Daily Mail – Junk Mail
It is because I love this land that I despise
Your dirty rag. It is because I love this planet
And humanity in all its hues that I have never
Purchased you. And yet your reputation,
So preceding is it, that I’ve never needed to,
For what you do and say is parroted from every
Right-wing quarter every day and poured into my
Eyes and ears by all your corporate, mainstream
Peers as though your narrow, xenophobic tract
Did constitute empirically known fact.
But you are everything you claim to hate –
So rabid in your enmity of citizens and State.
You make your living sieving any information
That ingratiates you to the racists, homophobes,
Misogynists, elitists and the nationalists who’d
Have us in our places. You are bigots with a
Passion for a petty use of microscopic focus;
You are locusts to the fields of understanding,
Tolerance, compassion and…
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Consequences
Anyone tempted to listen to the anti-Corbyn propaganda should remember this: most of the measures described in the article below were contained in the Tory Welfare Bill 2015. That was passed in the Commons during the Labour leadership contest. Acting leader Harriet Harman told her MPs to abstain in the vote on the bill so that us voters would understand that Labour could be “trusted on benefits.” 184 of them did. 48 of them voted against it (including John McDonnell, who said he would “swim through vomit” to do so). Jeremy Corbyn was the only leadership candidate to vote against it: Yvette Cooper abstained, Andy Burnham abstained, Liz Kendall abstained. The bill was passed, with the predictable results below.
Now then, which one of those abstaining beauties would you prefer as Labour leader? Jeremy is criticised for having voted against the Labour whip in Parliament many times since his arrival there in 1983. But that’s because he’s got principles. If others had done the same over the Iraq war, we’d be in a better place today. And if those 184 Labour MPs had joined with the 48 and the SNP and other smaller parties that night in 2015 and voted against the whip they could have beaten George Osborne’s bill. And the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society would be in a better place as they face the months ahead.
Please read the article.
Their game revisited
I suppose the lesson is that you shouldn’t blog in the heat of the moment. In yesterday’s blog (Their game) I reacted to the news that a relative of Abu (the man the police had thought was yesterday’s attacker on Westminster Bridge) had called Channel 4 News to say that Abu couldn’t have caused the mayhem at Westminster yesterday because he was in jail. I reacted in haste and without thinking clearly, forgetting that the attacker was dead – thinking instead that he had escaped. Since he was dead, the idea that the police would now go searching desperately for someone else to blame instead of him was nonsense.
I made this careless mistake partly because, like everyone else, I was upset at the events as they unfolded. And also, in the week that Martin McGuinness died, I thought of all the other times that the police, desperate to get “a result”, have arrested the wrong people, cooked evidence, and sent people to jail. The Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four sprang to mind. I also knew some of the people involved in the Carl Bridgwater case, where the wrong people were convicted of murder on manufactured evidence and served several years in jail before having their convictions quashed. And thus I blogged. But in this case I got it wrong and I apologise.
But the police got their identification wrong too and named a person who had not committed the attack. They now say the attacker’s name was Khalid Masood. If, of course, he had escaped, and the police had gone searching for Abu (we don’t know the basis of the original misidentification) they would presumably have quickly found him in jail. After that, the scenario I described yesterday would not have been such an unlikely one. While we all depend on the state authorities to protect us, we should also keep our eyes on them. Their main job is to defend power and we should not trust them overmuch.
What I forgot in yesterday’s furore were the words of the late, great Stephen Jay Gould, giving advice about publishing research (in his case, in the disciplines of evolution and palaeontology). Before you publish, he said, you should “examine, ponder, ruminate, observe again, obsess, reconsider” and then, and only then, “eventually publish.”
I seem to have missed all those steps yesterday, except the last one.
Their game
Let me tell you how confident we can be in the hands of our police and security services. The suspect or suspects for the Westminster atrocity today was originally thought to be a bald-headed white man and/or a bearded black man. It has emerged that, although the white/black/bald/bearded suspect was later identified as Abu, who had long-standing links with terrorist organisations going back several years (and although this identification resulted in hastily scrambled profiles of his career on various news channels, accompanied by sighs of “there you are, I told you so, now we’ve got him”), it now turns out it can’t be him after all. Abu is at this very moment (and was especially this afternoon at 2.43 pm) serving a prison sentence in one of Her Majesty’s prisons. Now, an optimist would say that’s good – now they can search for the real culprit. What I say is that they will search their files, pick a name at random, double-check he’s not in jail or dead, and arrest him. They’re not interested in getting the culprit, just getting somebody – anybody. They’ll rough him up, apply the thumbscrews, get a confession, and claim another success. They will also, of course, have radicalised his brother, or his cousin Ali, in the process. But that’s OK – it’ll keep them all in business for years. After all, that’s why Islamophobia was put firmly in place after the Cold War. “Without the Russians”, they said, “what are we going to do with our spies and spooks, our agents and double agents? We need to construct an enemy so here’s what we’ll do: we’ll send them after the Muslims.” And here we are today, with the prospect that we will have a blowback of unintended consequences not imagined in our worst nightmares.
What was the name of that play that ran so long in London in, I think, the 1980s? “Stop the world …”
in the moment by Malcolm Evison (reblogged)
my faithful hound
displays that ease
of being in the moment –
eyes closed
and lips aligned
into a smile
suggesting ecstasy –
composure
as in a state of bliss –
it thrills
yet fills me
brim full of envy
as health concerns
and turmoil of emotions
have long since
cast aside
such calm
assurance
malcolm evison
15 february 2017
“That’s what I do, I fix things” – Donald J. Trump
If this was a movie we would laugh out loud, from Airplane to Catch-22. But this is real-life news, not even fake news (see link below). A temporary ban on travel leads to a temporary halt to the ban, which leads to a demand for a temporary stay against the temporary halt. Meanwhile, airlines and officials are said to be confused about what they should do.
Hail to the Chief.
The Trump-May axis
Thanks, Bishop, but …
The Rt. Rev. James Jones, the former Bishop of Liverpool, has been given a knighthood. He chaired the Hillsborough Inquiry panel which finally got to the truth about the Hillsborough disaster. So we owe him and the panel a great debt of gratitude.
But a knighthood? He will go to Buckingham Palace to be hit on the shoulder by Her Majesty whose governments over – what was it? – 29 years resisted all calls for justice for the victims and their families, and whose police lied and covered up the truth all that time. None of that is unusual, of course – we all remember the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, etc., etc.
Don’t accept this tatty award, change your mind, James. The only thanks you need are the thanks from the victims and their families. And you’ve got that beyond measure. And from the rest of us, who weep over the injustices built into our system. As an ex-bishop you presumably believe that “the powers that be are ordained by God … For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad” (Romans 13:1, 3). But when the powers that be go bad, you should resist them. You certainly shouldn’t accept their rewards. Change your mind – or, in more biblical language, repent.
In any case, what’s this Empire you want to become a knight of?
On oaths
The government may make new British citizens swear an oath of allegiance to “British values”. In my Christian youth we used to argue about whether it was right to swear an oath, even in court. Jesus had said that we shouldn’t and that anything more than just Yes or No “comes from evil”. I think it was because he rejected the assumption that everyone was a lying bastard unless they swore otherwise under some kind of threat from on high.
In later years, when I went to refugees’ citizenship ceremonies, I discovered that they were required to swear allegiance to “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and all her successors”. I realised then that I could never have become a naturalised citizen if I’d had to even just declare such allegiance, never mind swear it. Tony Benn famously found a way round it. Faced with the necessity of swearing allegiance to said Queen and said descendants at the opening of each Parliament, he read out the form of words – but prefaced them with his own: “I, Tony Benn, under protest, and in order to serve my constituents, do swear … ”
But I don’t suppose the new oath makers will put up with any ploys of that kind when they’re registering oaths from today’s new citizens as they swear blind that they are totally committed not only to Her Majesty (even if her governments did try to bomb their home countries to buggery), but to cricket, or knitting, or Manchester United or anything else that they already subscribe to. I saw one list of British values that included “family values”. Unfortunately, our government’s own allegiance to the “right to family life” found in Article 8 of the Human Rights Act is more than doubtful. If you don’t believe that, you’ve never tried to assist already-naturalised citizens to negotiate the obstacles deliberately put in their way to thwart their attempts to reunite their families on good old British soil.
Oaths? I’ll give you oaths.
Passport to health
The government has plans for us. If it thinks a pilot scheme in Peterborough, Stamford and St George’s Hospital in Tooting is successful it may be rolled out across the country, and coming to a health centre near you.
Will that be good? No.
If the scheme gets the go-ahead, we won’t just have to show our passports when we go abroad and come back. We’ll have to show them before we go into hospital for operations. No passport, no operation; no ID, no treatment. Go home and wait to die.
The Guardian explains: “Patients could be told to bring two forms of identification including a passport to hospital to prove they are eligible for free treatment under new rules to stop so-called health tourism.”
Why?
Well, apparently, “the government paid out £674m to other European countries for the treatment of Britons abroad, but received only £49m in return for the NHS treatment of European citizens.”
Chris Wormald, Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health (the Department’s “Sir Humphrey”) explained his thinking to the Commons Public Accounts Committee today and told MPs that the results so far are encouraging:
“Individual trusts like Peterborough are doing that and it is making a big difference – they are saying please come with two forms of identity, your passport and your address, and they use that to check whether people are eligible.”
He realised that such a practice might be criticised but then confirmed that, like Credit, it would be Universal: “It is quite a controversial thing to do, to say to the entire population you’ve got to prove your identity.”
No decision has yet been made, of course. It’s not clear whether Chris just blurted out this information under pressure from the committee (some members of these committees can be quite pushy once they’ve got the bit between their teeth) or whether he was floating the idea to test the water.
Well, I’ll tell you what I intend to do. If the scheme comes in, and I’m asked for my passport, I will refuse to produce it, or any other proof of my identity. And I’ll see what they do. That’ll be me testing the water, like Chris.
Listen, I’m 74, and, so far, healthy. A nurse at my medical centre, explaining why they stop automatic over-60s medical checks at 74 (I’m due for my last one) said, “Well, the checks are preventative – but when you reach about 90 there’s not much we can prevent!” Point taken, although that still makes 74 a bit early, but I’ll let that pass. However, at some point or other I’m likely to need some of the “passport-required-before-access” treatment they’re talking about. But I was born half a dozen years before Nye Bevan’s great struggle with the doctors to create the NHS, free at the point of use, no questions asked, no passports required, and I started benefiting from it immediately. I’m buggered if I’m going to provide ID to get hospital treatment at this late stage. It’s against my principles.
So is the suggestion by “a source close to the Health Secretary”, Jeremy Hunt: the scheme “might only be applied in areas with shifting populations and large influxes of immigrants.”
That’s called racism, Secretary of State. But what more can we expect?
Here’s the Guardian article:
Bob Mouncer's blog 