Summer Break

The time has come, for me to take a break from my daily blogging.  I am trying to write a book, a novel for young adults, and I find I just don't have enough time to do both.  I will continue to keep an eye on the political comings and goings and if something deserves my comment I will certainly not hesitate to resume the blog, but until September when the special conference is held I shall not attempt to write something every day.

For those of you who have read what I have written so far, thank you and I hope you enjoyed some of what I have to say.

Until then, take care

Love Tim xx

Hinkley Tinkly

There is chaos in the ranks of the Labour Party.  Everybody knows and besides, as my late mother-in-law used to say, it was in the Telegraph so it must be true.

And yes there is certainly a great deal of disagreement within the party at all levels. Allegations from MPs who should know better about the way a local election was handled in Totnes must be music to the ears of the rightwing media (is there any other sort these days?), despite the fact that the way it was described differs from the truth in some quite significant ways.  The MPs claim that the CLP has been taken over by Corbynistas when it would appear that the very opposite is true and the CLP steadfastly refused to support a Corbyn supporter in her attempts to be the Labour candidate in the by-election, resulting in her standing as an independent.  

I am apparently a thug, an entryist, a trot, a member of militant and presumably an all round bad egg.  I'm not sure exactly what an entryist is... oh, just looked it up and it turns out I am not an entryist after all.  Entryist in this context is a member of Momentum who has been instructed to join the Labour Party and infiltrate their ranks.  Sorry but I joined the party first and then decided to join Momentum too as they seemed to be pursuing the same agenda as me. Does that make me a back-entryist? 

Presumably members of the Church of England who join the Conservative party are entryists, not that they are ever described thus. I note that they have been signally unsuccessful in bringing any sort of Christian ethos to the Tory party, so even if they are we don't have to worry about them.

Meanwhile back at Tory HQ all is presumably sweetness and light, everybody pulling in the same direction, steered by that safe pair of hands which is Mrs May, our very own Mother Theresa. Well that's clearly what they and the media would like you to believe but yesterday an announcement was made which clearly blows this concept clear out of the water.  

On Thursday we were told that finally after much soul searching French energy company EDF had approved the financing of the Hinkley Point C project at a board meeting.  It was a close run thing. Many people within the organisation were not convinced the project was a good idea, some of the technology was untried and may not work and the budget could easily over-run.  Well let's face it it wouldn't be a real budget if it didn't.  In the end it received approval by seven votes to ten and the resignation of two board members.

A safe pair of hands?  Let's examine the facts.  In what was one of her first parliamentary pronouncements Mrs May said unequivocally that she would be willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians if we were attacked by nuclear weapons. Exactly the sort of statement to give Express and Mail readers a mild orgasm. The men were immediately transported back to the nursery and Nanny whom they adored.  The women because here was one of them proving when compared to men they can be equally unpleasant.  Hooray!

Mrs May was on pretty safe ground here.  She knows that there is little likelihood of a nuclear attack, and in the chaos if it did happen, no-one would know whether or not she did press the button, or whatever it is you have to do to unleash weapons of mass destruction. If she didn't there wouldn't be many people left to hold her to account and those who were still alive would probably have other things to worry about.

Now let us look at two other, more real and more pressing issues that Mrs May has had to deal with in the first couple of weeks of her premiership.

Firstly Brexit.  A loathsome name for a loathsome concept. Despite anything the Express may say on the matter it is fairly clear that it is going to be a mess and businesses, and by implication those employed by them, are going to suffer.

One thing we do know is that Brexit means Brexit.  How do we know?  Well Mrs May told us.  The only problem is that nobody knows what Brexit means.  It's about as meaningless a phrase as 7=7.  This is self evidently true yet tells us no more about what makes seven seven; what constitutes sevenness, what for example makes seven different from six or eighty three. Certainly from her actions so far it is clear that Mrs May does not think that Brexit means a straightforward leaving of the EU.  Not only that but she has told us that no decision to invoke Article 50 will be made until the new year. Mrs May is so worried about what effect her actions might have that she is putting off making a decision.

The important thing about having a good pair of hands is that you can catch anything that is thrown at you.  Brexit can hardly be a surprise, after all that is the sole reason that Mrs May is Prime Minister and not still Justice Secretary, yet here she is saying, sorry, wasn't ready for that one, could you throw it to me again, maybe next year.

Secondly Hinkley Point C. This ball has been in the air for such a long time that she must have seen it.  Yet once again she holds up her hand and says, sorry, wasn't ready for that one, could you throw it to me again, maybe in the Autumn.

Philip Hammond must be absolutely livid.  He always looks a bit of a prick, but the way she made him look on TV made him look like the todger on the Cerne Abbas Giant.  There he was telling the nation that we were just waiting for final confirmation for EDF and then we would sign the contract.  The Chinese were here ready, the marquees were up, I'm sure there would have been bunting, and then Mrs May pipes up with:  Hang on a minute...  be with you in a minute...  just checking my diary... look can we make it some time in the Autumn...?  Sorry about that.

This is leadership.  This is a safe pair of hands.  Imagine what the media would have said if Corbyn had been Prime Minister.

At this point I should say that I am very conflicted about Hinkley C.  Our house is powered entirely by electricity, so I understand the importance of generating it.  I understand the problems with using fossil fuels.  I also understand the problems of dealing with nuclear waste, although fortunately I will be dead before the waste produced by Hinkley C becomes a problem.  

Mrs Green and I buy our electricity from Good Energy which claims to be 100% renewable, although how they can tell escapes me.  I am very much in favour of renewable energy but until we devise a proper method of storing it we will always be subject to the vagaries of the weather. I quite like the idea of building tidal barrages across our estuaries but I am also aware of the ecological impact this will have.  The plain truth is we are suffering from chronic underfunding in the power generation sector, which I am sure is a direct consequence of its privatisation.  

If we don't build Hinkley C we a probably buggered because it is planned to go on line in 2025, just as we turn off the last of our coal fired stations.  Given that Hinkley C will inevitably over-run both its cost and time scale predictions 2025 doesn't look too rosy either way.   

Mrs May's response to this was to put off making the decision.  By the Autumn there may be no offer on the table.  EDF are already really not keen and given this excuse they might just withdraw their offer completely.  

I understand Mrs May's predicament, but I am not Prime Minister and I did not put myself forward for a job where I would be called on to make this kind of decision.  I suspect she doesn't want to go down in history as the PM who took the UK out of the EU, thus possibly triggering a break-up of the UK and also as the PM who gave the green light to the biggest white elephant in the history of power generation, while simultaneously allowing the Chinese access to the National Grid.

Welcome to the real world Theresa. 

Love Tim xx

The World of Messrs Foster and Green

So the British judicial system in the form of Mr Justice Foskett has spoken.  Sense has prevailed and Mr Corbyn will be allowed to defend his position as leader of the Labour Party in the forthcoming ballot.  There will be no coronation of Citizen Smith, in the absence of a challenger. Tory rules will not be followed.

Of course there was never any doubt about the outcome because we do after all have the best judicial system in the World.  

Actually just about everything about that last sentence is absolute bollocks.  There was always a chance that a judge asked to rule on a matter such as this might take it upon himself to rule differently.  The minds of our judges are indeed labyrinthine and their decisions are not for us mere mortals to understand.  Fortunately in this case the judge in question seems to be aware of a land outside the Inns of Court and moreover to inhabit the twenty-first century rather than the nineteenth. I have read the judgement in full and indeed understood most of it.  It seems fair and evenhanded and even though I am happy with his conclusions I can see that Mr Justice Foskett has used his not inconsiderable intellect to weigh up the matter carefully.  If he had decided otherwise and had demonstrated a similar degree of rigour I would like to think I would have accepted his judgement in the same spirit.

I bet I wouldn't have though.

The other testicular matter is the idea that we have the best judicial system in the world.  It is the sort of jingoistic claim made by Iowan farmers who have never left Iowa, that the USA is the greatest nation on Earth.  It is generally a claim made in profound ignorance by those who have precisely no knowledge of that of which they speak.  Precious few in this country have the faintest glimmering of how the judicial system works here.  Even fewer have any idea how the judicial system in say Germany works never mind that in The Philippines or Japan.  Neither do I, yet this does not stop many in our society stating quite baldly that we have the best justice system in the world. Bar none. No question about it.  After all we invented it didn't we?

When I was a child our education system seemed geared towards making us feel immensely grateful that we had been born British rather than French or Italian or, heaven forfend, German. Most of the map of the World was coloured red showing the extent of 'The Empire Upon Which The Sun Was Rapidly Setting' and we had just won the second great war in a row. Rule Britannia!

I rather hope that we have grown up a bit since then, although reading the headlines in certain newspapers does make me wonder. I don't buy them by the way but the BBC does a rather nice resumé of the next day's front pages on the News Channel at about half ten of an evening which saves me the bother. 

Obviously as a Corbyn supporter I am both pleased and relieved at today's results but something else has made me both simultaneously very happy and also slightly sad.

I am immensely pleased that Sir David, The Hon. Mr Justice Foskett, not to be confused with Professor David Foskett who is Head of the London School of Hospitality and Tourism, who might have laid on a good spread afterwards but who is singularly unqualified to judge on this matter although he might have a role to play on Masterchef, I am immensely pleased that Mr Justice Foskett chose to award costs to the defendants, The Labour Party and Mr Corbyn, which means that Mrs Green and I as members won't be forking out and the nice Mr Foster will be faced with a hefty bill, because as we know, lawyers don't come cheap and two of those involved were QCs a particularly expensive kind of barrister available only to the seriously rich.  What simultaneously makes me sad is that none of this money need have been spent in this way.  The lawyers will undoubtedly not mind, but if Mr Foster really were a socialist and not a nasty ex-theatrical agent with a reputation for getting his own way, he might have better used it by donating it to a food bank, say or a women's refuge.  I suppose it's vanity litigation, available to those who can afford it, just like vanity publishing. In neither case is success assured.

On a different matter I note that Sir Philip Green seems hell bent on becoming an admiral. He owns four yachts of different sizes and I wonder whether he has plans to put himself forward as a privatised Trident replacement.  It would chime in well with the present government's views on using private firms to provide public services. Stick a couple of missiles on each of them and send them off round the world. And more importantly if they get attacked, nobody is going to miss Sir Philip anyway. 

How about: Death and Destruction, brought to you you by Arcadia.

Not SI VIS PACEM, PARA BELLUM but ET IN ARCADIA EGO or roughly translated 'I am in every arcade.'  

If you buy your clothes from Burtons or Topshop or Miss Selfridge or Dorothy Perkins or Outfit or Evans or Topman or Wallis you too are in Arcadia, and helping Sir Philip or Uncle Phil as I like to think of him, put down the deposit on his next boat, which I understand will be an aircraft carrier so he can use his Gulfstream G6 without the inconvenience of having to set foot on dry land and mix with the hoi polloi because he doesn't like the way they look at him.  

If Arcadia makes a move for G4S be very, very afraid.

Love Tim xx  

Vermin

When Mrs Green was out walking with our dog Spike this morning he suddenly became very animated and charged off, only to the of his lead as it happens, but something had obviously caught his attention.  As they watched, two foxes appeared and trotted across the field in front of them and disappeared through a hedge.  

We don't often see foxes round here, it is heavily wooded and there are definitely foxes and badgers as is evidenced by the corpses which litter the main road, but unlike the urban fox whose nightly foray into back gardens and bins has reduced his fear of humans, our foxes are much more wary, and apart from these two our only other encounter was when I came face to face with one on my morning walk.  I don't know which of us was more surprised but without any fuss we both agreed to go our separate ways and parted on relatively good terms. 

This chance encounter set me to thinking about our attitude to wildlife in this country and indeed elsewhere. Physically we are quite a small island.  Much of what is not urban is developed land in that it has been modified and altered over the centuries in the interests of agriculture, and more latterly, especially in the South East in the interests of golf.  Google Earth is a wonderful tool and I, (sad person that I am) can spend hours revisiting my past and seeing how everything I remember has changed.  The most startling thing is the number of golf courses which have been built around the village in which I was brought up. What was once reasonably good arable land planted with wheat and barley and beans and peas and potatoes and where I earned half a crown a bag picking peas and my sister earned pocket money pulling wild oats from cereal crops, is now dotted with bunkers, not nuclear but hazardous nonetheless, especially if you aren't very good at golf.  In our landscape we have gradually removed all the totally wild areas and with them the habitats of much of our native wildlife.

One of the consequences of this is the emergence of the urban fox, who is now at home in our towns and cities.  Foxes are not popular, nor are rats or moles or mice or mink or rabbits.  Indeed they are often classified as vermin, and so in the interests of accuracy I thought I would discover what the legal definition of vermin actually is.  It turns out that there is no definition of the term in UK law. 

According to Lord Whitty in such a situation the Oxford dictionary definition should be applied. The Oxford Dictionary defines "vermin" as "Animals of a noxious or objectionable kind. Originally applied to reptiles, stealthy, or slinky animals, and various wild beasts; now, excluding in US and Australia, almost entirely restricted to those animals or birds which prey upon preserved game . . ." 

So we dismiss as vermin anything we don't like.  Basically we are persecuting creatures for being what they are.  A fox didn't choose to be a fox and yet he is persecuted for doing foxy things.  Similarly with a mink, which although destructive, was brought here by greedy men who wanted his fur and is now hunted.  Rats don't decide to be rats.  They just are.

Having said all that I don't intend to enter into a long musing about the rights and wrongs of hunting, shooting, fishing, pest-eradication and so on. 

I just think there is an interesting parallel here with what is happening in society.  The colour of someone's skin or the language they speak or the religion they follow is not a matter of choice.  In nearly every case it is a matter of birth.  Syrians are Syrians because they were born in Syria.  If they had been born in Lithuania then they would not be Syrian, they would be Lithuanian, and might look different.  People from hot countries have darker skin as a result of evolution and not because they think that particular shade suits them.  

We here in our little island are no different.  We have a long and ignoble history of religious intolerance which has only recently started to be addressed.  The default setting in this country is CofE although active members of the Anglican Church have seriously declined in numbers over recent decades.  Britain First are prime example of this phenomenon claiming to be Christian and waving crosses as they protest outside Mosques. Different Christian sects show an antipathy one to another, and not just in Northern Ireland.

On social media we see the same thing happening in the political sphere where those with whom you disagree are labelled 'scum' and often much worse.  We are back to vermin again.  People are not vermin.  People are never vermin or anything approaching it and papers such as the Daily Mail who actively promote hate are hateful for doing it.

People are often bad, in that they behave badly, sometimes very badly, but we must always remember our humanity even when they forget theirs, otherwise what is the point.  We can be vigilant, we can invoke the law and those who transgress should be punished, but often it is discovered that these vermin, these scum, are seriously disturbed individuals who feel cut off from society and to have no investment in it.  How in touch with reality is somebody who is willing to blow themselves up in support of a cause?  

Hard or Soft Left

Yesterday I listened to Owen Smith being interviewed on Radio 4.  What he said seemed to make a lot of sense and apart from his stance on nuclear weapons I couldn't find much to disagree with him on.

Owen Smith is the unknown Welsh MP who has put himself forward to unite the Labour Party by challenging the formerly unknown Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership.  The reason for this challenge is that the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party have decided that they will never win power with Jeremy Corbyn as their leader.  To be fair it is not anything Jeremy has or hasn't done, despite assertions by others that it is.  

Many MPs decided even before he had won the election that they would never support him and made that abundantly clear even as the result was being announced.  Over the past nine months or so there has been a growing movement against the leader, although who is orchestrating this is not clear. Instances of bullying and Watergate style burglaries have been blamed on Corbyn. Apparently he is responsible for the trolls on social media and has it in his power to make them stop. That he is not doing so is further proof of his lack of leadership and proof that he is unelectable. 

In the interests of balance I have to say that maybe he has made one or two mistakes throughout his lengthy career in Parliament.  'Our friends in Hamas' is a phrase which has come back to bite him on the bum and is one example which the media have seized upon to prove he is a dangerous extremist. There are others, and nobody at the time thought anything of it, but then nobody thought he would one day be leader of his party.  

As far a skeletons in cupboards go however, I think Corbyn's are pretty small fry compared to many lurking in other MPs' wardrobes and which they are desperate to keep there.  I long ago learned not to have heroes because they will undoubtedly let you down and turn out to have feet of clay.  Admire people if you will, but do so from a distance, that way you are never too disappointed.  I welcome it when England win a test match or their rugby team play well.  I was pleased that Chris Froome won the Tour de France, but I never get down if they fail to do these things.  I am not a football fan and support no team in particular. The overwhelming optimism of those who are takes my breath away, but the downside to this must be the inevitable crushing disappointment when their team fails to win again.  So many teams, so few competitions, and therefore so few winners. 

Anyway let us return to Owen Smith.  Am I the only person to think he looks a bit like a younger John Smith?  

The Unity candidate.  Owen Smith claims he has the ability to unite all the party and move it forward in fighting the Tories. A split caused by MPs like himself who decided not to recognise their elected leader and thus oppose him at every possible end and turn.

It's a bit like somebody breaking your arm and then saying, 'It's ok, I'm an orthopaedic surgeon, I can repair it for you.  Who's that crying in the corner?  Oh that's just Angela, I sent her on ahead to make the way clear for me to ride to the rescue of the party. Think of her as a sort of John the Baptist figure.  She is not the One but the One who makes good the way for the One, or something. Now where's this broken arm, oh yes, silly me, I've still got hold of it.'

And how is he going to do his uniting trick?  Well it seems by basically nicking all Corbyn's policies except unilateral disarmament and claiming them for his own.  

This man is a smooth operator. He has seen which way the wind is blowing in the country and has decided that the only way to win them over is by promising them the same as his opponent. This puts the PLP in a difficult position. They have produced a unity candidate to take on what they see as a dangerously left wing leader and he is canvassing using the very left wing ideas which they claim to oppose.  

This throws up several possibilities.  Does he really espouse the things he is proposing, in which case do the MPs support him or not, or is he just saying he espouses them in order to win over the greater membership, while actually having no intention of being that radical once he is elected leader.  In other words can we trust him, is he a man of his word?  Or is he just another politician who will promise the moon and just give you a signed photograph instead. I do think he may have overcooked it a bit. One of the criticisms levelled at Corbyn by his detractors is that he wants to take us back to the seventies.  Let us look at what Smith is proposing: 

• Reintroducing Wages Councils, abolished by former Conservative PM Margaret Thatcher, across different sectors of industry - to boost pay above the minimum wage in sectors such as retail and care
• Minimum guaranteed working hours and the abolition of zero hours contracts
• Scrapping trade union reforms that curb the ability of unions to call strikes
• To establish a Ministry of Labour
• Same rights rights for agency workers as full time workers
• Workers to be placed on company remuneration committees
• A ban on companies being allowed to recruit only foreign workers

Forgive me for being a bit cynical here but these all sound a bit seventies as well.  How I wonder does Liz Kendall feel about these proposals?  Or Progress?

Laying aside nuclear disarmament for a moment, it seems that we are being asked to choose between a man who is renowned even among his detractors for being principled and thoughtful, who has worked tirelessly for more than thirty years to address wrongs and support the less privileged both here and abroad; and a man whom nobody had heard of a year ago, with no track record to speak of, who says the right thing, but whom we don't know we can trust to do what he promises.  I know where my money is.

On another topic, I had the misfortune to catch the end of an Adam Sandler film last night.  It was called Tower Heist and was a sort of comedy crime caper.  I find that any film described as a caper is devoutly to be avoided and most American films which call themselves comedies, likewise.

As I turned on the telly there was a Thanksgiving parade taking place and several FBI agents charging about looking worried.  Then suddenly a truck burst through a gate and proceeded to drive through the middle of the parade along its entire length until it was stopped by two police cars and officers pointing guns. Several things struck me about this. 

Firstly the truck was driven buy a black man, yet he was not shot dead when stopped.  In fact he was not shot at all and by the end of the film had walked free, despite having driven right through a Thanksgiving Day parade.  

Secondly in doing so he had not hit one single person, nobody was hurt. 

I would call it crass but then by definition any film with Adam Sandler in is by definition crass.  Let me instead call Channel 4 crass.  Crass and thoughtless and unthinking. TV companies, and particularly the BBC pull programmes when something has happened that might clash with the content of that film or show. Two weeks ago 84 people were killed and many more injured when a lorry driver deliberately drove into the crowd on Le Promenade des Anglais in Nice.  

To show the film so soon after the event was at the very best tasteless and Channel 4 should be ashamed of themselves.

Take care

Love Tim xx

Who wants to live for ever?

"What we’re trying to do is hit the biggest point of suffering right now in the industrialised world, which is the diseases of ageing.” Biotech boss Elizabeth Parrish has tried out her company’s anti-ageing gene therapy with, she says, amazing results. Too good to be true?

This was the strapline on a post on the Guardian's Facebook feed on Sunday.

Having ignored her slightly clumsy use of the Queen's english in her quote, I was intrigued enough to read the accompanying article.  The answer to the last question, 'Too good to be true?'  seems to be, 'Probably.'

Whether or not Ms Parrish has indeed discovered how to stop ageing only time will tell, by which time I will be to old to care, after all I'm nearly too old to care now. 

Trying to discover more about this wonder woman I trawled the internet, actually I googled her and read her Linkedin profile by which time I found myself losing the will to live, and I found that surprisingly she didn't seem to be any sort of scientist. 

Liz (it seems) is known as "the woman who wants to genetically engineer you," she is a humanitarian, entrepreneur and innovator and a leading voice for genetic cures. As a strong proponent of progress and education for the advancement of gene therapy, she serves as a motivational speaker to the public at large for the life sciences. One of them then.  

It seems that so convinced is she that these therapies work that she has tried them on herself.  She couldn't do that in the US because they have laws about that sort of thing so instead she went to Bolivia, and had it done there.  As I understand it Bolivia has not hitherto been renowned for its medical research, but of course that might be about to change, especially as they are quite happy, apparently to allow testing of unproven therapies on human patients. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised as anecdotally several Nazis fled there after the war. Maybe their work continues.

And this leads me to the kernel of what I want to talk about today.  It all hinges on ethics.  Gene therapy undoubtedly offers a great deal of hope to those who suffer from diseases which may be cured or halted by techniques which will emerge from research in this ares.  I am all for hope and am delighted that such research is being carried out.  I have absolutely no objection, ethical or practical to that being done.

Ms Parrish however, while claiming that she is trying (not her personally, you understand, she just promotes it motivationally) to cure the diseases of ageing.  As someone who already suffers from rather too many of these diseases I ought to be excited at the prospect that they may be curable, although I fear that there must be a point of no return, beyond which no amount of gene therapy will help. So perhaps it might be considered strange that I am deeply uneasy about the whole thing. 

It actually seems from reading the Guardian article that many scientists working in the field are sceptical about her claims and whether the results she claims will actually benefit her.  My unease runs deeper however.  Should we even be looking for a cure for ageing at all?

Let us look at just some of the possible effects of being able to say, double the normal life-span of a human being. In that case the average age at death would be about 150 in the developed world but of course considerably less in less developed countries.  Doubling the allotted span would emphasise these differences.  Nevertheless the effect on the total population of the world must be to increase it further.  I have been quoted studies which show that the 'worst case scenario' in Sweden would be an increase of only 35% over 50 years.  Quite why Sweden was chosen was not made clear but if we project even this crude estimate over the globe I think we will still find ourselves with a rather crowded planet, probably more crowded than it otherwise would have been.  I will not be alive in 50 years so if this stuff starts to happen, good luck to those of you that still are.  A rather over enthusiastic espouser of this anti-ageing therapy also directed me to a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt_cqEdDtEQ .  I couldn't watch it all, it made me so cross but others might find it less annoying.  He really lost me when he said the way to avoid overpopulation is not to have children.  I don't think that would happen.  He might be happy to be childless, Mrs Green and I don't have children, through choice, but we are definitely not the norm.

Besides I don't even think that overpopulation is the most significant reason for not wanting an anti-ageing therapy.

For a start it is not going to be cheap.  I think I can predict with some certainty that it won't be available on demand on the NHS.  This immediately creates an imbalance.  Society is already divided into the haves and the have-nots.  What if we found ourselves in a situation where the haves not only have much more than the rest of us, but they live for much longer as well?  One of the positives about cockroaches like Philip Green is that he is old and fat and may well not live a great deal longer, although looking up his details I see he is only eighteen months older than me.  The prospect of him being able to buy another sixty or seventy years in which to enjoy his ever increasing fleet of luxury yachts fills me with anger and I am not a struggling ex BHS employee.

If by some miracle it were to be made available to all on demand, I am still not sure I would want it. The government is already pushing retirement age over the horizon.  The prospect of living say 150 years and working till you are 140 does not appeal to me.  Ah, I hear you say, but we are all going to be replaced by robots so we won't have to work and will all have much more time to enjoy ourselves. Could I just respectfully point out that enjoying ourselves costs money, feeding, clothing and housing ourselves costs money.  If we are not working where will this money come from?  This bright bold new future is not actually quite as bright and bold as it might seem.  And not everything can be done by robots, so what about those of us who still have to work?  More resentment. More Chaos.

Taken to its extreme each country will have an immortal elite and a mortal proletariat.  I bet the North Koreans are looking forward to that.  Kim Jong Un living forever while the rest of them struggle and starve.  It won't be much better here.  Philip Green aside, how about an immortal Cliff Richard, Tamara Ecclestone, Queen Elizabeth (poor old Charlie), Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Branson, Roman Abramovich, Jose Mourinho? We really would have a 'them-and-us' society.  Each country could have its own immortal elite.  Imagine an immortal Trump, an immortal Berlusconi, an immortal Putin, an immortal Jeremy Hunt.  If it ever happens I off to Dignitas on the next plane and you can sort out the mess yourselves. 

Just like nuclear fission which was supposed to provide us with eternal free energy and instead provided us with nuclear waste we can't get rid of safely and nuclear weapons whose destructive power is unimaginable, a therapy for immortality or even significant prolonging of our natural life-span is a genie which should not be let out of the bottle.

Take Care

Love Tim xx

Showbiz

Before I start today's blog and apropos of what I was saying yesterday here is a link to a radio 4 programme which I heard just after I had posted my contribution. It is about how the whipping system works in Parliament. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07lfrjz#play

But back to business. On my walk through the woods this morning I was shouted at by a Jay from a tree as I passed underneath it.  It sounded quite angry and I wondered if it was a Corbyn supporter, a sub species say Garrulus glandarius corbynius.

I must say I am getting more and more frustrated as Labour parliamentarians find an excuse not to support their elected leader.  They all seem to fail to grasp one essential truth. They say they want a leader to unite the party so they are switching allegiance or at least supporting a previously unknown politician with a questionable track record who claims to be left wing.  His voting record is certainly quite encouraging, but it is what he did before becoming an MP which concerns many of his detractors.  He is from South Wales and was educated in a comprehensive school, although given that his father was at one time chair of the Arts Council of Wales he is scarcely working class. He also work as a lobbyist for Pfizer.

The truth that they are failing to grasp is that this is not about Jeremy Corbyn the man, it is about the ideals he espouses. I would guess that most of those who joined or rejoined the party after he became leader did not do so because they admired his leadership skills.  He probably didn't have many at the time, never having been a leader before.  They signed up in significant numbers, and I was one of them, because here was a man who seemed to believe in arguing his case rather than ridiculing those with an opposing point of view, who addressed the electorate as if they were adults, and most important of all espoused policies which might roll back some of the horrendous damage wrought on our society by a Tory government hell bent on selling everything off in the name of austerity.

That he has, I suspect without really wanting to, become a rallying point for so many people, tells us just how much some people felt the need for change. The political rallies he has been addressing up and down the country are on a monumental scale.  I struggle to remember rallies of such passion size which were in support of something positive, rather than protesting against government policies of one sort or another.

Much has been made of his performance during the referendum campaign.  Let's examine the facts.  Through a quirk of fate he found himself sharing a cause with the man who week in week out stood across the floor of the House and did his best to humiliate and bully him, cheered on by the baying members of the Tory Party in full voice.  Is it any wonder that he refused to share a platform with him?  He worked instead to put forward an alternative reason to remain in the EU, an institution which he acknowledged is flawed, but which is nonetheless vital for our future prosperity. He did this in a measured and reasoned way but, according to his critics, failed to persuade large numbers of working class voters who saw the referendum as nothing more than an opportunity to stick one on the Tories.  Cameron's pleas that this was all about protecting business will have done nothing to change their minds.  What did they care about fat cats?  Life was already pretty bad, how could it get any worse? Sadly they may well be about to find out.  I suspect that Corbyn thought he had done enough, as indeed did all the remain campaigners and many of the leave campaign as well.  The result seemed to come as much of a surprise to them as it did to everybody else.

In the end nearly twice as many Labour voters voted remain than stay, something which could not be said about the Conservative supporters of whom a majority voted leave. Nevertheless it was still Corbyn's fault. 

We live in a world of mass media today, where television and the internet are king and queen. Politics has become showbiz.  We have once again taken a cue from the other side of the Atlantic and turned what should be a serious and considered matter into a three-ring circus. Of course there must be passion, although I for one won't miss the sight of Cameron, declaring how 'passionate' he was about every single bloody topic he was called upon to discuss.  'This is something about which I am passionate...' give us a break.  All passion spent now though eh, Dave? 

I am beginning to think that allowing cameras or even microphones into the Houses of Parliament wasn't an altogether good thing.  Mostly it's unbelievably tedious stuff with hardly anybody in attendance.  In the Commons in theory there only needs to be the Speaker and one other member there for a debate to continue, and the quorum for a division is 40 including the Speaker which means that legislation can proceed with as few as 20 votes.  The quorum in the House of Lords is even smaller at 30.  

Every Wednesday the show comes to town, everybody troops in there is a lot of yahing and booing and then everybody buggers off for lunch. 

Parties need good orators, Michael Foot was a great speaker, also stabbed in the back by his right wingers.  Jeremy Corbyn can be quite impressive when he speaks in public, but not all the great orators in a party can be or need to be leader.  Both Bevin and Bevan were considered great speakers, Attlee was not.  I am not making a comparison, I am just pointing out that there is no single way to lead a party and each leader must adopt their own style.  And must be allowed to lead.  Democracy must be a the heart of this and Corbyn won the position with a ringing endorsement.

Take Care

Love Tim xx 

Much Ado About Nothing

There has been much talk of bullying amongst disaffected Labour MPs recently.  There are of course many such MPs who have made no secret of their dislike of their current leader and who have been very vocal in their criticism of he current leader.

I have always been very clear that bullying should be condemned wherever it occurs.  It happened to me at school, although not to any serious extent, and as an adult I suffered a mild form when working in a supermarket, but Mrs Green actually gave up her job because she was being bullied to such an extent by her boss in another supermarket nearby.

In my case the bullying was partly racial, as I was an Englishman working in small town Ireland.  In my wife's case there was no obvious reason for it other than her boss was a nasty woman, as we subsequently discovered by talking to other victims. 

In neither case had we behaved in any way which could have been considered a reason for such a reaction.

Having made it clear that I abhor bullying in any form, let us consider the accusations being levelled at the current Labour leader, and what is described as his team.

Firstly this team operates within a Parliamentary system where bullying is institutionalised.  I don't mean that it is endemic like we are told racism is in the police force.  I mean it is literally part of the fabric of parliament and is know as whipping.  This is an old practice whose name is taken from the hunting field so presumably that is why the Tories are so keen on it. Parliamentary political parties have a whips' office which consists of the Chief Whip and his assistants and their job is to make sure that their MPs vote in a way that the management desires.  

Is this bullying?  Probably yes.  

Is it Jeremy Corbyn's fault? Undoubtedly, because everything from the state of the pound to foot and mouth disease is self evidently his fault.  In the Middle-Ages it was customary to blame either the devil or some arthritic old lady for any ill that befell the village.  Now they have been replaced in the eyes of the press and other media by Jeremy Corbyn.  Indeed he is on record as saying that he is quite prepared to accept that everything is his fault, so it must be true.

The Observer today ran a story which reinforces this view.  Apparently a former member of the shadow cabinet Seema Malhotra, has complained to the authorities that her office has twice been broken into by one of Corbyn's aides.

It is instructive to look at the facts behind the rhetoric in so far as this is possible.

On 26th June Seema Malhotra resigned from the shadow cabinet along with several of her colleagues.  The reasons for this are still unclear unless you believe either it was a conspiracy to destabilise Corbyn's leadership or alternatively that several members of that shadow cabinet independently and quite spontaneously decided for their own personal reasons to resign on the same day.

Anyway, whatever the reason it seems that the office she was using was one which went with the job and that she would be moving out fairly soon.

It seems that Karie Murphy who is an office manager accessed the office on 13 July, two and a half weeks later, only to find a member of Mulhotra's staff still there.  When asked what she was doing she said she was only being nosy and asked when they would be moving out.  She was told it would be when they were allocated a new office.  She returned the next day but her key wouldn't work so presumably she went away.  And that seems to be about it.  Hardly Watergate.

What exactly did Mulhotra think Karia Murphy would find in her office.  Details of assassination plans?  Letters of application to join the Tory Party?  If she really had been sent there to find something don't you think she might have had a good story ready to explain her presence if she was discovered.  Saying you are 'just being nosy' doesn't really cut it does it?  In fact it's a bit of a giveaway.

John MacDonnell addressed this matter on the Andrew Marr show this morning.  I would share a direct link if knew how to do it, but it is on Momentum's Facebook page here. https://www.facebook.com/PeoplesMomentum/?pnref=story

I fear we are in for a long summer of mud slinging, at the end of which we will be no further on. Corbyn will still be leader.  The MPs will still be MPs, and on current showing the only way for him to persuade them to get back in line would be to garner about 27 million votes in the leadership election, and that ain't gonna happen not least because there aren't that many eligible voters.  If he does somehow manage to get that many then I think that calls of electoral fraud might be justified.  

Which reminds me.  The police are still investigating the Tory election expenses.  I do hope this isn't spoiling anybody's holiday in the sun.

Take care and don't let the bed bugs bite.

Love Tim xx

   

Examples of meaningless political waffle #1.  Baroness Stroud of Fulham on Broadcasting House this morning talking about Universal Credit.  'The first priority is to deliver it safely.' What does she envisage? A padded envelope brought by motorcycle courier with an armed escort?  I suspect not.  What did she really mean?  Not sure.  Probably delivered in such a way that nobody suffers as a result of its introduction.  As I said, waffle.

   

We're all going on a summer holiday...

Well off they all go, clutching bucket and spades, on their summer hols.  The Gove to Ayia Nappa with Sarah and the kids; Boris Alexander on a volunteering holiday in France building and repairing bridges with no doubt a bit of French 'slap and tickle' on the side; Osborne to Jaywick Sands to enjoy a bit more austerity, because nothing says austerity quite like Jaywick; Farage to Florida to Disney World to help Trump become a real Mickey Mouse President; Mrs May to Bournmouth for two weeks in a boarding house because that's what she's always done... the list goes on.  I wonder if the Blairs are still regulars at Cliff Richard's villa in Barbados, or will it be a Russian criminal who has the honour of entertaining them this summer?

And what do they leave behind?

Well firstly they leave Jeremy and Owen, still fighting over who should be Team Captain for next season.  Those two won't be having a prolonged summer break, although I imagine Owen will find time to get back to his roots to recharge his batteries. I understand Barry can be very nice in August, if you're lucky and it doesn't rain although it probably will.  As for Jeremy, well he often waits for things to hot up before he takes a break so I imagine he will wait until the schools go back and prices come down before nipping off somewhere quiet, just as the leadership election is reaching a peak. After all the ballot doesn't close until 21st September.

As usual this government also leaves behind a rather nasty smell. As they left they quietly scrapped the pledge not to keep the children of illegal immigrants awaiting deportation in prison-like conditions.  At present they are housed in The Cedars, a purpose built facility but funding has been withdrawn and now they will housed in Tinsley Park Immigrant Removal Centre which is run by G4S. They also confirmed the plan to scrap student nurses' bursaries, and the closure of the Office for Civil Society.  This latter was a throwback to The Big Society (remember that?) and proof that that is now dead in the water.

How will the world look when they all return in the autumn?  Well it is entirely possible that there will be major conflict somewhere in the Middle East.  Following the attacks last night in Munich I am beginning to wonder if there might be something to astrology as my neighbour told me his astrologer had predicted an escalation in attacks right though to the middle of August.  I think I shall remain entirely sceptical about astrology but the astrologer in question seems to have got it right so far.  Let's hope they don't continue to be right.

On BBC's This Week last night I caught the unedifying sight of Liz Kendall explaining how so many people had bust a gut trying to work with Jeremy Corbyn but he was just hopeless.  This I assume is the same Liz Kendall who refused to work with him from the day he was elected leader. Please tell me I'm wrong.  

It took an SNP MP, John Nicolson, to point out how badly many on the Labour right had treated him right from the start. Ms Kendall remained unrepentant as she sat alongside Michael Portillo, the well know left winger, who more or less supported her case.

On a stranger note I wonder how many heard the story about the Allens, Matt and Adele, an 'alternative' couple and their two children, Ulysses and Ostara who want to go and live in Costa Rica.  They totally reject just about all the norms of society and while I would question a fair few, I do believe that vaccination and conventional medicine have a part to play and that boundaries need to be set for children.  Anyway who am I to judge and if they want to go and die in a field somewhere in Central America I am not about to stop them.  The twist to this tale is that they are trying to crowdfund their enterprise.  Not only that, they want to raise £100,000 so that they can be, and I quote: 'self sufficient'.  So far they have raised £145 despite appearing on This Morning and a TV appearance usually drums up quite a bit of trade. Quite why they think that anybody would want to give them money so that they can bugger off to Latin America and be self-sufficient I cannot imagine, but some people are obviously willing to make a small contribution to their cause. Oh I almost forgot to mention that contributors will receive a free copy of Adele's as yet unwritten book The Unconventional Parent in electronic form once it is finished and published.  I hope she has time to write it, what with all the self sufficiency and stuff. And what will she use to write it on?  Living off-grid doesn't seem to include living off-line.  Don't computers require electricity to function properly or is it just mine?  It might be worth bunging them a quid or two just for a copy of the book.

Maybe we could run the entire welfare state by this method, and the health service.  Abolish taxes and make everybody raise their own cash to visit the doctor or pay their JSA. I wouldn't be surprised if someone in a think-tank somewhere hasn't already given the idea some thought. After all it would mean very small government and would be the ultimate market economy.  

On the other hand we could use this method find out how popular Trident actually is by crowd funding it and seeing how much is raised.

Take care

Love Tim xx 

Part two. McCarthy is still there.

I left you at the end of the last blog promising never to think leftie thoughts again.  You may like to look on it as a political promise, or more explicitly one which I don't intend to keep and never did. In other words basic manifesto fodder.

In between tearing what little of my hair I have left out at the roots and ringing my ISP to try and sort out my woes I have had time to ponder on why the epithet leftie is used so pejoratively and why here is no real equivalent for those on the extreme right, other than fascist, which has such extreme overtones that it is easy for those accused of it to dismiss it.

Last night Mrs Green and I watched the first episode of The Secret Agent,  a dramatisation of the book by Joseph Conrad, and it brought home to me how long a tradition what might broadly be called the left have of taking actions which they hope will bring about the downfall of the State and indeed society as a whole, leaving the way clear for the establishment of a proletariat state of some sort or another.  It strikes me that much like the Brexiteers the anarchists of that time had no real plan, but they saw injustice and wanted to do something about it.

The novel is set in 1886 and was written in 1907, well before the second successful proletarian revolution of modern times.  The first of course was the French Revolution of a hundred years earlier, which ultimately ended in Napoleon declaring himself Emperor, which is hardly the stuff or proletarian dreams. There was of course a great deal of unpleasantness between the start and the end, a fact which is easily exploitable by those with a vested interest in keeping the status quo as a reason for revolution not being the way to bring about change.  Even so the French are still regarded as a bit flakey by many Brits and I think the folk memory is long. Now the French content themselves with setting up new republics rather than beheading the elite.  They are currently on their fifth.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 can be regarded as the first successful overthrow of the ruling classes. I know the cold war is over, although Putin the Obnoxious, the current mouthpiece of the people seems to think it might be a good idea to cool it down again.  Communism has been discredited and we can all look forward to future of capitalist bliss, driven by enlightened market forces, with hardly any government intervention, unless you happen to be a bank, of course.

In China too, although it remains a one party state, state control has been relaxed allowing a large middle class to emerge, most of whom you can see in Bowness on Windermere almost any time between May and October.

I am not a communist and I have no desire to live in a communist state, but claims that communism and by inference, socialism have been discredited do not stand up to close scrutiny. For a start there is room for much debate as to whether what happened in Russia and China and North Korea or Vietnam was indeed communism.  Certainly in both Russia and China you had a huge un-educated peasant class, including many million who were in fact slaves for whom no opportunity had existed before and for whom life probably didn't change all that much after the revolution  There were commissars instead of aristocrats, but really 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.'  The difference was that the government were now ostensibly governing in the 'name of the people'.

Governments in the West saw what was happening and decided that the communist was the bogeyman.  What he really was was the enemy.  During the Second World War governments in West decided that fascism was now the greater threat and lo and behold the communist and good old Uncle Joe became our best friend. 

Once the Nazis were dealt with the only other obvious enemy were the Russians, or more correctly the Soviet Union, and so there began a witch hunt against anybody who professed to have communist or even socialist leanings.  In America so successful was this witch hunt that it was not until Bernie Sanders decided to run for the Democratic nomination that I ever heard the term socialist used in a non-pejorative way in American politics.  

Why this antipathy towards the Left? Well, the Right is in charge.  Throughout history we in these islands have been governed from the top down.  This is essentially right wing doctrine, although it is interesting to note that all the discredited attempts at communism which I mentioned have been based on a personality cult: Lenin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh. Government was for the people (allegedly), but not actually by many of the people.  It is here that Fascism and Communism become in many ways indistinguishable.  How is North Korea not a fascist state?  I suppose for much the same reason that I am called Tim and not Edward. It was decided at my birth.  

What western capitalist governments are really afraid of is totalitarianism, hence their mistrust of Putin, despite him nominally not being a communist, and Russia no longer being a communist state.

The sad thing is they use these fears to create an society in which the man in the street is suspicious of the left, without actually realising what the left is in a western democracy.  I'm sure there are Maoists and Stalinists amongst their ranks but nobody really wants to live in a totalitarian state, and those that say they do only want to if they can be in charge.  Their enthusiasm for Stalinism might diminish if they thought it might be them in the gulags rather than someone else.  

What the left represents, at least to me, is a desire for a change to the system, not by revolution, but by democratic means, so that it  becomes less top-down and takes account of the ordinary person, by providing a society in which we all can live safely and comfortably. I stress the word 'all'.

The current difficulties in the Labour Party, which I fear are not going to be solved by this or any other leadership election, are caused, I feel by a disagreement as to how this change be achieved.  The group of anarchists who meet at Mr Verloc's shop in Soho are all agreed on the need for change but are totally at odds as to the method for achieving it, espousing everything from extreme violence to pamphleteering, and all points in between.  It has always been thus on the left.

I saw a comment on a Facebook post today which attacked liberal lefties.  What, I asked, did the poster dislike so much about the liberal left. But answer came there none.  I assume this chap uses the NHS to cite one example of what the liberal left have given us, yet it is still a term of abuse amongst the ignorant.  By all means write disparaging comments about extremism and its attendant acolytes, but what has the world come to when being called a liberal leftie by someone who doesn't even know what one is is considered to be an insult.  

If this is the level of political debate bring on Donald Trump.  Now there's a man who talks sense. 

Until the next time

Love Tim xx