Tag: Priti Patel

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Rishi sunk, Liz trussed, Penny dropped

 

From wikipedia.org / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

 

Now the dust has settled after the British general election on July 4th, it’s time to offer my tuppence worth about the result.  This saw the Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, brought to power for the first time in 14 years.  It also saw the Conservative Party, under Rishi Sunak, take an ignominious and well-deserved humping and get booted out of government.  They shed 244 seats in the Westminster parliament and ended up with just 121.

 

But first…  A message for viewers in Scotland.

 

As (a) someone who’s believed for a long time that Scotland would ultimately be better off as an independent nation rather than as a region of Britain, and (b) a total pessimist, I wasn’t surprised at the dire election result for the Scottish National Party, where it ceded many seats in Scotland to Labour and went from having 43 seats to having a mere nine.  As I said in a post a few weeks ago about the SNP’s new leader John Swinney – what a baptism in fire he’s had – “I suspect folk in Scotland are so scunnered by the SNP’s recent scandals and mishaps, and so desperate to see the back of the Tories, that they’ll vote for Labour en masse next month.”

 

The SNP having so few Scottish seats in parliament and Labour having so many – they’ve now got 37 in Scotland – isn’t something that thrills me.  Scotland has lost some decent SNP representatives in London, for example, Alison Thewliss, John Nicholson, Tommy Shepherd and Alwyn Smith.  To be fair, I have no idea what they were like as constituency MPs, but they impressed me with their capabilities and eloquence when I saw them speak in parliament.

 

Also, I’m old enough to remember the 1980s and 1990s – a period of almost continuous Conservative rule from London – when the Scottish seats were also packed with Labour MPs and, the joke went, in Glasgow you could stick a red rosette on a monkey and it’d get voted into Westminster.  The old Scottish Labour contingent contained several heavyweights like John Smith, Donald Dewar, Alistair Darling, Robin Cook and Gordon Brown, and also a few mavericks like the admirable Dennis Canavan and the gruesome George Galloway.  But the majority of those MPs were, for want of a better word, turnips.

 

As I wrote on this blog a few years ago: “I’m thinking of such specimens as Lanark and Hamilton East’s one-time Labour MP Jimmy Hood, who once declared he’d oppose Scottish independence even if it made the Scottish people better off – the fact that as an MP he was busy claiming £1000-a-month second-home expenses in London no doubt had something to do with his keenness to keep Westminster running the show.  And Midlothian’s David Hamilton, who in 2015 did his bit for the battle against sexism by describing Nicola Sturgeon (and her hairstyle) as ‘the wee lassie with a tin helmet on’.  And Glasgow South West’s Ian Davidson, who charmingly predicted that after 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence the debate would carry on only ‘in the sense there is a large number of wounded still to be bayoneted’.  This shower became known as the ‘low-flying Jimmies’ because of their lack of ambition in anything other than being cannon-fodder for Labour at Westminster and enjoying all the perks that came with being MPs.  And with numpties like these populating the Westminster opposition benches during the 1980s and 1990s, it’s no surprise Mrs Thatcher’s Tories had a free run to do whatever they liked in Scotland.”

 

It’s possible the new crop of Scottish Labour MPs will be more distinguished than their predecessors, but I’m not holding my breath.  That’s especially since the two most famous ones are the self-important Douglas Alexander and Blair McDougall, head of the ‘no’ campaign before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, who famously reassured worried Scottish voters that Boris Johnson had no chance of ever becoming British prime minister: “I think that Boris Johnson’s a clown… he’s not even an MP let alone Prime Minister at the moment.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Lauren Hurley

 

Nor does it inspire confidence that new PM Keir Starmer has made Edinburgh Labour MP Ian Murray Secretary of State for Scotland.  Murray is more hardline-Unionist than many of the Tories.  When his predecessor as Scottish Secretary, Tory posho Alister Jack, was asked if a Conservative government would ever allow another referendum on Scottish independence, he mused that support for independence would have to be running at about 60% in opinion polls.  When Murray was asked if there were any circumstances in which he’d allow a referendum, he curtly replied: “None whatsoever.”

 

Not that I think Labour’s hegemony in Scotland this time will last as long as it did previously (when it had the bulk of Scottish MPs until 2015).  For one thing, the party situation and voting situation are now much too volatile.  Scotland today has six parties competing in a first-past-the-post electoral system – Labour, the SNP, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and, unfortunately, Nigel Farage’s far-right-wing Reform Party.  (I didn’t include Alex Salmond’s Alba Party in that list because they lost their deposit in every seat they contested.)  And Labour’s share of the vote in Scotland last week was just 5.3% ahead of that of the SNP, so their position is hardly unassailable.

 

Anyway, onto the results for Britain generally.  While I was delighted to see the Tories pulverized – and they thoroughly deserved to be pulverized, having presided over one of the most disastrous periods of government in British history, one that brought us austerity, Brexit, Prime Minister Boris ‘party during lockdown’ Johnson and Prime Minister Liz ‘crash the economy’ Truss – I have to say I’m worried.  Starmer’s Labour Party won the lion’s share of the seats in parliament, but the votes cast for them were not that many – they received 9,731,363 votes, 33.8% of the total cast.  That number is lower than those won by Starmer’s predecessor as Labour leader, the much-maligned Jeremy Corbyn, who managed 10,269,051 votes in 2019 and 12,877,918 votes in 2017.  What saved Labour’s bacon this time was a low turn-out and the presence of Farage’s Reform Party, luring right-wing voters away from the Tories.  If you add up the right-wing votes, those cast for the Conservative and Reform parties, they exceed Labour’s figures by more than a million votes and more than three percent of the vote-share.

 

Which is concerning, as I don’t think Starmer’s government is going to be popular for very long.  Again, as I wrote last month, his party was “so obsessed with attracting former Conservative Party voters they’ve made their policies a continuation of the right-wing ones that’ve damned Britain to rack and ruin during the past 14 years.  For instance, they’ve vowed not to revisit the terms of the Tories’ Brexit arrangement with the European Union, even though it’s hobbled British businesses and it’ll thwart their plans to ‘grow’ the economy; and they won’t countenance raising taxes, which makes you wonder how they’re ever going to lift Britain’s public services out of their current, dire state.”

 

Meanwhile, looking at what’s left of the Tory Party, I see that its surviving MPs include that self-promoting, hard-right-wing trio Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch.  As MPs, and with Rishi Sunak on his way out, they’ll be able to run for the party leadership.  I can see one of them winning, swinging the Tories even further to the right and cutting a deal with Farage before the next election, probably in 2029.  Farage is the favourite British politician of both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, so I’m sure lots of foreign money would mysteriously arrive to ‘grease’ such an arrangement.

 

© BBC

 

Oh well.  You have to take your pleasures when you can, and there was much to enjoy on election night, when various Tory politicians I didn’t like lost their seats.  I shed no tears, for instance, when Penny Mordaunt got the boot in Portsmouth.  Another self-promoter, she’s always annoyed me with her jolly-hockey-sticks brand of patriotism and it confounded me how, for a while last year, she was hero-worshipped for carrying a big sword, whilst wrapped in patterned blue wallpaper, at a ridiculous Ruritanian ceremony in Westminster Abbey.  Mind you, she was talked about as potential future leadership material, and was a moderate by Tory standards, so she might have prevented the party from veering off into Farage-land if she’d kept her seat.

 

I was also tremendously cheered by the departures of that preposterous, top-hatted, Victorian undertaker Jacob Rees-Mogg in Somerset; the braying, bearded bovver-boy Jonathan Gullis in Stoke; the middle-finger-raising Andrea Jenkyns in Yorkshire; the absurdly-coiffured Boris-Johnson cosplayer Michael Fabricant in Lichfield; and Liam Fox, Grant Shapps, Thérèse Coffey, Johnny Mercer, Gilliam Keegan…  Oh, how I laughed.

 

Incidentally, on the non-Tory front, it was also fun to see the afore-mentioned gruesomeness that is George Galloway usurped from his seat in Rochdale, just four months after he’d won it in a by-election.

 

Obviously, the best result was the one that ended Liz Truss’s tenure as MP for South West Norfolk.  The shortest-lasting Prime Minister ever – she managed only 44 days in office, easily beating the previous record set in 1827 by George Canning (who at least had the excuse of dying after 119 days as PM) – Truss has spent her time since showing not one ounce of contrition for her brief but disastrous reign, during which her plan to bring in massive tax cuts and pay for them by increasing government borrowing resulted in the pound plummeting, banks and building societies pulling 40% of their mortgage products off the market, and 30 billion pounds getting added to the British Treasury’s fiscal hole, effectively doubling it.  Far from it.  Truss has been blaming everyone but herself.  She’s even accused a beastly ‘anti-growth coalition’ and woke ‘deep state’ of sabotaging her premiership.  Meanwhile, she’s also been ingratiating herself with the American far-right and cheerleading for Donald Trump.  I do hope July 4th’s result terminates her political career, as her industrial-scale arrogance, incompetence and lack of self-awareness are getting a bit terrifying.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Simon Dawson

 

Finally, I was pleased to see the Green Party win four seats – just one seat less than Farage’s mob, who secured five.  Does this mean the British media, including the BBC, will now be giving them nearly as much coverage as they give Farage?  Don’t bet your life savings on it.

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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 8th 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 8th.

 

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

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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 12th 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 5th, 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 5th, 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

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

 

© Cold War Steve

 

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.

 

© Private Eye

 

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.

 

© The Jewish Chronicle / twitter / @ VirendraSharma

Posted on

No country for young men

 

From unsplash.com / © Piret Ilver

 

Reading last week’s news reports from the United Kingdom, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  The media minister John Whittingdale reached levels of daftness I thought were beyond even Boris Johnson’s Conservative government when he declared at the Royal Television Society Convention that the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 should make television programmes that ‘showcase British culture’ and ‘reflect Britain and British values’.  However, subsequent plans set out by the spectacularly useless Brexit minister Lord Frost that would allow shops, supermarkets and market stalls to sell their wares using old imperial measurements went rocketing into even higher parts of the stratosphere of stupidity.

 

I’ll talk about the measurements first.  The Conservatives are well aware that the bulk of their support lies among people who are older, more set in their ways, more likely to have acquired property and savings and more susceptible to fearmongering baloney from the Daily Mail and Daily Express about socialists wanting to redistribute their wealth.  So, I suppose Conservative Party apparatchiks believe they’re appealing to this constituency and its sense of nostalgia by bringing back the good, old-fashioned ounces, pounds, quarts, pints, inches, feet, etc., that were the units of measurement in their youth.  But hold on.  I’m now closer to sixty than I am to fifty and even I can’t remember a time when I measured things and made calculations using the imperial system.

 

When I was a kid at primary school in the early 1970s, it was the metric system I learned about – millimetres and centimetres, metres and kilometres, millilitres and litres, grammes and kilogrammes.  And it was really easy.  Everything was organised in tens, hundreds and thousands.  Even if you had neutron-star levels of denseness when it came to maths, you knew that to multiply something by tens, hundreds or thousands you just added one, two or three noughts to the number in question.

 

My parents, I have to admit, struggled to get their heads round the metric system.  This astonished me.  Just a couple of years earlier, they’d happily been performing mental gymnastics every time they went into a shop and used the UK’s pre-decimalisation currency system that had – yikes – one pound consisting of 240 pennies.  Also, I remember watching an early episode of the saucy department-store sitcom Are You Being Served? (1972-85) wherein battle-axe sales assistant Mrs Slocombe was so confused by centimetres that she called them ‘centipedes’.  Wow, I thought.  Mrs Slocombe must be really thick.

 

From nowthatsnifty.blogspot.com / © BBC

 

And what do I know of the imperial system today?  Well, words like ‘miles’, ‘stones’ and of course ‘pints’ are ingrained on my vocabulary because they never disappeared from British road-signs, weighing scales or pub-menus.  But like most people my age and younger, I suspect, how these units fit together is a mystery to me.  I know there are twelves inches in a foot, because inches and feet were marked along the bottom side of my school ruler, which had 30 centimetres marked along the top side that I measured things and drew straight lines with.  And I know there are 14 pounds in a stone… or is it 16?

 

But the rest is just baffling.  The relationship between feet, yards, chains, furlongs and miles?  I haven’t a scooby.  (Okay, having just checked the Internet, I can report there are three feet in a yard, 22 yards in a chain, ten chains in a furlong and eight furlongs in a mile.)  Between stones, hundredweights and tons?  No bloody idea.  (Again, having checked: 14 pounds make a stone, 112 pounds make a hundredweight and 2240 pounds make a ton.)  Gills, pints, quarts and gallons?  I’m totally clueless.  (In fact: four gills make a pint, two pints a quart and four quarts a gallon.)

 

So, anyway.  The British government is about to give retail businesses the go-ahead to inflict upon their customers an archaic system of measurements that the majority of Britons under the age of 60 don’t understand and, even if they did, would find migraine-inducingly difficult to calculate in…  All part of the impeccable logic of 2021 Brexit Britain.

 

From unsplash.com / © Edson Rosas

 

I suppose John Whittingdale’s proposals about British TV programmes having to contain a quota of ‘Britishness’ make slightly more sense because fewer young people nowadays watch ‘linear’ TV – i.e., programmes that are broadcast on a particular channel according to a pre-determined schedule.  The traditional, old-fashioned sort of telly that the politicians are obviously thinking about here is watched by an older and more conservative demographic, so having programmes with a more patriotic slant would probably go down well with many of the viewers.  But that’s not to say that the concept isn’t idiotic.

 

The examples Whittingdale cited of TV shows that reflect ‘Britain and British values’ include The Great British Bake-Off (2010-present) – well, I suppose the clue is in the name; the Carry On films, which, oddly enough, aren’t actual TV shows at all, but films; Only Fools and Horses, a sitcom that started in 1981 and ended its run as a series in 1991, three decades ago; and, surprise, museum-piece drama Downton Abbey (2010-11), created by Julian Fellowes, now incidentally a Conservative peer in the House of Lords, and which the late A.A. Gill once memorably described in the Sunday Times as “everything I despise and despair of on British television: National Trust sentimentality, costumed comfort drama that flogs an embarrassing, demeaning, and bogus vision of the place I live in.”

 

The idea of promoting ‘Britishness’ and ‘British values’ in TV programmes shatters into tiny, ridiculous pieces the moment you think about it.  Being British is something that applies (whether they like it or not) to Diane Abbot, Monica Ali, Alan Bennett, Anjem Choudary, Jeremy Clarkson, Nick Cohen, Arlene Foster, Armando Iannucci, Ken Loach, Val McDermid, Sir Steve McQueen, Meera Syal, Peter Tatchell, Gok Wan and Leanne Wood.  It applies to the current darling of the British media, the British-Romanian-Chinese-Canadian tennis player Emma Raducanu and, God help us, to Jacob Rees Mogg.  Good luck with finding common values among that lot.  Not that these disparities matter to Whittingdale and his government colleagues, who seem to believe being British means either being a toff with oodles of money, servants and a cut-glass accent – as represented by Downton Abbey – or being a working-class Cockney who likes a bit of a ‘laff’ (see Only Fools and Horses) and a bit of good-natured smut (see Carry On Up the Double Entendre or whatever).

 

From Gold / © BBC

 

Still, something in Whittingdale’s reptile brain made him realise there were people in the UK who didn’t fall into these two categories.  Presumably, this was why he cited the Northern Irish comedy Derry Girls (2018-2019) as another example of Great British programming.  If it was an example of that, though, shouldn’t it be called Londonderry Girls?

 

I suppose the thinking is, with the idiotic and Tory-approved decision to leave the European Union subjecting Britain to food shortages, jacking up its energy prices and wrecking its farming, retailing and other industries, the government needs a distraction.  Especially, it needs to distract the elderly folk most likely to vote for them.  Thus, they promote garbage like this in the hope it’ll kindle a rosy, agreeable glow of nostalgia in such folk.  And, with a bit of luck, it’ll enflame them too, making them believe the government is waging a culture war on their behalf against horrible, woke Marxists and anarchists who want to destroy the British way of life by using centimetres and kilogrammes and dismissing Downton Abbey as a pile of cobwebbed shite.

 

Incidentally, in the same vein, here are the moves I expect Boris Johnson’s ministers to announce next:

 

  • Banning all computer games whilst bringing back the patriotic British World War II comics of the 1970s. Instead of rotting their brains playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or Batman: Arkham City, British kids will develop some proper red, white and blue grit by reading about the adventures of D-Day Dawson in Battle and Union Jack Jackson in Victor, once a week, on cheap crinkly paper whose ink comes off on their hands.

 

 

  • Bringing in new laws to enforce the wearing of patriotic, and groovy, British fashions like platform shoes, bell-bottoms, plaid jackets, wide-lapel shirts, turtlenecks, cravats and long, lank greasy hair, so that everyone looks like a character in a 1970s Pete Walker horror movie.

 

  • Abolishing health and safety rules so that children can once again experience the adventure and thrill of playing around railway cuttings, disused canals, electrical sub-stations, slurry pits and tracts of dark and lonely water, like (the survivors of) their grandparents’ generation used to do.

 

From nationarchives.gov.uk

 

  • Bringing back hanging. To be honest, I’m not joking now.  With Priti Patel as Home Secretary, I can see this happening.
Posted on

Believing their own Ka-bul

 

© Nations Online Project

 

I’ve watched the copious, vivid and harrowing news footage of the chaos in Kabul while the USA and its allies attempt to end their occupation of Afghanistan and withdraw. I’ve also listened to the reactions of Western politicians and political pundits to that chaos.  Not for the first time, I find myself thinking of the lines from the poem To a Louse by Robert Burns: “O wad some pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us! / It wad frae mony a blunder free us / An’ foolish notion…”

 

In standard English: “Oh would some power the gift give us / To see ourselves as others see us / It would from many a blunder free us / And foolish notion…”  I suspect that if governments could see their policies as others see them and, indeed, if all human beings could see themselves as others see them, the world would be a far better place.

 

Before I continue, let me make a few things clear.  I don’t think the USA and its allies were sensible or indeed, had much right, to go into Afghanistan in the first place.  This was especially since the Taliban were willing to hand over Osamu Bin Laden, whose masterminding of 9 / 11 had sparked the war and invasion in late 2001.  And yes, I accept that the Taliban were and no doubt still are a bunch of bad bastards.  But if George W. Bush, Tony Blair and co. were really serious about usurping them, and replacing them with a functioning democracy, and transforming a country as notoriously hostile to outside influence as Afghanistan into a modern nation, they should have invested huge amounts of capital, manpower and infrastructure once they’d taken over.

 

But of course, any chance of that happening evaporated as soon as Bush, Blair, etc., drunk on their own military firepower, steamed into Iraq.  While the Iraqi debacle unfolded, diverting attention and devouring resources, Afghanistan was neglected and left to fester.  Anyway, as they say, that’s all academic now.

 

I also see the handling of the withdrawal as a fiasco. The fiasco includes the mind-melting ineptitude of the current incumbent in Blair’s old job, Boris Johnson, who thought the falling of the city of Kandahar into Taliban hands would be a good moment to pop off to Somerset for a holiday; and of his ultra-hapless Foreign Minister, Dominic Raab, who apparently felt consolidating his tan at a five-star beach hotel in Crete was more important than getting on the phone and attempting to help evacuate Afghan interpreters who’d been working with British forces.

 

And the predicament that many Afghans find themselves in, those who’ve worked or had dealings with the Western powers and their troops, institutions and agencies during the occupation since 2001, is a tragedy.  The West didn’t so much as build a nation in Afghanistan as erect a house of cards, and clearly little thought was given to the fate of the West’s local employees and clients should that house of cards collapse and control revert to a vengeful Taliban.

 

The fact that the situation was a house of cards must have been blindingly obvious to anyone bothering to take a smidgeon of an interest in Afghanistan over the last two decades.  I’ve known a few people who’ve worked there or had to visit it, and their descriptions – of having to undergo lengthy safety / security / survival courses before being allowed anywhere near the place, of being ensconced almost 24/7 in fortified bunkers cheek-by-jowl with battalions of Gurkha soldiers, of being cocooned inside the armour of military vehicles and helicopters when they did venture outside – made it sound like a surreal experience, part Fort Knox, part Siege of Ceuta, part Alice in Wonderland.  How could any society where outsiders felt so unsafe that they had to behave like this be considered sustainable, let alone normal?

 

Not only has there been little preparation made for evacuating the West’s Afghan colleagues and clients in the event of the unmentionable – inevitable? – happening and their suddenly becoming targets.  There’s been little willpower too, which is unsurprising given the reluctance of Western politicians, as exemplified by British Home Secretary Priti Patel, to countenance the entry of large numbers of refugees into their countries.

 

Incidentally, I wasn’t surprised at the excuse I heard for why certain groups of Afghans shouldn’t be helped to flee the country and escape to Britain. This was because, it transpired, they hadn’t actually been employed by the British Embassy, British NGOs, British companies, whatever. No, they’d only been employed by outsourced contractors that these British agencies had drawn upon.  They themselves weren’t really British employees.  (At least now, in the face of public revulsion, this abhorrent attitude seems to be changing.)

 

Subcontracting is the great ‘get-out-of-jail’ card employed by Western outfits working in the developing world.  On one hand they can loudly proclaim their Western, democratic values.  On the other hand, they use the subcontracting argument to avoid paying many local people working for them anything like a decent, livable wage, avoid giving them proper workers’ rights, and so on.

 

Many Western politicians and commentators have lamented about these people being thrown to the wolves, and rightly so.  But there’s also a massive hole in the narratives they’ve been spinning.  They make it sound like the withdrawal has been a betrayal of everyone in Afghanistan and now the entire Afghan population is wailing piteously as the Taliban prepare to take over again.

 

Really?  I have no doubt that the occupation benefited a small section of the population, in the cities.  However, it’s enlightening to read this article from 2020 on foreignpolicy.com that takes an all-too-credible look at rural Afghanistan, at the region of Nangahar to be precise, where Trump had the devastating MOAB bomb deployed in 2017.  The journalist interviews a young local man who’s just decided to throw his lot in with the Taliban.  “Omari’s family is part of the 90 percent of Afghanistan that lives below the national poverty line of $2 per day, according to the Afghan Ministry of Economy. Three-quarters of Afghans live in rural areas, where even basic services are in short supply; the Ministry of Education this month revealed that 7,000 schools across the country don’t actually have buildings…” Omari views the existing government as corrupt and expresses what seems to be a widespread belief that having the Taliban in charge at least can’t make things any worse than they are now.

 

One analyst quoted in the article describes Afghans’ reasons for enlisting in the Taliban thus: “In large part, recruitment seems to stem from family and tight community connections… Individual motivations are extremely diverse and range from revenge against the government or foreign occupiers for killed relatives or comrades to limited alternative opportunities in some regions to recruiting pressure from the organization.”

 

“…revenge… for killed relatives or comrades…”  Many Western politicians and pundits seem neurotic in their desire to avoid any possibility that their forces in Afghanistan were anything other than the ‘good guys’.  No doubt many servicemen and servicewomen from the US, UK and elsewhere believed they were in Afghanistan to make things better for the people living there.  Yet there’s plentiful evidence to suggest ordinary Afghans had reasons for not viewing their supposed Western liberators as angels.  There are specific reasons – see last year’s Brereton Report in Australia, which suggests some 39 Afghan civilians were murdered by Australian special forces. There are general ones too – for instance, a US study indicated that approximately 700 Afghan civilians were killed in airstrikes by the US and its allies in 2019 alone.

 

In addition, the West was determined (though it utterly failed) to wipe out Afghanistan’s opium / heroin trade, which in 2018 accounted for a third of the country’s GDP.  Opium poppies were the country’s biggest cash crop by far.  This can’t have endeared Western forces to Afghan farmers, especially as the countries sending those forces did little to rethink their own drug policies, which inadvertently fueled the demand for and drove the profits of the trade.

 

From unsplash.com / © Tim Cooper

 

“You can’t,” some Western strategists might say glibly, “make an omelette without breaking eggs.”  Or as the recently-departed, presumably now-roasting-in-hell Donald Rumsfeld once put it, “Stuff happens.”  But the carnage and the attendant shoulder-shrugging did nothing to win those all-important Afghan hearts and minds.

 

At the moment there’s an awful lot of breast-beating going on about the turn of events in Afghanistan. But I suspect those Western breast-beaters would be in for a shock if they saw themselves as many ordinary Afghans see them just now.