Politikk, religion og samfunn Mens vi venter på Brexit

[Gjestemedlem]

Litt malapropos til dette med rase/etnisitet og identitetspolitikk i det store og hele, og ikke minst kravet til offeridentitet.

The left’s problem with British Indians
Indians are now represented at the top of British politics, and the identitarian left is furious.

Rakib Ehsan

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/02/20/the-lefts-problem-with-british-indians/

Following last week’s unexpectedly dramatic reshuffle, Boris Johnson’s cabinet now includes four politicians of Indian descent. Priti Patel remained as home secretary and three British Indians were appointed in new roles.

Former chief secretary to the Treasury Rishi Sunak was promoted to chancellor of the exchequer in spectacular fashion, following Sajid Javid’s resignation. Indian-born Alok Sharma not only replaced Andrea Leadsom as business and energy secretary, but he is also now president of the upcoming UN Climate Conference in November, aka COP26. Suella Braverman replaced Geoffrey Cox as attorney general and is now the government’s top lawyer. These are interesting developments in a supposedly ethno-nationalist administration.

The Conservative Party’s relationship with British Indians – an admittedly diverse group in terms of migratory background and religious affiliation – is one of the more interesting developments of recent times. Traditionally, British Indians provided the Labour Party with high levels of electoral support – in part due to the party’s passage of race-relations legislation and its broader reputation for fighting racism.

But things have changed. Today, British Indians are the second-highest earning ethnic group in Britain, earning more on average per hour than the majority white population. British Indians are renowned for their entrepreneurial spirit and are generally not instinctive supporters of the high-tax, large-spend economic policies associated with Labour in recent times. Like most Brits, many British Indians are far from impressed with Labour’s – particularly Jeremy Corbyn’s – ties with Islamist organisations. And the party’s reluctance to discuss the terror threat posed by Islamist extremism – currently the most prevalent form of terrorism in the UK – is a cause for concern.

Support for Labour among British Pakistani and British Bangladeshi Muslims has remained exceptionally high over the past few General Elections. But among British Indians support for the Conservatives has steadily grown.

The most recent General Election showed a further fraying of the relationship between Labour and British Indians. In Harrow East – a west London seat with a sizeable Indian-origin population – Labour fell some way behind. Meanwhile, Conservative MP Bob Blackman increased his vote share by five percentage points. Leicester has the second-largest Indian-born population in Britain. In the last election, in Leicester West and Leicester East, Labour’s vote share dropped by 11 and 16 percentage points respectively.

The fact that British Indians have been so successful and have integrated into society should be celebrated by the left. Here is a story of migrants, refugees and their descendants making notable contributions to British public life – in business, politics, media, entertainment, sport and more.

However, the identitarian left is much more interested in keeping ethnic minorities locked into a perpetual state of victimhood. The values of personal responsibility, individual initiative and self-sufficiency, which run deep in British Indian communities, challenge the left’s grievance-driven narratives. The fact that British Indians have managed to thrive also calls the widespread notion of ‘white privilege’ into question.

A good number of British Indians hold culturally conservative views, which are fundamentally at odds with left-wing cosmopolitanism, particularly on issues such as immigration and integration. Indians are also the most pro-Brexit of the UK’s non-white ethnic groups.

Politicians of Indian heritage are a growing force in high-level Tory politics, and this has made them a target for the left. This often spills over into racial slurs. British Indian Conservative politicians have effectively been branded Uncle Toms and race traitors. One left-wing writer described them as ‘turncoats of colour’. Home secretary Priti Patel has been accused of having ‘internalised whiteness’. and a ‘Raj complex’. In a pathetic and bizarre hit piece, the Guardian – the bastion of chattering-class intolerance – highlighted Suella Braverman’s membership of a Buddhist sect, which it said could ‘raise questions’ about ‘her judgement as the government’s senior legal expert’. No doubt the left would be quick to call out such slurs and innuendos if they were directed elsewhere.

If the British left refuses to acknowledge the role of individual initiative in personal success, if it continues to appear soft on issues such as immigration and crime, and if it carries on fraternising with Islamists, then it will continue to alienate British Indians.

 

[Gjestemedlem]

Fra en av mine "politiske vener" Slavoj Zizek.

:

... eller det hele om du har tid og kapasitet:

 

[Hardingfele]

Vart lurt no.

https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/udland/br...ceres-i-polen-og-internettet-er-tykt-af-ironi

 

[Hardingfele]

Flere som blir lurt.

www.ft.com/content/8e82e01c-dbb6-11e5-a72f-1e7744c66818?

 

[Gjestemedlem]

Interessant. .. og bra. Keith Starmer tar over Labour og vi slipper heldigvis mer Corbyn og den ufyselige Long-Bailey og forhåpentligvis hele det forfeilede flycrashet Momentum... for all fremtid.

Ønsker lykke til.

 

[erato]

Her er jeg definitivt enig med deg. Tragisk at Labour parkerte seg selv som motvekt mot Toryene akkurat da UK trengte det.

 

[Gjestemedlem]

Her er jeg definitivt enig med deg. Tragisk at Labour parkerte seg selv som motvekt mot Toryene akkurat da UK trengte det.

Jepps...

“We’ve just lost four elections in a row. We’re failing in our historic purpose,” he said. “Be in no doubt I understand the scale of the task, the gravity of the position that we’re in.

“We’ve got a mountain to climb, but we will climb it, and I will do my utmost to reconnect us across the country, to re-engage with our communities and voters, to establish a coalition across our towns and our cities and our regions with all creeds and communities to speak for the whole of the country.

 

[Gjestemedlem]

Owen Jones: the police state must be intersectional
He campaigned for this lockdown, now he’s saying it’s racist.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/03/owen-jones-the-police-state-must-be-intersectional/



One of the most remarkable things about the authoritarian measures ushered in by the UK’s Tory government is how little opposition they have faced from the left. After spending months insisting Boris Johnson is a would-be far-right despot, many supposed leftists have spent the past few weeks actively demanding that Johnson put them under house arrest. Most notable among them was the Guardian’s Owen Jones, who greeted the suspension of our civil liberties with genuine relief.

Never thought I'd be relieved to be placed under house arrest along with millions of people under a police state by a right wing Tory government

— Owen Jones?????? (@OwenJones84) March 23, 2020

Perhaps nothing demonstrates how thoroughly illiberal, dimwitted and detached from everyday life the modern left has become than this alleged socialist clamouring for a Tory police state. Only in recent days has our Owen started to worry that suspending everyday freedoms and handing the state more powers may have adverse consequences. And news that the first person to be wrongly charged under new coronavirus laws is black has really given him pause for thought.

Who would have guessed that the first person to be wrongly charged under sweeping new police powers would just happen to be black. https://t.co/pi0ljHnBlE

— Owen Jones?????? (@OwenJones84) April 3, 2020

It’s hard to know where to start with this. If he genuinely believed the British state was racist, why did he support handing it sweeping new powers? Does he support a police state but only so long as it is suitably intersectional? Would he have been less bothered if the first person wrongly done over under these laws was white? The mind boggles. But perhaps this will be a lesson to him and other authoritarian ‘leftists’: if you happily hand the state more power, you give up your right to complain about what it does with it.

 

[Gjestemedlem]

UK skal være glad at de har en oppegående leder og ikke en innful kommunist.

Godt å se Boris frisk og tidi!

 

[noruego]

UK skal være glad at de har en oppegående leder og ikke en innful kommunist.

Godt å se Boris frisk og tidi!

Glad Boris ser ut til å ha kommet seg til hektene igjen, helt uavhengig av hvor politisk «oppegående» han har vært og er.

 

[Hardingfele]

FREEDOM! FREEDOM AT LAST. Og det blir jobber av det. 50.000 skal trenes opp til å fylle ut tolldeklarasjoner!

www.ft.com/content/3c1ae9bd-97e0-4131-b7e6-b4d0d5b8f4ff?

 

[kasol]

Hvor ble det av digitaliseringen ?

 

[Gjestemedlem]

^^

Hvor ble det nå av støtten til tollmurene/tollvernet/selvbergingstanken som ellers angivelig står så høyt i kurs? Var kanskje ideen om frihandel ikke så dum likevel... eller gjelder den kritikken bare når det er opportunt?

Finnes det noe mer opportunt enn en lokal tollmursentusiast som samtidig er anti-brexit bare fordi det var Boris og ikke Corbyn som frontet denne tanken.

 

[Voff]

Fri handel er vel ikke det store problemet, men fri flyt av sosial dumping og kriminalitet....

 

[Gjestemedlem]

Fri handel er vel ikke det store problemet, men fri flyt av sosial dumping og kriminalitet....

Skal du ha sosial utjevning som ikke er nasjonalistisk så er det ingen vei utenom internasjonalitet.

Jeg unner en polakk 4 årslønner etter noen få måneder i Norge, men jeg liker ikke dem som vil ha slutt på slikt fordi det er "sosial dumping"

.. og "kriminalitet" er bortkastet krydder i en slik sammenheng.

 

[Voff]

Det er vel bare til polakk erstatter deg for 6000kr i måneden....

 

[Hardingfele]

Boris forsvarte Cummings, som tok seg friheter med koronarestriksjoner.

Det kom en tweet på embedsverkkontoen. Nå er den fjernet.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1264613940698460160

 

[Gjestemedlem]

Britain’s chilling slide into totalitarianism
The arrest of peaceful anti-lockdown protesters heralds a new era of authoritarianism.

Britain’s chilling slide into totalitarianism

The arrest of peaceful anti-lockdown protesters heralds a new era of authoritarianism.

www.spiked-online.com

On Saturday, Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner was host to an unusual scene. As onlookers booed, police officers dragged 19 activists from the scene in handcuffs. Ten people were fined. Their crime? Refusing to disband their small protest in contravention of lockdown measures.
The protesters, who included Piers Corbyn (eccentric sibling of Jeremy Corbyn), were an odd conglomeration of anti-vaxxers and anti-lockdown preachers. Piers, who makes his brother look like a yuppie sell-out, was determined to warn his audience about what he saw as the virus-spreading horrors of 5G. Most people greeted the news of the protest with a mixture of bemusement and irritation. ‘Mad as box badgers’ and ‘The police have enough to do without this extra nonsense’ were typical of the comments on Twitter.
True, the protesters’ assertions that Bill Gates was the mastermind behind this crisis probably have not added much to the public discourse. The weirdness of the display aside, there is something deeply unsettling about non-disruptive peaceful protesters being bundled into police vans. For the first time in my lifetime, a British government has drawn a utilitarian line in the sand and declared that no peaceful protest can be tolerated.

Well, not utilitarian in a strictly calculated sense. We still don’t know what the effect of lockdown has actually been, or exactly how the disease spreads. In New York, for example, 66 per cent of the people hospitalised were ‘sheltering in place’ – that is, obeying the rules of the lockdown – when they caught the disease. Sweden, which never locked down, has just 60 per cent of the confirmed cases per capita of Ireland, which did.
Nor do we know what the ultimate stacking of lives saved versus lives lost due to lockdown will be. Cancer referrals in the UK are down by 76 per cent and there has been an alarming drop in hospitalisations for strokes and heart attacks. Perhaps, then, the British government’s reasoning behind banning protest can be best summed up as: ‘We are not sure it is worth the risk, but we could be wrong.’

authoritarianism.

JAMES MCSWEENEY

22nd May 2020

This ‘better safe than sorry’ authoritarianism hasn’t been limited to the government. In lieu of a scientific consensus on the merits of any particular policy direction, Facebook has nonetheless decided to stick its neck out and remove posts that contradict official lockdown advice (presumably while crossing its fingers that such dissenters don’t have any valid observations). Facebook has even taken down posts promoting protests against the lockdowns in certain US states.
Unsurprisingly, lots of authoritarian leaders see merit in this approach. President Erdogan of Turkey, for example, is so concerned about the risk of misinformation being spread about the virus that he has taken to going after journalists suspected of spreading it. Ever vigilant of threats to the health of his countrymen, prime minister Hun Sen of Cambodia has awarded himself emergency powers to ban opposition gatherings and declare martial law. Wary of the contagion risk of marches, China’s benevolent central planners have been forced to round up known trouble-makers in Hong Kong. According to Journalists Without Borders, 38 countries have introduced emergency measures to restrict journalistic freedom in the wake of coronavirus.

Is it facetious to make such comparisons? Seen from abroad, probably not. If Britain is to abandon its principles by banning protest on the basis of an uncertain estimation of the potential for infection, on what basis can we condemn authoritarian regimes which do the same?

The truth is, however much self-interest feeds into the calculation, the operators of many authoritarian regimes genuinely believe their actions are needed to avoid catastrophe. If law and order are the overriding concern, then this is not unreasonable. When protests toppled Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in 2011, the immediate consequence was violence and economic collapse. Last year’s deposition of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir was followed by a massacre and unchecked pillaging by armed gangs.

Even when, in 1819, British MPs voted through the Six Acts to restrict gatherings following the Peterloo massacre, most did so in the sincere belief that they were saving their country from a violent French-style revolutionary terror. The nature of principles like freedom of expression is that they are easily diminished if short-term considerations take precedence – that is why they must be principles which we defend regardless.
This brings us back to lockdown Britain. Say it turns out that the government is sticking to the restrictions, even if a consensus was emerging that lockdown could be killing more people than it is saving, would you still be happy that ministers get the final say on your right to protest or that Facebook could be preventing you from organising one?

All of this is worth bearing in mind the next time you find yourself getting angry at an idiot with a placard.
James McSweeney

 

[Asbjørn]

^ Unntatt når det gjelder Dominic Cummings, selvsagt. Hvis man tilhører den privilegerte kjernen rundt Boris gjør man som man selv finner for godt. Deretter lyver Boris på TV for å forsvare det, og diverse MPs og andre beordres til å lyve på Twitter for å dekke over det hele.

Kan hende britene finner seg i drakoniske restriksjoner hvis de opplever at det er en grunn til det, men de finner seg ikke i en lov for the Dom og en annen lov for alle andre. Da blir det bråk. Derfra er kanskje ikke veien så lang til å tenke at «når de lyver for oss om noe så enkelt som dette, hvordan var det med de brexit-greiene igjen...?»

Man skal ikke undervurdere i hvilken grad Cummings og Johnson har demolert regjeringens autoritet det siste døgnet. Jeg tipper Boris til slutt blir presset til å sparke Cummings, og at det derfra blir nokså åpenbart at Boris selv ikke har den fjerneste idé om politisk retning uten Cummings til å trekke i trådene hans.

Johnson's defence of Cummings sparks anger from allies and opponents alike

Possible police investigation aide is latest in series of Guardian disclosures that have rocked the government

www.theguardian.com

'What planet are they on?': the papers on the PM's defence of Dominic Cummings

Almost all the front pages focus on Boris Johnson’s response to criticism of his senior aide’s lockdown breaches

www.theguardian.com

 

[Asbjørn]

No dignity, no future: Boris forsakes leadership to protect Cummings | John Crace

PM didn’t throw a protective ring around care homes, but he sure as hell threw one around Classic Dom

www.theguardian.com

Look on the bright side: at least we’ve had it confirmed who is actually running the country these days. And it isn’t the prime minister. Boris Johnson is no more than Dominic Cummings’s sock-puppet. A fairly shabby one at that. The reality is that without Classic Dom, there could be no Boris. All that Boris really amounts to is a parasitical ball of compromised ambition fuelled by a viral overload of neediness and cowardice. There is no substance or dignity left within the prime minister. His only instinct is his own survival.

In saving Dom – for the time being at least – Boris had tossed away the credibility of his own government. He has been stripped bare and exposed as not very bright, lacking in judgment and completely amoral. Within an hour, he had not only defended the indefensible, he had basically told the nation they were free to do as they please. If there is a second coronavirus peak, Boris will have even more blood on his hands. He’d even made Shapps’s TV appearances look vaguely statesmanlike. That bad. At a time of national crisis, we have a prime minister who makes Henry Kissinger look worthy of a Nobel peace prize. Satire is now dead.

 

[Gjestemedlem]

Det burde være en borgerplikt å ikke adlyde den fascistiske husarresten, dette orvellianske dressurkurset, og da får de fanatiske venstrevridde i The Fucking Guardian bare hyle og skrike og okke seg som de pleier.

---

The lockdown fanatics have revived Project Fear

The scaremongerers must be defeated once more if we are to recover our freedoms.

The lockdown fanatics have revived Project Fear

The scaremongerers must be defeated once more if we are to recover our freedoms.

www.spiked-online.com

 

[Asbjørn]

Du forstår fortsatt ikke, skjellsordene til tross. Mannen som skrev slagordet «Stay home. Protect NHS. Save lives» og var med på å utforme coronareglene ga selv blaffen i å følge dem. En lov for folk flest, en annen for meg selv. Det godtar ikke briter. Det går ikke spesielt bra å drive demonstrativ sivil ulydighet mot lover du selv har innført.

 

[Gjestemedlem]

The disproportionate, whipped-up rage against Dominic Cummings was purely political

The disproportionate, whipped-up rage against Cummings was purely political

Hysterical hate WHAT a stomach-churning and shameful debacle the screeching hate campaign against Dominic Cummings has been. The mass hysteria on TV, social media and in his own street was like a …

www.thesun.co.uk

Hysterical hate
WHAT a stomach-churning and shameful debacle the screeching hate campaign against Dominic Cummings has been.

The mass hysteria on TV, social media and in his own street was like a weekend Rapture event for Remainer cultists and defeated Labour tribalists.

In they all piled, scenting blood — every single political foe on the Left, from the BBC to the civil service.

One Whitehall numbskull even tweeted partisan abuse from the civil service’s official account, confirming precisely why Cummings wants to dismantle it.

Even a few left-wing bishops feebly threatened something or other if he wasn’t sacked. And some Tories bearing grudges joined the fray.

We do understand the public discontent at Cummings seemingly flicking two fingers at the lockdown rules for his own convenience.

But it wasn’t entirely so, was it?

Boris Johnson’s top aide gave a convincing, detailed and verifiable account of himself yesterday, as he should have done three days ago.

Some key allegations against him were false.

And he was clearly motivated solely by getting the best care for his young child when he and his wife had Covid.

The official lockdown guidelines give him at least a partial defence.

The Sun hates hypocrisy. We often call it out. Some of our readers are furious with Cummings and we get why.

But the disproportionate, whipped-up rage elsewhere was purely political.

Nothing else explains the mob laying siege to his family home, hounding and bullying him in the street, blasting attack messages on a giant screen and sickeningly being congratulated for it by their Labour MP Emily Thornberry.

Who can blame Cummings for seeking help from his family in self-isolation instead of from locals like those?

We all know what this is really about: Destroying the man who swung the EU vote, crushed Corbyn and secured a Tory majority to force Brexit through.

The man who, post-Covid, will help bring vital change to forgotten parts of Britain that sneering metropolitan Remainers despise nearly as much as they do him.

Joy in store
IT seems bonkers to be so thrilled about the shops opening. But it is glorious to see ANY lockdown restrictions lifted.

What a welcome boost to our shattered economy it will be. We can only hope pubs follow shortly after. And we entirely agree with economics professor Eyal Winter on the urgency of that.

It will be easier if social-distancing is cut from two metres to the WHO’s recommended one. If, as the professor suggests opposite, limiting how many drinks we can buy will thin out crowds to safer levels, then fine.

We do have a hunch, though. Some just might be tempted to have their limit in one boozer, then start afresh in the next.

We could call this sneaky activity a “pub crawl”.

 

[Asbjørn]

Når tolv biskoper i Church of England fordømmer det han har gjort som moralsk uforsvarlig kan Murdoch-avisene forsøke å erklære ham en «very fine father», men det funker heller dårlig.

 

[Gjestemedlem]

Når tolv biskoper i Church of England fordømmer det han har gjort som moralsk uforsvarlig kan Murdoch-avisene forsøke å erklære ham en «very fine father», men det funker heller dårlig.

Biskoper i England er notorisk venstrevridde, og selv om de kaster seg på hylekorer så er det ikke tegn på annet en hykleri, propaganda og ynkelighet. Det er trist at kirken har blitt infiltrert av slikt... men vi ser litt tegn på det her hjemme også der mange venstrevridde geistlige har infiltrert organisasjonen.

Mannen har ikke gjort noe annet galt enn å forlate sitt hjem, uten statlig og kirkelig tillatelse.. med UK er da tross ikke Nord Korea heller, selv om de venstrevridde fryder seg over denne øvelsen i totalitarisme og folkelig underdanig lydighet. God trening på et slike samfunn kommunister og grønne anti-demokratiske hysterikere ønsker og streber for. En stat der man skal ha spesiell tillatelse for å forlate sitt hjem, inn-og utreisetilatelser, grotesk maktmisbruk fra politi og myndigheter og tilnærmet full propagandakontroll på media.

Her i Norge tar vi vår forhåndsregler, holder avstand og holder oss hjemme hvis vi er syke... men det er ingen som ville finne på å låse folk inne og kaste nøkkelen.. men slik har det blitt i UK. Heldigvis er ikke alle like nesegrust lydige for maktmisbrukerne her hjemme, og jeg banner på at mange av de som fordømmer mannen som våget seg utenfor egent hjem gjør nøyaktig det samme her hjemme, med de samme praktiske konsekvenser om man ser bort i fra det politiske og den dressureffekten.

 

[Gjestemedlem]

The grotesque interventions of the anti-Cummings bishops

Douglas Murray

The grotesque interventions of the anti-Cummings bishops

God, I loathe the bishops. Not Beth Rigby, Robert Peston and the other hacks who seem to be auditioning to guide the morality of the nation. I mean the actual bishops, who turn out to be even less use than these competitively incensed cross-examiners. Most people in Britain couldn’t name a...

www.spectator.co.uk

God, I loathe the bishops. Not Beth Rigby, Robert Peston and the other hacks who seem to be auditioning to guide the morality of the nation. I mean the actual bishops, who turn out to be even less use than these competitively incensed cross-examiners.

Most people in Britain couldn’t name a bishop if they tried. But Nick Baines is a name worth remembering. The otherwise utterly un-noteworthy Bishop of Leeds came to my attention in January 2019 when he gave a talk at Bradford Cathedral in which among other political interventions he referred to Boris Johnson (then foreign secretary) as ‘an amoral liar’.

Four months later the same Nick Baines, Bishop of Leeds, could be found warning against the increase in ‘violent bile’ and lack of ‘political restraint’ in discussions around Brexit. Another three months later and the good Bishop could be found appending his name to a joint letter of Church of England Bishops calling for ‘national reconciliation’ and, er, warning about the potential consequences of a no-deal Brexit.

Now Bishop Baines can once again be found entering the political arena by howling that Dominic Cummings is guilty of a ‘do what I say, not as I do’ attitude. An accusation that of course could never be levelled against Nick Baines, Bishop of Leeds.

I had assumed that my slight interest in the hypocritical Bishop was a private thing. So imagine my surprise when I learned how much media interest Bishop Baines and a few of his attention-hungry colleagues have been able to garner over recent days.

On the BBC, Sky and other channels, various presenters in need of something to talk about in this moment of national crisis have spent the last couple of days stressing that a number of bishops have come out as anti-Cummings. The views of the bishops have come up at press conferences and even the Guardian chose to report the thrilling news that ‘Bishops turn on Boris Johnson for defending Dominic Cummings’. If you care to read the Guardian or view Channel 4 News on a normal day you would be surprised to find them citing bishops in this manner.

Over recent years, the UK media has managed to get through many stories without once giving us the bishop-angle. The exception naturally comes when a handful of lefty bishops warn that as a result of the Prime Minister standing by Dominic Cummings these bishops may refuse to cooperate with the government in the pandemic.


It takes a certain something to turn me into an anti-clericalist, but this may prove to be the perfect storm. For months every Anglican church in the country has been shuttered: in many cases for the first time in more than half a millennium. I have seen officious little health and safety notices on a number of such churches informing people that God can be worshipped anywhere, but not here.

Now the nation is reopening and the Church of England still cannot manage to be any more relevant than it was at the beginning of this crisis. It has sat by while the nation’s garden centres have reopened and appears to be not at all bothered by this further relegation of its position in the nation’s life. As it happens I can think of a number of reasons why Church of England churches should have been the first buildings in the land to have reopened. Only the last of which is the fact that Church of England services have been practising social-distancing for years. Anybody who fears for their health but wishes to attend public gatherings should head to a C of E service first.

But what is so especially grotesque about the intervention of Bishop Baines and his fellows is not just the rancidly political nature of the intervention. It is the utter absence of any Christian ethic. What business is it of these bishops if Dominic Cummings takes a course of action to keep his family safe that the bishops would not have taken themselves? On Sunday (when he clearly has his feet up these days) Bishop Baines could be found tweeting:

“‘The question now is: do we accept being lied to, patronised and treated by a PM as mugs? The moral question is not for Cummings – it is for PM and ministers / MPs who find this behaviour acceptable. What are we to teach our children? (I ask as a responsible father.)’

I suppose that we’ll have to take it on trust that Bishop Baines is a responsible father. Certainly he is not a responsible bishop. For he sent out his weirdly furious political intervention before letting the father he was talking about give his account of himself. I should have thought that ‘listening’ and ‘trying to understand each other’ would be the sort of thing a god-bored bishop like Baines might at least still pretend to believe in. If not then perhaps there are other beliefs he might have held to before he left the ministry for full time political hackery. Such as – oh, I don’t know – ‘forgiveness’?


It would seem not. The Bishops of the Church of England are meant (like their counterparts in the other denominations) to have possession of the greatest truths ever revealed to mankind. They are meant to have a gospel of love which carries with it the meaning of absolutely everything: the purpose of the universe, the meaning of life and the cause of pain and human suffering. In the task of disseminating, or even preaching, these truths, Bishop Baines and his colleagues have proved historically incapable. They have overseen an era where there has not just been a fall-off in the number of people who listen to them, but an even steeper fall-off in the number of people who would ever want to hear from them. At a time when they have been needed, never in our national life has there been a time when they have been so irrelevant. If there is a reason for that then it comes in part from the fact that a group of bishops, privileged because their church claims to possess answers to the eternal mysteries, spend their days denouncing Dominic Cummings.

 

[t-roten]

Det har gått langt når Daily Star er imot Dominic.
Og for å klarere dette - det han har gjort er direkte imot de retningslinjer vi har blitt bedt om å følge. Via daglige pressekonferanser, TV og radio program og annonser og taler - i tillegg til Town Halls på jobb har vi blitt fortalt å bli hjemme. Vi har her i huset tre unger (ikke en) og vi har hatt coronaviruset (har blitt testet), men har fulgt alle retningslinjer med varer levert hjemme av venner, ikke gå ut (prøv et med knøttlite hus og tre unger med masse energi) - og så finner vi ut at disse reglene ikke gjelder for en av de som kom opp med dem. Gjør meg forb@~###a!!!

Og det er i tillegg til at han er i pressekonferanse sier det er greit for han å ta en 100 kilometer lang kjøretur "for å sjekke synet" - hvem gjør det, eller tenker opp noe slikt som unnskyldning og tror det er greit?

 

[Asbjørn]

Sjekke synet, med et barn i baksetet for sikkerhets skyld. Hvor dumme tror han folk er? Husk definisjonen av en demagog: en som forteller ting han vet er løgner til folk han vet er idioter.

Marina Hyde tar frem skalpellen:

The truth about why Cummings hasn't gone: Johnson is too terrified to sack him | Marina Hyde

The prime minister’s decision is not born of loyalty to his adviser – he just can’t get rid of his ideas man, says Guardian columnist Marina Hyde

www.theguardian.com

Cummings’ university history tutor once described him as “something like a Robespierre”, “determined to bring down things that don’t work”. Five years after his revolution, Robespierre himself was deemed to be something that didn’t really work, and was “brought down”, to euphemise the business of being relieved of your head in front of an ecstatic mob. I must say I found the footage of Cummings being screamed at in his street on Sunday distinctly disturbing when set alongside his account of his family’s house having become a target for threats of violence. This is never right.

Part of what’s disturbing was the vignette of a Britain Cummings himself did much to foment: grimly polarised, reflexively aggressive and running with an undercurrent of menace. His crowning triumph – the successful campaign to leave the EU – was a masterclass of stoking and exploiting divisions, unpleasantly emotive half-truths or untruths, and evidently considered itself above the law. I wrote last year about the dangerous folly of whipping up people versus parliament narratives, and how quickly those who imagine themselves on the side of the people can suddenly be reclassified as an enemy politician. But even I would have thought it too neat, too written, for Cummings to find himself on the wrong end of his sorcery as quickly as he has been. The thing about playing to angry mobs is that eventually they get angry with you. They came for Robespierre in the end, too.

 

[Gjestemedlem]

Så farlig, sette seg i egen bil.. uten noen andre til stede... og kjøre en tur .. så fuckings forferdelig at kommunistiske prester må gråte og okke seg, og få veslevoksne kommunister i menighetsbladene til å forfatte nidord , og få hele den røde saueflokken til å lukte blod.

Motbydelig og kvalmt men ikke uventet.

Det verste er at noen selverklærte ikke-sosialister hiver seg på heksejakten. Det er bare trist og regnvær. Falske folk.


+

 

[Gjestemedlem]

The media story about Dominic Cummings has collapsed
This has been a truly shocking week for British journalism.

The media story about Dominic Cummings has collapsed

This has been a truly shocking week for British journalism.

www.spiked-online.com

British journalism has had a terrible week. One of its worst of recent times. The hysteria over Dominic Cummings has clouded journalistic judgement and led to the publication of false claims and untrue stories. Here are some of the things journalists have said that have turned out to be untrue or at least not backed up by evidence.

1) Dominic Cummings drove to Durham twice

This was a transformative claim in the Cummings hysteria. Its impact cannot be overstated. It turned what was a story about a man doing what he thought was best for his family, rightly or wrongly, into a story of an arrogant political adviser gallivanting round the country while the rest of us suffered. It was published on the frontpage of the Sunday Mirror and the Observer. It generated hundreds of thousands of tweets, all condemning Cummings for being a serial lockdown breaker.
But there is no evidence to back it up. The story was based on the eye-witness testimony of an anonymous couple who claim to have seen Cummings and his wife in Durham on 19 April, days after Cummings said he had returned to London. That’s it. It is highly unusual to base a frontpage exclusive on the words of two random members of the public with no corroborating evidence. Cummings says he did not go to Durham twice. Boris Johnson says he has seen evidence that confirms Cummings was not in Durham in late April, when the second trip was said to have taken place. The Durham Police said there is ‘insufficient evidence’ to support the claims of a second visit.

This key part in the Cummings story, this claim that turned it from a minor affair into a huge scandal, seems to have fallen apart. And yet the newspapers that published it, and the tweeting journalists who promoted it, have offered no clarification. Extraordinary.

2) He took a walk among the bluebells

While the rest of us languished in lockdown, Cummings was in the lovely north walking through fields and admiring bluebells. He was hanging out at beauty spots and having a fine old time. Or so we were told.

The bluebells claim – that during his second visit to Durham he visited beauty spots and smelled the flowers – went viral. It became a talking point for talking heads, for whom this image of a modern-day Machiavelli hanging out in nature while everyone else was stuck inside summed up everything that is foul about the Boris government. The country was locked down and yet Cummings took a ‘secret road trip’ to ‘check out some famous bluebells’, snarked Tom Peck at the Independent.

But so far as we know, the bluebells thing did not happen. The story of Cummings and the bluebells came from the Sunday Mirror’s now highly unquestionable ‘second visit to Durham’ story. It was those two seemingly mistaken anonymous eye-witnesses who said they saw Cummings in Durham on 19 April who claimed that Cummings had said to them: ‘Aren’t the bluebells lovely?’
The wild spreading of this story, via the supposedly respectable media and among the Twitterati, is a classic case of confirmation bias. Hacks’ pre-existing loathing of Cummings led them to believe these claims uncritically and to transform them into perfectly symbolic evidence of the out-of-touch nature of the Boris set. Now that it seems Cummings was too busy working in London to be admiring bluebells in Durham, will the people who made this story go viral apologise? We know the answer to this question.

3) The police spoke to the Cummings family about lockdown rules

This was also a transformative claim: that cops visited the Cummings family home in Durham and spoke to Cummings himself about the lockdown rules. ‘Police spoke to Dominic Cummings about breaching the lockdown rules’, the Guardian reported. Illustrating the seriousness of this explosive claim, the Guardian swiftly followed up with the line: ‘There are now calls for his resignation.’
This story was based on a comment from Durham Police itself. It went viral. It became a classic scene in the Cummings hysteria: the man who is central to the government that locked down the country having to be reminded by the police about the importance of adhering to the lockdown. But it now seems that this never happened. It now seems that when Downing Street denied these claims and said the police did not talk to the Cummings family about ‘this matter’ – ie, the lockdown – it was telling the truth.

The Durham Police updated their claims. They have now made clear that a police officer, at the request of Cummings’ father, visited the home of Cummings’ parents and offered advice on security issues. Given the throngs we have seen outside Cummings’ London home in recent days, and the fact that Sky News door-stepped Cummings’ parents in Durham, it is entirely understandable that the Cummings family would want some pointers on security.
So this extraordinary image – of the police having to tell a senior government adviser to stick to the lockdown rules – also appears to be a fantasy. You will be searching for a very long time to find any clear corrections to the articles that pushed this seeming myth, with the assistance of the bumbling Durham constabulary, into the public realm.

4) Cummings broke the law

He’s a criminal! He completely defied the lockdown! He snubbed the rules he himself probably had a hand in drafting! This has been a key claim of commentators, tweeters and the yelling activists outside Cummings’ London home for a week. It’s poppycock.
As the Durham Police made clear yesterday, much to the disappointment of the anti-Cummings mob in the media and among the middle-class left, Cummings didn’t do anything particularly bad. The police said they did ‘not consider an offence was committed’ when Cummings and his wife and child drove to Durham; have not seen evidence that he visited Durham for a second time; and that his 30-mile drive to Barnard Castle on Easter Sunday – which is the only scandal the anti-Cummings lobby has left following the collapse of all their other claims – ‘might have’ been a ‘minor breach’ of the lockdown rules.
That’s it. One minor breach – possibly. For that, the media have spent a week obsessing over Cummings and ignoring or sidelining far more important stories, about care homes, the implementation of test-and-trace, the declining number of virus infections, the urgent need to lift the lockdown, and so on. What a catastrophic failure of journalism we have just witnessed.

5) Britain has the highest Covid death rate in Europe

Leaving aside Cummings for a moment – it would be great if the media could do likewise – we’ve also had the Financial Times telling us this week that Britain has the highest Covid-related death rate in Europe. Only we don’t. Spain does. The morbid death-watchers at the FT, who seem to relish their daily revelations of death stats, had to publish a correction. That’s something, at least. Of course the original claim spread like crazy through chattering circles, while the corrected truth was only talked about by a few. All of which proves the maxim: ‘A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its boots.’

6) Boris silenced Whitty and Vallance

This awful week for journalism ended with perhaps the most brazen display of media mythmaking. Senior journalists claimed that Boris Johnson, being Britain’s very own Putin, had ‘gagged’ his chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, and chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance. At the daily Covid news briefing, he prevented them from answering a question about Dominic Cummings on the basis that they shouldn’t talk about politics.

The outrage was intense. We have become a banana republic, some claimed. ‘This is not a real news conference’, said the BBC’s Nick Robinson. ‘Boris Johnson bans CMO Chris Whitty and CSA Patrick Vallance from giving their opinions on Dominic Cummings’ lockdown activities’, said the Sun’s Tom Newton Dunn. A Guardian piece this morning claims Boris is ‘the UK’s very own dictator’ who ‘silenced’ Whitty and Vallance.

Untrue. All of it. And what is extraordinary is that anyone who watched the news briefing will know that it is untrue. They will have seen with their own eyes and heard with their own ears as Whitty said, ‘I can assure you that the desire not to get pulled into politics is far stronger on the part of Sir Patrick and me than it is in the prime minister’, and they would have heard Vallance say, ‘I’m a civil servant, I’m politically neutral, I don’t want to get involved in politics at all’.
There you have it. From the experts’ own mouths. The media desperately wanted to politicise these neutral scientific and medical advisers, and the advisers said: No, thanks. No gagging, no banning, no Putin-esque clampdown – just experts refusing to dance to the tune of the Cummings-obsessed media.
This is where we have ended up following this atrocious week for the British media: in a situation where journalists are making things up about things we the public can see and hear for ourselves. We watched Whitty and Vallance saying ‘We really don’t want to comment on this’ and then we watched the media say ‘They’ve been banned’. It’s a kind of madness. Journalists are sacrificing their sense, their reason and their objectivity at the altar of their feverish Cummings obsession. That’s the true scandal of the past seven days.

Brendan O’Neill

 

[t-roten]

Hvem skriver dette tullet?
Punkt 6 for eksempel - jeg satt hjemme og saa denne pressekonferansen - Boris tok en helt klar linje og ba de sakkyndige holde kjeft.
Har en venn her som har jobbet som raadgiver for denne regjeringen, og han er sjokkert over hvor mye Boris forsoker aa "glemme" hele episoden med Cummings. Saken er ikke om Cummings har brutt loven, men det at han har gaatt direkte imot de raadene og reglene som er dratt opp for hvordan man oppforer seg i disse tider. Jeg er i samme situasjon som han, med full jobb og tre (ikke en) unge i huset. Har hatt viruset (har testet for dette) og vi har alle vaert syke - men regelen var helt klar - bli hjemme, noe han ikke klarte...

Tro ikke alt du leser paa Internett...

The media story about Dominic Cummings has collapsed
This has been a truly shocking week for British journalism.

The media story about Dominic Cummings has collapsed

This has been a truly shocking week for British journalism.

www.spiked-online.com

British journalism has had a terrible week. One of its worst of recent times. The hysteria over Dominic Cummings has clouded journalistic judgement and led to the publication of false claims and untrue stories. Here are some of the things journalists have said that have turned out to be untrue or at least not backed up by evidence.

1) Dominic Cummings drove to Durham twice

This was a transformative claim in the Cummings hysteria. Its impact cannot be overstated. It turned what was a story about a man doing what he thought was best for his family, rightly or wrongly, into a story of an arrogant political adviser gallivanting round the country while the rest of us suffered. It was published on the frontpage of the Sunday Mirror and the Observer. It generated hundreds of thousands of tweets, all condemning Cummings for being a serial lockdown breaker.
But there is no evidence to back it up. The story was based on the eye-witness testimony of an anonymous couple who claim to have seen Cummings and his wife in Durham on 19 April, days after Cummings said he had returned to London. That’s it. It is highly unusual to base a frontpage exclusive on the words of two random members of the public with no corroborating evidence. Cummings says he did not go to Durham twice. Boris Johnson says he has seen evidence that confirms Cummings was not in Durham in late April, when the second trip was said to have taken place. The Durham Police said there is ‘insufficient evidence’ to support the claims of a second visit.

This key part in the Cummings story, this claim that turned it from a minor affair into a huge scandal, seems to have fallen apart. And yet the newspapers that published it, and the tweeting journalists who promoted it, have offered no clarification. Extraordinary.

2) He took a walk among the bluebells

While the rest of us languished in lockdown, Cummings was in the lovely north walking through fields and admiring bluebells. He was hanging out at beauty spots and having a fine old time. Or so we were told.

The bluebells claim – that during his second visit to Durham he visited beauty spots and smelled the flowers – went viral. It became a talking point for talking heads, for whom this image of a modern-day Machiavelli hanging out in nature while everyone else was stuck inside summed up everything that is foul about the Boris government. The country was locked down and yet Cummings took a ‘secret road trip’ to ‘check out some famous bluebells’, snarked Tom Peck at the Independent.

But so far as we know, the bluebells thing did not happen. The story of Cummings and the bluebells came from the Sunday Mirror’s now highly unquestionable ‘second visit to Durham’ story. It was those two seemingly mistaken anonymous eye-witnesses who said they saw Cummings in Durham on 19 April who claimed that Cummings had said to them: ‘Aren’t the bluebells lovely?’
The wild spreading of this story, via the supposedly respectable media and among the Twitterati, is a classic case of confirmation bias. Hacks’ pre-existing loathing of Cummings led them to believe these claims uncritically and to transform them into perfectly symbolic evidence of the out-of-touch nature of the Boris set. Now that it seems Cummings was too busy working in London to be admiring bluebells in Durham, will the people who made this story go viral apologise? We know the answer to this question.

3) The police spoke to the Cummings family about lockdown rules

This was also a transformative claim: that cops visited the Cummings family home in Durham and spoke to Cummings himself about the lockdown rules. ‘Police spoke to Dominic Cummings about breaching the lockdown rules’, the Guardian reported. Illustrating the seriousness of this explosive claim, the Guardian swiftly followed up with the line: ‘There are now calls for his resignation.’
This story was based on a comment from Durham Police itself. It went viral. It became a classic scene in the Cummings hysteria: the man who is central to the government that locked down the country having to be reminded by the police about the importance of adhering to the lockdown. But it now seems that this never happened. It now seems that when Downing Street denied these claims and said the police did not talk to the Cummings family about ‘this matter’ – ie, the lockdown – it was telling the truth.

The Durham Police updated their claims. They have now made clear that a police officer, at the request of Cummings’ father, visited the home of Cummings’ parents and offered advice on security issues. Given the throngs we have seen outside Cummings’ London home in recent days, and the fact that Sky News door-stepped Cummings’ parents in Durham, it is entirely understandable that the Cummings family would want some pointers on security.
So this extraordinary image – of the police having to tell a senior government adviser to stick to the lockdown rules – also appears to be a fantasy. You will be searching for a very long time to find any clear corrections to the articles that pushed this seeming myth, with the assistance of the bumbling Durham constabulary, into the public realm.

4) Cummings broke the law

He’s a criminal! He completely defied the lockdown! He snubbed the rules he himself probably had a hand in drafting! This has been a key claim of commentators, tweeters and the yelling activists outside Cummings’ London home for a week. It’s poppycock.
As the Durham Police made clear yesterday, much to the disappointment of the anti-Cummings mob in the media and among the middle-class left, Cummings didn’t do anything particularly bad. The police said they did ‘not consider an offence was committed’ when Cummings and his wife and child drove to Durham; have not seen evidence that he visited Durham for a second time; and that his 30-mile drive to Barnard Castle on Easter Sunday – which is the only scandal the anti-Cummings lobby has left following the collapse of all their other claims – ‘might have’ been a ‘minor breach’ of the lockdown rules.
That’s it. One minor breach – possibly. For that, the media have spent a week obsessing over Cummings and ignoring or sidelining far more important stories, about care homes, the implementation of test-and-trace, the declining number of virus infections, the urgent need to lift the lockdown, and so on. What a catastrophic failure of journalism we have just witnessed.

5) Britain has the highest Covid death rate in Europe

Leaving aside Cummings for a moment – it would be great if the media could do likewise – we’ve also had the Financial Times telling us this week that Britain has the highest Covid-related death rate in Europe. Only we don’t. Spain does. The morbid death-watchers at the FT, who seem to relish their daily revelations of death stats, had to publish a correction. That’s something, at least. Of course the original claim spread like crazy through chattering circles, while the corrected truth was only talked about by a few. All of which proves the maxim: ‘A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its boots.’

6) Boris silenced Whitty and Vallance

This awful week for journalism ended with perhaps the most brazen display of media mythmaking. Senior journalists claimed that Boris Johnson, being Britain’s very own Putin, had ‘gagged’ his chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, and chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance. At the daily Covid news briefing, he prevented them from answering a question about Dominic Cummings on the basis that they shouldn’t talk about politics.

The outrage was intense. We have become a banana republic, some claimed. ‘This is not a real news conference’, said the BBC’s Nick Robinson. ‘Boris Johnson bans CMO Chris Whitty and CSA Patrick Vallance from giving their opinions on Dominic Cummings’ lockdown activities’, said the Sun’s Tom Newton Dunn. A Guardian piece this morning claims Boris is ‘the UK’s very own dictator’ who ‘silenced’ Whitty and Vallance.

Untrue. All of it. And what is extraordinary is that anyone who watched the news briefing will know that it is untrue. They will have seen with their own eyes and heard with their own ears as Whitty said, ‘I can assure you that the desire not to get pulled into politics is far stronger on the part of Sir Patrick and me than it is in the prime minister’, and they would have heard Vallance say, ‘I’m a civil servant, I’m politically neutral, I don’t want to get involved in politics at all’.
There you have it. From the experts’ own mouths. The media desperately wanted to politicise these neutral scientific and medical advisers, and the advisers said: No, thanks. No gagging, no banning, no Putin-esque clampdown – just experts refusing to dance to the tune of the Cummings-obsessed media.
This is where we have ended up following this atrocious week for the British media: in a situation where journalists are making things up about things we the public can see and hear for ourselves. We watched Whitty and Vallance saying ‘We really don’t want to comment on this’ and then we watched the media say ‘They’ve been banned’. It’s a kind of madness. Journalists are sacrificing their sense, their reason and their objectivity at the altar of their feverish Cummings obsession. That’s the true scandal of the past seven days.

Brendan O’Neill

 

[Gjestemedlem]

Denne? Ser ikke problemet. UK er ikke Nord Korea tross alt.

 

[Gjestemedlem]

Keir Starmer's attack on Boris massively backfires as Labour leader urged to fire own team

KEIR STARMER's attack on Boris Johnson's over his decision to stand by his chief political adviser Dominic Cummings massively backfired as Britons called on the Labour leader to fire his own ministers.

Keir Starmer's attack on Boris Johnson massively backfires

KEIR STARMER's attack on Boris Johnson's over his decision to stand by his chief political adviser Dominic Cummings massively backfired as Britons called on the Labour leader to fire his own ministers.

www.express.co.uk

Speaking to BBC Yorkshire, the Labour leader accused the Prime Minister of showing to be "weak" in the face of allegations against his top political adviser Dominic Cummings of flouting coronavirus lockdown rules. Sir Keir Starmer said: “The most important thing here is not these technical issues, the problem is that by not dealing with Cummings in a strong way, the Prime Minister has not only shown himself to be weak, and he has shown himself to be weak.

“I mean he’s so desperate for his advisor, h’ell cling on to him through thick and thin.

“But more importantly, what I’m worried about is that people might think: ‘Well, if Cummings doesn’t have to abide by the rules, why do I have to?’

“And then you’re on a slippery slope, because as we come out of lockdown it’s really important, and I will support the Government, that we all comply with the rules.

“We’ve all been doing that and so the real risk here is that we lose control of the rules, which actually are necessary, because in the ned we are talking about the health and lives of many people across Yorkshire and across the rest of the United Kingdom.”

But his bashing of the Prime Minister's approach to the Dominic Cummings saga backfired as BBC viewers took to Twitter to accuse the Labour leader of being a hypocrite.

One viewer said: “Another pointless Keir Starmer sound bite ...Durham police spoke out yea correct NO ACTION.

"Not dealing with Cummings.. hmm Stephen Kinnock got a promotion. Tahir Ali NO Action. Kevan Jones NO ACTION...That's strong leadership Is it Mr Starmer.”

And another: “The real problem is that you have to try to keep yourself feeling important every morning for the morning news progs. When in reality your are not important at all. Your just a well-spoken bloke in a suit, can’t really think of anything else.”

One Twitter user added: “Is this the Kier Starmer that said whilst in charge of DPP that he would not criticise those that worked for him. What strong action has he taken against the 3 Labour politicians who infringed lockdown regulations. Diddly squat”

And another wrote: “Why have you not fired Kinnock and TahirAli for breaking lockdown rules? BBC News, why are Labour MPs breaking lockdown rules not headline news? #TotalHypocrites #leftyBBC”

Labour MP Tahir Ali was forced to apologise after he attended a large funeral, while MP Stephen Kinnock was accused of flouting rules for driving to his parents' house.

However, more than 60 Conservative MPs have so far defied Mr Johnson’s calls to “move on” from the Cummings saga.

 

[Gjestemedlem]

Brendan O’Neill

What the fury about Cummings’s road trip is really about

What the fury about Cummings's road trip is really about

Is Durhamgate over now? It must be. Surely. With a simmering revolt in Hong Kong, riots in Minneapolis, heightened border tensions between India and China, and Twitter censuring the president of the United States, British journalists can’t still be obsessing over whether Dominic Cummings stopped...

www.spectator.co.uk

Is Durhamgate over now? It must be. Surely. With a simmering revolt in Hong Kong, riots in Minneapolis, heightened border tensions between India and China, and Twitter censuring the president of the United States, British journalists can't still be obsessing over whether Dominic Cummings stopped at a petrol station on a drive to Durham. If they are, it rather makes a fantastic irony of the fact that these are the kind of people who often refer to the rest of us at Little Englanders.

If – as so many of us hope – Durhamgate is finally fading away, now might be a good time to survey the wreckage. To look back on these feverish seven days in which journalists have thought and talked about little else other than the question of where Cummings self-isolated when ill, and ask what on earth it was all about. Why did some people get so het up about Cummings' drive to Durham? And why, even more strikingly, did Boris Johnson refuse to bend the knee to the whipped-up media fury by sacking Cummings?

I think it's pretty clear. What we have just lived through was not really about driving or Durham or even the lockdown. It was a revolt of the elites against a government they despise. And Boris knows this. In standing by Cummings in the face of one of the most relentless campaigns of media demonisation in recent times, Boris has just faced down the first revolt of the elites of his prime ministership. I think that's impressive. I also think other revolts will follow, and soon.

The least convincing thing I have heard Cummings obsessives say is that this isn't political. That the myopic focus on Cummings' activities during lockdown has nothing to do with Brexit or Boris or the Tories. It's just a plain, honest interrogation of officialdom to the end of ensuring that the integrity of the lockdown remains intact and public health remains the top priority. I'm sorry, but if you believe that then I have a vat of snake oil you might be interested in.

Anyone who has been to a middle-class dinner party or a political protest or for a pint with their leftish mates anytime over the past three or four years will know that Cummings holds a unique position in right-thinking circles. They hate him. Truly. They view him as a menacing Svengali, the puppetmaster of all of political life in the UK, the borderline demonic figure who led the British plebs to the cliff edge of Brexit, and the British economy to the precipice of post-EU insanity.

I'm not making this up. In October last year on a big Remainer march on Parliament (remember those?) there was a huge effigy of Cummings made to look like a Nazi. Cummings, of course, founded Vote Leave, which made him evil in these people's tear-stained eyes. On the effigy's head it said 'Demonic Cummings'. This vile creature was shown controlling Boris Johnson like a puppet. Because Cummings is all-powerful, you see. Controller of worlds, wrecker of dreams.

On pretty much every Remainer march I attended – strictly as an observer, you understand – I saw placards depicting Cummings as a devil-like figure and even as the Gollum of Brexit Britain. And of course much of this echoed the liberal media's depiction of Cummings as the manipulative mastermind behind Brexit, and later the Tories' smashing of the 'red wall', using his magic powers and wily social-media skills to brainwash 17.4m Brits into voting Leave and millions of Labour votes into backing Boris.

I've always thought that this view of Cummings was directly proportionate to the modern elites' sense that they were losing their grip on political ideology and public opinion. The more that ordinary people turned against the pro-EU outlook and bristled at the woke, identitarian agenda of the Corbyn movement, the more the liberal and left-wing set went searching for the thing that made this possible, the force that destroyed their political dreams.


And they landed, very often, on Cummings. They started to understand their political misfortunes and failures as the handiwork of one all-powerful bloke who broke the rules in order to break up political life.

They wildly exaggerated his influence on public life, of course. It is insulting to the millions of Brexit voters and millions of 'red wall' rebels to suggest that they were led astray by the social-media scheming and soundbites of allegedly dark political forces like Cummings. People can think for themselves. But unable to face up to this reality – the reality that ordinary people used their grey matter and decided they didn't want the EU or Corbyn – the opinion-forming set invented the myth of Cummings' awesome power to explain these political quakes.
That has been one of the great ironies of the anti-Cummings worldview: it has made Cummings appear more brilliant and powerful than he really is. A smart political adviser capable of reading the public mood was transformed into a Rasputin-like figure casting a spell over politics and the plebs.
And that is how we got to Durhamgate. This is why the media fury with Cummings' car journey has been so intense, so unhinged at times. It's not because these people think the lockdown rules must never be bent. They've probably done a bit of bending themselves. It's because here was a chance to wound the man who ruined right-on political life, and to injure the government he apparently puppeteers.
It was a revolt of the elites. Plain and simple. There is a section of society out there – I won't name any names – who were used to getting their way in virtually all matters political and cultural until Brexit happened. The vote for Brexit wasn't only ballot-box revolt against the EU, but even more importantly against the vast bulk of the political, media and business establishments here at home who favoured technocracy over democracy, expertise over the wisdom of the crowd, and neoliberalism over focused government investment in community life and public works.

The Brexit vote devastated the presumptions and privileges of those elites that had been taking shape from the 1960s onwards. Then, to add insult to injury, there was the 'red wall' rebellion: the mass exodus of working-class votes from a labour establishment that arrogantly took their votes for granted, and even desired to overthrow their votes for Brexit. More than in any other Western nation, even more than in the US, the modern elites of the UK have suffered some major democratic blows in recent years.

That is what Durhamgate is about. It is a revolt of the elites against a government enthusiastically elected by millions of people, including millions of Brexiteers and millions of the working classes. And in withstanding this revolt, in facing it down under incredible pressure, Boris has done something very, very important. He has said to these cosmopolitan, technocratic elites that they can't just throw their weight around; that they can't stamp their feet and get their own way anymore; that things have changed.

It was the first major battle between a new and popular political order and the bruised old establishments who feel cast out and confused. It won't be the last. Brace yourself, Boris.

 

[Gjestemedlem]

Long-Bailey dropped from shadow cabinet over 'anti-Semitic' tweet

Sir Keir Starmer has sacked Rebecca Long-Bailey from the shadow cabinet after sharing an article containing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

www.standard.co.uk

 

[Gjestemedlem]

En liten hyllest til UKs mest brilliante politiker. Jeg håper han blir PM en dag .. om ikke så lenge.

 

[Hardingfele]

Boris Johnsons verste mareritt nærmer seg: mannen som brøt opp unionen av nasjoner.
Tyve minutter man bør ta seg tid til:

The Documentary - Disunion - BBC Sounds

Edward Stourton asks whether Covid-19 could hasten the breakup of the United Kingdom?

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[erato]

An interesting article in the Financial Times about Britain's regained liberty.

The UK will now count the cost of Brexit sovereignty

Boris Johnson’s government is about to exchange real power for a chimera

Finally. In two short weeks the UK will reclaim its liberty. Brexit has so far been a story of rancorous division, shaking political fists and fractured ties with old allies. The union of Britain and Northern Ireland has been put in peril. But the glittering prize that will make it all worthwhile is now in sight.

We know what it is called. Boris Johnson and his fellow Brexiters speak of little else. The country, the prime minister promises, is to recover its “sovereignty”. Forget the last minute wrangling with Brussels. The difference between a trade deal and no deal before January 1 is trivial against the loftier purpose. What was it Mr Johnson once said? “Fuck business”. Brexit is about taking back control, returning the UK to self-government, regaining full command of its borders, money and laws.

In one narrow sense, Brexit’s true believers are right. The gap between a thin trade deal and the absence of any accord is one between severe and more severe disruption. Either way, the UK will need 50,000 or more new customs agents to cope with the bureaucracy being injected into once-frictionless trading arrangements. The bargain under discussion is the first trade agreement in history consciously to raise protectionist barriers.

UK citizens will forfeit the right to travel and work without hindrance across the EU. Service industry workers will lose automatic recognition of their skills and qualifications. The independent experts belittled by ministers such as Michael Gove are near unanimous in predicting slower economic growth and lower living standards.

In return, British citizens will be able to indulge their nostalgia with a new, blue-hued passport to distinguish them from fellow Europeans — a reward that seems unlikely to compensate travellers for being henceforth consigned to the slow lanes at EU airports. Sovereignty, we are told by the Brexiters, also precludes membership of the Erasmus student exchange scheme, a role in the Galileo satellite project, and full access to the EU’s intelligence gathering on terrorist and criminal networks.

So what, it now seems fair to ask, does this precious sovereignty look and taste like? Does it come in the form of a sculpted Britannia, disinterred from the cellars of the Berlaymont headquarters of the European Commission to be placed on a pedestal at Westminster? Will the scales of justice be transferred by carriage from the European Court in Luxembourg to the UK Supreme Court? And how, some British voters might be inclined to ask, will any of this improve prosperity and security?

You might have thought a prime minister so attached to the idea of sovereignty would have planned a spectacular demonstration of what it means for the UK to regain control of its borders, money and laws. After all, a post-Brexit pile-up of freight trucks waiting to cross the English Channel will not much look like an act of liberation.

Instead, the Brexiters’ fatal confusion between sovereignty and power is about to be exposed. Untrammelled sovereignty sounds alluring, but in a world in which each nation’s security and economic wellbeing is inextricably connected to those of others, it turns out that it does not confer real power.

Mr Johnson wants to stop migrants crossing the Channel in small boats to claim asylum in the UK. So what’s to prevent him after January 1, when the government will be free of all EU restrictions? It is called reality. Halting the boats will depend, as it always has, on the active co-operation of the French authorities. So much for sovereignty. During the debate before the 2016 referendum, Leavers were often asked when had the EU taken big decisions against the expressed will of Westminster. Where was the proof the EU had been trampling on the nation’s liberties? Beyond muttering about over-enthusiastic business regulation (much of it sought by British industry), I don’t recall them giving an answer.

These same Brexiters have nothing to offer now. Trade deals promised with third countries will largely replicate those the UK now enjoys within the EU. Mr Johnson’s insistence on a right to diverge from EU norms in areas such as the environment, safety and employment is empty of serious meaning. Businesses that want to trade will continue to shadow the rules set in Brussels. UK boats may catch more fish in “sovereign” UK waters, but they will have to find willing buyers on the other side of the Channel.

There you have it. Brexit is a national tragedy built on a chimera. The UK is about to discover that it has traded the real power to shape its destiny for an illusion drenched in nostalgia.

 

[Hardingfele]

^Alltid farlig når folk uten kobling til virkeligheten kommer i maktposisjon. De to siste klarte å lure en masse folk som ikke vet bedre til å tro at de stemte for sitt eget beste ...


Liam Fox

The free trade agreement that we will have to do with the European Union should be one of the easiest in human history.

The then international trade secretary made the declaration during a radio interview in 2017.

Boris Johnson

There is no plan for no deal, because we’re going to get a great deal.

Said during his time as foreign secretary. Johnson assured Britons there was no need to plan for a no-deal scenario. His statement was quickly slapped down by Theresa May’s Downing Street, who insisted that “contingency planning is taking place for a range of scenarios”.

Michael Gove

The day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want.

A month before the EU referendum, Gove, now the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, insisted the UK would “hold all the cards” if it voted to leave the EU.

John Redwood

Getting out of the EU can be quick and easy – the UK holds most of the cards.

The Conservative MP wrote of his confidence about the Brexit negotiations in July 2016, less than a month after the referendum result. “Too many people in government and the professions seem to think the UK is a weak petitioner which has to be very careful in case we are expelled from the single market,” he said.

Paul Nuttall

It will be easy to negotiate these terms, it will be easy to negotiate a trade deal, and of course, it is in European Union’s interest just as much as it is in ours.

Such was the confidence of the then Ukip leader during an interview with BBC Radio 4 on 17 January 2017. He went on to say he was “not trepidatious about this in any way, shape or form.”

Nigel Farage

To me, Brexit is easy … We have back British passports, we have control of our fishing waters, and our companies are not subject to EU law through the single market.

Said by the man who largely led the charge for Brexit, back in 2016.

Gerard Batten

What you could do in an afternoon, which won’t take two years, is to say to the European Union: ‘We want to continue with tariff-free trade and so do you, because it’s in your interest.’

Then Ukip’s Brexit spokesman, Batten said Brexit could be sorted “in an afternoon over a cup of coffee”. The Labour MP Alison McGovern hit back at the statement at the time, describing it as nonsense. “The idea that you could sort out customs arrangements for high-value manufacturing like that in an afternoon – that is an insult to my constituents and their jobs,” she said.

 

[Dr Dong]

det er som om tragedien spiller seg ut som komedie.