Politics – Page 2 – Blood and Porridge

March 26, 2023March 26, 2023

Hapless Humza and heaven’s Kate

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Government

From wikipedia.org / © ScottishPolitico

The devil and the deep blue sea. A rock and a hard place. Scylla and Charybdis. These are a few phrases that spring to mind when I think of the choice facing members of the Scottish National Party as they vote for a new party leader and First Minister of Scotland to replace Nicola Sturgeon, who a month ago announced her intention to resign from those posts and last week made her final appearance at First Minister’s Questions in the Scottish Parliament.

Neither of the options offered as Sturgeon’s successor is particularly inspiring. There’s Humza Yousaf, current Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, and previously Minister for Transport and the Islands. And then there’s Kate Forbes, currently Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy.

Okay, there’s also a third candidate in the running, Ash Regan, former Minister for Community Safety. But, working on the assumption that the average SNP member has at least a couple of braincells in his or her head, I imagine Regan has zero chance of prevailing. Her big idea so far has been to have an ‘independence-readiness thermometer’ displayed in a major Scottish city. Plus, much of her support actually seems to lie outwith the SNP, i.e., among the opportunists, grifters, misfits, transphobes and Scottish-indy ultras who joined embittered former SNP leader, former Russia Today presenter and generally-accepted lech Alex Salmond when he set up the Alba Party as a way of getting revenge on Sturgeon and his old party (and secured 1.65% of the votes cast in the subsequent Scottish parliamentary election).

Anyway, onto the two real candidates. Yousaf strikes me as a bloke with his heart in the right place… But his performance in government has been patchy and he’s prone to making gaffes, most recently when he met with a group of Ukrainian women and inquired, “Where are all the men?” Okay, whilst being in charge of Health and Social Care in Scotland, he’s been under constant bombardment from Scotland’s newspapers, which are almost without exception right-wing, conservative, unionist and shite-holey – the Scottish Daily Mail, the Scottish Daily Express, the Scottish Sun, the Scotsman, the Herald and the Scottish edition of the Daily Telegraph. While their beloved Conservative Party has, in government in London, under the leaderships of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, wallowed in mindboggling amounts of corruption and indulged in mindboggling amounts of incompetence, their response has been to shriek and scream that the Scottish government is equally, if not more, of a basket case. They’ve fixated on and magnified every fault and incompetence they can discover and never stopped to draw breath in their criticisms. Generally, their modus operandi has been, in the words of far-right strategist Steve Bannon, to ‘flood the zone with shit’. “Okay,” they seem to cry, “Britain is crap! But Scotland is even crapper! And an independent Scotland would be even, even crapper!”

From wikipedia.org

But I don’t think Yousaf has the dexterity, the gravitas and the general intelligence to establish himself the way Sturgeon did – who, though most of the mainstream media in Scotland hated her, was able to rise above their carping, convey a sense of competence, and convince everyone bar the most rabid Scottish Conservative that she was much more effective as an administrator than, say, the venal Johnson or the barking-mad Truss. Unfortunately, I can’t see how Yousaf will escape being portrayed by the media as a bungling klutz – in the same way that they succeeded in discrediting former Labour Party leaders like Michael Foot (supposedly a befuddled old fool who went to Remembrance services at the Cenotaph dressed as a scarecrow), Neil Kinnock (a Welsh windbag who tripped over on a beach and fell into the sea) and Ed Miliband (a two-kitchen-owning faux socialist whose dad hated Britain and who couldn’t eat a bacon sandwich properly). That said, I doubt if they’ll be able to absolutely demonise Yousaf like they did with Jeremy Corbyn.

Incidentally, it’s interesting to compare Yousaf’s troubled tenure as Health Secretary with that of Sturgeon, who held the brief for a couple of years when Salmond was First Minister. And if anyone says they don’t remember anything of Sturgeon as Health Secretary – well, that says a lot for her skill in keeping it a non-issue at the time.

From what I’ve seen of her, in purely political terms, Kate Forbes seems the most capable of the candidates. But there’s a big problem. She’s a member of the Free Church of Scotland and claims its tenets are ‘essential’ to her ‘being’ – which would be fine if her particular Kirk treated people from all walks of life non-judgementally, but it doesn’t, and Forbes has ended up saying some things that cross the line into intolerant, Bible-bashing crankery. She’s said she would have voted against same-sex marriage, and stated her opposition to the Scottish government’s trans-friendly Gender Recognition Act, and spoken out too against abortion and sex outside of marriage. This has put a lot of noses in the SNP out of joint. For instance, the party’s deputy leader in Westminster Mhairi Black, a lesbian who got wed last year, has tweeted that she was ‘incredibly hurt’ by Forbes’ stance on gay marriage.

Perversely, some right-wing commentators who, in right-wing news outlets, regularly castigate Forbes’ party have ridden to her defence during the controversy about her religious views. On February 23^rd, Fraser Nelson, editor of bilious far-right magazine the Spectator, wrote an opinion piece in the no-better Daily Telegraph under the headline PROTESTANTS ARE NOW HOUNDED OUT OF POLITICS, AS KATE FORBES HAS SHOWN. A day later, in Rupert Murdoch’s Times, the fogey-ish author and Evelyn Waugh wannabe A.N. Wilson penned a similar-minded piece entitled THE HOUNDING OF KATE FORBES SHOWS GODLESS SQUAD HAVE WON. And if the moral support of Nelson and Wilson wasn’t enough to drain all street credibility out of Forbes, and send it down a hole deep enough to reach Australia, the ridiculous Jacob Rees-Mogg got in on the act too. He wrote in a Daily Mail column that: “The last Scottish female public figure to be treated so badly for her religion was Mary, Queen of Scots, who was chased out of her country and eventually beheaded by her cousin Elizabeth for her Catholicism.”

From wikipedia.org

Oh, and the centre-right journalist and commentator Chris Deerin – director of the think-tank Reform Scotland, crooner with arthritic dad-rock band the Fat Cops, worshipper of Ruth Davidson and, mind-shreddingly, Scottish Editor for the supposed left-leaning New Statesman – has been carrying a torch for her recently too. Just in case the Kate Forbes Media Fan Club didn’t sound hellish enough.

Personally, I suspect the reason why so many personages in the right-wing press are currently batting for Forbes is because they’re licking their lips with anticipation about what might happen if she wins. They’d have a field-day reporting on the latest messes involving the First Minister of Scotland as, speaking her Free Kirk mind, she upsets gay people, trans people, unmarried mothers, women who’ve had abortions, etc. She could also very easily piss off Scotland’s sizeable Roman Catholic community, since the brand of old-school Scottish Presbyterianism she adheres to is not exactly known for its love of the Pope and the Church of Rome. And her social conservatism would probably mean the SNP’s current, informal governing alliance with the Scottish Green Party would end.

All in all, the Yousaf / Forbes leadership race looks like a lose-lose situation for the SNP and a win-win one for the right-wing mainstream media that would love to see the back of the party. Meanwhile, I have a feeling that a lot of people in the Scottish independence movement who’d expressed impatience, dissatisfaction and frustration with Nicola Sturgeon’s performance in recent years – well, apart from those bampots in Salmond’s wee faction – will soon realise how much they miss her.

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Government

March 20, 2023March 20, 2023

The butcher boy

From leftfutures.org

One feature of growing older is that every new day seems to be an anniversary of some sort or other – an anniversary of something you did, or something you experienced, or something big or small that you witnessed happening in the world. For instance, just last Friday, March 17^th – St Patrick’s Day 2023 – I realised it was 30 years exactly since some friends and I went to see the great Belfast punk band Stiff Little Fingers at Glasgow Barrowland. Both Stiff Little Fingers and the Barrowland, I’m pleased to report, are still on the go; and their histories have been happily entwined during the three decades since. As the latter’s Wikipedia entry reports: “Northern Irish punk band Stiff Little Fingers have played sold-out concerts at the venue every St Patrick’s Day since 1992, and recorded their Best Served Loud album there in 2016 to celebrate 25 years at Barrowland.”

Even if it reminds me of how ancient I am now, that’s at least an anniversary of something I remember fondly. However, there’s nothing fond I remember about the event that today, March 20^th, is the anniversary of. It’s now been twenty years since Western military forces, mainly American and British ones directed by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, blasted their way into Iraq.

The invasion was launched in order to depose Saddam Hussein who, it was claimed, possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. It transpired, though, that these WMDs didn’t exist and it became obvious that Bush and Blair had spun a web of lies beforehand to make people believe that they did. In the two decades since the invasion, those WMDs haven’t been the only things to not exist. The Iraq Body Count Project has calculated that, up until 2019, between 183,535 and 206,107 Iraqi people have stopped existing too. Their deaths have been a result of Bush and Blair’s actions – of the invasion, the bungled Western occupation and its chaotic aftermath.

George Bush once donned a flak jacket, posed on the deck of an American aircraft-carrier and boasted that the ‘mission’ in Iraq was ‘accomplished’. That seems a very long time ago now. Mind you, through the dubious involvement in the supposed occupation and ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq by outfits such as Haliburton, the debacle succeeded in lining the likes of Dick Cheney’s pockets very nicely. I suppose that was the real point of it.

Of course, the Iraq War helped to put some coinage into Tony Blair’s pockets too. Thanks to his support for the second-most right-wing and incompetent president in American history, the former PM was for a long time revered in Republican sectors of the USA and he made more than a few bob on the public speaking circuit there. (He also profited from a dodgy job negotiating the movement of oil between Iraq and South Korea.) I suppose his popularity in America reduced his pain at being less admired in other parts of the world. For instance, I was working in India during the worst phase of the ‘official’ Iraq War – Abu Ghraib and all that – and whenever I read the Indian English-language newspapers, his name seldom appeared in a sentence without being accompanied by the words ‘poodle’ or ‘lapdog’.

I’d never trusted Blair. His big smile and ingratiating, want-to-be-your-pal manner struck me as phoney, especially compared to the plain-speaking, no-nonsense demeanour of his predecessor as Labour Party leader, John Smith, who died unexpectedly in 1994. However, up until 2003, and having recently endured 18 years of Conservative government, I’d consoled myself with the thought that “At least he isn’t as bad as that other lot.” He headed a political party that claimed to have some conscience, principles and scruples, the supposed antithesis of Maggie Thatcher and her cynical gang. But events in March 2003 changed my opinion.

To be fair, in Britain, it wasn’t just Blair who willed the invasion into happening. He had the support of many in his party, though with a few noble objectors like the late Robin Cook, and the Tories backed him to the hilt. In fact, among the Westminster-based parties, it was only Charles Kennedy’s Liberal Democrats who showed some spine and opposed the bloody thing. It goes without saying that the majority of Britain’s predominantly right-wing newspapers were cheerleaders for it too.

From wikipedia.org / © William M. Connelly

And, though people still talk about the anti-war protests on February 15^th, 2003, which saw the biggest ever political demonstration in London’s history take to the capital’s streets (and was the subject of Ian McEwan’s rather annoying 2005 novel Saturday), I’m afraid to say it had the support of a good chunk of the British population as well. Before and during the initial invasion, I was living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but for personal reasons I also spent a lot of time down in East Anglia. Nearly everyone I know in Newcastle – Labour supporters to a man and woman – was horrified by what Blair was doing. But down south, it was a different story. I heard people saying it in pubs, and saw it on stickers in car windows. This war was right, Saddam Hussein was going to blow us up with his WMDs, we needed to hit him before he hit us, we had to support ‘our boys’, and if you were anti-war you were unpatriotic, a coward, a traitor. It was the mentality that, nearly 80 years earlier, had seen young men humiliated by getting white feathers if they didn’t sign up to fight amid the mud and bloodshed of the trenches.

Everything that happened in Iraq was a reprehensible failure – morally, politically, even in terms of making ground against Osamu Bin Laden in the supposed War on Terror. (It took a Navy SEALs raid in Pakistan during the Obama era to put an end to him.) In Britain, it loosened the Labour Party’s hold on power and paved the way for the David Cameron government and its disastrous austerity policies. It also shook the public’s faith in politicians and what they saw as ‘the establishment’ and, arguably, helped lead to the 2016 vote to leave the European Union, which was Britain’s other huge, idiotic mistake of the 21^st century. But all this never dented Blair’s belief that invading Iraq with Bush was the correct thing to do. He was right and those millions of people who came onto the streets to protest against the invasion were wrong.

A lot of this, I suspect, was down to Blair being a devout Christian. Since God was on his side, he reasoned, his decision to back Bush must have divine sanction. Bush, of course, professed to being a Christian too, although I couldn’t imagine the gimlet-eyed Texan being as zealous about it as Blair.

Actually, Blair’s Christianity puts me in mind of something said by the late William S. Burroughs in his spoken lyrics for the Bill Laswell song Words of Advice for Young People: “If you’re doing business with a religious sonofabitch, get it in writing. His word isn’t worth shit, not with the good Lord telling him how to f**k you on the deal.”

From unsplash.com / © Levi Meir Clancy

January 4, 2023January 10, 2023

Mad-lands

From wikipedia.com / © gov.uk

The last time I gazed into the abyss of British politics and wrote about what I saw there, it was September 2022 and Liz Truss had just been crowned leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, taking over from that unrepentant, lawbreaking blond blob Boris Johnson. That was a mere four months ago. What’s happened since then seems a cavalcade of chaos and insanity. To contemplate it again, and attempt to make sense of it all, feels like a risk to my own sanity. As Fredrich Nietzsche warned, “…when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

But oh well. Here goes.

So, Prime Minister Liz Truss. What could go wrong? Everything, basically, at top speed. On September 23^rd, she and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled a plan to cut tax on the largest scale for 50 years and pay for it all by increasing government borrowing. This spooked the world’s markets in the abrupt and dramatic manner that uttering the name ‘Dracula’ would spook an inn-ful of 19^th century Carpathian peasants. The pound plummeted, banks and building societies yanked 40% of their mortgage products off the market, the Bank of England started buying UK government bonds to re-establish calm and save pension funds, and 30 billion pounds were added to the British Treasury’s fiscal hole, which effectively doubled it.

Acting on a comment in the Economist that Truss’s grip on power was likely to be as long as ‘the shelf-life of a lettuce’, the Daily Star – a tabloid newspaper not normally known for its political acumen – set up a live stream where a picture of Liz Truss sat beside a limp, green and gradually decaying leaf-vegetable and viewers were asked, “Which wet lettuce will last longer?” On October 20^th, by which time Truss’s live-stream opponent had evolved to acquire googly eyes and a wig, she threw in the towel and resigned as PM and the lettuce won. It was a fittingly farcical denouement to a premiership of industrial-scale incompetence and self-delusion and of embarrassing brevity. Managing just 44 days in office, she easily beat the previous record set by George Canning in 1827 (and Canning at least had the excuse of dying after 119 days as PM).

Still, Truss’s disastrous tenure provided much hilarity as the country’s many right-wing newspapers had to contort themselves in the style of a circus rubber-man. Almost in the blink of an eye, they went from praising Truss, for being as loopily right-wing in her politics as they were, to lambasting her. AT LAST! A TRUE TORY BUDGET! trumpeted the Daily Mail headline on September 24^th. HOW MUCH MORE CAN SHE (AND THE REST OF US) TAKE? despaired the Daily Mail headline on October 15^th. LIZ PUTS HER FOOT ON THE GAS gushed The Sun’s Harry Cole one moment. The next moment, he was writing: HOW LIZ LOST IT: INSIDE STORY OF LIZ TRUSS’ FIRST 40 DAYS IN POWER THAT ENDED IN BIGGEST POLITICAL MELTDOWN IN YEARS. The Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley swerved from crowing LIZ TRUSS HAS RESURRECTED THE IDEA OF CONSERVATISM, AND THE LEFT WILL HATE HER FOR IT to lamenting TRUSS OFFERED US RISK AND AMBITION, BUT IS NOW LEFT FLOGGING AN UTTERLY DEAD HORSE.

It was also gratifying to see the policies advocated for years by those dodgy, mysteriously-funded ultra-right thinktanks and pressure groups congregated in or around No 55, Tufton Street get their moment in the sun, via their adherents Truss and Kwarteng, and immediately be shown to be utter bollocks. After this shitshow, it would nice to think that the likes of the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, etc., would, out of shame, shut up about unfettering the rich, about deregulating everything, about letting the environment, workers’ rights and workers’ quality of life get ground to a pulp in the rush for profits. But probably they won’t.

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Hammond, PM’s Office

By an uncanny coincidence, Truss’s departure occurred at the same time as another blond female departed from a vital role in British society – for Jodie Whittaker ended her tenure as the title character of the BBC’s long-running and much-loved science fiction series Doctor Who (1963-present). There was almost another uncanny coincidence here for in a shock twist Whitaker regenerated not into a new Doctor, but back into a predecessor, the hunky and wildly popular 10^th Doctor, David Tennant. Whereas it looked for a while like Truss might regenerate into a predecessor too – the hunky and wildly popular in his own mind, though un-hunky and wildly unpopular to everyone else, 55^th Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.

Since his resignation as PM in July, Johnson had been soaking up the sun and flashing his bronzed abs during seemingly non-stop holidays in Slovenia, Greece and the Dominican Republic. Very occasionally, he stirred to attend to matters pertaining to his 84,000 pound-a-year job (plus perks) as a Member of Parliament. Well, twice – he made a statement in the House of Commons about Ukraine and made another statement about the death of the Queen. Great work if you can get it. Following Truss’s demise, Johnson started sounding out support for him having another run at getting elected PM. And for a surreal few days in October, it looked like he might be back in No 10, Downing Street just months after he’d left it amid a merry shambles of sleaze, lawbreaking and mass ministerial resignations. However, he then announced – presumably realising that the human memory isn’t as short as he thought it was – that he wouldn’t run again after all, which left the field clear for his former chancellor Rishi Sunak.

Sunak became Prime Minister on October 25^th. This was after a rushed leadership contest designed to restrict the decision to Conservative parliamentarians, and keep it away from the party’s membership who last time, apparently stricken with dementia, had elected Truss and seemed capable this time of electing someone really stupid, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, or Rolf Harris, or Thomas the Tank Engine, or Vladimir Putin. Despite his Indian heritage, Sunak is hardly a symbol of egalitarianism and fairness. He seems more symbolic of Britain in the 19^th century rather than the 21^st. He’s minted. He and his wife Akshata Murty – believed, due to her non-domiciled status, to have avoided paying up to 20 million pounds in British tax – are worth a supposed fortune of 730 million pounds. And during the previous leadership race, when he unsuccessfully ran against Truss, a 2011 video surfaced wherein the young Rishi bragged about having friends from all walks of life: “…friends who are aristocrats… friends who are upper-class… friends who are, you know, working class…”

Really, Rishi? Working class?

“Well, not working class.”

From wikipedia.com / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

In fact, Sunak was soon performing feats of contortion worthy of those right-wing newspaper commentators who’d first applauded, then reviled Liz Truss. He became expert in the art of the political U-turn. He announced he wasn’t going to attend the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in November, apparently feeling he had better things to do than join other world leaders in their attempts to figure out a way of preventing the planet burning. Soon after – screech! Sunak announced he would attend it after all. (This change of heart came after Boris Johnson had announced he was going to pop along to COP27, presumably hoping there’d be someone there who hadn’t heard he’d stopped being British Prime Minister.) Mandatory housing targets? Screech! No mandatory housing targets – Home Counties Tory MPs didn’t fancy suddenly being in earshot of construction work in their leafy back gardens. A ban on onshore windfarms? Screech! “Yes,” Rishi decreed, “let there be onshore windfarms.” Frakking, the proposed Schools Bill, fines if you missed a GP appointment? Screech, screech, screech!

However, no U-turns yet from Sunak’s Home Secretary Sue-Ellen Braverman, who apparently likes to call herself ‘Suella’ because she hates being called ‘Sue-Ellen’ – her folks named her after Sue Ellen Ewing, the hard-boozing wife of Stetson-wearing villain J.R. Ewing in TV soap opera Dallas (1978-91). Sue-Ellen is still pushing ahead with plans to stick newly-arrived asylum seekers on planes and fly them out to Rwanda for ‘processing’, in defiance of the European Convention on Human Rights (whose founders in 1948 included that pathetic, woke, lefty snowflake Winston Churchill). At the Tory Party conference in early October, she told an audience: “I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.” Her dream? She might have the name Sue-Ellen, but at heart she’s pure J.R.

To round off the year with a final dose of misery, the cost-of-living crisis that’s deeply troubling households the length and breadth of Britain, and that Sunak’s government seems unable and / or unwilling to do anything about, prompted everyone and their dog to go on strike or threaten to go on strike: rail workers, postal workers, teachers, driving examiners, highway workers, Border Force staff, G4S workers and, while the National Health Service is allowed to fall apart and hospitals start to resemble war zones, nurses and ambulance staff.

From wikipedia.org / © Steve Eason

Incidentally, I’m sure there are even some right-wingers out there who’ve felt the urge to join a trade union after hearing the admirably straightforward, no-nonsense tones of Rail, Maritime and Transport Union general secretary Mick Lynch. After years of being subjected to the same old waffling, prevaricating, patronising, meaningless bollocks spouted by countless politicians and media pundits, Lynch’s ability to speak Human has been a breath of fresh air.

To Good Morning Britain’s Richard Madeley: “Richard, you do come up with the most remarkable twaddle sometimes.” To Sky News’ Kay Burley: “Picketing is standing outside the workplace to try and encourage people who want to go to work, not to go to work. What else do you think it involves?” To knuckle-dragging Tory MP Jonathan Gullis: “I think Jonathan should apologise for talking nonsense… (He’s a) backbench MP who’s just learnt it off a script.” To professional bawbag Piers Morgan, after Morgan had pointed out that his Facebook page featured a picture of the Hood, the villain in TV puppet show Thunderbirds (1965-66): “Is that the level journalism’s at these days?”

Talking of journalism again, don’t expect the UK’s predominantly right-wing press to do much just now to hold Sunak’s government to account. When they aren’t castigating strikers – see the Daily Mail’s headline about ambulance crews: HOW WILL THEY LIVE WITH THEMSELVES IF PEOPLE DIE TODAY? – they’re happily employing smoke and mirrors to distract readers from the big issues of the moment and hide the fact that, under the Tories, the country has turned into a basket case. Mainly, of course, they’re obsessing over the Royal Family – the latter-day British equivalent of Karl Marx’s ‘opiate of the masses’ – and promoting the current spat between Prince Harry and his spouse Meghan Markle and the rest of the so-called ‘Firm’.

Honestly, who cares? Yes, it was hideous of Jeremy Clarkson to fantasise, in his column in the Sun, about having Markle paraded naked through every town in the land while people jeer and pelt her with shit. But I don’t think the current shenanigans in the Royal Family, and the reactions to it in the media by beer-bellied, boob-chested, saggy-jowled manbabies like Clarkson, are of much importance to families panicking as inflation runs rampant, energy bills sky-rocket, and health and transport services disintegrate around them.

Still, after 2022 saw the UK become an absolute mad-lands… Surely things are so bad now that at least they can’t get any worse?

The sound you hear is 2023 saying, “Hold my beer…”

From unsplash.com / © Peter Leong

September 11, 2022September 12, 2022

London Bridge is down

From wikipedia.org / © Joel Rouse / Ministry of Defence

London Bridge is down. No, I’m not referring to a movie that stars Gerald Butler. I’m talking about the code-phrase used to communicate the news of the monarch’s death to the British government, police, armed forces and broadcasters, triggering the start of an elaborate and much-prepared plan that oversees the monarch’s funeral, the period of national mourning and the coronation of a successor. Those words were sent to the British establishment earlier this week, for September 8^th saw the passing of Queen Elizabeth II at the age of 96.

Not long ago, at the time of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, I expressed my thoughts about the British monarchy on this blog. Namely that, while monarchies might work for other European countries, slimmed-down monarchies in countries with fewer historical neuroses and fewer modern delusions than Britain, the British monarchy just seemed to epitomise and encourage so much stupidity, unfairness and obsequiousness that it wasn’t worth conserving.

That’s been my view for most of my life. Admittedly, for a few years around the 2012 London Olympics I took a slightly more benevolent view of the institution: “…my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth. It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect.” This was “partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town. This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run….”

Furthermore, Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics had temporarily fooled me into believing “that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country. Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.”

By the time of her Platinum Jubilee earlier this year, however, and with the country infected by the jingoistic and backward-looking craziness of Brexit, which called to mind not Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony but Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zombie movie 28 Days Later (2002), my tune had changed. Britain had become such a basket-case that if it was to survive in any sane form, it needed drastic surgery carried out on its many, ridiculously-archaic institutions. This included the abolition of its monarchy.

And I’m afraid the Platinum Jubilee’s sequel to the Queen’s hook-up with James Bond at the 2012 Olympics, which featured her having tea and marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear, didn’t work for me. Paddington, after all, was an immigrant who’d arrived undocumented from Peru and, in the rabid atmosphere of 2022 Britain, Priti Patel would probably have stuck him on a plane and flown him off to Rwanda for ‘processing’. Also, I thought it must have been terrifying for poor Paddington to find himself in a palace guarded by men wearing the skins of his relatives on top of their heads.

From unsplash.com / © Anika Mikkelson

The next days – weeks, months – will showcase all the idiocies that afflict modern-but-monarchist Britain. The Queen’s funeral and the coronation of son Charles will be a never-ending ordeal of Ruritanian faff and ritualistic flummery. Many Britons, of course, approve of this and believe it represents threads of tradition that run back to the country’s distant past. Actually, much of this arcane pomp was devised by that randy old goat Edward VII at the start of the last century. I find it fascinating, incidentally, that one of Edward VII’s many mistresses was Alice Keppel, great-grandmother of a certain Camilla Parker-Bowles.

From wikipedia.org / © Udo Keppler 1901

There will also be tsunamis of sanctimonious and sycophantic drivel written and broadcast about the Queen by the toadies, grovellers, cap-doffers, forelock-tuggers and brown-nosers that infest Britain’s mainstream media. One of life’s great ironies is that the media currently churning out drooling eulogies about the wonderfulness of the departed monarch was the same media that made life hell for many of her family’s members. Her ex-daughter-in-law wouldn’t have died in a car-crash in 1997 if there hadn’t been a fleet of paparazzi pursuing her, desperate for photos to sell to the tabloids. Incessant media hounding and tittle-tattle was a major reason why Prince Harry chose to bail out of the royal circus. And who can blame him? If British journalistic hacks thought they could accuse his wife Meghan Markle of murdering the Queen and get away with it, they would.

And inevitably, the Queen’s passing will add a tankerload of fuel to the culture-war fires that have burned across Britain since 2016 and Brexit. Already, social media has been overrun by people, swivel of eye and gammon-pink of complexion, desperate to weaponise her death against the woke, lefty snowflakes they hate so much. Spencer Morgan, son of the dreaded Piers Morgan and a supposed champion of free speech, opined the other day: “Sad thing is there will be people in this country celebrating this. They’re the ones we need to focus on deporting.” Correction: a champion only of free speech he agrees with. In his case, obviously, the blighted apple hasn’t fallen far from the twisted old tree.

Meanwhile, Henry Bolton, embarrassingly short-lived leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (he lasted less than five months), expressed his disgust that “most British schools no longer teach their pupils the National Anthem, or fly the Union flag” and called on Liz Truss to “issue an instruction to all schools to rectify this omission, and do so prior to Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.” Funnily enough, I went to school in the 1970s and 1980s and I don’t remember being taught the National Anthem or seeing the Union Jack flying back then. And a couple of my schools were attended by Northern Irish Protestants, generally the most Queen-adoring, flag-respecting folk in the UK.

Meanwhile, at this moment, I’m sure social media accounts are being scoured the length and breadth of the country. This is as right-wing journalists, politicians and rabble-rousers search for any off-message disloyalty towards Her Majesty expressed by supporters of political parties they disapprove of (Labour, the Scottish National Party, the Greens), members of news outlets they disapprove of (Novara Media), fans of football clubs they disapprove of (Liverpool, Celtic), comedians they disapprove of (Joe Lycett), etc., intent on starting a holy war if they find something. Already on twitter, I’ve seen one right-wing gobshite fulminate at Jeremy Corbyn for, in a tweeted tribute to the Queen, reminiscing that he “enjoyed discussing our families, gardens and jam-making with her.” Clearly, it was okay for Paddington Bear to discuss marmalade with the recently deceased Her Majesty, but not okay for Jeremy Corbyn to discuss jam with her.

From twitter.com/jeremycorbyn

Thanks to all the patriotic breast-beating and blabber, this is a golden opportunity too for newly-anointed Prime Minister Liz Truss and her government, a government in which talent is not so much lacking as non-existent, to sweep under the carpet the multiple crises facing the country. Mind you, as those crises include skyrocketing energy bills and inflation, Brexit’s crippling of the economy, the war in Ukraine, the potential arrival of new, deadlier Covid variants and the climate-change emergency, the bulge created under the carpet will be pretty huge. The right-wing mainstream media will aid and abet this. Already, we’ve had the BBC’s Clive Myrie dismiss the energy-bill calamity as ‘insignificant’ compared to the royal news.

Personally, I won’t be grieving over the Queen’s departure, though I feel slightly sad to see her go. That’s mainly because I liked the fact that she’d been a living link with so much history. She was the last surviving world leader to have served (admittedly tenuously) during World War II – she’d been a member of the women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). She’d met 13 out of the 14 past US presidents, kicking off with Harry Truman, missing out on Lyndon B. Johnson for some reason, and surviving her encounter with the hideous, ignorant, orange-skinned one. She came face to face with Marilyn Monroe when, coincidentally, both of them were 30.

She also had to deal with 15 UK prime ministers, firstly Winston Churchill and finally Liz Truss, which doesn’t suggest there’s been any progress in intellect and ability in British politics during the last 70 years. Quite the reverse. By the way, I’m glad she managed to outlast Boris Johnson’s premiership by a couple of days. Perhaps it was her wish not to have that bloviating narcissist hogging the limelight as PM during her mourning and funeral that kept her going until September 8^th.

I should add that I feel that same sense of historical loss whenever someone very old passes away. When I was a kid in Northern Ireland, I knew an elderly lady who could recall the days when Victoria had been on the throne, and being around her when she reminisced was like being in the presence of a human time machine. (Despite being a Northern Irish Protestant, she’d hated ‘the Widow at Windsor‘.)

I saw Queen Elizabeth II in the flesh once, back in 1999, when she attended the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. I was among the crowds along the sides of the Royal Mile when she and Prince Philip scooted past in an open carriage with horsemen riding behind and in front of them. The crowd went, “Hurrah!” Then one of the horses discharged several big dollops of dung onto the street’s surface. While the royal cortege receded, two workers from the city council, a man and woman who looked near retirement-age, hurried onto the street and used brushes and shovels to scoop up the dung and put it in a binbag. The crowd promptly saluted the council workers by shouting “Hurrah!” again. Delighted, the workers accepted this with a gracious wave of their shovels.

Looking between those two humble council workers and the procession making its way up the Royal Mile, I knew where my sympathies lay.

From twitter.com/dalrymplewill

September 8, 2022September 8, 2022

Britain gets Trussed

From wikipedia.com / © gov.uk

In a just world, the folk belonging to Britain’s Conservative Party would have been forced into mass exile by now, after foisting upon us the morally rancid Boris Johnson and the three years of lies, corruption, incompetence, embarrassment and disaster he presided over as Prime Minster. They made him party leader and PM in 2019, long after his myriad character defects had become public knowledge.

But instead, the Tory Party members have just elected another leader who will govern Britain from No 10 Downing Street. This is the gimlet-eyed careerist, self-publicist, charisma-vacuum and fifth-rate Margaret Thatcher impersonator that is Liz Truss.

Truss’s ascent to the top has seen many, convenient swerves in policy, belief and principle. From being an atypically-radical Liberal Democrat (at the 1994 Lib Dem conference she called for the abolition of the monarchy, which turned Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown into Paddy Meltdown) to being a hard-right Tory (in 2012 she co-authored the notorious treatise Britannia Unchained, which described British workers as ‘the worst idlers in the world’). From being an enthusiastic pro-EU Remainer (before the 2016 Brexit referendum, it looked like the Remain side was heading for victory and Truss wanted to be on the winning side) to being an enthusiastic anti-EU Brexiteer (the Leave side won… Quick, Liz, get on that winning side!) I know it’s an old cliché, but Groucho Marx’s observation, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… Well, I have others,” has never been truer here.

Her victory comes after a summer-long leadership contest that felt as interminable and punishing as Johnson’s premiership did. The eight candidates confirmed on July 12^th were less than inspiring. They included far-right, culture-war-obsessed moon-howlers like Kemi Badenoch and the self-aggrandising Suella Braverman. There was Nadhim Zahawi, estimated to be worth between 30 and 100 million pounds, who once claimed nearly 6000 pounds in taxpayers’ money to light and heat the stables on his estate in Warwickshire. And there was Johnson’s former chancellor Rishi Sunak, who makes Zahawi look like a pauper. Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty – reckoned, thanks to her non-domiciled status, to have avoided paying up to 20 million pounds in British tax – allegedly sit on a fortune of 730 million pounds. During the leadership race, a 2011 video was dug up wherein a young Rishi boasted about having friends from all walks of life: “…friends who are aristocrats… friends who are upper-class… friends who are, you know, working class…” Really, Rishi? “Well, not working class.”

From wikipedia.com / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

Eventually, the field was whittled down to two competitors, Truss and Sunak, and on September 5^th, after a soul-destroying two months of never-ending hustings, debates and idiotic ‘I’m-more-anti-woke-than-you-are!’-type bickering, the results of the party-membership vote were announced. It worked against Sunak that, by resigning as chancellor in early July, he helped set off the events that led to Johnson’s downfall. Thus, he was regarded by many (obviously dementia-stricken) Tory members as the Judas who’d done for their beloved Boris. And while I’m absolutely not implying that anyone in the Conservative Party is racist, there’s a teensy-weensy possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, Sunak’s ethnicity might not have worked in his favour either.

Mind you, Truss didn’t win by the landslide that many people had expected. She secured just 47% of the support of those eligible to vote. Amusingly, days earlier, there’d been speculation that as PM she’d change the rules of any future referendum on Scottish independence, making it compulsory for the pro-independence side to get the support of half of all eligible voters to win – anyone not bothering to vote would be automatically counted as a ‘no’. If she’d applied that goalpost-shifting rule to her own leadership election, she’d have lost.

Now Prime Minister Truss has announced her new cabinet. Looking at the, er, talent that’s featured in the cabinet, the future for Britain – beset by a cost-of-living crisis, energy crisis, war-in-Ukraine crisis, Brexit crisis and climate change crisis – looks bleak indeed. Appointees include Braverman as Home Secretary, a post previously held by the demented Priti Patel, though Braverman has the potential to make Patel look like a bleeding-heart liberal in retrospect. She’s expected to take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights, whose founders in 1948 included that pathetic, woke snowflake Winston Churchill. Indulging in brazen, lefty virtue-signalling, Churchill declared, “In the centre of our movement stands the idea of a Charter of Human Rights, guarded by freedom and sustained by law.” This will enable Braverman to get on with the business started by Patel of sticking newly-arrived asylum seekers on planes and flying them out to Rwanda for ‘processing’.

Elsewhere, getting the portfolio of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is the cobwebbed, monocled, top-hatted Jacob Rees-Mogg, surely history’s most Dickensian villain not actually devised by Charles Dickens. In the past, Rees-Mogg, whose fund-management company Somerset Capital Investment puts money into oil extraction and coal mining, has vowed to squeeze ‘every last cubic inch of gas’ out of the North Sea; called fracking ‘an interesting opportunity’ and likened its damaging geological effects to ‘a rock fall in a disused coal mine’; deliberately misrepresented the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to back his claims that efforts to combat climate change are ‘unrealistic’ and ‘unaffordable’; and, yes, blamed offshore windfarms for the rising cost of fish and chips. With him in position, the likelihood of Britain honouring its pledge to achieve net zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 is about as great as the likelihood that the famously stuck-up, affected and pompous Rees-Mogg has ever tasted fish and chips.

From wikipedia.com / © Cantab12

Meanwhile, casting a rotund shadow over everything is Boris Johnson, who hasn’t gone away. It’s widely assumed that Johnson and his followers – in Trumpian feats of delusion and reality-denial – believe that the British public still love him. Also, they believe it’s only a matter of time before Truss slips up and Johnson, ‘a prince across the water’ like a not-so-bonnie Bonnie Prince Charlie, will return to the fray, become PM again, save the Conservative Party and save the country. I imagine Johnson and co. are already conspiring to facilitate Truss’s slipping-up, and sooner rather than later.

To conclude on a Scottish note… On September 5^th, in her painfully inept victory speech, Truss paid tribute to Johnson by claiming he was ‘admired from Kiev to Carlisle’. This was meant to elicit a round of applause from the audience, but Truss was so flat of tone and lifeless of gaze that the audience didn’t get their cue and several moments of tumbleweed-infested silence ensued. Carlisle is the most northerly town in England, which suggests that for once Truss had got something right. Beyond Carlisle is Scotland and no one there can stand the sight of Johnson – not even the Scottish Tories.

And the next morning, in Boris Johnson’s farewell speech as PM, when he wasn’t comparing himself to Cincinnatus (the Roman statesman who retired from office to lead a quiet life on his farm but then, when duty called, returned to Rome to lead again – as a dictator, though Johnson didn’t mention that bit), he compared himself to a booster rocket: “Let me say that I am now like one of those booster rockets that has fulfilled its function and I will now be gently re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down invisibly in some remote and obscure corner of the Pacific.”

Boris Johnson calls himself a rocket? At last, he’s said something that people in Scotland would agree with. He’s a rocket.

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Hammond, PM’s Office

July 12, 2022July 14, 2022

Make it stop

From wikipedia.org / twitter.com

I firmly believe that if the Covid-19 virus, aeons from now, evolves into a multi-cellular organism, and further aeons from that, evolves into a humanoid being with homo sapiens’ abilities of thought and speech, it will look and sound a lot like Britain’s current, though hopefully soon to be ex, Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The big, blonde, blobby and bloviating Johnson and the humble 50 to 140-nanometre-wide Covid-19 virus already share many characteristics. Both of them made life miserable for large numbers of people in the early 2020s. And both have similar effects on the human physique. They both induce headaches, exhaustion and severe respiratory problems. Though with Covid-19, the respiratory problems are the result of it filling the lungs’ air sacs with fluid, which seriously reduces their capacity to take in oxygen. Whereas with Johnson, the problems come from exposure to his non-stop idiocies, venality, lying and gaslighting, which destroys your will to continue breathing.

Meanwhile, just as Covid-19 keeps mutating and keeps coming back at us in a dismayingly endless series of variants, such as the alpha, beta, delta, gamma and omicron ones, so too has a variety of Johnson variants appeared over the years.

The 1980s saw the Bullingdon Johnson variant – he was an enthusiastic member of the Bullingdon Club, the Oxford University dining club for posh yobs, who liked to strut around in tailcoats, waistcoats and bowties, wreck restaurants and burn money in front of homeless people. This was followed by the Sacked Trainee Journalist Johnson – the Times dismissed him when they discovered he’d made up a quote for a front-page story – and the Criminal Accessory Johnson – he agreed to supply his old Bullingdon mate, the businessman and future jailbird Darius Guppy, with the address of a journalist to whom Guppy wanted to administer a severe beating.

In the 1990s there emerged the Lying-about-Europe Johnson, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, who’d offered him refuge after his fall from grace with the Times – as the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Johnson wrote wildly exaggerated pieces on how the evil EU was imposing nasty and stupid regulations on plucky little Britain, helping generate the Euro-scepticism that eventually won the 2016 referendum in favour of Brexit.

From unsplash.com / © Annie Spratt

Around this time, certain Johnson variants appeared that have persisted to the present day. For example, the Racist, Homophobic Johnson – he’s described black African people as ‘piccaninnies’, described gay men as ‘tank-topped bumboys’, called Chinese workers ‘puffing coolies’, likened gay marriage to bestiality and compared Muslim women to ‘letterboxes’. That last remark, made in a notorious column in the Telegraph in 2018, was followed by a 375% rise in incidents of Islamophobia reported in the UK.

So too emerged the Shagger Johnson – he’s had extra-marital affairs with Marina Wheeler, whom he married in 1993 a dozen days after his marriage to Allegra Mostyn-Owen was annulled, with Petronella Wyatt, allegedly with Anna Fazackerley, with Helen Macintyre, with Jennifer Arcuri, and with Carrie Symonds, whom he married in 2021 following the end of his marriage to the long-suffering Wheeler. He also tried to punt Symonds into a six-figure-salary job in the Foreign Office in 2018, while he was Britain’s Foreign secretary and she was still his mistress.

As Johnson has shimmied up the slimy pole of politics, from Member of Parliament to Mayor of London to leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, further variants have materialised. There’s been the Partying with Oligarchs Johnson – in 2018, while Foreign Secretary, he was seen stumbling about an Italian airport suffering from a severe hangover, and lacking his security detail, after attending a shindig thrown by Russian media magnate Evgeny Lebedev at his castle near Perugia. Oddly enough, Lebedev subsequently received a peerage and now, technically, is ‘Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond on Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation’. The Talking Gibberish Johnson has also been observed – blabbering about Peppa Pig during an address to the Confederation of British Industry or filling the 2021 Tory Party Conference with excruciating riffs on his ‘Build Back Better’ slogan, such as ‘Build Back Butter!’ and ‘Build Back Beaver!’

Of course, we can never forget the Corrupt Johnson – detected, for instance, during the Wallpapergate saga wherein he and his missus tried to get Tory Party donors to foot the bill for more than 200,000 pounds’ worth of refurbishments to their flat, or during Johnson’s abortive attempts to get dodgy MP Owen Paterson off the hook after the Commons Select Committee on Standards recommended that he be suspended for breaking paid advocacy rules. Nor can we overlook the Breaking Lockdown Johnson – he seemingly presided over non-stop partying at No 10 Downing Street while the nation was under strict lockdown rules to slow the spread of Covid-19, which resulted in the police issuing 126 fines to Johnson, his wife, his Chancellor and their staff, making No 10 the most lawbreaking address in Britain during the pandemic.

From the BBC / © Daily Record

Obviously, the most virulent variant is the Big Fat Liar Johnson, which basically manifests itself every time he opens his mouth. To Conrad Black, media magnate and owner of the Spectator, in 1999 – make me Spectator editor and I won’t become an MP! (He did.) To the people of the constituency of Henley in 2001 – make me your MP and I’ll step down as editor of the Spectator! (He didn’t.) In response to claims that a mistress had to have an abortion in 2004 – it’s an inverted pyramid of piffle! (It wasn’t.) During campaigning for the 2016 Brexit referendum – if we leave the EU, we’ll be able to give an extra 350 million pounds to the National Health Service every week! (We weren’t.) To Londoners – I’ll build a garden bridge across the Thames! (He didn’t.) To Northern Irish Unionists – I won’t stick a trade border in the Irish Sea between you and the rest of the UK! (He most certainly did.)

To Keir Starmer – as Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, it was your fault Jimmy Saville escaped prosecution for his crimes! (It wasn’t.) In response to Partygate – I didn’t know about the parties! / The parties weren’t my fault! / I didn’t realise they were parties! / They didn’t actually break any rules! / I was only at them for a minute! (He did / They were / He did / They did / He wasn’t.) On the scandal involving the promotion of MP and serial groper Chris Pincher to the position of the Tory Party’s Deputy Chief Whip – I didn’t know he was a sex pest before I appointed him! (Oh yes you did.)

The Pincher scandal proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for those Tory politicians who’d supported Johnson or at least tolerated him. Last week, his ministers and MPs turned against him, first with the resignations of Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Education Minister Sajid Javid, and then with a deluge of resignations by MPs serving as ministers of state, private parliamentary secretaries and trade envoys. Even David Mundell, the embarrassingly cringy and spineless MP for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, the constituency I’m from in Scotland, quit his position as Trade Envoy to New Zealand. On July 7^th, Johnson at last accepted that the game was up and announced his resignation as Prime Minister. Here was a scrape that even he couldn’t squirm, worm and wriggle his way out of. The greased piglet, as David Cameron once called him, had finally been degreased, and spitted, and roasted.

Or had he? People have noted that his supposed resignation speech suspiciously lacked mention of the word ‘resignation’. Indeed, it lacked anything hinting at the vaguest feeling of remorse or apology. And Johnson only agreed to resign on the condition that he remain in post as ‘caretaker’ Prime Minister until the autumn, after a new Tory leader and Prime Minister has been chosen. Ominously, Johnson’s old advisor, now bitter enemy, Dominic Cummings tweeted on the matter: “I know that guy & I’m telling you – he doesn’t think it’s over, he’s thinking, ‘there’s a war, weird shit happens in a war, play for time, play for time, I can still get out of this, I got a mandate, members love me, get to September…’ If MPs leave him in situ there’ll be CARNAGE.”

Yes, just as we dread that Covid-19 will never be defeated, and will become a permanent, malignant feature of our increasingly fraught world, so Boris Johnson might never depart either. God help us.

From unsplash.com / © CDC

June 12, 2022June 13, 2022

Grovel, Britannia

From wikipedia.org / © Joel Rouse / Ministry of Defence

A week has now passed since the Platinum Jubilee festivities – and the accompanying tsunami of media hype – that celebrated Queen Elizabeth II reaching the 70^th year of her reign on the British throne. I’ve now emerged from my bunker and feel ready to articulate my thoughts about the British Royal Family. It’s fair to say my tolerance of the institution has waxed and waned over the years.

In my youth, during the 1980s and 1990s, I detested them. They seemed a bloody awful lot and it sickened me how much the media kept ramming them down everyone’s throats, though of course, a lot of the public seemed happy to have them rammed down their throats: the aloof Queen and her grumpy husband; the weird and socially awkward Prince Charles and his vacuous-seeming wife Princess Diana who, as it turned out, was sharper than she looked; the porcine Prince Andrew who, as it turned out, was viler than he looked; and the insipid would-be thespian Prince Edward. Princess Anne, however, I didn’t think was that bad, though that was probably only because she supported the national Scottish rugby team.

I knew ordinary people who were every bit as mediocre or dysfunctional as the royals, of course, but I didn’t have to hear about them every time I switched on the television or read about them every time I opened a newspaper. It also galled me that not liking them or even not wanting to know about them was considered unpatriotic in 1980s and 1990s Britain.

Fast forward to 2012, the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth. It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect for the old biddy. This was partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town. This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run. And the Queen had won a modicum of respect from me simply by doing her job for so long. She grew older, greyer, smaller, but still she did her walkabouts, made her public appearances, indulged in boring chit-chat with members of women’s institutes, rotary clubs and Boy Scout troops who’d turned out to see her, and had disreputable politicians come through the doors of Buckingham Palace – Bush, Berlusconi, Sarkozy – whom she put on a smile for.

If someone had forced an 86-year-old relative of mine onto the street every morning and made her tramp around the neighbourhood all day long, saying hello to people, and then when she finally returned to her house, foisted a shower of crooks and chancers upon her for company, I’d have reported them to the police. The Queen might have been one of the richest women on the planet, but what was the point of having shed-loads of money if you were subjected to torture like that every day of your life?

So back in 2012, I thought I could tolerate the idea of a British monarchy. That toleration, though, came with the proviso that the thing needed to be massively scaled down. The inhabitants of the Low Countries and Scandinavia had modestly-sized royal institutions and seemed no less respectful of their monarchs like Albert, Beatrix, Margrethe, Harald and Carl XVI Gustav, so why couldn’t that be the case in Britain? Why did the British Royal Family have to be such a massive and costly operation, featuring as many cast-members as an opulent and labyrinthine American soap opera like Dallas or Dynasty?

That was then, however. Maybe at the time I’d been infected by Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics and believed that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country. Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.

From pixabay.com / © Ben Kerckx

Now I just want the whole thing gone. Abolishing the monarchy the moment the Queen dies would be fine by me. My reversion to republicanism isn’t so much to do with the Queen herself, though she certainly hasn’t done herself any favours in recent years with the revelations about how much of her money is invested in dodgy, tax-avoiding offshore accounts or her eagerness to fund her second son’s 12-million-pound settlement with Virginia Giuffre, who claimed Andrew had sexually assaulted her while she was being trafficked as a minor by Jeffrey Epstein. (Andrew was unable to make an appearance at last week’s Platinum Jubilee festivities because he was stricken, supposedly, with Covid-19. Aye, right.) It’s more to do with the state of Britain. The place is now such a basket-case that it needs to have its Royal Family surgically removed – one of many drastic treatments required if it’s to make any sort of recovery.

For one thing, the Royal Family is the ultimate symbol of Britain’s neurotic obsession with the past. Remove that symbol and you might go some way to breaking the obsession, which hobbles the country left, right and centre.

There’s the dire state of its governing institutions, where more attention is paid to witless Ruritanian flummery like the State Opening of Parliament (the crown getting transported to the Houses of Parliament in a carriage of its own, the ridiculously ruffed Black Rod getting Parliament’s door slammed in his or her face) than to the constitution, which is unwritten and open to abuse by unscrupulous politicians, like the shower we have in office at the moment. The argument is that Britain’s constitution is protected by some absurd, Boy’s Own Paper-style, ‘good chaps’ theory of government. I’d struggle to describe the grinning war criminal Tony Blair, or the squish-faced posho David Cameron, or the Mother of Tears herself Margaret Thatcher as ‘good chaps’; but surely not even the most naïve person in the universe would bestow that term on the current incumbent of No 10 Downing Street.

There’s also the embarrassing preoccupation many Britons have with the Second World War and everything that goes with it (Churchill, the Blitz, Spitfires, Dame Vera Lynn), although to have even childhood memories about the conflict now you’d need to be in your 80s. In 2016, that finest-hour, standing-alone, ourselves-against-the-world narrative was exploited by self-serving ratbags like Nigel Farage, who managed to conflate the European Union with the Third Reich in some people’s minds and got them to vote for the economic and political disaster of Brexit.

Predictably, Britain’s obsession with the past is focused on the nice bits of history – pomp, pageantry, Ladybird Adventure from History books, stiff-upper-lipped World War II movies. There’s not much focus on the misery, poverty and injustices that the British Empire inflicted on millions of its ‘subjects’. Meanwhile, with this mentality, Britain is never to going to have a scaled-down monarchy like the Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, etc., have. It’s always going to be the full-on, super-expensive deal with parades, carriages, horses, bands, guardsmen and so on. It’s like some balding, beer-gutted, 50-something football hooligan covering himself in bling and believing he still looks ‘hard’.

I’d do away with the monarchy too because of the depressing sycophancy it engenders in British society. Everyone who comes into contact with the royals, and with the Establishment generally, seems to immediately de-evolve into a mollusc, apparently on the assumption that the more obsequious you are, the better your chances are of securing a CBE, OBE, knighthood or whatever. This is never more obvious than in the country’s press. British journalists do so much brown-nosing – presumably hoping that one day Her Majesty will reward them with an honour for services to toadying – that their pages, or webpages, seem to turn the colour of shite while you read them.

Inevitably, this brown-nosing was at its brownest during last week’s Platinum Jubilee. And it wasn’t done just by right-wing journalists and politicians wanting to use the Queen as a Culture War ruse to distract attention from the fact that under the current Conservative government there’s a lying sleazeball as Prime Minister, the country’s economic growth is on track to be second-worst in the G20 (after Putin’s pariah-status Russia), and nearly 180,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the last two years.

Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party and someone whom you’d expect to be at least a teensy-weensy bit socialist, wrote in the swivel-eyed, reactionary Daily Telegraph that it was our ‘patriotic duty’ to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee. There it is again – you’re not patriotic if you don’t like the Queen. Meanwhile, former Liberal Democratic leader Tim Farron tweeted: “You don’t need to think that everything about Britain is wonderful, just that being British is wonderful and that the Queen’s reign has been remarkable.” No, Tim, the Queen doesn’t know who you are. She isn’t going to give you a knighthood.

So yes, I just want the monarchy gone. Goodbye Queen, goodbye Prince Charles, goodbye William, Kate and the kids, goodbye all of them. But obviously, that isn’t going to happen. The British Royal Family will endure, undeservedly. And as for the country they’re supposed to represent… Well, I now think it’s beyond all hope.

From pixabay.com / © Sabine Lang

May 16, 2022

Scorpion tales

From wikipedia.org / © Eva Rinaldi

Here’s a hypothetical question I’ve heard many times. If you had a time machine, would you travel back in time, find the young Adolf Hitler and kill him? In Stephen King’s 1979 novel The Dead Zone, for instance, the hero puts this question to an old man who lost his son in World War II. The old man replies that he’d stick a knife in Hitler’s heart “as far as she’d go… and then I’d twist her… But first, first I’d coat the blade with rat poison.”

Recently, whilst looking at the dire state of the world and feeling fearful about the future, I’ve wondered about a variation on the time machine / Hitler question. In the future, after manmade climate change has decimated the environment and pig-ignorant ‘populism’ (i.e., fascism) has run society into the ground, who would the remnants of humanity choose to eliminate if they had a time machine and could send an assassin back to, say, the late 20^th century? Who would they remove from the timeline in the belief it’d change history for the better? The young Donald Trump? The young Vladimir Putin?

Neither. I suspect those guys would be considered small beer compared to the guy the time-travelling assassin from the future would really go after… Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch’s media operations have, over the last five decades, caused massive damage to human well-being. He promoted the voracious, greed-is-good, market-über-alles destructiveness of neoliberalism with his support for Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He’s done his best to ignore, distort and discredit the overwhelming scientific evidence for manmade climate change. Via Fox News, he’s created in the USA a paranoid, xenophobic, extreme-right-wing ecosystem whose millions of inhabitants believe Donald Trump’s lies and will probably vote him again, or someone even worse, into power in 2024 and turn the world’s biggest superpower into an authoritarian state. Yes, Murdoch has seemingly had a finger in everything shit that’s happened in modern history, in everything’s that propelled humanity further down the road to hell. No wonder Murdoch’s son James resigned from the board of News Corp in 2020, sick of the oceans of toxicity created by his father.

It says little for Britain’s newspaper industry that Murdoch owns a swathe of its national titles: the Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, Sun and Sun on Sunday. These played a prominent role in influencing the 2016 vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union, which led to the economic, diplomatic and cultural shambles of Brexit. No surprise there, either. The ghoulish old Antipodean tycoon once famously remarked that he could intimidate one country’s leader, in No 10 Downing Street, into following his wishes, whereas he couldn’t intimidate the combined might of 28 countries’ leaders represented in Brussels.

From dailysabah.com / © Sun

But Murdoch constitutes just one head of the hydra that is Britain’s predominantly right-wing press. Among the newspapers sold nationwide, only the Guardian, Daily and Sunday Mirrors and Sunday People could be described as having a political stance leaning any way towards the left. Elsewhere, the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, right-wing and totally honking mad, are owned by the billionaire Frederick Barclay. Resident on the island of Brecqhou, which is administered by Sark in the Channel Islands, Frederick and his late twin brother David once tried to avoid Sark’s tax-inheritance laws by having Brecqhou declared independent of it. That’s ironic considering the Telegraphs’ vehement opposition to Scottish independence.

Another billionaire, the non-domiciled Viscount Rothermere, owns the equally right-wing Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. About the Mail, I once wrote: “…you might just view the never-ending diet that the newspaper serves up of ignorance, prurience, grubbiness, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, small-mindedness, snobbery, racism, misogyny, Little Englander-ism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, immigrant-bashing, anti-intellectualism, tittle-tattle, curtain-twitching, pseudo-scientific quackery, petty-bourgeois fulmination and general all-round barking right-wing insanity and conclude there’s no hope left for the human race and try to book yourself a one-way passage on the next space probe to Mars.”

And let’s not forget the Daily and Sunday Express, near-clones of the Mail titles, though aimed at an even more demented readership who are additionally obsessed with Madeleine McCann, Princess Diana and the British weather. These used to be owned by millionaire and one-time porno magnate Richard Desmond, but are now the property of Reach plc, which publishes the Mirror. Presumably, Reach hasn’t tinkered with the Express formula because it’s decided to milk those barmy readers for money while they’re still alive.

Over the past few months, Britain’s right-wing newspapers have been fighting the corner of Boris Johnson, ever since they realised the fragility of his premiership. As PM, Johnson hasn’t been so much skating on thin ice as clog-dancing on it. It’s transpired that during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the UK had been put in lockdown, Johnson and his cronies turned No 10 Downing Street into an endlessly partying, boozing frat-house that paid zero heed to the strict non-socialising rules imposed on everyone else. (Intriguingly, Murdoch’s Sun, usually the gobbiest of Britain’s tabloids, has kept relatively quiet about ‘Partygate’, as it’s been dubbed. This may have something to do with James Slack, the Sun’s deputy editor, being Johnson’s Director of Communications at the time when No 10 was boogieing away the lockdown blues.)

The self-serving, scurrilous, mendacious Johnson is a creature of the self-serving, scurrilous, mendacious British press. He started off working at the Times, until he was sacked for fabricating a quote, then found employment as the Telegraph. Max Hastings, then-Telegraph editor, has since said of Johnson: “…he is unfit for national office, because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification.” As the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Johnson wrote wildly exaggerated pieces on how the evil EU was imposing spiteful and stupid regulations on plucky little Britain. These helped fuel the Euro-scepticism that birthed the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and eventually won the 2016 referendum in favour of Brexit. No wonder the right-wing press barons love Johnson – he’s one of their own.

From twitter.com/bbcnews / © Daily Mail

Unsurprisingly, their coverage of Partygate, in which they’ve tried to defend and big up the lawbreaking blond oaf, has been nauseating. First, there was the insistence, made most forcibly by the Daily Mail, that Johnson’s breaking of his own Covid laws was unimportant because Russia had just invaded Ukraine and, well, DON’T THEY KNOW THERE’S A WAR ON? More recently, they’ve dedicated their front-page headlines to ‘Beergate’, the hoo-ha over the Labour Party leader Keir Starmer – or, as he’s known in the right-wing press, ‘HYPOCRITE STARMER’ – having a beer and curry at a constituency office in Durham last year while lockdown rules remained in force. Starmer claimed no rules were broken, but the local police have, under pressure from the media, launched an inquiry into the incident. The assumption in the editorial offices of the Mail and the rest is that if Starmer is found to have broken lockdown rules too, their beloved Boris will get off the hook for his own, proven misdemeanours. (He’s already had to pay one fine for a lockdown breach and more fines are likely on the way.)

Starmer has just declared that he’ll resign as Labour Party leader if the police do issue a fine to him over Beergate. This was evidently intended to put some clear, blue, moral water between him and Johnson, already fined but not resigned. However, if he thought this would earn him some credit from the newspapers, he was mistaken. The Mail promptly responded with the headline: STARMER ACCUSED OF PILING PRESSURE ON POLICE.

The more I think about these rags, the more I think of the fable about the frog and the scorpion. The scorpion stings the frog to death, even though this will condemn it to death too, because it’s in its ‘nature’. It’s what it does. It can’t not sting.

The poisonous right-wing nature of much of Britain’s press is a headache for the Labour Party. How can they ever get a fair hearing when those newspapers are programmed to blindly support their Conservative opponents no matter how corrupt, venal and idiotic they become? A quarter-century ago, Tony Blair’s policy on this was to cosy up to them. He got so thick with Rupert Murdoch, the Scorpion King himself, that he became godfather to one of Murdoch’s kids. In return, the headline THE SUN BACKS BLAIR appeared on the front page of Murdoch’s number-one British tabloid prior to the 1997 general election, which saw Blair win power. But such sycophancy has its downside. If you get too close to the likes of Murdoch, you end up either stung to death, like the frog in the fable, or with so much poison in your own system that you become toxic yourself. The latter outcome happened to Blair. I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind describing ‘El Tone’ as a paragon of virtue in 2022.

Still, I don’t have much sympathy either for the supporters of the last Labour Party leader, the atypically left-wing Jeremy Corbyn, who blamed negative British press coverage for all their hero’s woes. Yes, aware that Corbyn represented a threat to the wealthy, powerful interests of their owners, those newspapers bombarded Corbyn with every slur going, that he was a terrorist sympathiser, an anti-Semite, a traitor, whatever. But Corbyn, whom I’ve always regarded as a decent bloke, engineered much of his own bad luck. He was a hopeless communicator. He seemed to be living still in the 1970s, when he’d been a compadre of old school socialist Tony Benn, and never responded to the attacks made against him with the imagination and agility necessary in the changed media landscape of the early 21^st century.

Actually, there’s proof close at hand that, to be successful, a political party doesn’t need to be backed by the majority of newspapers, and can triumph despite most newspapers stinging at it continuously with their scorpion-tails. In Scotland, only one newspaper, the National, supports the Scottish National Party’s policy of Scottish independence. The other Scottish newspapers – north-of-the-border editions of the right-wing ones I’ve just discussed, such as the Scottish Sun and Scottish Daily Mail, and locally published ones like the Scotsman, Herald and Daily Record – oppose the SNP and leap at any opportunity to excoriate it and its leader Nicola Sturgeon. (It’s noticeable how, in the headlines of the utterly wretched Scottish Daily Express, the British PM is always referred to as ‘BORIS’ whereas the Scottish First Minister always gets a contemptuous, misogynistic ‘STURGEON’.)

Yet the SNP have been in power in Edinburgh for the past 15 years and have topped the polls in eight Scottish elections in a row, most recently the council ones on May 3^rd that saw them increase their number of councillors by 22. A large part of this is surely down to Nicola Sturgeon herself. Whatever you think of her politics, it’s hard to deny that – unlike Johnson – she speaks like a normal human being, communicates her meaning clearly and generally exhibits some semblance of empathy and integrity. Obviously, this influences a sufficiently large number of Scottish voters, who choose to believe the evidence of their own eyes and ears over the crap they read in the newspapers.

Let’s hope that, when the time comes, British voters as a whole choose to do the same.

May 3, 2022May 16, 2022

Student politics

I’ve just read a review in the Guardian of Simon Kuper’s new book, Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. Chums tell the real-life story of student politics at Oxford University during the 1980s, a world whose inhabitants would often become well-known public figures in the 21^st century. On the Labour side there were ‘the Miliband Brothers, Dave and Ted, and Eddie Balls and Yvette Cooper’, who were busy ‘organising rent protests at their respective colleges’. However, it was some Conservative student politicos at Oxford in the 1980s who’d become particular big-hitters and who’d handle – or mishandle – the levers of power in Britain during the 2010s and 2020s.

They included Michael Gove, whom Kuper says was bought, wearing a kilt, for 35 pounds at a charity-fundraising ‘slave auction’ at Oxford Union in 1987. Even in 2022 and even after three-and-a-half decades of inflation, 35 pounds seems rather more than Michael Gove is worth, though maybe the kilt bumped up his value a bit.

They also included Britain’s current Prime Minister, the walking disaster area that is Boris Johnson. Recently, the Mail on Sunday claimed that Johnson’s ‘Oxford Union debating skills’ were so formidable that, during debates in the House of Commons, Labour’s working-class, comprehensive-school-educated deputy leader Angela Rayner had to resort to crossing her legs like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (1992) to distract him. According to Kuper, the young Johnson’s debating strategy was ‘to defeat opponents whose arguments were better simply by ignoring their arguments’ and rely instead on ‘carefully timed jokes, calculated lowerings of the voice, and ad hominem jibes’.

Also spicing up life in 1980s Tory Oxford University was David Cameron, though he was ‘rich enough and connected enough to feel himself above the “hackery” of student politics’; the BBC’s future political editor Nick Robinson; Daniel Hannan, NHS-basher, Enoch Powell fan, arch-Brexiteer and now in the House of Lords as Baron Hannan of Kingsclere, who, it’s been said, ‘may have contributed more to the ideas, arguments and tactics of Euroscepticism than any other individual’; and the future spin-doctoring Svengali behind Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings. Cummings, apparently, was a protégé of Dr Norman Stone, the historian, lecturer, author, advisor to Margaret Thatcher and student-groping pisshead from Glasgow. One obituary published after Stone’s death in 2019 hilariously noted that he ‘hated Oxford, which he thought… was full of Marxists.’ Actually, I can’t imagine Stone and Cummings together without thinking of Saruman and Grima Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings movies (2002-04).

Incidentally, Kuper acknowledges that Oxford University educated and employed not only J.R.R. Tolkien but also Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis. He notes how ‘the timeless paradise of Oxford inspired its inhabitants to produce timeless fantasies like Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit, Narnia and, incubating from the late 1980s, Brexit.’

Anyway, apart from making me mightily glad that I didn’t attend Oxford University during the 1980s, reading about Kuper’s book has got me thinking about the place where I was a student during the 1980s, Aberdeen University. What about the student politicians I encountered there? Did any of them ever get near – remotely near – those all-important ‘levers of power’? There follows a heavily revised, fully up-to-date version of a piece about this subject I first posted in 2014.

To be honest, I wouldn’t have encountered any student politicians at all if I hadn’t got involved with Aberdeen University’s student newspaper and co-edited it for a term in 1986. The newspaper office was located in the same building as the offices and meeting rooms where the members of the Students’ Representative Council did their business. And obviously, those student politicians also figured in a lot of the stories we reported on. So, I got to observe the species close up.

The one who probably did best for himself was Stephen Carter, who served as SRC President from 1985 to 1986. I found Carter lacking in warmth, humour and character and at one point, in a fit of naughtiness, I published in the newspaper a spoof article depicting him as an aloof Roman Emperor in the manner of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius novels. The article was entitled I, Carterus. We didn’t get on very well, though not because I’d likened him to one of the Caesars. Near the end of my editorship, I wrote a front-page article that made several criticisms of his reign as student president, which infuriated him. To be fair, I later discovered that I’d made an error with a financial figure I’d quoted, so at least part of his anger was justified. Being bawled out by the bland, automation-like Carter was a strange experience. The abuse didn’t seem to emanate from a real human being. It was like being scolded by an indignant speak-your-wait machine or a cranky elevator voice-recording.

From gov.uk

Decades later, in 2008, Carter served as Gordon Brown’s Downing Street Chief of staff. Also, from 2008 to 2009, he was Brown’s Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting. As he wasn’t a member of either house at Westminster at the time, which would have barred him from taking on a ministerial position, he was quickly ennobled. He was made Baron Carter of Barnes and entered the House of Lords. I didn’t hear much about how that he got in on those roles, except for claims that his relationship with Brown’s notorious spin-doctor Damian McBride was ‘fractious’. Actually, McBride was such a scumbag that it’s to Carter’s credit that the pair of them didn’t get along.

Coincidentally, days before Stephen Carter – sorry, Baron Carter of Barnes – ended his stint as Brown’s Chief of Staff, I found myself a full-time student again. In October 2008 I started an MA course at the University of East Anglia. The students there had mounted a protest against student debt, with hundreds of them sticking fake cheques to a campus wall. On each cheque was written the sum of money that each student expected to owe by the time of his or her graduation. To me (who’d graduated in 1987 with an overdraft of £1,500, which I paid off within two years), some of those sums were eye-watering: £40,000 or more. What, I wondered, would we have thought at Aberdeen University in the mid-1980s if we’d known that our student president would one day be a key figure in a government presiding over levels of student debt we wouldn’t have imagined in our worst nightmares?

Another student politician from that era who’s done well is Katy Clark. She was a leading light in Aberdeen University’s Labour Party and in 2005 became Labour Member of Parliament for North Ayrshire and Arran. Her career as an MP ended in 2015 with the virtual wipe-out of Scotland’s Labour seats that happened under the kamikaze leadership of Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy and spin-doctor John McTiernan. However, she kept busy, working as a strategist for Jeremy Corbyn and authoring for him a review of the Labour Party’s democratic structures. Then, in 2021, she got elected to the Scottish Parliament as a Labour MSP for the West of Scotland region.

When I co-edited the student newspaper, Katy came to our attention when she led protests against Aberdeen University’s then-rector, the former Scottish National Party MP Hamish Watt. At a debate during Freshers’ Week, Watt had made some supposedly-jovial comments in which he compared the young female students who’d just arrived on campus to ‘unbroken fillies’. Now, while Watt undoubtedly deserved to be strung up by his sexist testicles, I didn’t enjoy having to speak to Katy about the incident. I found her to be intense, one-note, lacking in personality and devoid of humour. Actually, looking at what I’ve just written about Stephen Carter, a theme seems to be emerging in that regard.

Despite that, I felt some admiration for Katy because, unlike many other student politicians, she stuck by the left-wing principles she’d had as a university student and didn’t drift rightwards as she started to earn money. During her career as an MP, she voted against the introduction of ID cards, against the renewal of the Trident missile system and against bombing campaigns in Iraq. However, in 2020, that admiration was dampened by the fact that she accepted a peerage and entered the House of Lords as Baroness Clark of Kilwinning.

What were you thinking, Katy? I don’t know how any socialists could debase themselves by becoming members of the archaic, undemocratic and embarrassing Lords. It’s a place where you rub ermine-clad shoulders with the likes of Baroness Michelle Mone of Mayfair (who’s just had her home raided by police as part of a fraud investigation into her links with a dodgy PPE company); and Baroness Dido Harding of Winscombe (who got where she is today through cronyism and blew 22 billion pounds of taxpayers’ money on a failed Covid-19 track-and-trace system); and Baroness Claire Fox of Buckley (the former Revolutionary Communist Party member, Bosnian genocide denier and IRA supporter, now swivel-eyed Brexiteer and enthusiast for all things right-wing); and the afore-mentioned Baron Daniel Hannon of Kingsclere… and many more.

While she was there, I wonder if Katy ever bumped into her old Aberdeen University compadre Lord Carter of Barnes and they reminisced about their days on campus in the 1980s. (“What was the name of that hairy, beer-swilling prick with the Northern Irish accent who used to edit the student newspaper?” “Can’t remember…”)

I should add that while running for the Scottish Parliament, Katy promised to ‘stand down’ from the House of Lords; and, according to her Wikipedia entry, on becoming an MSP she took ‘a leave of absence’ from the decrepit institution. That, though, isn’t the same as ‘quitting’ it. Also, I notice that on Wikipedia she’s still billed as ‘Baroness Clark of Kilwinning.’

To the rightward end of the spectrum, meanwhile, I have to mention someone else from my old alumni – Murdo Fraser, who’s in the Scottish Parliament as an MSP for the Mid-Scotland and Fife region and was once deputy leader of the Scottish Conservative Party. That Murdo became a big name in Tory circles surprised me because he’d seemed an unprepossessing character in Aberdeen. The detail I remember most about him was that he wore a Glasgow Rangers scarf 24/7, to the point where I wondered if it’d been stitched on. A good friend who knew him a little, the late Finlay McLean, told me once that he had ‘the personality of a deep-frozen Cyberman’. Then again, for an ambitious politician, not having a personality seems to be part of the course.

Murdo’s political ascendancy happened despite the fact that he was once associated with the notorious Federation of Conservative Students, an organisation that by the 1980s had become more right-wing than the Conservative Party of which it was the university branch. At the time the Conservative Party was led by Margaret Thatcher, so being more right-wing than her was quite an achievement. In 1986, after a string of well-publicised incidents – wherein FCS members had abused ethnic-minority staff at student bars, brayed their support for the Contras in El Salvador, sang the Special AKA song Free Nelson Mandela with the words changed to ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’, and so on – this extreme-minded group was disbanded by Tory Party Chairman Norman Tebbit. And yes, being disbanded by Norman Tebbit for being too extreme was quite an achievement too.

The FCS at Aberdeen University were particularly obnoxious. Among other things, they had a penchant for insulting gay people and taunting them about AIDS. The start of my term as newspaper editor coincided with an incident wherein a bunch of FCS students invaded and disrupted a health-and-welfare talk being given to an audience of new students. Their motive for disrupting the talk seemed to be because it covered safe sex for gay as well as straight students and was therefore, somehow, encouraging AIDS.

Later, after the newspaper had published an article about the society for gay students, Gay Soc, we received a letter from one deranged FCS member accusing us of furthering the interests of ‘the plague rats of the 20^th century’. We published his letter in the belief that by allowing the FCS to air their views publicly, we were letting people see what arseholes they were. Give them enough rope and they’d hang themselves, we felt. However, at least one gay friend of mine was deeply upset that the letter had appeared in our newspaper. Today, 35 years on, I’d think twice about publishing it.

In Murdo Fraser’s defence, I’ll admit that he seemed aware of what a squad of bampots he was having to keep company with in the FCS. He kept his mouth shut when the rest of them were being as offensively vocal as possible, and whenever I saw them strutting about the campus en masse he seemed to trail silently and reluctantly along at the back, rather like Eddie Bunker’s Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs (1992). Actually, being Mr Blue was appropriate given his footballing allegiances.

Having dissed the Labour and the Conservative Parties, I suppose in the interest of balance I should say something about Aberdeen University’s 1980s Liberal Party, the Liberal Democrats as they are now. The Liberals’ most visible representative was one Dan Falchikov who, with his excitable and eccentric manner and his striking dress sense (a psychedelically-coloured sweater), possessed something that other people I’ve mentioned lacked: a personality. And I think Dan was a genuinely well-meaning guy even if he wasn’t endowed with a great deal of common sense. However, he was also an easy target for us unscrupulous hacks at the student newspaper and we spent a lot of time poking fun at him, calling him ‘Dan the Man’, ‘Desperate Dan’ and (when he was being particularly off-the-wall) ‘Dan F**k-me-off’.

From the Sutton & Croydon Guardian

Out of curiosity, I googled his name a while ago and discovered that, in 2010, while he was a Liberal Democrat activist in the London constituency of Kingston-upon-Thames, Dan got himself embroiled in controversy. He was overheard boasting on a train that he’d managed to ‘plant’ a story, a false story, in the Evening Standard newspaper about the Labour Party having plans to close Kingston Hospital. Unbeknownst to Dan while he blabbed about this into a mobile phone, a train-passenger sitting nearby was none other than the journalist Kevin Maguire, political editor of the Daily Mirror. Maguire not only tweeted about what he was overhearing but also sneaked a camera-phone picture of Dan and posted it online. Thus, it was a bit unsettling to find the eccentric, psychedelically-sweatered Dan the Man of Aberdeen University dabbling in the political dark arts and establishing himself as the bad boy of local politics in Kingston-upon-Thames.

I should add that since then Dan seems to have ditched the Liberal Democrats and joined the Green Party. Considering that the Lib Dems were part of David Cameron’s discredited, austerity-obsessed coalition government from 2010 to 2015, and were disastrously led by Jo ‘nuke-’em’ Swinson in 2019, this suggests he has more sense than I’d credited him with.

I don’t think any of the student politicos I knew in the Scottish National Party went on to have political careers. Probably having to deal with Hamish Watt, the university rector, ex-SNP MP and vocal admirer of young unbroken fillies, put them off politics for good.

I’ve tried to keep this account of student politics at Aberdeen University light-hearted, but there were some goings-on I found pretty unsavoury. For example, before I graduated, some nasty rumours circulated in the SRC building about one student politician making another one pregnant. There wasn’t actually a pregnancy but this didn’t prevent two SRC people, from two different political parties, both of whom had axes to grind with the guy involved, from approaching me and assuring me it was true. One even swore that she’d seen the results of a pregnancy test. Presumably, I was fed this false information in the hope that, as a student journalist, I’d spread the word to the detriment of the guy’s reputation. Never mind what distress it’d cause him or the woman. None of the people I’ve mentioned above, I should say, were involved in this saga.

Some student politicians I did genuinely like. Indeed, if I ever bumped into the likes of Graeme Whiteside, Tim Morrison, Alan Strain or Stuart Black again on the High Street of Old Aberdeen, I’d invite them into the St Machar Bar and buy them a pint. However, with regard to those people, there’s a sobering point to make. None of those decent sorts, as far as I know, pursued their political careers any further than university. None of them ended up becoming real politicians.

It reinforces Douglas Adams’ famous comment in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980) that “it is a well-known and much lamented fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.”

March 18, 2022March 18, 2022

It’s time Putin’s pals were put in the bin (Part 2)

Continuing my rant about miscreants who support Putin and / or are generally making arses of themselves during the current crisis in Ukraine – this time miscreants in the United Kingdom.

Vladimir Putin – presently stuck in a big, bloody hole he’s dug for himself in Ukraine, but still determinedly digging, using thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives as his shovel-blade – has never been short of pals in Britain. Back in 2001, soon after Putin had won his first presidential election in Russia, and not long after the start of the second Chechen war, which saw the deaths of at least 25,000 civilians, a third of Chechnya deemed a ‘zone of ecological disaster’, and most Chechens left suffering ‘discernible symptoms of psychological distress’, then-British Prime Minister and Labour Party leader Tony Blair jetted out to Moscow and cosied up to Putin. El Tone praised him for showing ‘real leadership’ and giving ‘strong support’ in the ‘fight against terrorism’.

Even today, Blair is hero-worshipped by certain centre-right politicians and commentators in Britain. Ironically, while later Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is commonly loathed and belittled as a traitorous, anti-Western, lefty scumbag, it’s worth recalling what Corbyn said about Blair’s visit to Moscow in 2001. “When the Prime Minister… meets President Putin this evening, I hope that he will convey the condemnation of millions of people around the world of the activities of the Russian army in Chechnya and what it is doing to ordinary people there. When images of what is happening are translated into other parts of the world, many people are horrified…” Exchange ‘Ukraine’ for ‘Chechnya’ and you realise how Corbyn’s words resonate in 2022.

No doubt nowadays Blair keeps his mouth shut about Putin’s supposed statesmanship. But another well-known British politician is less reluctant to express his admiration for the warmongering Russian ogre. Right-winger, Europhobe and wannabe broadcaster Nigel Farage has said of him: “I wouldn’t trust him and I wouldn’t want to live in his country, but compared with the kids who run foreign policy in this country, I’ve more respect for him than our lot.” Meanwhile, the donkey-faced, and full-of-donkey-shit, Farage has made copious appearances on Russia Today, coming out with such gems as the claim that Europe’s modern democracies have been run ‘by the worst people we have seen in Europe since 1945’. Worse even than Putin? Yes, I’m sure Nige thinks so.

By the way, let’s not forget Aaron Banks, Farage’s compadre in the Vote Leave campaign that managed in 2016 to tear the UK out of the European Union, possibly helped by a wee bit of Russian funding. In 2017, Banks did his bit for the Putin cause by tweeting: “Ukraine is to Russia what the Isle of Wight is to the UK. It’s Russian.”

Elsewhere, there’s multiple evidence suggesting that Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, if not totally in love with Putin’s habit of inflicting atrocities on neighbouring countries that annoy him, is certainly in love with the wealth of the Russian oligarchs who surround the man. Recent claims about the amount of donations the Conservative party has received from such oligarchs have ranged from 1.93 million to 2.3 million pounds.

Johnson seems particularly enamoured with members of Russia’s mega-wealthy elite. In 2018, while he was serving as Theresa May’s foreign secretary, he was seen stumbling about an Italian airport suffering from a hangover, and lacking his security detail, after attending a shindig thrown by Russian media magnate Evgeny Lebedev at his castle near Perugia. Lebedev subsequently received a peerage and now, technically, is ‘Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond on Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation’. Johnson has sheepishly denied allegations that he used his influence to secure the peerage for his buddy.

Though late last week the British government announced it was freezing the assets of seven Russian billionaires (including Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich) with close ties to Putin, this only came after weeks of prevarication. Originally, it looked like the UK wouldn’t be clamping down on dodgy Russian money until late in 2023, which would have given those likely to be affected a good year-and-a-half to sell their assets and move their money off British soil. Even with this new change of heart, Abramovich and co. have already had a fortnight’s grace-period to shift some of their wealth. Basically, Johnson’s regime is reluctant to do anything that might sully London’s reputation as a haven for dodgy money.

Summing up the absolute state of the Conservative Party on this issue is its wretched co-chairman Ben Elliot. Simultaneously, Elliot’s been sourcing donations from super-rich Russians and been offering services to them in Britain through his ‘concierge’ company, Quintessentially. “Quintessentially Russia has nearly 15 years’ experience providing luxury lifestyle management services to Russia’s elite and corporate members…”, ensuring that from “restaurant bookings to backstage concert access, a bespoke lifestyle is at our clients’ fingertips.” So drooled the blurb on Quintessentially’s website until recently. Then, suddenly and mysteriously, this obsequious drivel was deleted from it.

While we’re heaping abuse on the British government, we shouldn’t overlook the smirk-faced Priti Patel, who – until another apparent U-turn last week – seemed determined that the Ukrainian refugees Britain was allowing in should be vastly outnumbered by the Russian oligarchs it was welcoming with open arms. At one point, while other European countries had taken in Ukrainian refugees in the tens of thousands, the UK had dished out a mere 50 additional visas to them.

Besides Patel, it’s worth castigating government minister Kevin Foster, who advised people fleeing Ukraine to apply to Britain’s ‘seasonal worker scheme’, which would allow them to spend their time in the country picking fruit. Such humanity, Kev! Also, some hatred should be directed towards whatever nasty piece of work in the Home Office complained to the Daily Telegraph that Ireland had allowed in too many Ukrainian refugees. All those shifty Ukrainians, claimed the anonymous source, would “come through Dublin, into Belfast and across to the mainland to Liverpool”, thus creating “a drug cartel route.”

Needless to say, Britain’s resident community of publicity-seeking, rent-an-opinion gobshites have fastened onto the Ukrainian crisis like flies fastening onto a cow-plop. George Galloway, that fedora-wearing gasbag whose rhetoric seems to weave between old-school socialism (when he’s in England) and hardline British nationalism (when he’s in Scotland), and who’s a fixture on the Russian-owned Sputnik radio channel, tweeted recently: “Me, Farage, Hitchens, Carlson and Rod Liddle are a pretty broad front of people who think NATO expansion to the borders of Russia was a pretty bad idea. Maybe pause and think about that?” When I paused and thought about it, my immediate thoughts were: “George Galloway, Nigel Farage, Peter Hitchens, Tucker Carlson, Rod Liddle… Wow, what a team! Couldn’t Marvel make a superhero movie about them? Maybe call it Arseholes Assemble?”

Hilariously, Galloway’s Putin-sympathetic stance has ended all unity in the All for Unity party, the staunchly pro-UK outfit he set up in Scotland prior to the last Scottish parliamentary elections. Jamie Blackett, the party’s former deputy leader, and also the Deputy Lieutenant for Dumfriesshire and a Daily Telegraph writer, recently disowned his old boss and announced the disbanding of the party.

Meanwhile, Neil Oliver, the alleged Scottish historian and talking head on right-wing outlet GB News, lately delivered a bewildering monologue, the gist of which was: “I’ll be honest. I don’t know what’s happening in Ukraine. I don’t understand it either.” Oliver’s professed ignorance of the situation didn’t stop him talking about it for nine minutes, however. It’s also strange that when it comes to Putin and Ukraine Oliver is so hesitant to climb off the fence, considering how quick he’d been in the past to condemn, say, the Scottish National Party (‘disastrously incompetent’, ‘small’, ‘not worth bothering about’), or the Black Lives Matter movement (‘anarchists and communists’ eating ‘into the built fabric of Britain’). Very strange indeed.

One other thing bugging me about Putin’s current horror show is how certain people have pounced on it and tried to use it to promulgate the right-wing agendas they’ve been pushing for years already. Take the ‘culture wars’, in which Putin’s ‘anti-woke’ position had until recently won accolades from Western pundits on the right of the spectrum. Well, now that Putin is officially a Bad Lad, they can’t praise him directly anymore. Instead, they’re pushing the narrative that woke stuff no longer matters during the crisis that good old Vlad, sorry, bad new Vlad has created.

Here’s the absurd Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, recently opining: “The outbreak of war has shone an unflattering light on our society… Watch issues like LGBT, net-zero, Partygate, Black Lives Matter and farcical ‘Stay Safe’ Covid restrictions all fade into well-deserved insignificance now that war is back.” According to Pearson, in other words, now that Putin’s behaving like a c*nt, we should all stop fretting about being civil to our fellow human beings, about preventing them from dying of Covid, about preventing the planet from burning up, and about our leader Boris Johnson being a lying, unprincipled sack of shite.

And here’s the barmy Spectator pundit Lionel Shriver, writing: “Decolonisations, contextualisations, gender-neutralisations – it’s all a load of onanistic, diversionary crap, and the West having shoved its head up its backside is one reason that Putin feels free to do whatever he likes.” Though I suspect Putin would still have attacked Ukraine if fewer people on Western social media had been using the pronouns ‘they’ / ‘them’ in their profiles.

One last thing for which Britain’s right-wingers must be thanking Putin is the attention he’s diverted from the looming issues of manmade climate change and the dire state of the environment. Thanks to the headlines being dominated by Ukraine, not much attention has been given to, for instance, the apocalyptic floods that have stricken Queensland and New South Wales. And, somewhat inevitably, the afore-mentioned Nigel Farage is currently trying to relaunch his political career by demanding a new national referendum – this time, not about the UK’s membership of the European Union, but about the British government’s supposed adoption of Net Zero policies to combat climate change. Farage, of course, wants us to vote against them.

I wonder why he’s doing this. Could he be thinking of a country that helped finance his previous, successful referendum campaign? Or could he be thinking of an oil-exporting country that would stand to gain if Britain gave up on green energy and became wholly dependent on fossil fuels again?

I can’t possibly think of a country that falls into both categories.