our agenda is basic social justice”.

+ (Wednesday 7 October 2020) Chancellor of the Exchequer/finance minister Rishi Sunak announces that firms whose locations are legally required to shut over winter as part of local or national lockdowns will receive grants covering 67% of employees’ salaries up to £2,100/$2,725 a month. This is a reduction from the original furlough’s provision, which paid 80% of employees’ wages up to £2,500/$3,245 a month.

For those on the Basic Minimum Wage (which is set below what independent think tanks and poverty-action groups call the Basic Living Wage, meaning the BMW is already is already set below the poverty line really determined by the BLW) Sunak’s announcement means they will receive 2/3rds of their mortgage, 2/3rds of their rent, 2/3rds of their utilities, and 2/3rds of all other bills. In a word: the unfortunate people who now earn the BMW will be probably be toast financially. “Basic social justice” indeed!

+ (Thursday 8 October 2020) It is announced that MPs will get a salary increase of £3,360/$4,362. A tad more than “basic social justice” for the parliamentary elite?

Covid-19 would have been a challenge for any competent government. But constant indecision, a total absence of strategic clarity, Downing Street’s mania for centralized control (regional leaders are not consulted and obtain information about BoJo’s decisions by reading the newspapers), hyperbolic over-promising and repeated failures to deliver, comprehensive mismanagement, and simply hoping the job will get done by handing-out vast sums of money to cronies in the private sector–all these lie at the root of the government’s problems.

+ One prominent Tory MP speaking to a journalist anonymously said of BoJo: “He genuinely doesn’t give a flying fuck what the policy is”. The MP went on to say: “he’s never done the homework, so he doesn’t know anything. There really is no point in talking to the Prime Minister about policy at all”.

+ With BoJo barely able to hold a press conference or briefing without putting his foot in his mouth, the government decided to emulate the US and appointed a White House-style press secretary, so he wouldn’t have to face journalists with their bothersome questions.  Allegra Stratton, a former TV and newspaper journalist, was given the job. Ms Stratton is married to James Forsyth, political editor of The Spectator magazine (BoJo is a former editor). She’s currently working as Director of Communications for the Chancellor of Exchequer Rishi Sunak. Sunak was best man at their wedding in 2011. The commissioning editor of The Spectator is Mary Wakefield (who worked at The Spectator with BoJo), the wife of Dominic Cummings, BoJo’s Rasputin-like chief adviser. With this latest episode of revolving doors some speculate that the work-shy BoJo can cut down his office hours to a couple of hours a week.

+ The government is urging Brits to look for “new careers” instead of waiting around in the hope that their old jobs will return at some stage during or after the pandemic. To this end its National Careers Service has a Skills Assessment website, where visitors can take a skills assessment by answering multiple-choice questions. Out of curiosity I took the Assessment, and was informed at the end that I should pursue careers “options” as a psychiatrist, clinical psychologist, intelligence analyst, or archaeologist– all jobs for which I am completely unsuited. People are having fun on Ukanian social media by taking the Assessment and posting the results. One former high school student I taught in the 70s, of a strong pacifist disposition who answered the questions seriously, was advised to seek a military career.

At the end takers of the Assessment are informed that “If your results are in a sector that has been affected by COVID-19, call 0800 100 900 to discuss your results with a careers adviser who will have knowledge of local opportunities”.

No wonder people say satire or irony are becoming outdated.

Photograph Source: three6ohchris – CC BY 2.0

The COVID-19 lockdown left many people the world over with no alternative but to work away from their offices, generating a rapid growth in working from home (WFH) as a result.

This has produced radical, and some say irreversible, changes to work practices and their attendant locations, as well as the hitherto characteristic ways people had of travelling to work.

According to McKinsey, “estimates suggest that early this April, 62 percent of employed Americans worked at home during the crisis, compared with about 25 percent a couple of years ago”.

McKinsey’s research found that “80 percent of people questioned report that they enjoy working from home. Forty-one percent say that they are more productive than they had been before and 28 percent that they are as productive”.

Other studies confirm McKinsey’s findings.

A recent study by Morgan Stanley found that only 34% of UK workers who could return to the office have actually done so, and many businesses have announced that they will extend the choice to WFH for the foreseeable future.

Facebook has said that 50% of its jobs will be remote within 10 years; Twitter is letting almost all its global workforce to WFH indefinitely, if they wish; the global law firm Slater and Gordon has relinquished its London office; fund manager Schroders says employees can continue to work flexibly for an indefinite period, as have investment bank JP Morgan and the legal firm Linklaters.

According to federal statistics the US’s real-estate industry is massive, being valued in 2018 at $2.7tn, or 13% of GDP.

The demand for office space is now at its lowest since the 2008 Great Crash, and this does not take into account the cumulative impact of this decline on the restaurants, coffee shops, bars and high-end retailers reliant on office workers’ lunch and after-work spending, as well as falling tax-revenues for city governments.

Corporations are also using the surge in teleworking to reduce real-estate costs significantly.

A case in point is MediCopy, a rapidly-growing Nashville-based medical records company, which added a second office two years ago, and was about to lease a third in June. But since the pandemic nearly all of MediCopy’s 200 staff have worked from home, and the company has given up both of its additional offices, converted its headquarters into a training centre, thereby saving $350,000 a year in leasing costs.

It is estimated that some corporations could reduce their real-estate costs by 30%, and those that opt for a fully virtual office-model could wipe-out nearly all of these costs.

Two further benefit of the virtual office for corporations are:

1) Reducing their level of risk by having employees work in many different locations.

2) Accessing new pools of talent with fewer locational constraints. When Ken Wissoker, editorial director of Duke University Press moved to New York in 2014, along with his spouse who had taken up a position at CUNY Graduate Center, he was able not only to keep his position at Duke, but also become CUNY’s Director of Intellectual Publics. Admittedly Wissoker’s move took place before the current pandemic, but this does not detract from the fact that teleworking reduces locational constraints.

At the same time, it would be premature to pronounce the wholesale demise of the conventional office. There was already a move away from offices located in the downtown areas of big cities before the COVID-19 lockdown.

According to Bloomberg Real Estate Report:

The suburbs are clearly on their way to becoming a favored asset class for offices … Companies that don’t want to cram employees into headquarter offices are considering smaller, satellite offices in the suburbs closer to where their employees live. Microsoft, to name one example, recently signed a 400,000-square foot lease in Reston, Va. with Boston Properties in an expansion of its smaller nearby space.

A survey released on July 16, 2020, by the Site Selectors Guild confirms Bloomberg’s findings.

Suburbs and mid-size cities, followed by rural areas, will be the biggest gainers in new corporate expansions and relocations, with large urban areas falling to the bottom of the list, according to the survey, which sought to ascertain changes and trends in corporate location strategy prompted by the COVID-19 crisis.

The survey asked members to identify locations that are “likely” or “very likely” to be sought after by corporations looking to expand, relocate, or open new units in the next 12 months, and found that 64% chose suburban areas, 57% chose mid-size cities, 31% chose rural areas, with just 10% choosing large urban areas.

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed a premium on physical distancing in office spaces, as well changing the forms of transportation used by office workers.

The choice of a suburban location, usually a leafy corporate park with lakes and trails for walking and jogging, allows for the construction of new and more energy-efficient buildings, and of course shorter commutes in the main.

Americans have saved more than 32.9 million hours of commuting by car during the lockdown, according to research conducted by the freelancing platform Upwork.

For the average person who commuted to work daily before the lockdown, this represents more than 4 full days of time freed-up for other activities, especially in 10 commuter-heavy metro areas across the US (see below).

Upwork found that people working remotely due to the lockdown saved an average of 49.6 minutes a day, amounting to more than 4 days since teleworking became significant after mid-March, and people stopped commuting.

The savings involved bear not just on time saved but also household budgets.

To quote Adam Ozimek, Upwork’s chief economist: “To put this into perspective, commuters who were commuting by car prior to the pandemic have saved over $2,000 each since mid-March”.

Ozimek points out that across the US, those taking a break from commuting could be saving as much as $183m a day in key commuting costs such as fuel, as well as vehicle maintenance and repairs.

To determine areas where commuters taking such breaks derived the most benefit, Upwork compared the results of its survey with data from the US Census Bureau to pinpoint metro areas having the most jobs that could be done away from the office. Of the 261 regions researched, the top 10 locations where teleworkers save the most time on commutes are:

1) East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania: 83.6 minutes per day

2) New York-Newark-Jersey City, New York and New Jersey: 76.2 minutes per day

3) Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, District of Columbia and Virginia: 71.9 minutes per day

4) Vallejo-Fairfield, California: 70.4 minutes per day

5) San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, California: 70.2 minutes per day

6) Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, Connecticut: 69.2 minutes per day

7) Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, Illinois: 67.5 minutes per day

8) Bremerton-Silverdale, Washington: 67.3 minutes per day

9) Boston-Cambridge-Newton, Massachusetts and New Hampshire: 66.8 minutes per day

10) Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, California: 66.6 minutes per day

Greater worker autonomy, enhanced teleworking, workers being able to arrange work settings to their personal satisfaction, and more accessible leadership, all facilitated by technology, is however not always the panacea it is made out to be.

Internet provision can be sketchy in some parts of the country (as numerous colleges and universities which moved to online instruction soon found out), it is easier for junior teleworkers to fade into a cyber-background and be overlooked, and the shared know-how and camaraderie made possible by gathering around a coffee-maker, etc., is harder to reproduce in WFH.

At the same time, not all corporations are eschewing offices in metro areas. The growth in WFH is driving down the price of office space, which makes this a good time to buy for some corporations.

Earlier this year Amazon acquired the Lord & Taylor building– an 11-story property in Midtown Manhattan that formerly served as Lord & Taylor’s flagship department store– for $978m. The building will house 2,000 Amazon workers.

These eye-catching purchases of downtown office space notwithstanding, the WFH trend set in motion by the COVID lockdown appears irreversible.

Photograph Source: Arno Mikkor – CC BY 2.0

UK’s parliament returned from its summer recess last week.

For the Tories it has been a summer of serial blundering and fiascos.

These include the high-school concluding examinations– the A-levels, where half-a-million students who couldn’t sit the exams because of the Covid-19 lockdown were assigned grades by a computer algorithm that wasn’t up to the job, thereby scuppering the entire university admissions structure for 2020– that I wrote about recently in CounterPunch.

There is also the botched reopening of businesses and schools, especially the initial decision not to require face masks to be worn in schools that had to be rescinded almost immediately.

Rather than under-selling an objective and then over-delivering (perhaps the recommended technique in management theory for announcing a goal or objective), the Tories have done the reverse by announcing this-or-that measure as “world-beating”, only to see it flop.

A “world-beating” test-and-trace system, promised for the end of May, has still to see the light of day.

Also bigged-up in this way was a Covid testing regime of several million tests per week, or even per day, with results supposedly known in a super-fast 20 minutes– alas this marvel of marvels awaits a technology that does not exist at present.

Long-forgotten is a previously anticipated Covid-19 tracking app for mobile phones. Instead of partnering with Apple and Goggle to develop the app, the government went its own way, and ended-up with a useless prototype that was incompatible with the Apple and Goggle operating systems.

In Virginia, where I live, we have a tracking app, produced in conjunction with Apple and Google, that has been running for almost two months. Virginia’s Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, is a physician who has been praised for his handling of the pandemic. There is a visible contrast here between the buffoonish BoJo Johnson and the serious, even earnest, Northam.

Meanwhile the UK continues to have the undesirable record for having a top number of coronavirus deaths per head of population in the world, and this week’s daily number of new Covid cases is at a level not seen since mid-May.

The current death toll stands at 41,551.

The shortcomings of BoJo and his colleagues are now reflected in the opinion polls. Labour, having been 26 points behind in March, has drawn level with the Tories, and its leader, Keir Starmer, leads BoJo in the leader versus leader category.

The increasingly rattled BoJo, with growing signs that he is not up to the job of being prime minister, had little option but to divert attention from these failures.

As is the case with Trump, BoJo’s subsequent strategy, aided by the UK’s rightwing tabloid press, has been one of diversion and deflection by resorting to “hot button” issues central to the culture wars.

Brits were thus subjected to the clamour of a faux refugee crisis, when a couple of hundred refugees and asylum seekers crossed the Channel each week in what the Tories and their supporters in the media hyped-up as an “invasion”.

The hapless refugees and asylum seekers made the hazardous journey (the Channel is the busiest shipping lane in the world) in wonky dinghies, and the demagogic Tories created a media splash by threatening to have the Royal Navy intercept the “invaders”.

The “invasion” brouhaha was sufficient to incite neo-Nazi gangs to patrol beaches in search of “invaders”, and an exhausted arrival was beaten-up by a fascist thug as the former disembarked from his dinghy. The hoodlum in question was arrested and is now due for a court appearance.

Another opportunity for hot-button pressing arrived when the BBC announced that the Last Night of the Proms (a televised summer classical music concert series running nightly for 8 weeks) would not feature the singing of the patriotic anthems “Rule Britannia” and “Land of Hope and Glory”, with only the orchestral versions being played.

I used to go to the Proms frequently in the early 70s when I was a student at a university a train stop from central London, but avoided the Last Night as if it were the plague.

The music offered on that Night is light fare culminating always in the singing of “Rule Britannia”, and caters basically to a flag-waving and mostly drunk crowd. The singing is especially loud when these two lines are sung:

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.

“Rule Britannia” was first heard regularly in 1745, when Britain was the leading slave-trading nation in the world, but the irony in those two lines is always lost on those who sing it.

Sir Edward Elgar, who featured the opening lines of “Rule Britannia” in his 1912 choral work The Music Makers, attended a Last Night and was so horrified by what he saw that he could not bring himself to sing it.

BoJo Johnson is obviously not of the same mind as Elgar– Brits must stop “this general bout of self-recrimination and wetness” he opined, after news of the changes to the Proms emerged.

In typical hyperbolic fashion BoJo added, “they’re trying to restrain me from saying this”, but did not identify who was trying to prevent him from weighing in on this issue.

Many on social media thought this burst of patriotic enthusiasm from BoJo was a tad out of place, given that a parliamentary investigation found him to be in the pockets of several Kremlin oligarchs with ties to Putin—maybe a version of “Rule Britannia” renamed “Rouble Britannia” could be composed just for him and his fans?

Another diversion was the appointment of the gaffe-prone Tony Abbott—a failed Aussie ex-Prime Minister (2013-15) and Rupert Murdoch stooge– to be in charge of post-Brexit trade negotiations! As the Australian commentator Van Badham put it: “Brits, take it from an Aussie: If Tony Abbott is your solution, you’ve got big problems”.

The chances of striking a Brexit deal before the end of the transition period on December 31^st recede with each passing day. Unemployment is expected to rise when the government’s furlough scheme ends at the end of October. A No-Deal Brexit would add many more workers to the already high unemployment total, unless of course the furlough scheme is extended.

This extension of the furlough will further subtract from the public purse, and it is already becoming apparent that something will have to give: higher taxes or else no further extension of the furlough scheme, or perhaps one with greatly reduced provision.

As more Tories go public with their anxieties over BoJo’s incompetence, Tory worries are also being expressed about tax increases.

The contemporary Tory party is factionalized, despite any appearances to the contrary.

One wing, though with diminished size and influence since the Thatcherite ascendency, consists of liberal paternalists (albeit if the term “liberal” is used loosely), who used to be known as “One Nation” Tories, the most prominent recent representative of which is held to be David Cameron, despite all his trimming and hedging.

Another wing consists of the neo-Thatcherites, always baying for low taxes and reduced public spending, and having as their signature a “hang ‘em, flog ‘em” position on Britain’s social problems.

The third wing consists of the die-hard Brexiters, banding together in the Europe Reform Group (ERG). This is a motley bunch of old Empire fantasists, open racists, anti-immigrant xenophobes, and Europhobes (the EU being too “socialist” for their taste). To the extent that they adhere to neoliberalism, they make common cause with the neo-Thatcherites.

BoJo Johnson’s problem within the party is that he is not clearly identified with any of these three groupings.

He was against Brexit when he was mayor of London, and switched sides when it became clear that, for the foreseeable future, only a Brexiter could become party leader. His zeal for Brexit is therefore tempered by the irremovable stench of opportunism.

As someone renowned for his libidinal profligacy, the constraining petty-bourgeois moral outlook of the neo-Thatcherites (apart from a few exceptions, though much hypocrisy abounds on this score) was not for BoJo with his string of mistresses, and neither was he for them.

On some appearances BoJo could have been a “One Nation” Tory, except that this brand of Toryism clings to some form of noblesse oblige, outdated of course, and BoJo, with his infinite self-regard and deep self-interest, has never been one for any kind of noblesse oblige.

BoJo, an authoritarian populist not guided by principle or scruple, is thus his own brand.

As long as he delivered electoral success, which he did in December last year when Brexit was the sole issue concerning most of the electorate, the Tories put their divisions to one side, and BoJo remained their man.

But his shambolic handling of the pandemic, and complete inertia over Brexit negotiations with the EU, have revealed the man for who he is— BoJo the unprincipled bullshitter, and little else.

Photograph Source: Conor Lawless – CC BY 2.0

The highest qualification for high-school students in England, Wales, and the north of Ireland, is the A-level. Scotland has a different system called the Highers.

UK students seeking admission to tertiary education within the UK’s four sub-nations have to take A-levels or Highers– though the International Baccalaureate and qualifications in other countries equivalent to the A-level, such as the Abitur in Germany or Bac in France, are also recognized. The US SAT is not recognized.

The A-level exam is unlike the US’s SAT.

The SAT is multiple-choice, whereas the typical A-level exam involves writing 2-4 long (or longish) essays in a 3-hour period in response to questions chosen from an exam-paper with a typical range of 8-12 questions. For this reason successful students taking the more demanding A-levels receive a year’s advance credit if they choose to matriculate at a US university.

Another key difference is that UK students don’t apply directly to individual universities.

Since the UK only has 1 private university, the 105 government-funded universities have a centralized admissions system (UCAS).

Via UCAS, students about to take their A-levels apply to 5 universities at which they wish to study (ranked by applicants in order of interest). Applicants are advised to list the subject they wish to study (this includes joint-degrees), since applicants only get one personal statement for all universities they apply to, the statement having to be tailored to their subject, as opposed to university, of choice.

A key part of the application will be the predicted grades for the applicant provided by their teachers.

UCAS forwards applications to the universities concerned, who then assess the application and decide whether to make an offer for study, which includes the grades applicants must achieve in order to matriculate.

The examinations are set and graded by a number of exam boards.

England, Wales and Northern Ireland have several exam boards; schools can choose between them on a subject-by-subject basis, without restrictions.

Currently, there are 5 exam boards available to state schools: AQA (Assessment and Qualifications Alliance); CCEA (Council for the Curriculum, Examinations & Assessment); OCR (Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations); Pearson; and WJEC (Welsh Joint Education Committee).

The Covid lockdown threw a spanner in the works of this system, by preventing students from taking proctored A-level exams at their respective schools. Students had grades to aim for, but sans exams, had no way to attain their hoped-for objectives.

This is where the government blundered.

The 2020 A-level exam period would have run from Monday 11 May until Wednesday 26 June. It became apparent in March that it would be impossible to hold this year’s exams because of the pandemic lockdown, and the government cancelled them.

The Tory education minister, Gavin Williamson (a dimwit whose main claim to fame is being the 2006 fireplace salesperson of the year), therefore had a couple of months to implement an alternative mode of grade-calculation for 2020’s exam takers.

The government decided that grades for these thwarted exam-takers would be based on a combination of their predicted grades, rankings provided by teachers, and an algorithm based on schools’ previous results.

The flaw in the use of this algorithm was clear even without the benefit of hindsight. As is the case nearly everywhere, exam results tend to mirror a location’s prevailing poverty levels.

Students in poorer areas come from schools with lower levels of attainment, the converse being the case for schools in prosperous areas.

The algorithm downgraded 40% of predicted A-level results, with students in less-advantaged areas the hardest hit, while private schools enjoyed the biggest leap in the percentage of top grades.

As a result, thousands of poorer pupils missed out on places at university—in effect the algorithm assigned them grades based on their postcode.

Facing a huge public outcry (including Tory MPs), Williamson dumped the algorithm by making a drastic U-turn in government policy, saying A-level students would now be given the grades their teachers had predicted.

The result has been an absolute crisis for universities.

Those allowed to matriculate on the basis of the algorithm could not now be denied their university places, while those with subsequently acceptable grades based on their teachers’ predications are having to be admitted as well.

An example of this chaos was given me by a family member in the UK university system. A medical degree in the UK is a 5-year undergraduate degree, and clinical practice is of course a vital part of it. But with matriculants now considerably in excess of what medical schools can accommodate, it will be impossible to conduct clinical practice within the existing framework.

What next for medical schools?

Perhaps doctors who are not as well-trained because of shortfalls in their clinical practice, or a huge compensatory infusion of government funds for medical schools in a time of pandemic-induced economic recession, with a post-Brexit crisis still to come on top of this in early 2021?

Hopefully for Brits it will be the latter.

And what about Williamson himself, as well as his boss BoJo Johnson?

Williamson remains in post as education minister despite another U-turn after screwing-up the A-levels exams.

He had decreed that state schools should reopen (in September) without masks being required in classrooms.

Furious protests from parents and teachers compelled a reversal– masks will now be worn in classrooms when schools reopen.

Williamson and BoJo are trying to preserve their careers by throwing educational bureaucrats under the bus.

The head of England’s exam regulator (Ofqual), Sally Collier, has resigned, and the head civil servant in the department of education (DfE), Jonathan Slater, will step down on September 1 after the “prime minister concluded that there is a need for fresh official leadership” in the department, the DfE announced.

Slater is the fifth senior civil servant given the boot in less than a year, following the permanent secretaries of the Foreign Office, Home Office and Ministry of Justice, as well as the cabinet secretary, Mark Sedwill.

Gone are the days when ministers took responsibility for poor decisions made on their watch by resigning (this only seems to happen in Japan)— these days a hapless bureaucrat or two has to face the chopping block in their place, while the ministers involved still drive around in their black limousines, and lie repeatedly in media interviews and even in parliament about the debacles they preside over.

The UK’s parliament is touted in some circles as the mother of all parliaments— nowadays, more appropriately, it is perhaps the motherfucker of all parliaments.

BoJo Johnson became the source of derision even in the normally sedate parts of mainstream media when he blamed the A-levels fiasco on the nonsensical notion of a “mutant algorithm”.

Given that an algorithm can only be applied more or less well by those in charge, there were many jokes about who the real “mutants” were.

The technique used by the Tories in this episode is known in social media as “firehosing”.

Firehosing involves churning out as many lies as feasible as often as possible, not so much with the aim of having people swallow the lies peddled, but rather with the aim of sidelining arguments purporting to rely on ascertaining facts, and putting in their place phantasmagorias of “reality” reduced to the positioning of “narratives” and “optics”. Those who can sell these positions best are then said to win the “argument” in question.

Individuals such as BoJo (and Trump) don’t really care if people believe them. Their aim is to supplant what used to be considered “reality” by relatively well-informed social groupings possessing a modicum or approximation of scruples, with a riotous epistemological anarchy (à la Fox News), so that those so disposed are in a position to affirm that right is wrong, the true is false, left is right, and so on.

This is the underpinning of what is now considered “post-truth” politics.

BoJo and his allies, however, are not the UK’s first post-truth politicians.

That title belongs to the fundamentally unserious and lightweight “Dodgy” Dave Cameron, BoJo’s fellow Etonian and Oxonian predecessor as prime minister, who was an advertising executive on a minor commercial TV channel before he took up politics (saying he wanted to do this because he’d “be good at it”).

For now this is another story, along with the firehosing surely to follow the disastrous no-deal Brexit almost certain to kick-in on 1^st January 2021.

In the lead-up to this possible future story, the current Optimum opinion poll may become relevant.

The poll shows Labour is now in a tie with the Tories for the first time since last summer, before BoJo became the Tory leader. In just 5 months since the lockdown was imposed by Johnson, the Tories have relinquished a 26-point lead over Labour, who now stand neck-and-neck with the Tories on 40%.

The sad truth for Labour is that it has done nothing to merit this gain. Its Blairite leader, the erstwhile leading lawyer Keir Starmer, has wiped the floor with BoJo in parliamentary debate, but apart from trying to sideline the party’s Corbynites, he’s not made a single policy move or statement of significance since becoming leader.

The opportunism and unbearable lightness that was Tony Blair’s mantle may now descend on Starmer, by his own choice.

Relying on the Tory opposition to shoot themselves in the proverbial foot, which they’ve done repeatedly so far, can bring impressive but variable gains for now, but this Tory foot-shooting won’t fill Labour’s policy vacuum in the longer term.

As for the pandemic, in the last weekend of August, the UK recorded 1,715 Covid cases in largest weekend figure since mid-May.

Kenneth Surin is emeritus at Duke University, North Carolina. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

The post The UK’s High School Examinations Fiasco appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

I have retained Trump’s linguistic infelicities in this compendium of his remarks on the COVID-19 pandemic.

July 1— “I think we’re going to be very good with the coronavirus. I think that, at some point, that’s going to sort of disappear, I hope.”

July 2— “Some areas that were very hard-hit are now doing very well.  Some were doing very well, and we thought they may be gone and they flare up, and we’re putting out the fires.  But other places were long before us, and they’re now — it’s like life; it’s got a life.  And we’re putting out that life, because that’s a bad life that we’re talking about.”

July 4— “Likewise, testing – there were no tests for a new virus, but now we have tested over 40 million people. But by so doing, we show cases, 99 percent of which are totally harmless. Results that no other country will show, because no other country has testing that we have – not in terms of the numbers or in terms of the quality.” [Dr Anthony Fauci: “I’m trying to figure out where the president got that number. What I think happened is that someone told him that the general mortality is about 1%. And he interpreted, therefore, that 99% is not a problem, when that’s obviously not the case.”]

July 6—  “Why does the Lamestream Fake News Media REFUSE to say that China Virus deaths are down 39%, and that we now have the lowest Fatality (Mortality) Rate in the World. They just can’t stand that we are doing so well for our Country!”

July 7—  “I think we are in a good place.”

July 8—  “In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November election, but it is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!”

July 8—  “I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools. While they want them open, they are asking school [sic] to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!”

July 13— “I have a very good relationship with Dr Fauci. I’ve had for a long time – right from the beginning. I find him to be a very nice person. I don’t always agree with him.”

July 14— “We hold China fully responsible for concealing the virus and unleashing it upon the world.  They could’ve stopped it.  They should’ve stopped it.  It would’ve been very easy to do at the source when it happened.”

July 19— “Many of those cases are young people that would heal in a day. They have the sniffles, and we put it down as a test.”

July 19—  [responding to interviewer Chris Wallace, who asked Trump about his claim that dealing with the pandemic was now a matter of putting out “burning embers”] “No, no. But I don’t say — I say flames, we’ll put out the flames. And we’ll put out in some cases just burning embers. We also have burning embers. We have embers and we do have flames. Florida became more flame like, but it’s — it’s going to be under control.”

July 19—  “But when you talk about mortality rates, I think it’s the opposite. I think we have one of the lowest mortality rates in the world.” [The US has the 7^th highest mortality rate in the world, ahead of Brazil and Russia.]

July 21— “You will never hear this on the Fake News concerning the China Virus, but by comparison to most other countries, who are suffering greatly, we are doing very well – and we have done things that few other countries could have done!”

July 21—  “We are in the process of developing a strategy that’s going to be very, very powerful. We’ve developed as we go along. Some areas of our country are doing very well, others are doing less well.”

July 21—  “The virus will disappear. It will disappear.”

July 23— “It’s really something that, for me — I have to protect the American people.  That’s what I’ve always done.  That’s what I always will do.  That’s what I’m about.”

July 28–  “He’s [referring to Dr Fauci] got this high approval rating. So why don’t I have a high approval rating with respect — and the administration — with respect to the virus?”

August 1– “Wrong! We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country, 60,000,000. If we tested less, there would be less cases.”

August 3– “I think we are doing very well and I think … as well as any nation.”

August 3– “They are dying. That’s true. And you — it is what it is.”

August 3– “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!”

August 3– “Right now I think it’s under control.”

August 3–  “You know, there are those that say you can test too much, you do know that.”

August 5– “If you look at children, children are almost – and I would almost say definitely – but almost immune from this disease.”

August 5– “We’re supplying the world now with ventilators. You go back four months, we didn’t have any.”

August 5– “It will go away like things go away.”

August 10– “I think it’s been amazing what we’ve been able to do. If we didn’t close up our country, we would have had 1.5 or 2 million people already dead. We’ve called it right, now we don’t have to close it. We understand the disease. Nobody understood it because nobody’s ever seen anything like this. The closest thing is in 1917, they say, right? The great pandemic. Certainly was a terrible thing where they lost anywhere from 50 to 100 million people. Probably ended the Second World War, all the soldiers were sick.” [Spanish flu, the pandemic Trump is referring to, occurred in 1918. World War 2 started in 1939.]

August 10– “These [college footballers] are young strong people, they won’t have a big problem with the China virus. Most of them will never get it, statistically.”

August 17– “….My Administration and I built the greatest economy in history, of any country, turned it off, saved millions of lives, and now am building an even greater economy than it was before. Jobs are flowing, NASDAQ is already at a record high, the rest to follow. Sit back & watch!”

August 17– “We built the greatest economy in the history of the world, and now I have to do it again. You know what that is? That’s God testing me. He said, ‘You know, you did it once.’ And I said, ‘Did I do a great job, God? I’m the only one that could do it.’”

August 18– “The places they were using to hold up now they’re having a big surge … they were holding up names of countries and now they’re saying ‘whoops!  Do you see what’s happening in New Zealand? They beat it, they beat it, it was like front-page news because they wanted to show me something. Big surge in New Zealand, you know it’s terrible, we don’t want that, but this is an invisible enemy that should never have been let to come to Europe and the rest of the world by China.” [The death rate in New Zealand is 0.45 deaths for every 100,000 people, compared to the US rate of 53.04, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.]

August 22– “The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!”

Malaysia’s former prime minister Najib Razak was found guilty in the first of 5 trials he faces for his multibillion-dollar looting of Malaysia’s 1MBD development fund. This particular trial concerned US$14m of funds deposited in Najib’s personal accounts from a unit of 1MDB.

In all, it is alleged that US $4.5 bn was stolen from the fund by Najib and his associates, with more than $US1bn ending up in Najib’s personal accounts. This in a country where 40% live on less than US$2.50 a day.

The court sentenced Najib to serve up to 12 years in prison after finding him guilty of crimes that brought down his government in a surprise election defeat 2 years ago.

Najib’s sentence involved 1 count of abuse of power, 10 years each for 3 counts of criminal breach of trust, and 10 years each for 3 counts of money laundering, as well as a fine of US$48.4m. The judge ordered the sentences to run concurrently, so Najib will face up to 12 years in jail.

The ruling in this trial came 5 months after the ethnic Malay party previously led by Najib returned to power as the largest bloc in an alliance that replaced the Mahathir Mohammed government which had ousted Najib in 2018.

Mahathir had initiated an investigation into Najib’s 1MDB dealings and his subsequent prosecution.

In his final statement, Najib spoke of his achievements during his 9-year tenure as prime minister and swore in Arabic with Allah as his witness that he wasn’t aware of the money channeled into his bank accounts from a unit of 1MDB.

Najib said: “I did not demand the 42 million [in Malaysian ringgit], I did not plan for the 42 million, nor was the 42 million offered to me. There has been no evidence nor witness to this. And I also like to say that I have no knowledge of the 42 million”. He said he was misled by rogue bankers and the case against him was political.

The judge, Mohamad Nazlan Mohamad Ghazali, agreed with the prosecution that Najib had “overarching control” of 1MBD, that he did not refute the prosecution’s charges against him, and that the prosecution had established beyond reasonable doubt that Najib misappropriated funds for his own use.

Najib’s lawyers argued he was misled by Malaysian financier Jho Low (now a fugitive in China) and other 1MDB officials into believing that the funds banked into his accounts were donated by the Saudi royal family, rather than embezzled from 1MBD, as prosecutors alleged. The judge said in his decision it was “far-fetched” to believe Najib could have been misled by Low.

The judge said the sentence was “appropriate and proportionate” taking into consideration that Najib had committed his crimes from a “position of trust” as prime minister, as well as the need to deter others from committing similar crimes.

The prosecution said the case had risked showing Malaysia to be a kleptocracy and requested a sentence sufficient to remind those in high office that “no one is above the law”.

Najib’s lawyers had argued for a light sentence. In an obvious legal ploy aimed at a future appeal, they said their case was “crippled” by the judge’s refusal to delay their sentencing arguments.

Najib’s lawyers immediately sought a stay of execution of the sentence. Najib will remain free while he challenges the judge’s decision.

It should however be remembered that Najib’s political party remains in office, as part of an alliance led by the current prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin. Najib, though out of power, retains clout in his party through family networks going back to Malaysia’s independence from Britain in 1957, beginning with his father (who was Malaysia’s second prime minister).

Malaysia’s judiciary has been stacked by the ethnic Malay ruling party for decades (the 2-year rule of Mahathir Mohamad’s coalition possibly being the sole exception, though Mahathir himself stacked the judiciary in his previous term as Malaysia’s longest serving prime minister), and the decision of the independent-minded judge could be overturned upon appeal.

For now, Najib is disqualified from being a candidate in any election. To be eligible for any such candidacy he would need to win his appeal, a possibility that cannot be ruled out.

Commentators say the verdict is likely to lend weight to the prosecution’s case in Najib’s remaining trials and would show clearly that Malaysia’s legal system is sufficiently robust and independent to take on crimes of this magnitude.

However, the deeper repercussions of this verdict are a little uncertain.

Prime minister Muhyiddin’s credibility in international circles, and also locally, could be enhanced by properly conducted legal proceedings against Najib.

At the same time, Muhyiddin’s rickety coalition– made up of Malay-centric parties and rural Islamic hardliners, with Najib’s United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) as its biggest cog— could fall apart and trigger a snap election.

The coalition has a bare majority in parliament, and is struggling to deal with the Covid pandemic and record unemployment. It hardly has a mandate to act in any significant way, and some say fresh elections are needed to break this impasse.

Waiting in the wings should there be new elections will be the multiracial, secular party led by the former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, which is now the main parliamentary opposition to Muhyiddin’s ruling coalition.

Anwar has had a tumultuous political past.

When Mahathir was prime minister between 1981 and 2003, Anwar served as deputy prime minister, and was being groomed by Mahathir to be his successor. They fell-out over the handling of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, with Anwar supporting deflationary measures advocated by the IMF and World Bank, and Mahathir opposing the recommended austerity.

Mahathir had Anwar put behind bars on corruption and sodomy charges that many regarded as bogus.

Once out of jail in 2005 Anwar blew the whistle on the goings-on at 1MDB. This time it was Najib’s turn to throw him in jail in 2015 under yet another set of trumped-up charges.

Mahathir Mohamad left UMNO when the IMDB scandal broke, and formed his own party, which became a component in the Pakatan Harapan coalition. In his determination to oust Najib, Mahathir reconciled with Anwar, and formed an alliance with him.

Mahathir agreed that if he won the 2018 election with Anwar’s support, he would have him pardoned and released from jail, and then make way for him to become prime minister in 2 years.

The 93-year-old Mahathir led his coalition to a shock victory in 2018, giving Malaysia its first opposition government since independence. Anwar’s wife, Wan Azizah, became Mahathir’s deputy.

Anwar was pardoned and released from prison, but before there was a chance for Mahathir to honour his agreement with Anwar, Mahathir resigned as prime minister earlier this year. There had been a faction in Mahathir’s coalition wanting it broadened to include a post-Najib UMNO, but Mahathir resigned rather than work with the latter. Malaysia’s king then asked Muhyiddin Yassin to form the government that is now in power.

Should a snap election be called, it is likely that Anwar will at last become prime minister.

The court’s decision comes just days after Malaysia reached a $3.9 billion deal with Goldman Sachs over its role in helping 1MDB raise funds, proving yet again that Goldman Sachs functions as the equivalent of crime syndicate.

The financial reporter Matt Taibbi once referred to Goldman as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”. Taibbi’s words are borne out by Goldman’s RAP sheet over the last 20 years or so– it includes at least 33 major legal actions involving violations of dozens if not hundreds of laws, costing Goldman almost $10 billion in fines and settlements.

The details regarding Goldman Sachs and its dealings with Malaysia are provided in this piece by CounterPuncher Binoy Kampmark.

The UK parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), drawn from MPs and peers of all parties, last week published its report on possible Russian interference in UK politics.

The report’s release had been delayed by 9 months after it had been blocked by Boris “BoJo” Johnson in the run-up to the December 2019 general election.

The 55-page report– containing 175 redactions as well as several secret annexes– investigated possible interference by the Kremlin in UK politics.

The ISC does not come to firm conclusions, because it was not in a position to do so. It was impossible to say whether the Russians had in fact tried to influence UK politics—quite simply, the government made no attempt to find out what, if anything, was going on, or could have been going on.

If the report could not come to any conclusions about the activities of Russian bots, it certainly had enough to say about Russian oligarchs.

While UK politicians were turning their collective back on this issue in an act of willful blindness, the report makes it clear that quite a few in the top echelon of the Tory party had become particularly good pals with Kremlin oligarchs. Indeed, a cynic would say, why take an interest in the origins and uses of the iffy money pouring into the “Londongrad laundromat”, as long as the roubles were coming in by the truckload?

The report is forthright about the corruption of the UK associated with the inflow of wealthy Russian oligarchs, making use of easy-to-acquire “investor visas” if you could afford it, from the late 1990s onwards (Blair’s New Labour was in office at that time).

According to the ISC report:

“Russian influence in the UK is the new normal. Successive governments have welcomed the oligarchs and their money with open arms, providing them with a means of recycling illicit finance through the London ‘laundromat’, and connections at the highest levels with access to UK companies and political figures”.

The report goes on to say:

“There are a lot of Russians with very close links to Putin who are well integrated into the UK business and social scene, and accepted because of their wealth…. The money was also invested in extending patronage and building influence across a wide sphere of the British establishment – PR firms, charities, political interests, academia and cultural institutions were all willing beneficiaries of Russian money”.

Though the report does not name these “Russians with very close links to Putin”, the Tories are reported to have received donations from 9 Russian individuals.

In addition, a reading of the Byline Times reveals who some of them are.

They include Alexander Lebedev, the former London KGB chief who owns the Evening Standard and the Independent. The playboy BoJo often parties at Lebedev’s properties in the UK and Italy, and met him soon after the Novichok nerve-agent poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018.

Lebedev and BoJo call each other “Sasha”, the Russian diminutive of “Alexander” (“Alexander” being BoJo’s first name).

Former and current big players in the UK political and commercial scene include Roman Abramovich (the owner of the Premier League soccer club Chelsea), Oleg Deripaska (known to have business dealings with Trump’s felonious associate Paul Manafort), Dmytro Firtash (wanted in the US for loan fraud), and the former Russian arms chief Alexander Temerko, who has donated more than £1.3m to the Conservatives. Temerko has been a citizen of the UK since 2011.

Just last week the Electoral Commission published new data showing continued financial support for the Conservative party from the wife of a former minister in Vladimir Putin’s Russian government.

Lubov Chernukhin, who is married to ex-Russian finance minister Vladimir Chernukhin, donated £325,000/$410,000 to BoJo’s party in the first quarter of 2020, according to the latest data, making her the biggest ever female political donor in the UK.

In 2014, she paid £160,000/$202,000 for a game of tennis with BoJo and then-prime minister David Cameron, as well as a further £30,000/$38,000 for dinner with the UK government’s current education secretary, Gavin Williamson.

In May last year, Chernukhin dined with ex-prime minister Theresa May and numerous female members of the Cabinet at the time, after donating £135,000/$170,000 to a Conservative Party fundraising event.

The Northern Ireland secretary former and former Tory Party chairman Brandon Lewis received £25,000/$32,000 from Chernukhin. (Lewis also received £23,000/$29,000 from Alexander Temerko.)

In all, Lubov Chernukhin has given over £1.7m/$2.16m to the Tories. As a British citizen her donations are legal.

An investigation by Open Democracy found that the Conservative Party received at least £498,850/$642,000 from Russian business executives and their associates between November 2018 and October 2019. This was a substantial increase from the previous year when donations from Russian sources amounted to less than £350,000/$441,000.

The Independent reports that 13 Tory cabinet ministers received “large sums” from Russian donors.

Alok Sharma, the business secretary, received £10,000/$13,000 from Temerko’s energy firm Aquind in 2020 and £15,000/$20,000 from Offshore Group Newcastle (OGN) in 2014. Temerko was vice-chairman of OGN.

Simon Hart, the Wales secretary, received £9,000/$11,500 from Temerko between 2016 and last year and a further £23,000/$29,500 from Aquind in 2019.

The chancellor of the exchequer/finance minister Rishi Sunak’s constituency party received £6,000/$7,700 from Temerko in 2015.

The justice secretary Robert Buckland’s constituency party received £5,000/$6,400 from OGN in 2014.

The international development secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, received £2,500/$3,200 from Temerko and her constituency was given a further £17,000/$21,700.

James Wharton, the former MP and Northern Powerhouse minister, received £25,000/$32,000 in donations over 4 years from Temerko.

David Morris MP received a £10,000/12,800 from Temerko’s Aquind.

Theresa Villiers, minister for environment, food and rural affairs from 2019 to 2020, received £2,000 through her constituency party in 2019 from Lubov Chernukhin.

Mark Pritchard MP received £5,000/$6,400 from Temerko’s Aquind for his constituency in 2019.

As the money laundering capital of the world, Londongrad has been the primary recipient of this dark money fed into it by the Russian kleptocracy.

Just two known cases – the Moldovan Laundromat scheme and the Deutsche Bank ‘mirror trades’ scam – saw £20bn/$25bn shifted into the UK through shell companies and limited liability partnerships in the past decade alone, successfully corrupting large areas of the financial industries which process this illicit money. A chunk of it then finds its way into the coffers of the Tory party.

Brits have also cashed in on the Russian connection. Brexit-supporting businessmen such as Jim Mellon and the Chandler brothers made huge fortunes in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and some senior parliamentary figures, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg (the Leader of the House of Commons), still have important investments there.

The ISC report also noted that “a number of members of the House of Lords have business interests linked to Russia, or work directly for major Russian companies”.

Several peers and ex-peers sit on the boards of wealthy Russian companies. They include Lord Barker, who is chairman of EN+, co-owned by the already-mentioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

Tony Blair’s former adviser, Lord Mandelson, was a non-executive director of the Russian conglomerate Sistema, for which he was paid £200,000/$255,000 a year. Mandelson reportedly continues to be a shareholder in Sistema.

Other members of the Lords work for Russian enterprises, including the shipping firm Sovcomflot UK, the oil firm RNG joint stock company, and the oil refining giant Russneft.

BP, the petroleum multinational, has a 19.75% stake in Rosneft (not to be confused with Russneft). Rosneft’s CEO Igor Sechin is a close ally of Putin’s. Other leading companies with branches in Russia include Barclays and Citibank.

The ISC report recommended that members of the House of Lords should register payments above £100, in line with the register of interests required of members the House of Commons.

In addition to blocking the ISC report for 9 months, and rejecting every one of its rather tepid recommendations, BoJo and the Tories have opposed, consistently, every legal measure to introduce tax transparency. As a result, their billionaire backers can continue on their merry ways with little or no accountability.

Anyone for tennis with BoJo? At £160,000/$202,000 a pop?

And those handsome donations? If you are a Russian billionaire, Tory HQ will probably provide you with details of the appropriate account for a bank transfer.

Trump and the Republicans have corrupted and weakened the US political system, and BoJo and the Tories have done something similar to its UK equivalent.

It is impossible to avoid the thought that this state of affairs brings a gleam of satisfaction to the eyes of Putin and Xi Jinping.

Boris Johnson and his Tory colleagues are playing a game that is doomed to fail where the twin threats of the Covid pandemic and Brexit are concerned. As the UK careens towards a No Deal Brexit, the “message” is that the economic and social disaster caused by a No Deal Brexit is really to be attributed to the pandemic, while another “message” is that the country will be “back to normal” by Christmas with regard to the pandemic, leaving the decks miraculously clear for a mighty effort to stem the calamitous No Deal Brexit.

“It is my strong and sincere hope”, BoJo Johnson told a Downing Street press conference, that the virus will be under such strong control that the country could see “a significant return to normality” from November.

Both messages are a con, which must surely be apparent even to a self-deceiver like to BoJo. It certainly is to EU leaders.

The Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte added this twist to the Brexiter’s mantra “Brexit means Brexit” by adding “and hard Brexit means hard Brexit”. As has been clear all along, the EU is not going to give an inch to perfidious Albion in its divorce from the EU.

It soon became obvious that BoJo’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and chief medical officer Chris Whitty did not get BoJo’s message. Within hours both men were telling the House of Lords science committee that social distancing is here to stay.

Whitty said: “[The virus] has not gone away. [The measures] need to continue for a long period of time”. Vallance added that “social distancing and hygiene measures will be necessary” given it was “highly likely” the virus would return, stressing that it was just a matter of when, not if, Covid “comes back in force” in several waves.

The truth is that there will be no return to a “pre-Covid normality” without levels of contact tracing that have never been achieved in the UK, as well as effective Covid security on public transport, and so on.

The current testing system, outsourced to the private companies Serco and G4S, fails to contact nearly a quarter of people who test positive. In one town in the north of England now dealing with a major outbreak of the virus, the testing app, touted as “world-beating” by BoJo, is failing to reach half of its close contacts.

The UK economy was in poor shape even before Covid struck, but the economy is now on the verge of flat lining.

National output dropped by a dismal 20.4% in April, and although economic forecasters predicted growth of 5.5% in May the actual figure turned out to be an insipid 1.8%. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says another major coronavirus outbreak in the UK could result in an unemployment rate of 15%.

The Office for National Statistics reports that 650,000 people have lost their jobs since lockdown began, and vacancies are at their lowest level since records began two decades ago. Up to 3 million UK jobs are now thought to be at risk because of unsustainable corporate-debt levels, and these firms are pleading for government bailouts.

The coronavirus crisis has left many UK businesses in a worse position to cope with a no-deal Brexit, according to the independent think-tank the Institute for Government. The Institute says that 3 out of 5 firms have not even begun to prepare for the finalization of the EU-UK separation on 31st December 2020 due to continued indecision about the UK’s future relationship with the EU.

The minister for Brexit, Michael Gove, has confirmed that up to 5 sites in Kent (in the south of England abutting the English Channel) will be used as Brexit border facilities, with another 7 situated elsewhere in the country. Gove has already confirmed the purchase of a £705m/$942m site for a “Brexit border” centred on a vast lorry park in Ashford, Kent, where transport operators will have to fork out money on an hourly basis while they wait for customs clearance.

The profound irony is that Ashford is solidly pro-Tory and pro-Brexit— in the 2016 EU referendum it voted Leave 59.4% (with Remain at 40.6%). Property values in Ashford are expected to crash with the construction of the vehicle park, with its ensuing traffic bottlenecks and the stress it will place on local infrastructure and services.

The Brexiters of Ashford are already turning NIMBY, though understandably many Remainers have little sympathy for them.

So much for the Brexiter “taking back control” slogan.

BoJo suffered a major political defeat this week.

He had been sitting on a parliamentary report since before the December 2019 election which investigated Russian interference in the 2016 EU referendum and the 2019 general election.

Releasing the Russian report is the task of the House Committee on Intelligence and Security, but BoJo had prevented it from meeting for 7 months. When he could no longer do this, BoJo tried to influence the committee’s leadership. In an act of egregious executive over-reach, he directed that the committee be headed by one of his flunkies, the error-prone former minister Chris “Failing” Grayling.

The committee has 9 members, 5 Tory and 4 belonging to opposition parties. In something of a coup, one of the 5 Tories, the independent-minded Julian Lewis, stood against “Failing” Grayling, and persuaded the 4 opposition-party members to vote for him.

BoJo’s hope was that Grayling would somehow be able to prevent the release of the Russian report, but Lewis, now the committee’s chair, has already chaired his first committee meeting and obtained unanimous agreement to publish the report within a week.

BoJo retaliated by having Julian Lewis kicked out of the parliamentary Conservative party.

Such is the state of democracy in Ukania.

So, what can lie ahead for Ukania?

The Thatcherite neoliberal “settlement” from 1979 onwards was a failed attempt to deal with the breakdown of the 1945 social-democratic settlement, premised as it was on a “managed capitalism”.

The current convergence of the consequences, mostly impossible to anticipate, of the continuing pandemic (and especially a projected Covid second wave), with an economic upheaval brought out by a No Deal Brexit, could create conditions for the overturning of the 1979 “give capitalism free rein” Thatcherite consensus.

But let us not get ahead of ourselves.

Labour’s current Blairite leadership, under Keir Starmer, having eschewed Corbyn’s experiment in social democracy, is committed in so doing to the maintenance of Thatcherism, give or take a few palliatives not so far in evidence.

If the sting of a No Deal Brexit is not felt deeply by those who believe the EU is to blame for the UK’s decades-long economic and social decline (and this anti-EU refrain is the constant Tory message), the overturning of the Thatcherite consensus can be deferred.

For how long though?

History shows that events tend to proceed at their own pace, though sometimes with great rapidity.

In December last year The New York Times referred to Boris Johnson’s “blundering brilliance” in an attempt to account for his popularity with many voters. The NYT went on to say:

“It’s hard to take the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, completely seriously. Just look at him: a chubby, permanently disheveled toff with an accent that comes off as a parody of an upper-class twit, topped off by that trademark mop of silver-blond hair he deliberately musses up before venturing into the public eye. Then there are those photo-op moments in his long career that seem designed to make him look supremely silly — stuck dangling in midair on a zip line with little Union Jacks waving in his hands; rugby-tackling a 10-year-old in Japan [at 5’9” Johnson reportedly weighs 250 lbs/113kgs]; playing tug-of-war in a publicity stunt and collapsing, suited, onto the grass….”.

Alas for Johnson more people are starting to see that this carefully-cultivated veneer is precisely that—a façade intended to con the electorate.

The UK continues to have one of the highest Covid-19 death tolls in the world (44,819, with only the US and Brazil ahead). However, as the pandemic’s toll increases BoJo Johnson’s standing in the opinion polls decreases.

His approval ratings tanked from a weighty +40% in April to minus figures in June. The fall in the percentage of people who believed his government had done a good job was even more drastic, from +51% to -15% between March and the end of May.

Meanwhile, the Tory government’s already lengthy catalogue of errors and oversights advances daily.

Nearly every measure taken is adopted too late or turns out to be broken-backed upon implementation.

Shutting the pandemic stable door after the horse has bolted is routine.

Three months into the lockdown (8 June), quarantine for arriving air passengers was finally introduced.

Now, 4 months into the lockdown, mandatory face masks in shops are about to be introduced (or maybe not, because different ministers say different things).

Next, the much delayed test and trace app will probably be declared to be up and running (even though it may only work 50% of the time), while it is hailed by BoJo as a “world-beater”. Do Brits laugh or cry?

BoJo used to be caught between a rock and a hard place where the pandemic is concerned, as he was tugged one way by the pro-business right of his party (and its wealthy donors), and the other by his scientific and medical advisers.

This farcical situation, which involved BoJo seeming to play both sides, could however no longer be maintained, and had to be discarded.

BoJo, following his mentor Trump, abandoned daily briefings in which he or his ministers would appear alongside senior medical and scientific bureaucrats. The briefings were a palpable sham, as the ministers lied or prevaricated persistently while casting hopeful looks at the stony-faced bureaucrats by their side, wondering if the latter would at least offer some words of support.

Admittedly, some bureaucrats, possibly with knighthoods in mind, were happy to oblige on occasion, while one other, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, was stern in his condemnation of the lockdown-breaking 600-mile roundtrip drive taken by BoJo’s Rasputin-like adviser, Dominic Cummings (although Van-Tam did not mention the British Rasputin by name, saying only that the lockdown rules “applied to everyone”). Van-Tam then met the same fate as Trump’s adviser Anthony Fauci, who was sidelined after not toeing Trump’s line. Van-Tam did not appear at another briefing.

Turbulent doctors, like their mediaeval priestly equivalents, will be rid of by their masters.

What Brits have now are briefings involving ministers only, touting the excellence of the Tory response to the pandemic, and announcing the gradual but haphazard lifting of the lockdown– proclaiming all the time that “the science” is somehow on the side of the profit-resuming real motivation behind the lifting of these restrictions.

Like Trump, BoJo has opted for profits over the well-being of citizens, while feigning to have the latter somewhat in mind. Or to say that profit-making and the health of Brits go hand-in-glove.

The latest news is that 200 workers at a vegetable farm and packing business in Herefordshire supplying leading supermarkets have been ordered to isolate on the property after an outbreak of coronavirus.

In addition, at least 73 workers in another Herefordshire-based farm have tested positive for Covid-19, and more are awaiting results.

Police have been stationed outside these premises.

The government is still refusing to hold an independent inquiry into the pandemic, but parliament took the matter into its own hands, and this week will start an inquiry involving MPs drawn from all parties. The inquiry committee will take submissions, in writing, audio, and video, from the families of victims and healthcare professionals.

You can bet BoJo will refuse a summons to appear before his parliamentary peers.

Kenneth Surin is emeritus at Duke University, North Carolina. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

As a Labour party member, it is unavoidable that I should have an opinion on the party leader Keir Starmer’s sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey.

RLB was shadow education secretary until her dismissal, as well as being Starmer’s primary opponent for the party leadership when Jeremy Corbyn resigned after Labour lost to the Tories in December’s general election.

In the leadership election I voted for Long-Bailey, with the current shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy as my second choice, and Starmer was last of the 3 candidates I could vote for.

RLB made a mistake in retweeting the actor Maxine Peake’s accusation that US police forces are taught the neck restraint technique by the Israelis. Peake subsequently apologized for tweet.

Granted, the officer who murdered George Floyd was trained by the Israelis, who commonly use the technique on Palestinians. But it does not follow that he was taught it during his training by Israeli “security experts”.

There is a more or less strong likelihood that the officer in question was, but, to state the obvious, the likelihood of X is not an actual X. After all, there are dozens of clips showing the neck restraint technique being deployed on Palestinians, some of them children, and the killer cop could have acquired the technique from watching these videos.

Moreover, at least 100 Minnesota police officers attended a 2012 conference—the second such conference to be held– hosted by the Israeli consulate in Chicago, with the FBI as its joint host (as if we need anymore evidence that the militarization of American police forces is state-sanctioned).

At these conferences Minnesota police were instructed in the brutal techniques used by Israeli forces as they coerce and terrorize Palestinians living in the occupied territories under the pretense of security operations.

That said, the assertion that RLB and Peake made, even though not substantiated, hardly amounts to an “antisemitic conspiracy theory”. It was directed at a state regarded by many as a rogue state, or at any rate, a state where consistent violations of human rights are integral to its functioning.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has adopted the following “working definition” of “antisemitism”:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

In its elaboration of this definition IHRA continues:

“Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

It has also to be noted that IHRA says explicitly that this definition is not legally binding. Which is just as well, since many jurists, including the UK’s Lord Justice Stephen Sedley (who is himself Jewish), have said that the definition would not stand up in a court of law.

At least two problems arise for Starmer and his Zionist supporters with regard to the sacking of Long-Bailey.

Firstly, the IHRA’s clause that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic” shows unequivocally that criticizing Israel for teaching its police, and the police forces of other countries, techniques of arrest which inflict serious injury or death on a person already under restraint, is not antisemitic as such.

After all, the apartheid regime in South Africa provided training, including crowd and riot control, for police forces in Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi, (the then) Rhodesia, and (the then) Zaire under the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. South Africa’s police during this time was basically an unaccountable paramilitary organization, with the uniformed branch tasked with patrolling the black townships widely regarded as thugs dressed up in uniforms.

Apartheid South Africa’s police was criticized for its racist policing methods, with parallels for the way Israel is criticized today for its policing in Palestinian areas. Many of the abuses documented where the apartheid South African police were concerned, parallel equally well-documented violations by Israeli security, police and military officials.

Since the criticism made of Israel’s police is on a par with that levelled at the police of apartheid South Africa, Israel is therefore being subjected to a form criticism that is levelled at other countries, and so this criticism of Israel cannot be considered “antisemitic”, even according to the IHRA’s stipulations.

Secondly, to say that criticism of Israel as a state, such as Peake’s and Long-Bailey’s, is “antisemitic” is tantamount to saying that, e.g., criticism of Zaire (as a state), under the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko (a fan of routine torture), even if not substantiated in the one instance, is “racist” because the population of Zaire is overwhelmingly black. A palpable absurdity obviously.

But, some may object, the Israeli authorities say they do not teach the neck restraint technique to foreign police forces, nor even to their own forces, because it is not in their police-training manuals. This, surely, is a poor attempt at humour—one only has to go to Google Images and enter a search for “Israeli forces kneeling on the necks on Palestinians” to find numerous still shots of Israeli forces using the knee-on-neck technique. Just because something isn’t in someone’s manual doesn’t mean that….

Starmer should have asked RLB to issue a clarification after she refused to retract her tweet, e.g. by allowing her to say that the policy of having police officers (of any country) trained by Israeli police forces is highly problematic, given the propensity of those forces to engage in human rights violations, and this in the course of enforcing an occupation that is illegal according to international law.

According to Amnesty International, hundreds of US police officers from Baltimore, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state, and the DC Capitol police have traveled to Israel for training. Thousands of others have been trained by Israeli representatives here in the US.

Amnesty International has made numerous criticisms of Israel’s human rights violations. By Starmer’s logic, he should stand up in parliament and acknowledge that the rationale he used for sacking RLD behooves him to say that Amnesty is likewise antisemitic.

Alas, I am more likely to encounter a unicorn on my daily walk than see him do this! Labour has several anti-Zionist MPs—perhaps one of them can raise this issue at the appropriate time in the House?

Before his election as party leader Starmer received a donation of £50,000 from the UK’s Zionist lobby. He did not disclose this donation until after he was made party leader. This may or may not have been inadvertent, just as it may or may not have anything to do with the ditching of RLB.

At the same time, I suspect RLB’s anti-Zionism was not the only consideration involved in her sacking. As education secretary RLB was forthright in her support of the teachers’ unions in their opposition to the Tory drive to get them (and pupils) back to schools in unsafe conditions.

We have to remember that Starmer is a Blairite, and Blair and his followers were no friends of any union.

As I write (the weekend of 20-21 June), the UK’s death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic has reached 43,632, and the total number of cases over 300,000. The total number of excess deaths (the number of deaths for a period of a particular year typically calculated against the average for that time of year for the preceding 5 years) is 64,500 (according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics).

The ONS also reported a rise in unemployment of 600,000, with more expected to be out of a job in the coming months, and even more when a likely No Deal Brexit starts to kick-in at the end of 2020.

The UK economy has declined by 20%, and is already in an official recession, which will only deepen with Brexit.

The UK’s COVID-19 death toll is now the highest in Europe, and the highest in the world after the US and Brazil. Speaking of Brazil, jokes are made in British social media about Bolsonaris Johnson.

The UK is second in the world for COVID-19 deaths per million of population (631.22), with only Belgium placing higher (845.99).

Another fiasco involved the “test, track and trace app” said only a few weeks ago to be the key to easing lockdown restrictions, but which has now been abandoned after 3 months.

The Tories, under the auspices of the NHS, awarded a no-bid £90m/$112m contract for this app to a private company, despite repeated warnings from experts that it would not work on Apple and Google phones (the latter companies would have to do a major reconfiguration of their operating systems to accommodate the doomed app, and this being a no-brainer for them because of the huge expense involved, they told BoJo Johnson and his colleagues to get lost).

So, in yet another U-turn, BoJo’s government said it was going to switch to an alternative designed by Apple and Google themselves (!), since presumably an app designed by them would be compatible with their operating systems. This app, however, is months away from being ready. Moreover, Apple said it was news to them that they were to be involved in the production of the new app.

It was also revealed that the unit responsible for the government’s failed contact-tracing app attempted to block rival apps to safeguard its own version, thereby hindering efforts to track the early spread of COVID-19.

Contrast this with the German government’s Corona Warn app, the largest open-source project undertaken by the German government, which was ready to go after just 50 days, and has been available to download from both the Apple App Store and Google Play since the evening of June 15. The app, produced by Deutsche Telekom, SAP, and other companies, has already been downloaded over 6 million times since then.

Critics wondered why BoJo did not do the sensible and obvious thing by paying for the German app, along with any modifications required for its deployment in the UK, which would have saved time and money (and lives!).

The obvious answer is that Brexiters such as BoJo, having touted the UK’s superiority over anything to do with the EU, couldn’t now turn to an EU-member to bail him out in a situation that might signal the UK’s inferiority in comparison with the EU and its members.

This is not the only Tory U-turn in the past few weeks.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, the 22-year-old Manchester United and England soccer player Marcus Rashford (who has already played 38 times for England despite his relative youth), teamed up with food charities to raise £20m/$25m to provide food for children who would not receive free school meals during the lockdown.

Rashford wrote an open letter pleading for the extension of free school meals into the summer holidays, an extension refused initially by the Tory government.

With huge public backing for Rashford’s initiative (in a poll Rashford was supported by a majority of Tory voters), BoJo announced his government would be rescinding its initial refusal of the extension.

I have already mentioned in a previous CounterPunch piece the U-turn on foreign NHS staff having to pay a surcharge for their NHS medical treatment. However, nothing has been done to implement the new policy, and foreign NHS workers are still having to pay the surcharge.

Another government U-turn involved the decision to send children back to school on June 1^st, despite the fact that no track and trace system would be operational by that date. Facing pressure from parents, teachers and their unions, and the medical associations, the government caved-in, and assigned September 1^st as the new date for a return to school.

In the last Opinium poll for The Observer in late March, the week after the lockdown started, the Conservatives had a huge 26-point lead over Labour (54% to 28%). BoJo’s personal approval rating was at +29%. This weekend’s poll, by comparison, has Labour under Keir Starmer in a virtual dead heat with the Tories, while BoJo’s approval ratings and those of his government have plummetted.

BoJo, notorious for his failed vanity projects when he was mayor of London, also ordered a £900,000/$1,111m paint job for the RAF’s Voyager aircraft set aside for VIP use. The plane’s camouflage exterior is to be replaced by the patriotic red, white, and blue, even though the gaudy makeover will render the plane useless for military operations when not ferrying dignitaries such as BoJo and members of the royal family.

The root cause of these fiascos is apparent. The Tories had reconfigured themselves to be a Brexit campaigning party, with no real ideas or plans or policies for the task of government itself. The fact that nearly all of BoJo’s team of advisers, including his Rasputin-like chief adviser Dominic Cummings, are holdovers from the Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum, speaks for itself.

The PR, spin, and “optics” that are a priority for political campaigners in these populist and media-saturated times, do not in themselves translate into the proficiencies required for adequate government.

In a time of great peril, marked by the sheer complexity and rapidity of events, the arch-philanderer Boris Johnson has thus been caught with his pants down.

In three previous pieces in CounterPunch I compiled Donald Trump’s statements on the COVID-19 pandemic up to May 2^nd-3^rd. Here is a continuation of that list.

Rather than place Trump’s statements in strict chronological order, I have sometimes put 2 or more of statements from different days together, to highlight Trump’s contradictions and subsequent deviations– these are prefaced by an asterisk. I have retained Trump’s numerous linguistic infelicities.

May 19 — (responding to doctors warning about possible adverse side-effects of hydroxychloroquine, which Trump says he’s taking) “If you look at the one survey, the only bad survey, they were giving it to people that were in very bad shape. They were very old. Almost dead. It was a Trump enemy statement.”

May 19 – (responding to Nancy Pelosi calling him “morbidly obese”) “Pelosi is a sick woman. She’s got a lot of problems, a lot of mental problems.”

May 19 – (responding to a question from a female reporter who asked him why he has yet to announce a plan that would get the millions of Americans now seeking unemployment aid back to work) “Just a rude person you are… that’s enough of you.”

May 20 – “Some wacko in China just released a statement blaming everybody other than China for the Virus which has now killed hundreds of thousands of people. Please explain to this dope that it was the “incompetence of China”, and nothing else, that did this mass Worldwide killing!”

May 20 – (when asked how US testing compares with other countries on a per capita basis) “You know, when you say “per capita”, there’s many per capitas. It’s, like per capita relative to what? But you can look at just about any category, and we’re really at the top, meaning on a per capita basis too.”

May 21 – “We’re going after Virginia, with your crazy governor, we’re going after Virginia. They want to take your Second Amendment. You know that, right? You’ll have nobody guarding your potatoes.”

May 21 – “We are opening our churches again. I think the CDC is going to put something out very soon, spoke to them today. I think they are going to put something out very soon. We got to open our churches.”

*May 22 – “Some governors have deemed liquor stores and abortion clinics essential, but have left out churches … it’s not right. So I am correcting this injustice and am calling houses of worship essential. If they do not do it I will override the governors.”

May 21 – (on being tested for COVID-19) “I tested very positively in another sense. I tested positively toward negative. I tested perfectly this morning, meaning I tested negative.”

May 24 – (when asked about a Columbia University report which showed that thousands of lives could have been spared if the lockdown had been introduced earlier) “Columbia is a liberal, disgraceful institution to write that because all the people that they cater to were months after me [alluding to his January travel ban on foreign nationals from China]. It’s a disgrace that Columbia University would do it, playing right to their little group of people that tell them what to do.”

May 24 – “Schools in our country should be opened ASAP. Much very good information now available.”

May 24 – “Some stories about the fact that in order to get outside and perhaps, even a little exercise, I played golf over the weekend. The Fake & Totally Corrupt News makes it sound like a mortal sin – I knew this would happen! What they don’t say is that it was my first golf in almost… 3 months and, if I waited 3 years, they would do their usual “hit” pieces anyway. They are sick with hatred and dishonesty. They are truly deranged! They don’t mention Sleepy Joe’s poor work ethic, or all of the time Obama spent on the golf course, often flying to…Hawaii in a big, fully loaded 747, to play. What did that do to the so-called Carbon Footprint? He also played moments after the brutal killing by ISIS of a wonderful young man. Totally inappropriate – and it was me who shattered 100% of the ISIS Caliphate. I was left a MESS!” [Obama wasn’t the president when Daniel Pearl was murdered on 1 February 2002.]

May 25 – “I love the Great State of North Carolina so much so that I insisted on having the Republican National Convention in Charlotte at the end of August. We would be spending millions of dollars building the Arena to a very high standard without even knowing if the Democratic Governor would allow the Republican Party to fully occupy the space. If not, we will be reluctantly forced … to find, with all of the jobs and economic development it brings, another Republican National Convention site.”

May 25 – (when asked by a reporter if he would have done anything differently facing the crisis) “Well, nothing. If you take New York and New Jersey — which were very hard hit — we were very, very low…. We’ve done, you know, amazingly well.”

May 26 – “Great News: The boring but very nasty magazine, The Atlantic, is rapidly failing, going down the tubes, and has just been forced to announce it is laying off at least 20% of its staff in order to limp into the future. This is a tough time to be in the Fake News Business!”

May 29 – (on severing the US’s relationship with the WHO) “China’s cover up of the Wuhan virus allowed the disease to spread throughout the world. Chinese officials ignored their reporting obligations to the World Health Organisation.”

*June 10 – “You’ve got 30 names you can call this thing. I call it the plague from China. The plague. And it’s not good. And it’s not good. It could have been stopped in China but they decided not to do that and we’ll have to figure that one out won’t we.”

June 5 – “”Remember this: When you have more tests, you have more cases. I say to my people: Every time we test, you find cases because we do more testing. So if we have more cases — if we wanted to do testing in China or in India or other places, I promise you, there’d be more cases.”

June 8- “So we were able to close our country, save millions of lives, open.  And now the trajectory is great.”

June 11- “And I hope that the lockdown — governors, I don’t know why they continue to lock down, because if you look at Georgia, if you look at Florida, if you look at South Carolina, if you look at so many different places that have opened up — I don’t want to name all of them, but the ones that are most energetic about opening, they are doing tremendous business.  And that — this is what these numbers are all about”. [After lifting the lockdown, there has been a surge in new cases in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. On June 12 Oregon paused its reopening as cases began to multiply. Arizona reported a 49% increase in hospitalizations since Memorial Day. Texas has had a 36% increase in new cases over the same period.]

June 11- “A gift from China — not good.  They should have stopped it.  They should have stopped it at the source.  But it’s a gift from China and a very bad gift, I will tell you that.

And you do say, “How come at Wuhan, where it started…”  And they were very badly — they were in bad trouble.  But it didn’t go to any other parts.  It didn’t go to Beijing.  It didn’t go to other parts of China.  Then you say, “How come it came out to Europe, to the world, to the United States?”  So it didn’t go to China; they stopped it cold.  They knew it was a problem.  But they didn’t stop it cold from coming to the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world.  Somebody has to ask these questions, and we’ll get down to the answer.” [The claim that the virus did not reach Beijing was fact-checked by Agence France-Presse and found to be false.]

The lockdowns in pandemic hotspots worldwide tend to be in major urban areas with high population densities and, understandably, receive the most attention from the media. New York, London, Mumbai, Lagos, San Paolo, and Paris, for instance, are/were places a person in a high-risk group would probably not want to be if they had a choice.

So, what if you live in a small college town in a rural county in the mountainous area of Virginia, the county with a population of 100,000 and the town 30,000 (along with 30,000 students during the academic year), where 91 people have so far tested positive for the virus with 1 fatality?

Surely, you, in my case a 72-year-old with asthma, but otherwise fairly fit and healthy, would feel safe?

As always the answer is– it depends, because such matters have underlying imponderables (the ghastly Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns”).

In Virginia, a business is considered by law to be a person, and is therefore protected by privacy laws. Hence, for instance, a nursing home does not have to disclose if it has been a virus hot spot. Rumour fills the informational void, and the one fatality in the county is believed to have occurred on the outskirts of Blacksburg.

If the tally of Covid infections jumps by 4 cases a day in a small rural area, speculation does arise.

Moreover, testing in rural areas, even though I in live in a town with a well-known university, has been sketchy, despite the fact that Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam, is the only US governor who is a medical doctor, and has taken flak from the inhabitant in the White House for his cautious and thoughtful approach throughout the pandemic.

Before the lockdown was imposed, an academic friend of ours living in our county returned from a conference abroad, and developed symptoms. No test was available until the symptoms passed, though subsequent testing revealed the presence of Covid antibodies. We know two other people whose symptoms passed before they could be tested.

Despite Trump’s boasts about US testing levels, the experience of our friends is reported to be common in many rural areas in the US.

Governor Ralph Northam is a centrist Democrat aligned with Virginia’s two centre-right senators— Tim Kaine and Mark Warner— and is well-known for his support of corporate interests when it comes to environmental issues such as the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

However, Northam has received praise in many quarters where the Covid crisis is concerned. And not only that– he also declined Trump’s request to send the Virginia National Guard to “restore order” in Washington DC, and ordered the removal of the statue of Robert E Lee from Richmond, Virginia’s capital and the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

A mixed bag is Northam, therefore, like Kaine and Warner.

Virginia governors can only serve one term, and are “dead ducks” as a matter of constitutional necessity. In some cases, with no need to think about their prospects of being reelected, this or that governor can grab opportunities to cash in on their office (a case in point being Virginia’s last Republican governor, the Pat Robertson protégé and grifter Bob McDonnell), in others it serves as a buttress for principles not evident when they took office.

And of course, in some cases it is both, since venality and scruple certainly coexist in the same individual depending on circumstances. Not every public figure is Eleanor Roosevelt or Nelson Mandela.

The current Virginia governor has done a decent job dealing with the pandemic, but rural Virginia does not have a consistent record of support for Democratic politicians. Our college town is solidly Democratic, the surrounding rural areas are in Trumplandia.

Virginia has been a purple state since the Clinton presidency– Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by a 5% margin in 2016, and Biden is expected to take the state by a comfortable margin in November.

Less certain than this is how rural Appalachia will cope with a virus second wave, especially when students return to campus for the fall semester from all parts of the country, and as the flu season starts to overlap with the Covid pandemic.

I self-insolate as much as possible.

There was a necessary visit to my periodontist a couple of weeks ago (he and his staff had full-on PPE). Our groceries are either delivered by the national-chain supermarket or picked-up curbside at our organic food store. We go to our Farmers’ Market one day a week, where barriers have been set up to ensure distancing between customers.

For the rest we try to find alternatives to the Bezos Monster, but alas have still to rely on Amazon for several items.

Friends my age, confronted with such “unknown unknowns”, say they expect to be in self-quarantine for the foreseeable future, as indeed do I. We heave a sigh of relief that we do not live in Florida or Georgia, with their Trump boot-licking governors.

SPRING FUNDRAISER

BoJo Johnson was admitted to hospital on 5^th April, after spending several days at his residence in self-isolation as a result of testing positive for the COVID-19 virus. When his condition worsened while in hospital he was put in intensive care, where he spent 3 nights before being discharged on 12^th April. He is expected make a slow recovery.

BoJo was almost killed by his fundamental unseriousness.

On 3^rd March 3, the always lighthearted and clownish BoJo joked: “I’m shaking hands continuously [sic]. I was at a hospital the other night [for one of his usual photo ops] where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know. I continue to shake hands”.

That same day, as Italy reached 79 deaths, BoJo declared that “our country remains extremely well prepared…. We already have a fantastic NHS, and fantastic testing systems and fantastic surveillance of the spread of disease.”

This of course was absolute pie-in-the-sky, as subsequent events confirmed. BoJo, like his orange-hued friend across the Atlantic, has never been able to disentangle cheerleading from leadership, or rather, he assumes that the former constitutes the latter.

On 16^th March BoJo joined a conference call with more than 60 manufacturing businesses to address the shortage of ventilators in the NHS.

Some participants came away from the conference call unimpressed with Johnson’s demeanour. “He couldn’t help but act the clown, even though he was on a call with serious CEOs from goodness knows how many companies,” one participant told POLITICO. POLITICO reported that BoJo “joked” that the initiative to build more ventilators could be known as “Operation Last Gasp”.

As of 12^th April, the total recorded death toll in the UK has risen to 10,612, with 84,279 cases confirmed. Like the US, the UK only counts hospital deaths, and it is estimated that there are over 1000 deaths in care facilities and individual homes.

The government has come under fire for its slow initial response and a lack of preparedness, and there is criticism from doctors and nurses who said they were having to treat patients without proper personal protective equipment (PPE) such as masks and gloves.

Among those to have died after testing positive for COVID-19 are 19 health care workers including 11 doctors.

BoJo’s government has replicated some of the mistakes made by Trump’s administration.

A lack of preparation led to slow decision-making, when this need not have been the case.

The roots of the problem go back to the government of BoJo’s predecessor, the equally shallow but less buffoonish David Cameron.

An excellent article by Richard Stokoe, whose field is planning for disasters and civil contingencies at the University of South Wales, shows in detail that “the roots of the pandemic are deeper, systemic and have been years in the making”.

Stokoe provides a detailed account of the UK’s chain of responsibility when it comes to dealing with disasters (not just pandemics).

The Cabinet Office is responsible for modelling predictions of the next disaster to hit the UK, in order to make plans for prevention and mitigation.

This process involves the creation of the National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies. The first Register was produced in 2008, and updated editions were released in 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015 and most recently in 2017.

In each of these editions one possibility remained constant– every National Risk Register has pandemic flu (along the lines of the 1918 Spanish Flu) as the most likely  catastrophic threat to the UK.

The assumption in the Registers was that each identifiable risk would generate workable plans, procedures, and systems to manage the disaster in question.

The aim was to have these in place for immediate implementation once the disaster struck.

Stokoe says that even though pandemic flu was consistently identified as the most likely potential disaster, the last strategy designed to tackle a catastrophic flu epidemic was produced 9 years ago, with a few addenda added in 2014.

This 70-page document was then left to lie on the shelf by the Tory government of David Cameron.

Another important aspect of disaster-planning is communication. The pivot-point for this in the UK in case of a flu pandemic, is the government’s UK Pandemic Influenza Communications Strategy, written in 2012, and designed to provide timely and accurate information to the public.

The document has never been updated, and given the searing pace of advances in communications technology, it might as well belong to the Stone Age.

Stokoe says that the document contains no mention of the important phrases used by officialdom in the COVID-19 pandemic, such as “social distancing”, the “cluster effect”, or “flattening the curve”.

Equally short-sighted and downright irresponsible, the guide to dealing with fatalities during the pandemic, containing supposed key named contacts, was last published in 2008.

Meanwhile, the government’s Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Team based in the Department of Health, and tasked with tackling a crisis of this nature, has not been seen since 2011.

In apportioning responsibility for these failures, it is hard to tell if they were the result of deliberate policy decisions, or an indirect consequence of austerity measures which reduced the civil service by one-third, or a consequence of the Brexit process, which diverted a shorthanded and overstretched civil service into managing the UK’s divorce from the EU.

In any event, such apportioning is irrelevant in the midst of the current pandemic, since the commission of inquiry which is bound to be set up once the plague is over will have this as part of its remit. Though cynics may note, rightly, that such commissions usually exist to provide the customary whitewash.

Far more important for now is the fact that the Tory government is working half-blind, bereft of the latest tools for gathering evidence, without up-to-date policies or science, and so is behind the coronavirus curve rather than flattening it.

The government, caught napping or with its pants down (perhaps the more appropriate metaphor since its head is the priapic BoJo Johnson), is having to engage in short-term improvisation as it responds to events without having even a modicum of control over them. Or it is having to look over its collective shoulder to learn how other better-prepared countries are responding to the crisis.

Symptomatic of this is the government’s daily press briefing, in which a government minister features alongside two government-employed senior health professionals. A reporter usually asks why the UK’s response to the crisis has been much inferior to Germany’s.

Those at the podium just shrug their shoulders and say nothing, even though the answer to the reporter’s question is readily available.

The simple answer (which those at the podium already know, but this is an answer that cannot speak its name at a government presser):

Germany has 28000 critical care beds vs the UK’s 6000.

Germany has twice as many doctors, and 4 times as many ventilators.

Germany’s health service has not undergone 10 years of cuts, and its nurses have not faced a 7-year wage freeze.

BoJo and his colleagues are just not up to the job of dealing with this crisis.

Since he entered parliament in 2014 (he was mayor of London before that), Johnson has voted for every cut to the NHS, and he voted against a pay increase for nurses in 2017, despite the fact that their wages had been frozen since 2010.

In 2018, during a meeting on a failing hospital in his constituency with a junior health minister and NHS bosses BoJo asked: “can’t we get some sort of American company to take it over?”.

During the Brexit referendum campaign in 2016, BoJo used a German-made tour bus with “We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead”. Only a fraction of this sum has been seen by the NHS.

In the December 2019 general election campaign, BoJo promised “40 new hospitals” for the NHS. It was subsequently revealed that funds would only be provided for modifications to 6 existing hospitals.

In a display of nauseating hypocrisy before he tested positive for COVID-19, BoJo led the weekly Thursday evening clapping ritual for NHS workers.

Now that he has been discharged from hospital, the UK media are full of guff about a likely BoJo change of heart on the NHS, given that its staff have saved his life.

Speaking in a video message just hours after leaving hospital, BoJo said he had left hospital “after a week in which the NHS has saved my life, no question”.

Does this statement reflect a possible change of heart on his part towards the NHS? It may, but the odds are stacked against this possibility.

Firstly, BoJo is an inveterate liar, and asking him to stick by any of his pledges (“40 new NHS hospitals”, etc.) will be akin to asking the proverbial leopard to change its spots.

Secondly, BoJo’s cabinet is the most rightwing in British history, and stacked with “free market” ideologues bent on destroying the NHS, and they will not give easy acquiescence to any such change of heart on his part.

Thirdly, the NHS is a vast and hugely complex entity (it is the UK’s largest employer). BoJo, apart from matters involving Eros, is known to have the attention span of a fruit fly, and halting the NHS’s decline after a decade of its being undermined by the Tories will require sustained attention to these complexities. Going by his past history, this task will be beyond BoJo.

Meanwhile, it is predicted that the UK’s COVID-19 death toll will be the largest in Europe.

Rather than place Trump’s statements in strict chronological order, I have sometimes put 2 or more of statements from different days together, to highlight Trump’s contradictions and subsequent deviations– these are prefaced by an asterisk. I have retained Trump’s numerous linguistic infelicities. It should be noted that Trump sometimes refers to himself in the third person:

Jan 22 –- “We have it totally under control. It is one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

Jan 22– “No, the coronavirus won’t become a pandemic. Not at all.”

*March 17 -– “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

Jan 24 -– “It will all work out well.”

Jan 30 –- “We have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at the moment – five. And those people are all recuperating successfully.”

Feb 10 –- “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

*April 3— “ “I didn’t say a date. … I said it’s going away, and it is going away.”

Feb 19 –- “I think the numbers are getting progressively better as we go.”

Feb 20 –- “…within a couple of days, is going to be down to close to zero.”

Feb 22 -– “We have it very much under control in this country.”

Feb 24— “The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock market starting to look very good to me.”

Feb 25 -– “…the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus… they tried the impeachment hoax … and this is their new hoax.” (to Sean Hannity)

Feb 26 – “It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for and we will essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.”

*Feb 29 -– “Everything is really under control.” (The vaccine will be available) “very rapidly.”

*March 2 -– “You take a solid flu vaccine — you don’t think that would have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?” [“No,” Dr Schleifer replied.]

Feb 26 -– “We’re going down, not up.”

Feb 26 -– “But with Ebola — we were talking about it before — you disintegrated. If you got Ebola, that was it. This one is different. Much different. This is a flu. This is like a flu. And this is a much different situation than Ebola. … We can now treat Ebola. In that — at that time, it was infectious and you couldn’t treat it. Nobody knew anything about it. Nobody had ever heard of anything like this. So it’s a much different situation”.

March 2 -– “It’s very mild.”

March 3– (saying he doesn’t want to let people off the Grand Princess cruise ship because the number of coronavirus cases in the country would go up) “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.”

March 4 –- (on the WHO saying the coronavirus death rate is 3.4%) “I think the 3.4% number is really a false number. Now this is just my hunch, but based on a lot of conversations … personally, I’d say the number is way under 1%.”

March 4– “…we’re talking about very small numbers in the United States.”

March 4– “So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better”.

*March 5—“I never said that people who were feeling sick should go to work”.

March 4– “I think that Easter Sunday and you’ll have packed churches all over this country, I think that this will be a beautiful time.”

*March 29 –” “Social distancing rules will be extended to 30 April. My open for Easter plans were only aspirational.”

*April 4— “We’re not going to churches on Palm Sunday. But think of next Sunday: Easter. And I brought it up before, I said, maybe we could allow a special for churches. Maybe we could talk about it. Maybe we could allow them with great separation outside on Easter Sunday.”

March 6 -– (visiting the CDC) “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘how do you know so much about this?’ maybe I have a natural ability.’ Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

March 6– “Anybody that needs a test gets a test. We –- they’re there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful”.

March 6—(at Fox News Town Hall) Well, actually, we were giving — I think really given tremendous marks — if you look at Gallup poll, you look at other polls — for the way we’ve handled it.…

[W]e’ve been given rave reviews….

So we were really given tremendous marks…

Again, we’ve gotten the highest poll numbers of anybody for this kind of a thing. …

We’ve been given A-pluses for that….

Well, I think people are viewing us as having done a very good job.

March 7– “I’m not concerned at all. No, we’ve done a great job with it.”

*March 30– “If we could hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000, that’s a horrible number, maybe even less, but to 100,000 — so we have between 100- and 200,000 — we altogether have done a very good job.”

*March 31– “I want every American to be prepared for the tough days ahead. This is going to be a very, very painful two weeks.” [As American fatalities surpass those in China.]

March 30– “We’ve tested more now than any nation in the world. We’ve got these great tests…. I haven’t heard about testing being a problem.” [South Korea, which reported its first COVID-19 test the same day as the United States’ first, has tested 40 times more people than the US on a per-capita basis.]

*April 2– “We’ve tested more than any other country in the world both in terms of the raw number, and also on a per capita basis, the most.” [The reality regarding testing per capita– Germany: 1 in 90 people, South Korea: 1 in 119 people, US: 1 in 273 people]

March 10 -– “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

March 10– “I’ve been briefed on every contingency you could possibly imagine. Many contingencies. A lot of positive. Different numbers, all different numbers. Very large numbers. And some small numbers, too, by the way.”

* March 30—””You know, I see things — I see numbers. They don’t matter to me.”

March 18—“We have tremendous numbers of ventilators, but there’s never been an instance like this where no matter what you have, it’s not enough.”

*March 26– “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You know, you go into major hospitals sometimes and they’ll have two ventilators.”

*March 30—”Many of the states are stocked up. Some of them don’t admit it, but they have — we have sent just so much — so many things to them and — including ventilators.”

*April 1– “We have, as you know, almost 10,000 ventilators which we need for flexibility. It’s sounds like a lot but it’s not.”

*April 3– “We are doing the best we can… We happen to think [Governor Andrew Cuomo] is well served with ventilators. We are going to find out.” (As China is sending thousands of ventilators to New York]

March 13– “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

March 16 –-(asked to rate his own performance) “I’d rate it a ten.”

March 17 –-“The only thing we haven’t done well is to get good press. We’ve done a fantastic job but it hasn’t been appreciated. Even the closing down of the borders, which had never been done, and not only did we close them but we closed it early. The press doesn’t like writing about it.”

March 19— “Other countries are following what I did”.

March 20—(touting an untested malaria drug as a possible cure for COVID-19) “I will say that I am a man that comes from a very positive school when it comes to in particular one of these drugs, and we’ll see how it works out… I’m not saying it will, but I think people may be surprised. By the way, that would be a game-changer.”

March 25– “The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success.”

March 27– “22 days ago we had the greatest economy in the world, everything was going beautifully, the stock market hit an all-time high”. [On March 5, 22 days before Trump’s statement, the Dow dropped 3.6% or 970 points, then its fifth-worst single-day point drop on record.]

March 28– “We’ve had a big problem with the young, a woman governor from, you know who I’m talking about, from Michigan. So we can’t, you know, we don’t like to see the complaints.”

*March 30– “I get on a lot of the governor calls where we’ll have all 50 governors… And I’ll tell you what, if you could listen to those calls, you’d never hear a complaint.”

March 29– “It’s a New York hospital. How do you go from 10 to 20 [thousand masks per week] to 300,000? Ten [thousand] to 20,000 masks, to 300,000 – something is going on, and you ought to look into it as reporters. Are they going out the back door?”

March 29– “President Trump is a ratings hit. Since reviving the daily White House briefing Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, roughly the viewership of the season finale of ‘The Bachelor.’ Numbers are continuing to rise…”

March 30– (on Nancy Pelosi’s criticism of his handling of the virus crisis) “She’s a sick puppy in my opinion. She really is. She’s got a lot of problems… My poll numbers are the highest they’ve ever been because of her.”

March 30– “I don’t have to call because I’m probably better off not, because we don’t get — he’s a failed presidential candidate. He’s a nasty person. I don’t like the governor of Washington [Jay Inslee].”

March 30– “It’s almost a miracle the way it’s all come together…”

March 30– “So we have more cases than anybody, but we’re doing really well, and we also have a very low — relative to other countries — very low mortality rate. And there are reasons for that.” [It’s too early to know actual death rates from COVID-19 in any country.]

March 30– “I know South Korea better than anybody. It’s very tight. Do you know how many people are in Seoul? Do you know how big the city of Seoul is? Thirty-eight million people. That’s bigger than anything we have.” [The population of Seoul is less than 10m. South Korea’s population is 51 million.]

March 30– “We inherited a broken test.” [There could be no test for COVID-19 until it emerged.]

March 30— “I stopped some very, very infected, very, very sick people, thousands coming in from China long earlier than anybody thought, including the experts. Nobody thought we should do it except me. And I stopped everybody. We stopped it cold.” [The travel ban was a consensus recommendation from Trump’s public-health task force.]

March 30– “Unfortunately, the enemy is death. It’s death. A lot of people are dying, so it’s very unpleasant. It’s a very unpleasant thing to go through.”

*April 4—“… there will be a lot of death, unfortunately.”

March 30— “I didn’t say that.”

March 30— “This is really easy to be negative about. But I want to give people hope too. You know I’m a cheerleader for the country — we are going through the worst thing that the country has probably ever seen.”

March 31—(on his daily press briefings) “I’m sure people are enjoying it. I will say this: It’s an incredibly dark topic, an incredibly horrible topic, and it’s incredibly interesting. That’s why everybody is going crazy, they’re going crazy, they can’t get enough of it.”

April 1– “I have hundreds of millions of people. Number one on Facebook … Did you know? I just found out.”

April 1– “He [Dr Fauci] was a great basketball player, did anybody know that? He was a little on the short side for the NBA but he was talented.”

April 1– (When a Fox News reporter asked him a tough question) “What are you, working for CNN?”

April 2– “Massive amounts of medical supplies, even hospitals and medical centers, are being delivered directly to states and hospitals by the Federal Government. Some have insatiable appetites & are never satisfied (politics?). Remember, we are a backup for them. The complainers should…”

April 2– (when Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the appointment of a bipartisan House committee to investigate the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic) “This is not the time for politics. Endless partisan investigations –- here we go again – have already done extraordinary damage to our country in recent years. You see what happens. It’s witch-hunt after witch-hunt after witch-hunt and, in the end, the people doing the witch-hunt have been losing, and they’ve been losing by a lot. It’s not any time for witch-hunts.”

April 2— “By the way, the states should have been building their stockpiles. We’re a backup, we’re not an ordering clerk. Whoever heard of a governor calling up the federal government and saying, ‘Sir, we need a hospital?’”

April 2– “I will always protect your Social Security, your Medicare and your Medicaid” [Trump has always supported cuts to these in the past.]

April 3– (When asked why the US failed to stockpile enough medical supplies for the current emergency) “Speak to the people from the previous administration. The shelves were empty.” [Trump has been president since 2017, and ignored early warnings of a forthcoming pandemic, including from his own HHS secretary. Three months before the first COVID-19 cases began spreading through China, Trump’s administration ended a $200m early warning programme intended to alert it to potential pandemics.]

April 3— (When asked by a reporter for clarification on Jared Kushner’s statement about the federal stockpile of medical supplies being “ours”) “You oughtta be ashamed of yourself for asking that question.”

April 3– “The models show hundreds of thousands of people are going to die and you know what I want to do? I want to come way under the model. The professionals did the models and I was never involved in a model. At least this kind of a model.”

April 4– “”caranavirus” [mispronunciation]

April 4—“ “So I want to keep them out of ventilators, I want to keep them — if this drug works, it will be not a game changer because that’s not a nice enough term. It will be wonderful, it’ll be so beautiful, it’ll be a gift from heaven if it works, because when people go into those ventilators, you know the answers, and I’m glad you don’t write about it.”

The UK has been preoccupied with its roiling Brexit psychodrama since 2016.

Brexit has to be seen in the larger context of the UK’s incomplete recovery from the 2008 financial crisis—a context which not only complicated the Brexit imbroglio, but also served as a wider arena for the exposure of several fractures in the UK’s political and constitutional arrangements.

These unresolved fractures— social (class divisions especially); economic (growing income disparities); cultural (the “culture wars” are integral to electoral alignments around Brexit); regional (the north-south divide); national (it is easy to forget that the UK is a multinational state, and the issue of Scottish nationalism and the status of northern Ireland featured prominently in Brexit decision-making); and European—are a further underlying context for the UK’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

BoJo Johnson has now tested positive for the virus, along with his health minister, and Prince Charles.

BoJo, who has only one register affording him ease and comfort, a breezy nonchalance, was bragging a short time before that about how he visited hospitals (for photo ops) and shook the hands of everyone he encountered.

The mainstream media should have shown him little sympathy for his reckless self-inflating opportunism, though this was not forthcoming. After all, the preening bastard was putting frontline health professionals at risk in an absolutely vital time merely for his photo ops.

BoJo is 55 years old, and thus not really in one of the COVID-19 risk categories (unless, given his unrelenting erotic enthusiasm, an undisclosed sexually-transmitted disease turns out to be a medical issue potentially complicating his positive test-finding), so he’ll survive this.

But, as is the case with his pal Trump in the US, something like the equivalent of a nation-wide Stockholm Syndrome has kicked in for BoJo.

BoJo, though not the proverbial rocket scientist, is much better informed generally (and less demented!) than his orange-hued American counterpart, and so, for instance, knows that hospitals caring for COVID-19 patients need more than 2 ventilators each, and that making egregious suggestions regarding possible “cures” for the virus is best left to those better trained in science and medicine!

At the same time, shades of Trump, BoJo’s approach to the COVID-19 crisis, while cavalier and careless, has actually ensued in a significant increase in his UK opinion-poll popularity!

The world is of course a rather strange place, but this is pretty much the functional equivalent of an inept African despot increasing his 89% popularity-rating to 99% simply because the Ebola virus afflicted his country, as he did fuck-all about it until it was too late!

Social media has invoked the Stockholm Syndrome as the most plausible explanation of such irrationality.

There are now 17,089 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the UK, with 1,228 deaths. However, the total number of people tested for the virus was 120,776, as of Saturday morning (testing began at the end of January).

Given that the UK’s population is just under 68 million, the number of people tested so far is pathetically small, and it is fair to assume that there are people with the virus among those untested.

The government wants to increase the number of tests to 10,000 a day by the end of March and 25,000 a day by mid-April.

Among the dead are 2 frontline NHS surgeons, their deaths almost certainly caused by a lack of adequate protective equipment.

BoJo has been all over the place in his response to the crisis.

He rejected EU coordination for the production and availably of ventilators (the UK is a member of the EU until the end of this year), fearing that this collaboration would be seen by hardline Brexiters as a weakening of his resolve to leave the EU.

BoJo urged people to stay away from at-risk relatives before telling reporters he would be going to see his mother on Mother’s Day (which fell on 22^nd March in the UK).

In the letter being sent to 30 million households at an anticipated cost of £5.8m/$7.2m, BoJo writes mendaciously: “From the start, we have sought to put in the right measures at the right time. We will not hesitate to go further if that is what the scientific and medical advice tells us we must do”.

Not often mentioned at length by the government are the economic consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak. The costs incurred by Brexit will almost certainly put the UK economy into recession, and this will be compounded by the impact of the COVID-19 crisis.

UK economic output is expected to fall by an unprecedented 15% in the second quarter of 2020, and unemployment to more than double, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), as businesses shut down and consumer spending plunges as a result of wide-scale lockdowns.

All this is in spite of £330bn/$411bn of government-backed loans for businesses, as well as an extension of business rates relief, both emergency measures taken as a result of the pandemic.

The government has also committed to paying 80% of the salary for workers unable to work during the pandemic, up to a maximum of £2,500/$3100 per month, if they are still on their employer’s payroll.

One further step taken by BoJo is to call in the team of spin doctors used by him in his general election victory a few months ago.

Spin doctors are only good for one thing– “controlling the message”—and propaganda put out by professional liars is the last thing the British public needs in these desperate times.

David Nabarro, Chair of Global Health and co-Director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) at Imperial College, London, said that now is not a “time for blame” but for “collective struggles”, but the Trump and BoJo strategy is the opposite, namely, using “populist” measures to divide and rule their respective electorates.

In any event, Dr Nabarro is wrong– “blame” and “collective struggle” are not mutually exclusive. I’m sure some Brits are not going to swallow everything dished out by BoJo’s spin doctors, and damn right they are!

I’ve been in New Delhi for over a week, attending a conference organized by the Muslim-majority Jamia Millia Islamia University. Jamia has been a focal-point of protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) which came into law in December last year.

The CAA provides a fast-track to citizenship for refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, who sought refuge in India prior to 2015. The CAA does not however include Muslims, while including Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Christian and Parsi refugees.

Every non-Muslim Indian I spoke with at the conference said the CAA is patently discriminatory, and also violates India’s constitution, which stipulates that citizenship cannot be linked to religion.

Trump, accompanied by three members of his grifter family (daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared, with Melania tagging along as the perpetual afterthought) arrived for a state visit on my last day in India.

The routes taken by Trump’s motorcade were lined by hundreds of billboards with slogans such as “two dynamic personalities” (hardly describes Trump with the oodles of “executive time” he takes to watch Fox News and the aeons he spends on golf courses), “great democracies” (with two leaders doing their best to undermine those democracies), and so on.

In addition to Delhi Trump was also due to visit Ahmedabad, taking in Gandhi’s ashram near the latter.

Gandhi’s reputation is at a bit of an ebb in Hindu-nationalist India. He is deemed by more extreme nationalists to have been too “pally” with Muslims, and there are web-sites in India which glorify the memory of Gandhi’s ultra-nationalist and Muslim-hating assassin.

So is the decision of the Modi government to take a palpable scoundrel and rake like Trump to Gandhi’s ashram perhaps an ever-so-subtle attempt to besmirch further the reputation of the Mahatma by having the orange-hued villain set foot in a place revered by many Indians?

In any event, the slums en route to the ashram were shielded from Trump’s eyes by the simple expedient of building a tall wall.

An Indian academic joked with me: “Trump finally got his wall, courtesy of the Indian government, but not where he wanted it!”. An aside: “India paid for Trump’s wall, not Mexico!”.

Attempts to foster Trump’s aesthetic sensibilities are not being confined to wall-building around a slum.

Trump held a rally before going on to the Taj Mahal. He bragged that the crowd in a stadium with a capacity of 110,000 was “the biggest ever”. Someone should have reminded him that the crowd at Gandhi’s funeral was estimated at over 2 million.

When Trump visited the Taj Mahal, fresh water was pumped into the Sabarmati River in Gujarat and the Yamuna River in Agra, to produce the comforting impression that these usually noxious, sewage-filled, and malodorous rivers are anything but that.

The Taj Mahal was built by the Muslim Emperor Shah Jahan, though the Islamophobic Trump might have overlooked this because he probably thought it was built by Disney India.

Petty political gestures are not alien to Trump and Modi. Melania Trump was due to visit a school in Delhi with an innovative “happiness curriculum”. Delhi state is governed by the AAP, which trounced Modi’s BJP in recent state elections, and its chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his deputy Manish Sisodia were due to welcome Melania Trump at the school (the curriculum had been introduced by the AAP government in 2018).

US officials informed Kejriwal and his deputy they had been dropped from the invitation list a couple of days before the visit, which had been organized by the US embassy. Modi’s office offered no comment, but it is clear the BJP central government had put pressure on American officials to exclude Kejriwal and Sisodia from the event.

Trump’s popularity in India in India far exceeds the ratings he gets in polls conducted in the US. A Pew Research poll conducted here shortly before his visit showed that 56% of those polled expressed “confidence” in Trump, almost matching the 58% achieved by Obama just before he left office.

The Times of India says of the Pew survey:

“As more Indians become familiar with Trump, his popularity is on the rise, says the survey, attributing the positivity in part to the Indian right-wing, pejoratively referred to as “bhakts” in liberal circles and often compared to Trump’s MAGA base.

“Those who associate more with Indian Prime Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party are more likely than supporters of the Indian National Congress opposition party to voice confidence in Trump. (Those who are closer to the BJP are also more likely to offer an opinion”, the survey says….)”.

Trump will of course get a “bigly” ego-massage from these ratings, even if their basis is provided by a section of Indian society that is less educated and often poorly informed– not that he gives a rat’s arse about this!

Trump may tweet sitting atop a kitschy golden toilet, but the much less privileged, some affected by “Shit-Life Syndrome” with only a white identity to serve as their emblem of a presumed superiority, are precisely his source of support and solace.

Incidentally, Benjamin Netanyahu is another politician popular with the Right in India, of course for his viciousness towards the Muslim-majority Palestinians.

Meanwhile the Jamia students detained by the police for protesting against the CAA are regarded as “political prisoners” by their supporters.

The protests against the CAA are continuing, and each day brings new revelations about what happened during the disturbances at Jamia and Delhi’s other well-known left-leaning university, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).

The Times of India reports that 4 CCTV clips taken from the Jamia university library indicate that some Hindu-supremacist Jamia students, past and present, were with the thugs from outside campus who invaded Jamia on 15^th December last year.

There had been news reports previously that the police simply stood around while students were beaten-up by the mob. The Washington Post reports that some cops joined in the attacks on students.

The Times of India article mentioned above also says that the CCTV clips show some policemen smashing CCTV cameras, presumably in a complicitous attempt to thwart the identification of rioters for later criminal charges.

Everyone I spoke with from Jamia (and JNU, see below) said it was clear the police were accomplices of the thugs on both campuses.

As mentioned, an attack by rightwing goons took place at JNU last month. Though the rioters at JNU were masked, some were recognized as members of a Hindu-nationalist student organization, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (ABVP), which is the youth wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

The RSS has been around for a relatively long time—it was founded 94 years ago by fervent admirers of Mussolini.

Gandhi’s assassin was an RSS member, and the flavour of Modi’s politics is conveyed by the fact that he began attending meetings of the RSS when he was 8 years old (1958), and has been a member of it for 43 years.

A gleichschaltung is taking place in Modi’s India.

The above-mentioned Washington Post article says that the Indian corporate media, with profit margins in mind, has fallen in line with the BJP, and sacked or sidelined those journalists who are critical of the BJP and its policies.

I had dinner with a Delhi-based fellow CounterPuncher. Our conversation focused on Indian politics, and touched on the CAA, due to come before the Indian Supreme Court, and Article 370 of the Indian constitution, conferring a special status to Jammu and Kashmir, which the BJP government had abrogated, and is also due to come before the Supreme Court.

My friend told me that Modi had tilted the Supreme Court towards the BJP. As if to prove him right, a couple of days after our dinner there was a media report in which Supreme Court Justice Arun Mishra, speaking at a conference, called Modi an “internationally acclaimed visionary” and a “versatile genius, who thinks globally and acts locally”.

Not even US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh would go in for such colossal arse-licking and describe Trump in these terms!

Academics who are BJP stooges are being made heads of universities, and given the task of making life wretched for their leftwing colleagues.

I met a professor at the conference who has taken out 3 lawsuits against the head (Vice-Chancellor) of his university. He’s just won the first case, and is fairly confident the other two will go his way.

Towards the end of 2019 the JNU administration attempted to turn the screws on Romila Thapar, professor emerita of Ancient Indian History at JNU, and doyenne of Indian historians, by asking her for a copy of her curriculum vitae (CV), to review her status as professor emerita.

The university authorities justified the move on the bogus grounds of changes in JNU’s rules and regulations regarding the continuation of a professor emeritus after turning 75.

This is a cock-and-bull rationale.

The title “Emeritus/Emerita” is bestowed for life on scholars of sufficient accomplishment upon retirement. It is purely honorary, carries no stipend, is for achievement up to the point of retirement, and so is beyond review after being conferred (unless hitherto unknown facts establishing the gross moral turpitude of the awardee come to light after their retirement, and so forth).

(I speak as an emeritus at my American university.)

In 2003 Thapar was appointed to the US Library of Congress’s Kluge Chair. Her appointment was opposed in an online petition containing more than 2,000 signatures, on the grounds that she was a “Marxist and anti-Hindu”, and that it was a “waste of US money” to support a leftist. The Library of Congress ignored the petition, and Thapar became its Kluge Professor.

As in the US, the teaching of history in India is a frontline for rightwingers, religious bigots, and racial and ethnic supremacists, as they seek to alter the content of textbooks to reflect their warped view of the past.

Professor Thapar has not minced words by in effect telling her Hindu chauvinist critics to crawl back under their rocks, hence their antipathy towards her.

The Hindustan Times had a piece on the head of Visva Bharati University, Kolkata, Vice-Chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty, who caused controversy when he described Congress Party supporters wearing Nehruvian white caps ”as the country’s biggest thieves”. A video clip has also emerged of Chakrabarty questioning protesters about their opposition to the CAA. The man is clearly doing everything the BJP requires of a university head.

Modi is foisting a version of neoliberalism on India in the name of “development”, one which has benefitted the country’s plutocracy, but done little for its working-class economically.

Modi has provided the large Hindu majority with a Muslim enemy, thereby concealing his failure to deal with the abject poverty afflicting hundreds of millions of Indians— despite revising the definition of poverty to exclude those making 26 rupees/US 36 cents or more a day, 400 million Indians live below the poverty line.

Ordinary men and women are being instigated to blame Muslims and left-wingers for their economic predicament, while Modi and his crew of scoundrels are let off the hook.

Little wonder Trump and Modi, authoritarians both, get along like a house on fire.

The day Trump arrived in Delhi there were disturbances between pro- and anti-CAA protesters, involving stone-throwing, buildings being torched, stick-wielding police charges and the use of tear gas. Four people have been killed so far, including a police constable.

The Trump-Modi love fest will float tranquilly above the fray.

Trump’s visit will conclude with a state banquet, and it will be interesting to see what will be on the menu. Trump’s staple is the beefburger, and the BJP has been playing “beef politics” since it cam to power in 2014 by fostering an anti-beef ideology.

In some cases Hindu vigilante mobs have lynched people accused of eating beef, including a tragic case in 2015 in which a Muslim man was lynched for eating what turned out to be mutton.

Part of the animus against Romila Thapar comes from her research which shows that beef eating was common in ancient India.

So will Modi, the anti-beef-eating ideologue, feed Trump his beef customary beef burger?

I am in New Delhi, attending a conference.

The conference was originally due to take place at the Muslim-majority Jamia Millia Islamia University. The university has been a centre of protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) which came into law in December last year.

The CAA grants a path to citizenship to refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, who sought refuge in India prior to 2015. The CAA does not however include Muslims, while including Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Christian and Parsi refugees. It is obviously discriminatory—for instance, there was a Muslim presence in India at last a century before the first Parsis arrived from Persia.

The disturbances at Jamia prompted the conference organizers to change the conference venue to another location in the middle of Delhi, but shortly afterwards participants were informed that the conference would now be held at a location near the airport, some distance away from Delhi’s centre.

India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) of prime minister Narendra Modi (Trump’s “good friend”), has an openly Hindu nationalist agenda.

Shortly before I arrived elections for the Legislative Assembly of the National Capital Territory of Delhi were held.

The BJP ran a stridently fearmongering anti-Muslim campaign, and was trounced, winning just 8 seats in the 70-seat assembly. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP, Common Man’s Party in English) won the remaining 62 seats. The Indian National Congress, India’s oldest party, which had ruled Delhi for 15 years until 2013, once again failed to win a single seat.

A taste of the BJP’s anti-Muslim campaign is provided by 2 episodes.

During the election campaign the BJP minister Giriraj Singh said the Muslim-majority Delhi suburb of Shaheen Bagh was a “breeding ground for suicide bombers”.

Campaigning for the BJP in Delhi, Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, well-known for stoking hatred and violence against India’s Muslims, cut to the factionalist chase by saying that (Muslim) “terrorists” should be fed with “bullets not biryani”.

BJP’s attempt to polarize the electorate obviously backfired, and the AAP returned to power in Delhi.

The AAP, led by Arvind Kejriwal, is probably the most left-wing political party in India apart from the Communist Party of India. It supports legalizing both homosexuality and same-sex marriage, has a significant anti-corruption agenda, and reduced the price of electricity when it came to power (by means of subsidies).

Kejriwal has been fighting legal battles recently over his request that AAP party members should offer bribes to BJP politicians and tape the encounters when this happened. His opponents sued, making the point that a blatant incitement to break the law is illegal. The case is continuing.

While Modi, who has been prime minister since 2014, was re-elected with a huge majority in the May 2019 national elections, at the state level the BJP has not done well in elections. Since December 2018, it has lost power in 5 states– Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand.

Modi is of humble origins, and worked at a tea stall early in his life instead of acquiring a formal education. If they seemed amenable to discussing politics, I asked some of the locals who attended the conference who typically belonged to Modi’s electoral base.

One graduate student said with a hint of exasperation: “his supporters come from the chaiwallah (street tea-seller) class”.

Ah, somewhat analogous, give or take a few obvious differences, to the demographic that supports Trump and Boris Johnson— that is, those who believed themselves to belong, probably correctly, to the “Left Behinds” created by neoliberalism and globalization.

Alas for these LBs, Modi, Trump, and BoJo Johnson are all members of neoliberalism’s executive committee, and so these LBs are the proverbial equivalent of foxes opposing a ban on fox hunting.

(OK, many Brits like me are obsessed, pro or con, about fox hunting. Tories tend to regard it as a quintessential emblem of “Britishness”, while the rest of us view it as a pursuit extraterritorial to one’s humanity.)

Trump is due to arrive in Delhi on 24^th February for a state visit. Even though the orange-hued fellow is said to make fun of Modi by mimicking his accent, the visit should go well, despite the fact that negotiations between India and the US on a trade deal have run into choppy waters.

Modi and Trump form a mutual admiration society—if Trump respects a foreign leader, then Modi in all probability ranks just behind Putin, Netanyahu, and Mohammad bin Salman, probably in a tie for fourth place with Kim Jong-un.

The bar’s not high on such matters where Trump is concerned—in fact he’d probably show the door, any door, to a Nelson Mandela, Jawaharlal Nehru, Julius Nyerere, Bruno Kreisky, or Willy Brandt. And let’s not get started on Fidel or Ho Chi-minh!

The reporting here in India, on the front page of Hindustan Times (along with an item on 2 Indians on the cruise ship quarantined in Yokohama Harbour who had contracted the COVID-19 virus), is that signing the above-mentioned US-India trade deal was going to be the centerpiece of Trump’s visit. At least that seemed to be the Indian government’s hope.

At the last moment, the US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said he was “unable to travel indefinitely” to finalize the terms of the deal prior to Trump’s visit.

India with its growing economy wants shale-extracted or “fracked” gas from the US, while the US wants Mastercard and Visa to enter the Indian credit-card market on the same terms as the Indian government-backed credit card RuPay. If this happens, RuPay will be wiped out by Mastercard and Visa, who have global resources sufficient to undercut their Indian-confined competitor.

Should we look to see how much Visa and Mastercard donate to Trump’s re-election campaign?

At the same time there are cynics here who say the trade-deal “glitch” between the US and India is merely a smokescreen for Trump and Modi, arms linked aloft in triumph, to announce to an adoring crowd on Trump’s visit that they had managed somehow to resolve the deal’s impasses thanks to their “special relationship”.

Trump can then boast once again he is the master of the “art of the deal” (“I renegotiated NAFTA, blah blah—woo hoo!”), and Modi can say to Indian voters he plays in the same league as the really big hitters amongst the world’s politicians.

Watch this space to see if the Indian cynics are right.

And meanwhile Delhi continues to be, in the words of one of my Delhi friends, the world’s most polluted major metropolitan area (now that Beijing has managed to clean-up its act thanks to very firm and forthright measures adopted by the authoritarian Chinese government).

“Blame doesn’t help anybody at this time, and over-analysis of these things is not a productive exercise”

– Australian prime minister Scott Morrison

Media-inflected “fatigue” has been in the news recently.

“Impeachment fatigue” on the part of the public is cited as the context for the sham impeachment proceedings which allowed Republican senators to dump every remaining shred of principle in their contorted attempts to exculpate Trump (Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee saying Trump was guilty but should not be removed from office because senators were bound not so much by their oath of office and the principles of the justice as by the opinions of their electorate).

Similarly “Brexit fatigue” is invoked as a reason for Boris Johnson’s recent election victory— his misleading slogan “Get Brexit done” resonated with voters allegedly fatigued by the 3 preceding years of unproductive and often farcical goings-on as Brexitannia meandered towards its divorce from Brussels.

The Australian wildfires, which started in August last year, have receded from media attention outside Australia.

The fires have (so far) killed 34 people and an estimated 1 billion native animals since August. Approximately 2,500 homes have been destroyed and more than 26.2 million acres have been razed.

Australia’s wine industry is starting to be affected by “smoke taint” caused by the wildfires. “Smoke taint” is brought about by particulates which settle on the skin of the grape and affect its taste. The entire 2020 crop has been lost in some parts of the Hunter Valley and Adelaide Hills wine regions, while many growers are harvesting only a fraction of their fruit.

While many fires continue to burn, heavy rain is falling on coastal areas, and less so in drought-affected areas inland. Fires have so far been reduced fires by a third, though flooding is now a major problem on the coast, causing widespread evacuations and power outages.

The Australian summer still has some way to go, and warm temperatures can be expected to last until April.

But has media and public fatigue set in where the fires are concerned, especially after a spell of torrential rain?

The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison (also known as ScoMo and Scotty from Marketing), seems to be counting on it as he “evolves” his government’s policy response to climate change and the continuing wildfire crisis.

In a TV interview last week Morrison said he would not “be bullied” into more action on climate change:

“We listen to Australians right across the country. Not just in the inner city…. It’s important to listen to everybody but take people forward on practical, balanced action that doesn’t go and write people’s jobs off, or industries off…. It’s about technology, not taxation. So we won’t be bullied into higher taxes or higher electricity prices. What we’ll do is take practical action that deals with these challenges”.

ScoMo heads a coalition government consisting of his centre-right Liberal party and the right-wing National party, so he has on his “left” moderates who want more done to address climate change, and on his “right” hardliners who say flat-out that the science behind climate change is a leftwing “hoax”, or that the science is somehow beyond them because they are “not scientists”.

Keeping this crew together requires ScoMo to give the appearance of doing something about climate change, but at the same time not doing anything significant enough (such as passing a carbon tax or taking concrete steps to reduce emissions) to fire-up the troglodytes in his coalition’s rightwing.

Scotty from Marketing has therefore to operate on two fronts, one policy-oriented, the other involving “messaging”.

Evidence of the latter is evident in the interview mentioned above. First comes a pitch directed at “Australians right across the country”, thereby giving the impression that ScoMo will not be “bullied” by this or that faction of Australians with their own axes to grind (while he of course remains in the pockets of carbon-energy companies possessing their own very sharp axes).

Then comes an immediate dilution of the seeming inclusivity of this pitch, as ScoMo separates-out the “inner cities” from “Australians right across the country”.

Many Aussies will know there is underlying code at work here.

As in most parts of the western world, cities tend politically to be more liberal and progressive than their rural counterparts, and so in Australia the opposition centrist Labor party has its strongholds in the cities.

Labor had introduced a carbon tax a few years ago when in government, only to have it rescinded by the coalition when it took over, so by saying he would “listen to everybody” and not just the “inner cities”, ScoMo is implying that his climate-change agenda would tilt in favour of measures that work for “everybody”, and not just the pro-environment inner cities.

Moreover, this would be done by moving “forward on practical, balanced action”, all this undertaken without threatening industries (coal!) and the jobs therein.

“Practical” and “balanced” are of course easily-recognizable as tranquilizing representations underwriting the status quo— who in their right mind likes being called “impractical” and “unbalanced”?

So what seems on the surface to be a message conveying a welcome inclusivity, turns out on inspection to be a tad more select, as Scotty signals he’ll continue to coddle carbon-energy producers and polluters, while flipping a finger at environmental activists—those irritating “inner city” types– who unlike ScoMo don’t “listen to everybody”.

This underlying coded message of partiality is confirmed by Morrison’s policy proposals. In the interview just mentioned he goes on to say:

“Hazard reduction is important, if not more important, than emissions reduction when it comes to protecting people from fire and hotter, drier, longer summers in the future.

Also, in a country ravaged by drought, and the impacts that we have experienced, and that drought continues, building dams is climate action now”.

Emissions reduction will therefore be less of a priority for ScoMo than building more dams and so-called hazard reduction.

Dam construction is a well-known double-edged phenomenon, likely if at all to be beneficial in the shorter term, while these benefits are at the same time offset by environmental problems and a diminishing cost-benefit ratio as the dam ages. In a previous CounterPunch article I discussed Australia’s “market-based” approach to dam construction, which drained waterways and stiffed small farmers while lining the pockets of agribusiness fat cats and the water companies. If Scotty wants more of this, then the small farmers are going to need divine intervention.

Hazard reduction– involving controlled burning, and removing trees and vegetation, both dead and alive– is another potential smokescreen employed by ScoMo.

Climate change, by bringing hotter and drier conditions and higher fire-danger ratings, is reducing the time-frames that allow controlled burning to be undertaken safely.

Fire chiefs have also said that some fires have been so intense they crossed areas that had already been subject to hazard reduction. One fire chief said there has been “reburning” in some places that had previously been scorched— so dry is the atmosphere that after a couple of weeks even burnt leaves were able to reignite.

In addition, hazard reduction costs money for equipment and personnel, and ScoMo’s record on being forthcoming with extra funds for fighting the wildfires is patchy (to say the least).

Rupert Murdoch’s titles account for 59% of the sales of all daily newspapers in Australia, and they have played a significant part in conveying disinformation about the wildfire crisis.

Spreading the blame and finger-pointing are well-known tactics used by politicians criticized for mishandling a crisis, and here the Murdoch media have helped Aussie conservative politicians in two respects.

Firstly, the Greens and other conservation groups were blamed for preventing hazard reduction activities by being over-zealous in safeguarding natural habitats (so-called “vegetation worship”).

The New York Times reported that Murdoch’s media empire has been instrumental in publishing claims blaming Greens for impeding hazard reduction.

Murdoch’s media also says these fires are no worse than normal.

Secondly, Murdoch’s flagship newspaper, The Australian, spread the story that the wildfires were the work of arsonists, obviously in the hope that this would detract from the assertion that climate change is the main contributing factor to the crisis.

The moronic Donnie Trump Jr quickly used Twitter to repeat the story in The Australian.

A common premise in these debunked stories is that the Australian police and firefighters are the source of what is purveyed in Murdoch’s papers.

Alas for Murdoch the police and firefighters have refused to play their part, and refuted his papers’ claims.

The Guardian reported a spokeswoman for the Victoria state police as saying “There is currently no intelligence to indicate that the fires in East Gippsland and the North East have been caused by arson or any other suspicious behaviour”.

The Guardian article also notes that according to a Rural Fire Service spokesman, “The majority of the larger fires in the state [of New South Wales] were caused by lightning, and that arson was a relatively small source of ignition”.

The claim that “vegetation worship” on the part of the Greens is impeding hazard reduction has also been discredited by officials.

The former New South Wales state Fire and Rescue Commissioner Greg Mullins wrote in The Guardian: “Blaming ‘greenies’ for stopping these important measures is a familiar, populist, but basically untrue claim”.

In 2012 a UK parliamentary inquiry into the widespread phone-hacking of celebrities by Murdoch’s papers concluded that he was “not a fit person” to run a major international company.

Murdoch appeared before the inquiry, and presaged Harvey Weinstein’s current tottering walking-frame courtroom act, by playing a doddering old fool clueless about what was going on in his companies.

Alas for Murdoch, renowned for micro-managing the content of his papers, the UK parliamentarians did not fall for his con.

Australia could emulate the UK and hold a similar inquiry into the part played by Murdoch’s media in spreading outright lies and distortions during one of Australia’s greatest-ever crises.

If Australian officialdom did hold such an inquiry, it should come to the same conclusion as its UK counterpart on Murdoch’s lack of “fitness” to head a major international corporation.

In the meantime, the Australian summer still has a couple of months to go.

Formally, BoJo’s Brexit got “done” at 11pm on Friday, 31 January.

The impression that Brexitannia is now no longer a member of the EU is somewhat misleading. The UK now enters an 11-month transition period, due to last until 31 December 2020, that will still keep the UK bound to the EU’s rules.

The UK will remain in both the EU customs union and single market during this time, while it works out a trade agreement with Brussels. Or any trade deals with other countries that can substitute for those the UK relinquished as a result of leaving the EU.

BoJo, persuaded more by his love of the grand gesture than any sense of realism, set himself a deadline by end of 2020 to get a comprehensive deal with the EU, but the EU has set time-frames (both sides have confirmed that negotiations will begin on March 3^rd) and conditions the UK– with increasing certainty as time runs out—will be unable to meet.

The UK faces a dire economic situation if it settles for a No Deal Brexit, and the EU’s game plan from now on is becoming obvious.

While observing all protocols, run out the negotiating clock on the UK, so BoJo has to plead for an extension to his end of 2020 deadline, which, given that he had promised to die in a ditch if he didn’t get Brexit “done” by Halloween last year, could start to dent his credibility with his Ukanian base.

BoJo, like his exemplar Trump, relies on a team of toadies and a compliant Murdoch-led media to abjure strategy in favour of impression-management and PR.

Trump in his cheesy flummery calls this “listening to his gut”, claiming, however improbably, that his “gut” outdoes those around him who rely on their intellects.

BoJo, though just as crass and vulgar as his American counterpart, enjoyed a more patrician upbringing, so such earthy references to sounding out their bowels is something the presumably genteel Johnson nanny taught BoJo and his siblings to eschew.

BoJo is a chancer, bully, and manipulator, with all the weaknesses these dispositions entail, and the EU negotiating team has already started to take advantage of these traits.

Step One: confirm all the way that you are impervious to such bullying and posturing, since they are intended solely for the UK electorate.

Step Two: take every opportunity to remind the UK, and the Tories especially, that this mess was entirely of their own making, so the onus for resolving it is placed on BoJo and not the EU.

Step Three: allow as many proxies as possible to complicate the life of the bully, such as having EU-member Ireland confound BoJo on its post-Brexit relations with the UK’s north of Ireland (hence when northern Ireland expresses a desire for reunification with the Republic the odds are that the EU will back reunification); or saying and doing nothing about Remainer Scotland’s threat of secession from the UK (the EU flag was taken down in the rest of the UK but Scotland is continuing to fly it); or showing partiality with respect to the British colony Gibraltar’s strong Remainer desire as a result of its close economic ties with Spain, and so on.

Spain has territorial claims to Gibraltar, and the EU has backed Spain in the forthcoming Brexit negotiations by giving Madrid the power to exclude Gibraltar (designated as a British overseas territory) from any trade deal agreed with Brussels. This will have serious implications for Gibraltar’s economy and its fiercely pro-British inhabitants, pitting their economic interests against their British identity.

Step Four: the UK will require trade deals with non-EU countries after Brexit, so put in place conditionalities and baselines with regard to the UK that will require these non-EU deals to be absolutely congruent with EU interests.

The EU insists the UK must agree to alignment with its rules on workers’ rights, the environment and state aid, as the condition for a deal, in order to preempt the UK stealing a competitive advantage. BoJo however insists he will make no such concessions, and that there will be no alignment of any kind. Something, someone, will have to give.

Many countries have for decades traded with the UK under the auspices of the EU, so they will wait to see what (if any) deal the UK will strike with the EU before they negotiate bilaterally with the UK.

BoJo and his handlers are now touting the prospect of a Canada-style trade deal with the EU. Canada’s deal with the EU took 9 years to negotiate, and eliminated 98% of tariffs on goods, but did little for financial services, the latter being of course a key UK objective in any trade deal.

It also turns out that France still has the ability in the transition period to veto the sale of British Steel to a Chinese corporation. British Steel has a plant in France, which the French now say is of vital “national interest” to them.

Japan has already indicated to the UK that securing a Japanese trade deal will depend on BoJo completing one with Brussels first. Since much of the business Japan does with the UK is undertaken via the EU, Japan will need to know what kind of relationship the UK will have with the EU before it strikes a bilateral deal with Johnson.

Several Japanese car manufacturers have plants in the UK, and they will want a UK-Japan deal which does not expose their operations to any commercial risk as a consequence of Brexit. For instance, if British-manufactured Japanese cars face a tariff barrier when exported to the EU, it is almost certain the Japanese will relocate production to the EU itself—the EU has 27 member states versus the UK on its own, so the arithmetic on this is a no brainer if you are Japanese. Japan will want UK alignment with the EU’s trade rules, a possibility already ruled out by BoJo. Something, someone, will have to give.

BoJo added a complication to a possible trade deal with the US when he announced that the Chinese tech company Huawei would be allowed to supply Britain’s 5G network,. The US has voiced its concerns over data security. To quote The Guardian:

“The green light to Huawei was given in the teeth of concerted opposition from the US and some of the prime minister’s own backbenchers. America has warned that the company’s participation in 5G networks would represent a major security risk to the west, given its close relationship to the Chinese state. Huawei has already been excluded from 5G networks in Japan and Australia on the grounds that control of vital infrastructure could fall into the hands of a potentially hostile power. One Republican senator said on Tuesday that “London has freed itself from Brussels only to cede sovereignty to Beijing”.

While the US’s “security concerns” are no doubt overblown (Trump talks about upcoming military operations with fawning guests at Mar-a-Lago, and speaks in advance with Putin about US air strikes in the Middle East without extending the same courtesy to his western allies), BoJo has always shown he’s pretty challenged when it comes to technology.

This is obvious when we see video of BoJo sitting at a computer, but his use of the demarcation between “core” and “non-core” 5G functions to say that Huawei’s participation in the UK’s 5G network would be confined to the latter prompted much derision in the media—the main reason why 5G is superior to previous phone technologies is that it is designed to operate seamlessly across the entire system, thereby eliminating any barrier between “core” and “non-core”.

No doubt BoJo will seek to convince the Americans that a trade deal is completely different from such security concerns over phone technology, but will this carry weight with Trump, with his penchant for taking advice from the mercurial Rudy Giuliani, Sean Hannity on his latest Fox News show, an array of rightwing evangelical “spiritual advisers” keen to tell him he was “sent by God”, and his fat-cat golfing partners?

The Tories owed their convincing election victory to persuading voters in Labour strongholds that voting for a Tory-Brexit will bring them a boatload of goodies (which of course Corbyn and “socialism” would not).

This was a snake-oil con, but it worked in the election. The possible evidence so far that it wasn’t a con is receding over the political horizon.

Despite a Tory election pledge to have it lifted, austerity is continuing because of Brexit — the Bank of England is moving interest rates from the current emergency rate to an even lower rate, and BoJo has told all his ministers to reduce spending by 5%.

BoJo promised that the Labour areas which switched to the Tories over Brexit would reap rewards in the form of increased investment, and so on. The opposite is now materializing, as funding already earmarked for these “Left Behind” areas is being transferred to prosperous Tory shires in the south-east of England. A review of local authority funding could move £300m/$357m from councils in highly deprived areas to Tory-controlled shire councils.

This being Brexitannia, a moment resembling a Monty Python sketch, or Bertie Wooster in a PG Wodehouse novel putting his foot where he shouldn’t put it, is not likely to be far away.

+ A couple of Brexiter MPs, with BoJo’s support, launched an online GoFundMe campaign called “Big Ben must bong for Brexit” to pay for its chimes (which had been silenced during renovation) to sound on Brexit day. The sum needed was not reached, so there was there was no Big Ben bong.

+ A 50p coin to commemorate Brexit was released. The original Brexit memorial coin had to be melted-down, at taxpayer expense, because it was marked with the original departure date of 31 October 2019. The replacement coin bore the mendacious inscription “Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations”, and a storm in the proverbial teacup arose when various members of the Ukanian cognitariat said an Oxford comma was needed after the word “prosperity” to meet some hard-to-identify linguistic norm.

+ The Conservative HQ issued a tea towel to commemorate Brexit with a triumphant “Got Brexit Done” slogan and BoJo’s jowly visage stamped on it. Over-priced at £12/$15, the towel’s critics said it resembled something to be found on a roll of toilet paper, and that Brexit would of course not be “done” until the UK and EU finalized an exit deal.

Also on Brexitannia-related display:

+ A sign seen in a Dublin Bar: “All Brits must be accompanied by a European after 11PM,
Except Scots, they’re sound”.

+ A “Brexit Day” poster demanding that all residents speak the “Queen’s English” has been posted on every floor of an English city tower block.

+ A Dutch city replaced the Union Jack with the Scottish Saltire in a line-up of EU flags.

In the midst of all this kerfuffling, the EU’s message to Brexitannia has been unambiguous and unwavering: whatever deal we give you will be inferior to what you had as an EU member.

The Tory Brexit has never been more than a marketing ploy for the electorate, so all BoJo can do in response to an implacable Brussels is to repeat to his supporters the plaintive refrain that “Brexit is Brexit”.

To which Brits like me say: “Of course it bloody well is, so what’s next?”.

Immediately after his general election victory BoJo jetted to the private Caribbean island of Mustique with his latest mistress. Sequestered in a rental villa that cost £20,000/$26000 a week for a couple of weeks (probably paid for by one of his billionaire pals), and supposedly chugging down vodka martinis while sunning his plump frame on the beach, BoJo was unavailable for a response at the start of the Iran crisis. Not that he would have done much. With an unenviable track-record when it comes to being Trump’s lapdog, his response would have been all-too predictable.

Parliament started its post-New Year session, but everything was low-key and there wasn’t much to do, as the Tories sat on their comfortable 80-seat majority, and Labour was in the process of choosing its next leader, with Jeremy Corbyn as its lame-duck leader until his successor is chosen.

BoJo is easily bored, so most parliamentary business was left to his talentless subordinates.

In his two political positions before he became prime minister—mayor of London and foreign secretary– BoJo was averse to any kind of administrative heavy-lifting, preferring to leave this to his staff.

Philandering apart, BoJo’s energy levels are lifted by vanity projects and publicity stunts.

His vanity projects (buying second-hand water cannon from Germany even though the London police didn’t want them (they were sold for scrap later), a white-elephant garden bridge across the Thames which was never built (but whose preparatory work cost £43m/$56m of public money), and playing to nostalgia by reintroducing a red double-decker bus with failed air-conditioning and windows that can’t be opened (and which cost twice as much to build as its celebrated but abandoned predecessor).

BoJo’s failed publicity stunts include being stuck on a zipline, 5 metres above ground, during the 2012 London Olympics. BoJo, in a suit and wearing a hard hat and waving 2 plastic Union Jack flags, had to be hauled to the ground by staff using a tow line.

Invigorated by his sojourn in Mustique, BoJo embarked on his latest stunt: to have the Big Ben bell ring at 11pm on Brexit day, January 31.

Big Ben has been undergoing renovations since 2017, though a temporary floor had been put in place to strike the 13-ton bell during Remembrance Sunday and at the New Year. The floor has since been removed and would need to be reinstalled at a cost of £500,000/$650000.

A parliamentary commission dismissed the plan because of the cost, so BoJo went along with the suggestion made by a couple of his buffoonish Brexiter MPs to launch an online GoFundMe campaign called “Big Ben must bong for Brexit” to pay for the chimes. As of 23 January, the campaign has raised around £250,000 of its £500,000 target, so it is unlikely that Brexiters will get their Big Bong celebration.

The next stage in the Brexit saga, apart from the official EU exit date of January 31, will be the presumed conclusion of a trade deal with the EU by the end of 2020.

Agreeing to negotiate a deal, and setting up a provisional timetable (though the two sides have different versions of it), has been relatively easy, while actually negotiating the deal will of course be the difficult part.

Both sides know what they want from the deal (in the UK’s case this is a trade deal compatible with its Brexit aspirations– which so far seem no more than mouthing the Tory election slogan “Get Brexit Done”– and its need to make trade deals with other countries, while the EU is open to this provided certain conditions are met and its trading interests protected).

Both sides know how far they’re prepared to yield on each point (e.g. the sum paid for the “divorce settlement” is the point on which both sides will probably be most flexible, regulatory alignment between the UK and EU will probably be the most difficult, arrangements regarding fishing rights will be somewhere in between, etc.)

Moreover, both sides typically know where the other’s baselines are (in the case of the EU, this will be the Irish Republic’s final terms for its trade and diplomatic relations with the North—the Republic being an EU member, the EU will set these terms as a negotiating baseline rather than go against them).

In the case of the UK, a baseline is likely to be fishing rights, since the French, Danish and Dutch are keen on access to British waters, while the UK is set against this move.

Another EU baseline, which tripped-up Theresa May when she was prime minister, was the EU’s insistence on “sequencing” talks, so the UK has to agree one set of issues before the EU will move to another set.

Agreement will not be reached, or be much harder to reach, if a side insists that one or more of the other side’s baselines be crossed (e.g. the UK will almost certainly demand that the EU separate the “4 freedoms” (movement, goods, capital, services)– so that, for instance, the UK won’t accept free movement between itself and the EU countries, but may be willing to allow the other freedoms to exist (with or without modification).

Sticking points: both the UK and EU have to determine what protections they require to prevent the other side from using the deal to misuse their respective markets. For example, the EU will be determined to ensure that any UK-EU deal will not be a way for US food imports to circumvent EU food standards.

For instance, if the UK undertook to uphold EU food standards in its trade deal with the EU, then while US chlorinated chicken, irradiated fruit, etc., can be imported into UK markets, they will not then be exported from the UK into the EU market.

Another EU baseline would be not allowing the UK an unfair post-Brexit competitive advantage. The EU will not sign-up to a trade deal that allows tariff free, quota free and frictionless access to UK goods being imported into the EU if there isn’t a level playing field in terms of production standards, and so on, because that would constitute unfair competition. The EU would not therefore allow a product into the EU via the UK that happens to be cheaper or of lower quality because of differing production standards.

For instance, the EU requires milk chocolate to contain at least 20% dry cocoa solids and darker chocolates to contain a minimum of 35% dry cocoa solids. In the US the FDA mandates that American milk chocolate must contain at least 10% dry cocoa solids, and that semisweet and bittersweet American chocolate must contain at least 35% dry cocoa solids. The British chocolate manufacturer Cadburys also has an operation in the US, licensed to Hershey, meaning that American chocolate bearing the Cadbury name is actually produced by Hershey.

The EU might baulk at the movement into the EU of Cadbury chocolate made by Hershey, and brought to the UK before being exported to the EU. Semisweet and bittersweet American chocolate would of course pass muster because their required cocoa-solid content is the same as the EU’s.

It is a misimpression to think that all EU trade deals are handled by Brussels exclusively. Some deals covering policy areas that are not the sole preserve of Brussels have to be voted on by national parliaments, and sometimes regional parliaments, depending on the constitution of the EU-member-state in question.

These hybrid deals can be fraught with difficulty because each country and region has its own commercial interests to consider before signing.

The more extensive a trade deal is, the greater the likelihood of it going beyond the authority of Brussels and requiring the approval of individual member states.

Deals that involve cross-border trade in services – a key UK objective – are very likely to be hybrid agreements and thus subject to votes in the relevant national parliaments. The EU has already said that the final agreement will have to be ratified by all 27 member states.

This is why a trade deal between the EU and other countries takes 4-7 years to bring to the gate, and it shows why the BoJo is living in cloud cuckoo land (as are his Brexiter supporters), if he thinks he can get a complete deal by the end of this year. But posturing and privileged incompetence are BoJo’s forte, not attention to detail and technicalities.

The European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has already made it clear that BoJo will not get a complete deal if he insists that one must be finalized by the end of 2020. The European Commission has also said the EU will not be ready to open trade talks with the UK on a post-Brexit trade deal before the end of February, which leaves only 10 months for the UK to finalize a trade deal.

I’ve only mentioned a few of the complexities involved in each side’s baselines, and there will be hundreds of them!

The EU also has the upper hand when it comes to bringing heft to the negotiating table. A mere 9% of EU trade is with the UK while 47% of British exports of goods go to the EU.

Apart from an EU deal, BoJo will also want one with the US and China. In fact, he intends to pursue parallel trade talks with the EU and the US after Brexit Day on Friday, with some hardline Tory Brexiters convinced they can be played off against each other. Faced with the prospect of a “bidding war” with the US, the EU’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier has said “There will be no overbidding on our side”.

Barnier has also said that border checks on goods will “become the norm” after Brexit – even if Johnson secures the no-tariff, no-quota deal he seeks.

At the moment, BoJo seems to be concentrating on a trade deal with the US rather than China, with its potential impact on NHS drug pricing and NHS outsourcing to the American health industry, and importing American chlorinated chicken or hormone-fed beef.

But a trade deal with the US is likely to include provisions that militate against one with China. To quote The Guardian:

“But the US has another priority: to constrain the growth of China’s economy as far as possible, particularly in areas such as tech. The new US-Canada-Mexico trade agreement has a “poison pill” clause, which would allow the US to pull out if either of the other two countries signs a trade agreement with a “non-market” economy such as China. The US is likely to demand a similar clause in a US-UK agreement”.

The Trump administration is also demanding that Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, be excluded from bids to supply the UK’s 5G network. This US baseline for a UK-US trade deal is therefore likely to breach a major Chinese baseline for a China-UK trade deal.

The Tory Brexiters have long been saying that membership of the EU makes the UK a perpetual “rule taker”.

They will be in for a surprise when the UK begins trade negotiations with the US. All they need do is ask the Canadians who the “rule taker” is when they engage in painful trade negotiations with their power neighbour!

At present, a mere 3.5% of the UK’s exports go to China, less than the UK’s trade with Ireland, whose economy is minuscule compared to China’s.

Britain’s huge financial services sector has limited access to China, and the UK’s focus on any trade deal with China will almost certainly be on increasing this access.

But here there are likely to be stumbling blocks, especially since the UK’s financial sector has an unenviable reputation for being the money-laundering capital of the world. To quote The Daily Coin (January 18, 2020):

“In 2016 Italian journalist Roberto Saviano, who has spent most of his career investigating the mafia, claimed Britain was the most corrupt country in the world.

Saviano told an audience at the Hay-on-Wye Book Festival: “If I asked you what is the most corrupt place on Earth you might tell me well it’s Afghanistan, maybe Greece, Nigeria, the South of Italy and I will tell you it’s the UK. It’s not the bureaucracy, it’s not the police, it’s not the politics but what is corrupt is the financial capital. 90 percent of the owners of capital in London have their headquarters offshore”.

The Daily Coin also quotes Nicholas Wilson, a whistleblower on the criminal activities of London’s banks:

“He [Wilson] said: “Nothing can be done to clean up the City of London. If any politician tried to dismantle the City of London the world economy would collapse. Drugs money was the only thing that kept the banks going during the 2008 financial crisis.”

In 2016 the Home Affairs Select Committee claimed £100 billion in illicit money was being laundered in the London property market every year.

Mr Wilson said the bank with the worst reputation was HSBC which he said was implicated in 18 of the 25 top corruption scandals listed by the watchdog Transparency International last year…..

Mr Wilson said the political and financial establishments were closely entwined and he said there have been numerous examples of former MPs and ministers going to work for banks and former bankers entering politics or influential jobs.

The City of London Corporation declined to comment and the Financial Conduct Authority, which was also approached, did not provide a comment”.

It will be interesting to see what the Chinese government, which keeps its own banking sector on a tight leash, will do when BoJo and his emissaries come with a request to open China’s financial doors to cowboys from London’s banks, eager and coked-up to unload their toxic financial instruments on Chinese markets.

In a previous CounterPunch piece I mentioned a scathing adage regarding Australian prime minister Scott Morrison, a former PR executive, making the rounds in Australian social media: you can take Scotty out of marketing, but you can’t take the marketing out of Scotty.

When he became PM last May ScoMo (as he is also known) hired a couple of “empathy consultants” to get him in the right psychological shape to deal with distressed farmers badly affected by Australia’s record-setting drought.

The empathy trainers must have been overly specialized, perhaps by being attuned only to coaching Scotty how to empathize with victims of drought conditions, because ScoMo the wannabe empathizer was a total flop when it came to dealing with victims of the catastrophic wildfires.

He quickly showed himself to be tin-eared, and was heckled and sworn-at when he visited areas that had been incinerated.

After these debacles, the empathy trainers probably went back to the drawing board, either broadening their repertoire to take in fire victims, or finding some new empathy-enhancing tricks to teach their benighted client, or both.

So this week a (marginally) different ScoMo appeared— looking somewhat chastened, seemingly more aware of the sincerity of the environmental activists who have been the bane of his prime ministerial existence, and promising to “adapt” (whatever that means).

But it soon became apparent that nothing had really changed beneath this newly-acquired veneer. To quote The Guardian:

Three times David Speers [a TV interviewer] asked him on Sunday if the government would increase its emissions targets. Morrison responded with: “Well, the cabinet and the government will continue to evolve our policies.” Then he added: “What I’m saying is I’m not going to put someone’s job at risk, a region’s, town’s future at risk.” And finally: “What I’m saying is we want to reduce emissions and do the best job we possibly can and get better and better and better at it.”

What he is saying is “no”. Nothing he has said suggests any change in policy that will actually involve emissions reductions”.

In a switch of tactics ScoMo and many of his supporters have abandoned climate-change denial, and now accept, selectively, the “facts” of climate change. However, he won’t go in for emission reduction targets, and instead his country will find ways to “adapt” to the existing “facts” of climate change (by building more dams, etc.).

ScoMo has never bothered with the science of climate change, and it shows in his ignorant proposition that building more dams, and so forth, will help deal with what he takes to be a “new normal”, as if there is a linear movement to this new state of affairs.

However, a new report by McKinsey Global Institute shows there won’t be a linear progression to this “new normal”, but rather ever-increasing disasters on a catastrophic scale. Building dams will be as irrelevant in this situation as ScoMo’s Christian fundamentalist belief in creationism.

ScoMo has also ruled out a carbon tax that would raise electricity prices and impact polluting industries. Australia did have a carbon tax, introduced by the Labor party, from 2012 to 2014 before it was repealed by the government of Tony Abbott (who belongs to the same Liberal party as Morrison).

The devious PR man ScoMo even sought to appear on the side of the good and virtuous this time round: Aussies need “to be better prepared” to deal with this new reality, and this included Scotty himself, since one of his “core” responsibilities as prime minister is to “keep Australians safe”.

ScoMo, in this feigned practicality, will make “feasible” measures of adaptation his focus, rather than pay heed to grandiosely “impractical” proposals, premised on the actual reduction of emissions, canvassed by climate-change proponents like the Australian Greens and pesky schoolkids such as Greta Thunberg.

In short: Australia will continue to have no mechanism for controlling its greenhouse gas emissions, and steps towards this control will be “aspirational” and nothing else.

The reality is that Australia was named along with Brazil and the US as a major obstacle to global progress on greenhouse gas emissions at the recent Madrid COP25 climate change conference, and last in the world for climate policy.

According to the World Population Review, Australia leads the developed world in CO₂ emissions per capita (using 2019 population figures): Australia emits 15.83 tons per capita, the US 15.53, followed by Canada’s 15.32.

In 2015 Australia’s national science agency CSIRO and its Bureau of Meteorology released a detailed report on the future impact of climate change in Australia:

“Kevin Hennessy, a principal research scientist at the CSIRO, said it and the Bureau of Meteorology now had a greater confidence than ever in their forecasts of Australia’s climate.

“We expect land areas to warm faster than ocean areas, and polar regions faster than the tropics,” Hennessy told Guardian Australia.

Given Australia’s geographical position, that would mean much of the country was expected to warm faster than the global average.

“Australia will warm faster than the rest of the world,” Hennessy said. “Warming of 4C to 5C would have a very significant effect: there would be increases in extremely high temperatures, much less snow, more intense rainfall, more fires and rapid sea level rises”.

Scott Morrison and his supporters can’t say they were not warned. But he ploughed on regardless—for instance, in 2017, when he was Treasurer, ScoMo discontinued government funding for the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, a move now widely regarded as short-sighted.

And while Scotty says he is “evolving”, there are members of his rightwing coalition who continue to deny there is a link between climate change and the wildfires.

This leaves ScoMo with a conundrum. Rightwingers in his party, along with his far-right coalition partner the National party, are vehemently opposed to any increase in emissions targets.

At the same time surveys show the proportion of Aussie voters listing global warming and the environment as their top issue is at an all-time high.

ScoMo can staunch the bleeding in terms of public support and in so doing risk magnifying divisions in his party and the coalition; or he can keep party and coalition together, by denying and doing little or nothing about climate change, and so continue losing public support.

ScoMo has responded to this conundrum by resorting to double-think and double-talk, in an attempt to manipulate both sides. One of his Liberal MP colleagues has said:

‘”We say emissions are going down and they are going up. We say investment in renewables is higher than ever but it’s falling because of the policy mess we have created”….

“At the moment they are running around like headless chooks [Aussie slang for chickens], throwing money here, there and everywhere without any thought.

“It is little wonder we have no credibility on this issue”.’

However it should be noted that ScoMo, as is the case with Trump, retains solid support from his base. Just as Trump has polarized the US electorate, Scotty has achieved something similar. In the words of The Guardian:

“There is something eerily Trump-ian about this phenomenon: when the leader is objectively at his weakest, his supporters lock in hard, grabbing on to whatever they need to maintain their worldview.

These findings should also serve as a caution for those who see the crisis as the moment to dramatically up the ask on Australia’s climate policies. Yes, the PM is weakened, but his base needs more to shift”.

Australia is halfway through its summer, and so far the wildfires have devastated more than 10m hectares/24.72m acres of land (an area a third of the size of Germany), killed 29 people, and destroyed thousands of properties nationwide.

The Australian tourist industry has taken an A$1bn/$699m hit so far. Tourism employs 10 times more workers than the Australian coal industry, but simply does not have the latter’s political clout.

The coal barons not only have the government on their side (primarily in the form of subsidies worth billions and tax breaks for mines that would otherwise be economically unviable), but also Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp media empire when it comes to disseminating misinformation about climate change and the wildfires.

Incidentally, Murdoch’s son James, has just split with his father over News Corp’s policy of climate-change denial, and done the equivalent of a “Prince Harry” split from an overweening family. “Murxit” James had better tread carefully, since Murdoch pere has a reputation for being a vindictive bastard, and the old brute will of course have loads of money to splash around in his will.

There was welcome rain in some fire-affected areas last Tuesday, in the form of 1-in-100-year storms, forecast to last for several days.

At the same time the Bureau of Meteorology warned that the storms could be “a double-edged sword” likely to cause flash flooding and landslides in fire-affected areas— these areas now lack the “sponge effect” provided by the vegetation that has been destroyed.

Another rain-associated problem has been caused by ash and sludge running into waterways, resulting in huge fish kills. Hundreds of thousands of native fish are estimated to have died in the Macleay River in northern NSW.

The Guardian states that “species seen dead and reported to Guardian Australia were Australian bass, eels, bullhead mullet, yellow-eye mullet, herring, gudgeons… and eel-tailed catfish. The number of fish impacted is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands”.

All things considered, therefore, while Scotty from marketing may be “evolving”, he’s evolving away from decarbonizing Australia’s economy, even as he continues to muddy the waters on climate change, and its already catastrophic blows at ground level, with PR weasel words.

I am in Seattle for an academic conference, having last been here about ten years ago.

Seattle is a beguiling place, as most who have visited it will know. Since I was born with an aversion to sightseeing and what’s called “tourism”, it is the intertwining of politics and business (capitalism, really) that interests me when I visit a place.

Here Seattle does not disappoint. It is home to Amazon (approx. 25,000 employees), Microsoft (approx. 42,000 employees), Boeing (approx. 80,000 employees), and its other big employers are Joint Base Lewis-McChord (approx. 56,000 employees, both civilian and military), and the University of Washington (approx. 25,000 employees).

In addition, Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the Seattle metropolitan area are Starbucks (#131), Nordstrom (#188), freight-forwarder Expeditors International of Washington (#429) and the timber products company Weyerhaeuser (#341).

All have benefitted from political largesse at the local, state, and federal level, including the University of Washington, which became an internationally-renowned research university in the 60s and 70s thanks in part to the huge amounts of “pork” the powerful senator Scoop Jackson– a Democrat and notorious Cold War hawk– was able to acquire for Washington state.

Seattle is also the fourth-largest container-port in North America.

This intertwining of business and local politics can be problematic.

The late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and owner of the Seattle Seahawks football franchise (as well as the Portland Trailblazers basketball franchise), while noted for his philanthropy, paid to put the construction of a new stadium for his football franchise to a referendum in order to set-up a public-private partnership that would pay for the construction cost of $430m. The vote went in Allen’s favour, the partnership was set-up, and it required Allen (estimated worth $16 billion) to contribute a mere $130 million of the project’s cost, while the city (i.e. Seattle taxpayers) coughed-up the remaining $300 million. Local media report that some taxpayers consider themselves to have been stiffed by this deal.

Allen also donated $100,000 to defeat the I-1098 Tax the Rich statewide initiative in 2010.

I-1098 would impose an income tax on individuals making over $200,000 a year ($400,000 for a couple) to pay for health care and education.

At that time (2010) Washington state had the most regressive tax structure in the country. The poor paid 17.3% of their income in taxes while the rich paid only 2.6% percent of their income in taxes.

The latest figures (2018) show that Washington is still the most tax-regressive state in the country– the poorest fifth of residents pay 17.8%, the top 1% only pay about 3% of their income in taxes.

Allen is not alone in using money to exert a disproportionate influence on local politics.

A record $4 million was spent on last year’s city council elections, $1.5 of this coming from Amazon. Last week Seattle city Council moved on legislation, almost certainly to be challenged in court, to limit corporate contributions in city elections.

The legislation would limit all contributions to the political-action committees (PACs) that corporations, unions, and other entities use when spending money on elections.

Campaign financing is a legal minefield, so the strategy espoused by the Seattle Council is to align its own legislation with the federal law banning foreign influence in elections.

The Council would ban contributions from corporations with a single non-American investor having at least 1% ownership, two or more non-American investors owning at least 5%, or a non-American investor taking part in decision-making concerning American political activities.

Amazon would fall within the scope of this legislation once it is enacted, but has so far not commented on it.

The target in election spending by Seattle-based corporations has been the independent socialist council member Kshama Sawant, who led a grassroots campaign for an “Amazon Tax”, which was passed unanimously and then repealed a month later.

Jeff Bezos, certainly in the top echelon of those seemingly reluctant to pay even a penny of tax, made strenuous efforts to block this tax. He halted construction on a new skyscraper in an attempt to put economic pressure on the City Council. His other move was to contribute $350,000 to the 2017 election campaign of the mayor Jenny Durkan. Durkan orchestrated the repeal of the Amazon Tax when she won that election.

Sawant—whose campaign slogan is “Who runs Seattle –- Amazon and big business, or working people?”– survived the machinations of the corporations, and won her election.

The legislation limiting campaign contributions may provide politicians of Sawant’s persuasion with better protection from fat-cat adversaries like Jeff Bezos.

The other big item of news in Seattle while I was there concerned the release of internal documents from Boeing to a Congressional investigation regarding the construction and design of the now-grounded Boeing 737-MAX aircraft.

The investigation comes after 2 crashes in which 346 people died, with the blame focused on the aircraft’s flight-control software meant to prevent stalling.

The scandal-ridden Boeing’s contribution to the US economy is massive. The US’s largest export manufacturer, Boeing supports 8,000 suppliers across the US and its troubles have an effect on the economic fortunes of the entire country.

For instance, on Friday last week the aircraft parts manufacturer Spirit AeroSystems announced it was laying off 2,800 workers at its facility in Wichita, Kansas, due to the grounding of the MAX. According to the Council of Economic Advisers, Boeing’s troubles in 2019 cut gross domestic product from March through June by 0.4%.

The released employee documents are shocking– not just for the often ribald language in trash-talking emails which mocked the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), overseas aviation regulators, the supplier of the MAX simulator, airline customers, and colleagues– but for the widespread culture of deceit within Boeing. To quote The Seattle Times:

“While some of the more memorable quotes may be dismissed as bravado — nothing more than hard-charging guys who “blew off steam” after work, as the lawyer for the lead pilot put it — other, more sober internal emails reveal the pressures the pilots were under from the MAX program leadership. They suggest a troubling Boeing culture that prioritized costs over safety.

All the messages from the leaders of the MAX program “are about meeting schedule, not delivering quality,” one employee laments in a 2018 email”.

One email said the MAX had been “designed by clowns”. Cost-cutting was the primary consideration, as Boeing’s own software designers were replaced by much lower-paid sub-contractors whose credentials were not scrutinized properly (proper scrutiny would have added to costs).

Another cost-cutting measure was flight-simulator training on operating the new flight-control software, which could have prevented the 2 crashes. However, training on simulators costs money.

The released documents show how Boeing made concerted efforts to block any regulatory necessity for airlines to train their pilots in a simulator on the differences between the MAX and its predecessor the 737 NG.

Boeing insisted, falsely, that the MAX and the NG were so similar that experienced pilots could be trained on their differences in a 1-hour session on an iPad—and of course avoiding training on a simulator saved yet more money.

The released documents also show Boeing executives ridiculing the FAA, which, to an alarming degree, allowed Boeing to do its own safety checks during the certification process. One Boeing pilot who gave a presentation to FAA officials during the certification process mocked their poor technical knowledge: “It was like dogs watching TV”.

Boeing sacked Dennis Muilenberg, its CEO, last month, allowing him to walk away with a $62.2 million golden parachute. Sacking him, and hauling a few rogue employees over the coals, is not going to resolve the shambles that is Boeing today.

Making heads roll and holding people accountable is necessary, of course, but Boeing has given little sign that from now on safety is going to be more important than profit margins.

The culture of deception and duplicity fostered in Boeing also arose in a political context that made lax oversight the norm.

Here the omens are not propitious– Donald Trump has used 2 executive orders to reduce regulatory supervision and hand more of that task over to corporations.

The administration’s 2019 budget proposed an 18% cut to the transportation department.

Those airline passengers who fly regularly (as I do) will probably have one piece of advice for the airlines which transport us: for the foreseeable future, buy Airbus instead of Boeing.

Front page of The Seattle Times (January 11, 2020). Photo: Kenneth Surin.

I was in Australia a month ago, experiencing some of the effects of the huge wildfires that had been burning there since August.

The authorities were saying then that the conflagrations would probably not start to die down until cooler weather arrived with the end of the Australian summer (March 2020 or thereabouts).

March 2020 was also the time when rainfall was expected to arrive and abate the prolonged drought accompanying the wildfires.

In the meantime the fires have grown in scale and turned even more deadly. The devastation is monumental.

When the Amazon rainforest caught fire last January, 906,000 hectares were destroyed. 2.6 million hectares were burnt across the Siberian steppe last July. Since the fires began in Australia, more than 5 million hectares (12.35m acres) have been incinerated. To quote from a report in The Guardian:

“The direct death toll stands at 23, with more expected. Some species have been pushed to extinction, and more than half a billion animals are estimated to have been killed. Farmers have reported running out of bullets as they work to end the suffering of half-dead livestock”.

Prime wine-producing land in the central state of South Australia has also been extensively destroyed, as have UNESCO biospheres and tourist towns.

Smoke from the fires drifted across the Tasman Sea, a distance of 1,400 miles, and turned glaciers in New Zealand brown.

Australian navy ships have been rescuing hundreds of people from beaches in towns whose roads have been cut-off by the fires.

The fires are also causing severe disruption to power supplies, as sub-stations and transformers are engulfed by them.

Reuters reports (4 January, 2020) that “the bushfires… are generating so much heat that they are creating their own weather systems including dry lightning storms and fire tornadoes…. A RFS firefighter was killed on Monday by a fire tornado caused by the collapse of a pyrocumulonimbus cloud formation that rolled over the fire truck he was in”.

The Prime Minister, the former PR man and Donald Trump’s pal Scott Morrison, once spearheaded a multimillion-dollar campaign to enhance tourism when he was head of Tourism Australia.

The Saatchi PR agency provided the campaign it its slogan–#Wherethebloodyhellareyou.

Morrison’s handling of the fire and drought emergency has been maladroit (to put it mildly), and the Saatchi slogan—which helped give Morrison the soubriquet “Scotty from Marketing”– has now been turned against him, as he disappears from public view for days before reappearing in disaster-affected towns for photo ops with their traumatized but unwelcoming victims.

Morrison has a tin ear (some say he has two), and says and does all the wrong things, despite having used A$190,000 of public money to pay consultants for “empathy training” when he dealt with drought-stricken farmers.

When an exhausted and soot-covered firefighter in the town of Cobargo– 240 miles south of Sydney, where 3 people out of its population of 776 had died– told him he hadn’t eaten all day, Morrison just shook his hand and said, “Well I’ll let you get back to it”.

Several people in Cobargo refused to shake hands with him. The Huffington Post reports on video footage in which a firefighter refuses to shake Morrison’s hand:

“I don’t really want to shake your hand,” the firefighter says.

Morrison then leans down to grab the fireman’s hand but he again refuses. The prime minister then walks away — patting the man’s shoulder as he leaves.

“Oh, well. Nice to see you,” Morrison can be heard saying.

Morrison was later heard telling a fire official: “Tell that fella I’m really sorry, I’m sure he’s just tired.”

“No, no, he’s lost a house,” the incident controller tells him”.

When the mood of bystanders—like the firefighter many were rendered homeless by the blaze– started to turn ugly, Morrison and his gun-toting security squad made a swift exit from Cobargo as furious hecklers yelled “scumbag”, “fuck-off”, and “you’re not welcome, you fuckwit”. Again, this was caught on video.

At the start of the crisis, a group of 23 retired emergency and fire chiefs had requested a meeting with Morrison to discuss it and ask for more specialized equipment to deal with hotter and more prolonged bushfires, but the request was turned down.

Last week Morrison hosted a reception and a game of backyard cricket for the Australian and New Zealand cricket teams at the prime minister’s official residence, saying in his welcoming remarks, after a cursory reference to “terrible events”, that “Australians will be gathered whether it’s at the SCG or around television sets all around the country and they’ll be inspired by the great feats of our cricketers from both sides of the Tasman [Sea] and I think they’ll be encouraged by the spirit shown by Australians”. Many believe the reception should not have taken place.

As a result of these and other clangers, critics on social media have declared Morrison’s “empathy training” to be a complete waste of public money.

Morrison did not call-out the Australian Defence Force Reserve to assist civilian firefighters until 4^th January, when 3000 reservists were mobilized. That day the temperature in Penrith, in Sydney’s west, reached 48.9C/120.02F.

Despite many offers from foreign governments of extra water-bombing aircraft throughout the crisis, it was not until 4^th January that Morrison committed funds to lease 4 extra planes– 2 long range fixed-wing DC-10s with 30,000 litres capacity and 2 medium range large air tankers with an 11,000 litre capacity. Experts say this underestimates what is needed.

A 2016 request from the National Aerial Firefighting Centre (NAFC), which currently oversees a fleet of 145 aircraft, for a “national large air-tanker fleet” to assist firefighting operations was dismissed in September 2017, with the government saying it would continue its A$15 million annual support for the NAFC without expanding the national capability.

(ScoMo, as Morrison is called, is now having this moniker morph into ScumMo.)

The Australian public are well-aware of ScoMo’s record as a climate-change denier who’s opposed carbon taxes, and even proposed outlawing boycotts by environmental activists.

In his most recent press conference, ScoMo announced last week that there would be no change to Australia’s climate policy. He said it was impossible to establish a connection between climate change and a single event like the current Big Burn.

Under the terms of the Tokyo Agreement, Australia (the world’s largest exporter of coal) pledged to cut carbon emissions by 26% from 2005 levels by 2030, but Morrison’s government has already started to work-round this commitment– earlier this month at a United Nations summit in Madrid, Australia resorted to sharp practice by using its old carbon credits to count toward future emissions targets.

The understandable upshot is that unflattering construals are placed on any one of ScoMo’s fumbling efforts to deal with this disaster.

Morrison, though, is in a difficult personal situation, albeit one entirely of his own making.

If he becomes more proactive in firefighting efforts, and more visible at disaster sites, the more opportunities there will be for the media to contrast this newly acquired show of “empathy” with ScoMo’s previous record of climate-change denialism and his so-far unenergetic response to the crisis.

ScoMo’s unsuccessful strategy has been to play-down the severity of the crisis (completely in line with his indifference to climate-change), and to restrict himself to sporadic public appearances in the hope that this will be just enough to convince Aussies he cares for their well-being.

He’s failed on both scores. Public opinion is now strongly opposed to climate-change denialism.

Research in 2019 by the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney found 78% of Australians supporting reduced fossil-fuel use and 64% raising taxes to implement this policy.

A look at the Twitter responses to ScoMo’s handling of the crisis indicates widespread agreement with the incensed hecklers who chased him out of Cobargo.

What trick will ScoMo now have up his sleeve?

Well, he has an unfailing trust in marketing. As I finished this article, ScoMo’s office put out a political-campaign ad, complete with a jaunty jingle, lauding his government’s firefighting efforts.

The scathing social media response was immediate, and along these lines: you can take ScoMo out of marketing, but you can’t take the marketing out of ScoMo.

In the recent UK general election the winning Conservatives managed to convince voters nostalgic for the days of Empire that the repeated slogan “Get Brexit Done” was somehow the guarantee of a “Rule Britannia” resurgence of patriotism.

In addition to “Get Brexit Done”, the Tories had “Take Back Control” as their other election slogan.

Both slogans were of course pure nonsense.

BoJo Johnson, born in New York, was an American citizen until the US tax authorities started to take a prosecutorial interest in his tax-dodging ways last year, and this course of action ensued in an overnight relinquishment of BoJo’s US citizenship.

BoJo can now pose, more or less successfully, as a full-blown “patriot” and Ukanian exceptionalist.

So: no more divided loyalties for BoJo, though he and Trump continue to conduct sporadic “love-ins” for the benefit of a pliant rightwing media in the UK.

The US media, understandably, couldn’t give a rat’s arse about a future trade deal concocted between the two posturing leaders of their respective countries.

Given the vast trade imbalance between them, commerce between the US and China is much more important to the US in financial terms than anything a jaunty BoJo can offer Trump.

“Take Back Control” and “Get Brexit Done” are thus vapid and meaningless until the UK manages to be in a position to conclude, in ways binding and definitive, at least a fraction of the hundreds of post-Brexit trade treaties needed to replace those it previously had by virtue of its EU membership.

Only then will the UK have “cred” as a potential trading partner with something to offer.

But this level of seriousness has never been within BoJo’s compass.

The quintessential chancer and con man, he’s set his store, albeit without saying so, by a failure of any withdrawal deal with the EU, thereby hoping to blame the EU for this– BoJo believes he can then concoct an alibi in the hope of convincing his supporters that the fault for a no-deal Brexit lies with the eurocrats in Brussels.

At the same time, Britain’s technocrats of whatever political persuasion, apart from a few die-hard Europhobes, agree that a no-deal Brexit will be hard for a disordered UK to weather economically.

Since the 2008 financial crash, the UK’s economic recovery has been uneven and tepid: investment has been sub-par, productivity growth almost non-existent, wages adjusted for inflation are still below where they were in 2007, and household debt, while stabilizing since 2013, continues to be at a very high level.

Brexit is reckoned to have a 1-3% drag-effect on this already sluggish economy once it is implemented.

But the key “over-ride” in the face of any such supposedly realistic considerations is “patriotism”.

The myth here, mock-Churchillian in tone, and designed for the consumption of BoJo’s mostly elderly and less educated supporters, is that the Britain which once stood alone against a continental European adversary, must now somehow be able to “do it again” (this time with regard to the EU as a more or less hazy across-the-Channel entity).

The underlying fable here, obviously, is that of a British exceptionalism.

And, in terms of underlying political and philosophical principle, this is probably where Corbyn lost.

Corbyn, in his long political career, has never been an Ukanian exceptionalist.

He’s been opposed all the UK’s neocolonial military ventures (to the extent of saying his government, if elected, will find ways to send Tony Blair to the Hague for his participation in the invasion of Iraq).

Labour campaigners on the doorstep found traditional working-class Labour voters having doubts about Corbyn’s “patriotism”—his failure to bow to the queen at the opening of parliament, or sing the national anthem, or not wearing a big enough poppy badge on his lapel for Remembrance Sunday in November, or wanting a ceasefire with the IRA during the Troubles, or his long history as a peacenik, and so on, were projected to voters craving a more gloriously rose-tinted Ukanian past as evidence that Corbyn was insufficiently “patriotic”.

Britain’s rightwing trash-rags of course added fuel to the sentiment that the “unpatriotic” Corbyn had long disdained any vestige of Ukanian exceptionalism (as did some of Corbyn’s Blairite enemies in his own party).

His “constructive ambiguity” over Brexit was fed into this narrative by being glossed as yet another sign of Corbyn’s weakness— here was a fence-sitter who may not be able to stand-up to the flinty eurocrats the way a jingoistic and chippy BoJo would.

Labour has always faced two challenges posed for it by the Establishment and the rightwing media.

The first has to do with socialism, every significant form of which is branded in the rightwing media (which of course monopolizes the UK’s mediascape) as “loony leftism”, “Marxism”, “a revolutionary cult”, etc.

All that Corbyn’s Labour presented to voters this time round was the prospectus for a UK version of Scandinavian social democracy.

But the outcome here has been obvious, even without hindsight: in its frantic (past) efforts to convince voters that it is absolutely committed to a perceived non-revolutionary politics, Labour had to eschew socialism.

Corbyn and his leadership group were the first Labour team in decades not to treat “socialism” as a dirty word, and the outcome was Labour’s worst electoral performance since 1935.

Brexit was of course the dominant factor in contributing to this dismal outcome, but here the second challenge materialized, namely, Labour having always to deal with the charge that it is constitutively “unpatriotic”.

Labour politicians were the prime targets of the “red scares” during the Cold War. “Red scares” can no longer be mobilized politically, but the “patriotism” motif has now morphed into something more generalized, that is, an intrinsic connectedness with Ukanian exceptionalism.

Europhobia, and an accompanying Little Englanderism, showed themselves in the cluster of issues surrounding Brexit.

But we can be critical of, or indeed hostile to, the EU without succumbing to any kind of europhobia or Ukanian exceptionalism.

The EU is after all a staunch supporter of big business and the multinationals (“What is good for Bayer and Daimler Benz is good for Europe”), doesn’t even pretend to represent the interests of working people (except where health and safety measures are concerned), and is profoundly undemocratic (the European parliament is just a debating chamber with no legislative function). And let’s not forget the EU’s part in the fiscal waterboarding of the Greek people during that country’s 2009 financial crash in order to protect the French and German banks from the risky loans they made to the Greek elite.

Corbyn, like many in Labour—the so-called Lexiters– has always been sceptical of the EU for the above reasons.

But as a staunch internationalist, and thus lacking credentials as an Ukanian exceptionalist, the “unpatriotic” card could be played against Corbyn by Brexiter exceptionalists like BoJo.

So someone who grabbed a journalist’s phone and put it in his pocket rather than look at a photo of a young child lying on a hospital floor, who ran and hid in a fridge rather than be questioned by Piers Morgan on his morning TV show, and whose “deal of the century” was precisely the crap one he voted against as an MP 18 months before, got virtually no negative publicity, while Corbyn copped most of it.

The Independent commented on this disparity by citing a report produced by Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Communication and Culture:

“Because the largest newspapers were more friendly to the Conservatives, when weighted by circulation, the final week of the 2019 election gave the Tories a positive score of 30.17 while Labour’s was minus 96.66 – a vast gulf in treatment.

All opposition parties were portrayed negatively, with only the ruling Tories portrayed in a positive light”.

The Labour leader taking-over from Corbyn will therefore face not just the two challenges just mentioned (being branded as “unpatriotic” because shunning Ukanian exceptionalism, and being “a loony leftist” for espousing social democracy), but also a hostile media campaign of unremitting ferocity and character assassination— unless of course they come across as “patriots” and commit themselves to a non-socialist politics.

Only then will Labour be deemed “electable” by Rupert Murdoch and his ilk.

Already Rebecca Long-Bailey, the Corbynite frontrunner in the contest to find Corbyn’s successor, has called for a “progressive patriotism” in an attempt to obviate the charge directed at him (though she has refrained from criticizing Corbyn). To quote The Guardian:

“Long-Bailey differentiates herself from Corbyn by saying that as Labour leader she would champion “progressive patriotism”. She says: “From ex-miners in Blyth Valley to migrant cleaners in Brixton, from small businesses in Stoke-on-Trent to the self-employed in Salford, we have to unite our communities. Britain has a long history of patriotism rooted in working life, built upon unity and pride in the common interests and shared life of everyone”.

The problem of course is detaching this “progressive patriotism” from any kind of Ukanian exceptionalism.

This may seem equivalent to squaring the circle, but look for Long-Bailey and her strategists to move the terms of the patriotism-debate, should it become significant, from a patriotism based on ethno-nationalist fantasies to one based on a version of “civic” patriotism.

The scale of the Tory victory in the UK general election last week is known to all who read a half-decent newspaper or news site—the biggest Tory win since Mrs Thatcher’s success in 1987, and the biggest Labour loss since 1935.

As a member of the Labour party I of course found the loss shattering. It is no consolation that although Corbyn’s Labour obtained 2 million fewer votes than in 2017, he still gained more votes than the 3 previous Labour leaders in their elections: Ed Miliband (2015), Gordon Brown (2010), and Tony Blair (2005, but not 1997 and 2002).

Although Labour lost in 2017, it reduced the Tories to a minority government, and with Jeremy Corbyn entrenched as leader, with a mandate that was popular within the party (except for its Blairite remnant), there seemed to be a springboard for future electoral success.

So where did it go wrong? The possible answers are to be found in two areas: the campaign itself, and structural considerations that are longer-term in nature and predate the emergence of Corbyn and his allies (the so-called Corbynistas). To deal with the latter first.

Labour’s traditional base—the so-called Red Wall extending from Wales to the Midlands and much of the north—has been afflicted with postindustrial blight since the time of Thatcher, when the breakdown of the postwar social-democratic concordat between capital and labour occurred.

The Tories were quite content to do nothing about this, since votes in these areas went to Labour and not the Conservatives.

In fact there is a letter, dated 11th August 1981 and marked “Secret”, written by Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer/finance minister, to Mrs Thatcher, warning her not “to over-commit scarce resources to Liverpool…. We must not expend all our resources in trying to make water flow uphill”. Howe recommended instead a policy of “managed decline” for Liverpool.

(In last week’s election, while Labour was being trounced in its traditional areas of strength, all 5 MPs in Liverpool and Merseyside belonged to Labour. But hatred for the Conservatives runs deep and long in Liverpool.)

Nonetheless, blame for this postindustrial ruination must also be attached to Labour. Tony Blair whizzed around the country talking about a new skills-based economy, but never really followed up with any substantial investment.

Accompanying such industrial decline in Labour’s heartlands was the decline of working-class institutions (unions, workingmen’s clubs with their cultural activities such as choirs and reading groups, thrift societies, worker education associations, and so on).

Nothing significant took their place. Decently-waged industrial labour was replaced by precarious jobs in the new gig economy— insecure, flexible contracts in warehouses and the service sector were now the norm in communities that hitherto had enjoyed secure employment and respectable wages.

This erosion was a decades-long process, but New Labour did nothing to reverse it.

Even Corbyn’s team misread the situation this time round.

They failed to appreciate the extent to which the “left behinds” in Labour’s heartlands were drifting away from their customary political allegiances, and that Labour would need to establish something like a new compact with its traditional base.

Instead Corbyn’s strategists decided to focus on supposedly vulnerable “target seats” held by the Tories, and campaigned there instead of mustering support in traditional working-class areas.

Thinking that a “youthquake” could substitute for more traditional forms of support, they also concentrated on the big cities and university towns. The “youthquake” failed to materialize. Although more 18-24-year-olds were registered to vote than in 2017, fewer actually voted in 2019.

Corbyn’s close ally, John McDonnell the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, acknowledged this when he said in a post-election interview that “There’s a long history of maybe 40 years of neglect” in his party’s approach to its traditional base.

In the campaign itself, Labour’s strategy was undone by Brexit.

Labour supporters who voted Leave in the EU referendum abandoned their party, while Tory Remainers held their collective nose and stuck with Boris Johnson.

The British Right, which had been in a steady decline since Thatcher’s time, was reanimated by the issues surrounding Brexit, and used them to expand its popular base.

As several writers, most notably Richard Seymour, pointed out, there was no “good” Brexit position for Labour to hold.

It gained time by securing parliamentary victories against Theresa May and BoJo, but this backfired with Leave voters, who merely perceived these parliamentary “successes” to be an obstruction of “the will of the people” (despite the fact that the actual Leave vote in the 2016 referendum of 17,410,742 was a fraction of those entitled to vote in it (47,350,700)).

Knowing that going all-out for the Remain or the Leave position would divide the party and the electorate, Corbyn and his team opted for a position of “constructive ambiguity”.

Labour, when in government, would strike an exit deal with the EU, and hold a binding second referendum in which this deal would be voted on, alongside an option for Remain.

Labour was thus impaled on the horns of a dilemma: faced with an unconvinced base, it had to decide whether “Stop Brexit” or “Stop the Tories” was to be its emphasis with regard to this base. “Stopping Brexit” meant opening the door for the Eurosceptic Tories, while “Stopping the Tories” meant supporting Brexit.

Another dilemma faced Corbyn: he had colleagues and members who insisted on posing the issue in terms of “loyalty to Labour” or “loyalty to the EU”, or at any rate they viewed the two loyalties as non-negotiably coextensive, when they clearly aren’t.

The second referendum was a fudge to deal with these intractable issues.

“Constructive ambiguity” did not work with Leavers, who saw it as an “anti-democratic” fix intended to thwart Brexit. Nearly all the Labour losses in the North and Midlands were in areas that voted Leave in the EU referendum. These Leave voters believed, rightly or wrongly, that Labour, in wanting a second referendum on leaving the EU, was selling-out on the Leave result of the 2016 Referendum.

BoJo played on this Leaver dissatisfaction in a relentless pitch to voters, casting the vote as a “people vs. parliament” election. This, together with his mendacious soundbite “Get Brexit done”, resonated with a large part of the electorate.

Labour by contrast sought to playdown Brexit and focus instead on the impact of Tory austerity and the cannibalization of the welfare state. It did not succeed, as Labour Leave voters forgave, or turned a blind eye to, the depredations of austerity, and voted for the Tories.

The Blyth Valley constituency is a case in point. Held by Labour since its creation in 1950, its voters administered a kicking to Labour by voting in the Tories, overlooking what austerity had done to Blyth Valley:

+ Blyth Valley has 18,947 (24.18%) children living in poverty.

+ 26.7% of its households are classified as fuel poor.

+ Blyth Valley’s unemployment rate is 31%.

These “Left Behinds” had voted-in a party that never had their interests at heart. The Tories have never been friends of these blue-collar voters.

Symptomatic of this anti-working-class attitude was what BoJo had written about working-class people like the voters in Blyth Valley, when he claimed that they were “likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless, and perhaps claiming to suffer from low self-esteem brought on by unemployment”.

With hindsight, Labour got its message wrong where these voters were concerned. It should not have ceded Brexit to the Tories as a primary campaign issue. It could have pushed relentlessly on the difference between “Brexit” (as an aim, however nebulous) and the con that is BoJo’s “Bullshit Brexit”.

BoJo was a Remainer until 2016, when he realized this put him out of step with his party’s entrenched Europhobia, and that he would never become its leader (and thus prime minister) until he equipped himself with a completely new set of principles on this issue.

Labour could have pounded him on this and other issues which showed BoJo’s rampant opportunism, hypocrisy, and duplicity, but it did not. Part of this had to do with Corbyn’s personality.

Corbyn, admirably, has always made a point of eschewing personal attacks. It is reported that when asked, rhetorically, when he would “land a punch” on BoJo, Corbyn replied: “I am not a boxer”.

BoJo and his acolytes had no such scruples, whereas Corbyn was constrained by them.

Many of us would say that harping on BoJo’s cavalier erotic life, his proven and repeated lying, his racism, homophobia, and bigotry, are all fair game in an election campaign.

After all, these are BoJo’s real credentials, which Labour never really attacked.

With the overwhelming connivance of the rightwing trash-rags and the BBC, this allowed Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the old Etonian posho who’s never done a day’s real work in his life, to masquerade as a man of the people.

By contrast, Corbyn was framed by the same media outlets as a typical “London” politician, a metropolitan type who could never be “one of us”.

The outcome was an unprecedented demonization of Corbyn, involving the pumping-up of the faux antisemitism “crisis”, Corbyn’s alleged links with terrorists, his suspect patriotism, and so on.

The anomaly is that voters liked the policies set out in the Labour manifesto, but on the doorstep, said that Corbyn was their stumbling block to voting for Labour, despite the fact that Corbyn was the architect of these policies!

Something of a cognitive override was happening here, which cannot be explained simply in terms of brainwashing by the media, lack of education, “turkeys voting for Christmas”, and so forth.

We are in the realm of a deep and multi-layered orchestration of affect, of subliminal sentiment, a story that must be saved for another place.

So while BoJo hammered away at his simplistic and dishonest “Get Brexit done” theme, Labour presented voters with a plethora of policy options (“policy incontinence” in the words of one Labour insider) that after a while left John and Jane Bull of Nottingham somewhat bemused.

Labour’s proposals had been costed, so the typical rightwing charge that this was just Labour throwing money around did not stick. In any event, the 2008 bankers’ bailout had cost more than Labour what was proposing to spend in government, and of course the rightwing media did not squeal about that particular act of generosity.

But Labour should have announced to voters a clear prioritization of these policies, and since they couldn’t all be implemented at one go, given a rough-and-ready sense of the implementation-mechanisms for as many of them as possible (admittedly it did do this with some of its proposals). For instance, it is clear that the NHS needs to be a top priority, but how would its needs be balanced against those of the Green New Deal Labour proposed?

Labour committed to phasing out dormitory wards in hospitals, but how quickly would this be done, as against its commitment to deliver nearly 90% of electricity and 50% of heat from renewable and low-carbon sources by 2030?

Fewer policy pledges with more detail attached to each of them might have served Labour better in its election “ground game”.

But all this is mere hindsight.

More important is the massive task of institution-building and cultural transformation facing Labour in its former heartlands.

Despite these electoral setbacks, Corbyn’s achievement has been massive. He tore Labour away from its Blairite fetters, and although some are saying Labour will only win elections when it opts once again for centrism and triangulation, this Blairite recapture of the party won’t happen.

Kenneth Surin is emeritus at Duke University, North Carolina. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

I am in Sydney, having just spent 6 days in Brisbane to the north. The area around, and to the south of, Sydney has been engulfed by extensive wildfires which have been burning since August. This includes 20% of the Blue Mountains world heritage area.

According to The New York Times, in the middle of November, more than 85 fires burned across Australia’s east coast, 40 of them out of control. The Guardian said that on 1^st December, about a third of the 146 wildfires then burning were not contained, and later reported that some fires would take weeks to put out.

At the end of 2018 The Guardian had already described fire conditions in Australia as “catastrophic”.

Accompanying the wildfires is a prolonged drought of historic proportions. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology says:

“When compared to other 34-month periods commencing in January, the 34 months from January 2017 to October 2019 has been the driest on record averaged over the Murray–Darling Basin (36% below the 1961–1990 average), as well as over the northern Murray–Darling Basin (40% below average) and for the state of New South Wales (35% below average). All three regions have also been the driest on record for the 22 months from January 2018 to October 2019, whilst for the 27 months from August 2017 to October 2019 rank second in all three regions; only the 1900–02 peak of the Federation Drought has been drier”.

The Bureau of Meteorology also predicted below average rainfall for most of Australia until the early part of 2020, and above average maximum temperatures from October to January.

The Climate Council of Australia (CCA) says climate change is “supercharging extreme weather events, putting Australian lives, our economy and our environment at risk”.

The CCA warns that by 2040 temperatures of 50C/132F could become common in Sydney and Melbourne unless global warming is limited to 1.5C/2.7F above pre-industrial levels (the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious level).

In addition, long-term climate models do not hold much comfort— they project a continuing decline in rainfall over southern Australia for the next century. The same models also project a decline in river flows in parts of the country.

As is the case with the wildfires in Amazonia (Brazil’s Bolsonaro: “Leo di Caprio paid to start the Amazonian fires”), Siberia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, and the droughts in other parts of the world (Kenya, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Brazil) there is an evident political dimension to the conflagrations and drought in Australia.

The two main Australian parties— centrist Labor and the rightwing Liberals—are both responsible for Australia’s water crisis.

As is the case in many capitalist countries with a significant agribusiness sector, disaster relief measures are tailored in the main to help this sector and less so small farmers.

The low-interest-loans scheme intended to tide-over small farmers during the crisis will not help much— already indebted and on their knees because the drought has devastated grazing lands for their animals, they will be hard pressed to repay these loans.

When there are water shortages on a significant scale, there must be an adage somewhere which says there will always be politicians (of all stripes) who love the idea of building dams as a putative “solution”.

Australia is no exception. To quote from an excellent article by Martin Scott on the World Socialist Web Site:

“Federal Water Minister David Littleproud [sic] recently lamented that states had done “three-fifths of bugger all” to build new dams, and similar sentiments have been expressed by Barnaby Joyce, the former federal agriculture minister, and Anthony Albanese, the federal opposition leader”.

Scott continues:

“A report from the Australia Institute has revealed that dozens of large dams have in fact been constructed in recent years, but not for the public good.

The report stated: “The recently constructed dams in the Murray-Darling Basin do not help drought-stricken towns, struggling small irrigators or the wider public. They are built with taxpayer money on private land mainly for the benefit of large corporate agribusiness like Webster Limited”.”

Australian federal governments have pursued a “market approach” when meeting water and irrigation needs in the massive Murray-Darling Basin (which drains around 1/7^th of the Australian land mass, and provides water for agricultural enterprises supplying more than 40% of the gross value of Australia’s agricultural production).

The key to this market approach is the sale of “water rights” under a plan which allows irrigators to be “owed” water by virtue of a provision allowing them to take as much as 300% of their annual allocation in non-drought-years to “make up” for drought years.

The result is predictable: flows downstream are insufficient nearly all the time, and vital wetlands are deprived of the water needed for their sustenance.

Building more dams will do nothing to remedy this flawed market approach, since of course their construction will be undertaken under the auspices of a plan that is broken-backed to begin with.

You don’t need to be Stephen Hawking to know that a sale conferring the right to drain a water-source in excess of the actual amount of water in it is a crazy idea that will deplete and ultimately destroy this or that river or lake sooner rather than later (definitely sooner in conditions of extreme long-term drought as is the case now).

Australia’s environmental problems are compounded by having a neoliberal coalition between the Liberals and Nationals headed by the conservative evangelical and strident Trump supporter Scott Morrison, who is a member of a holy roller (Pentecostal) church.

Prime minister Morrison sends his two daughters to a private Baptist school, saying he does this because he “doesn’t want the values of others imposed upon them”! As the tennis star John McEnroe used to say when berating umpires for their decisions: “You cannot be serious!”.

Morrison has a particular animus against environmental activists, railing in a speech a few weeks ago against a “new breed of radical activism” that is “apocalyptic in tone”, and promising to outlaw boycott campaigns directed at the country’s mining industry.

Somewhat ironically, the term “apocalyptic” is being used by the media to describe the wildfires and accompanying smog now shrouding Australia’s east coast!

Following vaguely in the footsteps of Oklahoma’s US senator Jim “Brain Freeze” Inhofe, who brought a snowball on to the senate floor to “prove” that global warming did not exist, the equally asinine Morrison once brought a lump of coal into the house chamber to show his fellow parliamentarians they need not be afraid of coal.

Just as Inhofe is in the pockets of the US fossil-fuel industry, Morrison is in the pockets of the powerful Australian mining industry. In contrast to the US and Australia, Germany has pledged to stop using coal by 2038.

Morrison is a foot-dragger on environmental issues, and has not taken the wildfires seriously enough. In fact, in a ridiculous reprise of US Republican “thoughts and prayers” responses to tragedies that have an obvious political dimension, he tweeted: “Our thoughts and prayers are with those who have been so directly and horribly impacted by these fires”.

In May Morrison announced that an AU$100m/$68.4m Australian Recycling Investment Fund would be set up, but there has been no sign of it so far (according to The Sydney Morning Herald).

Informed Australians know it is futile to expect Scott Morrison and the coalition government to take any lead on environmental issues, even those with catastrophic outcomes.